#Gate广场披萨节 The Bitcoin Pizza Guy You Don't Know: The True Story of Laszlo Hanyecz and Satoshi Nakamoto's Response!

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On May 22, 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz bought two Papa John’s large pizzas with 10,000 bitcoins. He became the “Pizza Day Legend” in the crypto world. But do you really know the person who “sacrificed” the most for Bitcoin?

Learn more: Hanyecz bought pizza with 10,000 BTC in 2010, he was a pioneer in early Bitcoin development, created the first MacOS client, and discovered GPU mining for the first time;
He spent nearly 100k BTC in total, which at today’s prices is worth over a trillion dollars.

A tech pioneer, the true king of pizza
Bitcoin Twitter’s bards repeatedly tell the legend of the “first real-world Bitcoin transaction.” The media also used sensational headlines, forever engraving this “pizza-for-coin” story into internet memory.
But what if I told you that Hanyecz actually spent nearly ten times the amount of Bitcoin on other things after that? And perhaps these expenditures were some form of atonement for his “early acceleration” of Bitcoin’s development?
He is a “tech trailblazer” recognized by Satoshi Nakamoto

Back to April 19, 2010, just days after he registered on Bitcointalk (a forum founded by Satoshi Nakamoto), Hanyecz posted the first MacOS client in Bitcoin’s history. Before that, Satoshi’s original code only supported Windows and Linux. Hanyecz’s development allowed Mac users to run Bitcoin software for the first time, laying the foundation for all future Bitcoin wallets and applications on Mac.
However, more influential was his discovery that graphics cards (GPUs) could be used for mining BTC—an enormous breakthrough almost no one realized at the time.
On May 10, 2010, Hanyecz wrote on the forum: “Updated the Mac OS X client… it can use your GPU to generate bitcoins. If you have a decent graphics card, like an NVIDIA 8800, it works really well.” This discovery ignited Bitcoin’s first “digital gold rush”: by the end of that year, Bitcoin’s total network hash rate skyrocketed by 130k%, and miners started building “mini farms” in basements, attics, and garages—precursors to today’s global industrial Bitcoin mining farms.

🍕 Is pizza some form of “atonement”?
His breakthrough prompted a “personal response” from Satoshi Nakamoto. Satoshi expressed concern in a letter: “An important point in attracting new users is that anyone with a computer can generate some bitcoins for free. GPU mining would skew this incentive mechanism too early toward users with high-end graphics cards… I don’t want to accelerate this monopoly prematurely.” In a 2019 interview, Hanyecz recalled: “After seeing his message, I stopped promoting GPU mining. I thought to myself: ‘Bro, did I ruin your project? Sorry…’” Perhaps this conversation led him to make that historic transaction request in May 2010—10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas. In fact, he made similar proposals more than once. In a 2019 interview, he mentioned that he spent nearly 100k BTC over the following year.
In a 2014 post, he wrote: “I spent my early Bitcoin on pizza, aside from a few small change. I’ve spent all I mined. You know, the difficulty increased, and mining became unprofitable for me later.”

He “ate” more than just pizza
According to the address listed in his April 2010 Bitcointalk post, from April to November 2010, he sent and received a total of 81,432 BTC at that address, worth over a trillion dollars today. While we can’t confirm whether all these bitcoins were used to buy pizza, other goods, or given away to forum users (a common practice at the time), he explicitly stated in his pizza transaction post that it was an “open offer.” But by August, he wrote: “I can no longer generate thousands of coins daily, I can’t afford to keep sending pizzas… Thanks to everyone who has bought me pizza.”

🧘‍♂️ Mindset: This is my deal with the internet
This transaction—and not to mention his subsequent ones—are enough to cause lifelong insomnia.
But at least in 2019, Hanyecz could look back with humor: “The deal was made because both sides thought it was fair. I felt like I was ‘beating the internet,’ getting free food. I thought, ‘I’ve connected these GPUs, now I mine faster, I can keep eating pizza and never buy dinner again.’”
“I wrote the code, mined the coins, and ate pizza. I felt like I won against the internet that day. Usually, hobbies are time-consuming and costly, but this time, my hobby bought me dinner.” [偷笑]😜$BTC ‌ ‌