#Gate广场披萨节

A Lunch Worth Hundreds of Millions of Dollars

On May 22, 2010, a Florida programmer named Laszlo Hanyecz, as he usually did, opened the BitcoinTalk forum. At the time, he had a large number of bitcoins that were worth almost nothing, and he was just hungry—so he posted a message on the forum that, in hindsight, looks like a “once-in-a-century catastrophic loss”: he was willing to trade 10,000 bitcoins for two large Papa John‘s pizzas.

Back then, only a handful of people paid attention to the post. 10,000 bitcoins—converted at the market price at the time—were worth only about $41. Others even joked that he would have to top up some shipping costs himself just to get the pizza delivered to their doorstep. At that time, Bitcoin was still merely a digital toy for the geek community—still far, extremely far, from earning the title of “digital gold.”

However, this seemingly “disastrous” pizza turned out to have accidentally opened Pandora’s box. Bitcoin was the first to break out of virtual code and gain real purchasing power in the real world.

So, just how inflated has this Pizza—stamped into history—become today? From the original $41 to today’s current market price of $77,382/BTC, two pizzas are now worth about $770 million. If calculated using last year’s peak of $120k/BTC, the value of this meal once exceeded $1.1 billion. Today, its market value is enough to buy an NBA team, or a yacht, or acquire a regional bank. Even “old believers” joked that if you took a bite of this Pizza, it would equal several years’ worth of wages for an ordinary person.

On the altar, we gradually lost our original intention

Today, Bitcoin Pizza Day has long been elevated and placed on a pedestal, becoming the industry’s most talked-about annual event. Major exchanges vie to deliver pizzas on this day, issue airdrops, and run promotions—making it extremely lively.

However, when we open our wallets with excitement to place an order, an utterly absurd magical-realist scene appears: at the event, everyone tacitly avoids paying with BTC and instead settles with USDT or ETH. This kind of behavior—“commemoratively using BTC” while excluding BTC itself—looks very much like black humor. Because BTC’s price fluctuates so sharply, the community has, almost unconsciously, developed a culture: “HODL” (hold until death). People no longer want to spend BTC easily, for a very uniform reason: even if you spend 0.01 BTC today, next year it might rise to a price that would make your heart skip a beat.

In this environment, the core of Satoshi Nakamoto’s original white paper—“peer-to-peer electronic cash”—has become essentially a formality. Besides the psychological reluctance to spend, there’s also the practical obstacle of high fees. Currently, buying a $25 lunch on the BTC chain might cost miners’ fees of as much as $2.5–$4, even accounting for over 10% of the total amount. What used to be a geek faith has been forced by the market’s big hand into a “digital Buddha statue” that can only be worshipped in a cold wallet.

Current Market Conditions and Trading Strategies

Let’s turn our eyes back to the current market. After half a year of repeated tug-of-war, as of May 22—the Pizza Day itself—Bitcoin’s price hovered around the $77,300 to $77,400 range. It had previously touched a stage high of $82,800 on May 6, but then faced renewed pressure due to macro data and the withdrawal of ETF funds. With the US CPI staying stubbornly high, expectations for Fed rate cuts have been slow to materialize. On top of that, the Brazilian central bank introduced the strictest regulation; the ban directly shut down Bitcoin payment scenarios in cross-border remittances, bringing a chill to the crypto market.

In the current market, VanEck’s CEO, when discussing the four-year halving cycle, believes the market is in a typical post-bull correction and bottoming phase. He thinks 2023–2025 are the three explosive years, while 2026 is the fourth year of correction and washout. This kind of bottoming often acts as a prelude to the next “structural opportunity.” Although Standard Chartered has lowered its expectations, it still sets a long-term target price of $100k for Bitcoin. From the macro liquidity perspective, the historical correlation between Bitcoin and global M2 liquidity is weakening, while technically the market remains dominated by high-level range-bound movement.

On trading strategy, it is suggested to adopt a “neutral-to-slightly-bullish, range trading, strict control of leverage” framework:

1. Lower defense line: Focus on the support strength in the $76,000–$77,000 range. This is the cost-basis line for short-term holders. If the weekly level can be effectively defended, it indicates that bullish momentum has not been completely destroyed. Conversely, if it breaks through below $78,000, it may trigger a second round of decline.
2. Key resistance overhead: The 200-day moving average is currently near $82,800. Holding above this moving average is an important confirmation signal for a trend reversal; below it, maintaining a range-trading mindset is more prudent.
3. Capital flow trends: In April, the single-month net inflow for spot Bitcoin ETFs reached $2.44 billion (the strongest in the year), and BlackRock’s share alone accounted for $1.7 billion. This suggests institutions are using low-price zones for a contrarian layout, and the long-term allocation logic remains.
4. Wait for signals and reduce the frequency of opening positions: The current divergence between bulls and bears is huge. Retail investors are leaning bearish, and the shorts’ share is relatively high—which can provide some fuel for short squeezes. However, until macro data becomes clear, the cost-effectiveness of adding large positions is not high. Focus on key variables such as the Fed’s June policy meeting and ETF fund flows.
5. Build positions in batches and allocate moderately: You can establish a bottoming position in small size in the core support area in stages, but the overall position should not be too heavy. The current market is a weak recovery driven by leverage, and real spot demand has not returned clearly. Until key moving averages truly break through, the signals for trend reversal remain unstable.

The best commemoration: finding balance between fear and greed

No matter how Bitcoin’s price curve moves in the future, the core meaning of this holiday will never change: back then, that smiling Laszlo who held two pizza boxes used an extremely expensive meal to show the world what it means to “put faith into action.” Although he lost the billions he might have accumulated, as he himself said: “If it weren’t for that time of using BTC to buy pizza, Bitcoin might have forever remained just a digital toy for the geek community.”

Today, we sit on the book-value assets brought by this digital revolution, yet we often lose the initial excitement of participating in a social experiment amid fear and greed. In an era today where no one is willing to spend BTC, perhaps the most important thing is not to calculate how much a pizza is worth, nor to predict which direction the candlestick chart will move next. Instead, in this annual “Pizza Day,” we should ask whether we can still remember the original intention behind joining this industry—why we are here is not only to profit from short-term price differences, but to witness a kind of decentralized financial freedom and transformation.

As a saying widely shared in the community goes, “Great things always seem absurd at first.” This $1 billion pizza is, in essence, the most vivid footnote to that line.