#Gate广场披萨节 Don’t cry over those two slices of pizza—the truth might sting you!

On May 22, it’s the crypto world’s once-a-year “Pizza Day.”
As expected, your feed is once again flooded with the retelling of that story: in 2010, the programmer Laszlo spent 10,000 bitcoins to buy two pizzas. By today’s coin prices, what he ate back then seems like an aircraft carrier or a skyscraper. The whole world aches for him, treating this story as the most heartbreaking textbook for “missing out on wealth freedom.”
Hold on. This man we’ve sympathized with for more than a decade may not even need your tears.
Today, at 57, he still lives in Florida, doing ordinary work as a programmer. When Bitcoin rose to $1, he sold most of his coins to buy a new computer. Faced with a media stampede, he blocked all strangers—he only wanted to hide back inside a programmer’s shell. He once said one plain truth: “Back then, I just wanted to eat pizza.”
See, the “tragic persona” imposed on him by the outside world—he never claimed it, from start to finish.
And when we lift the fog of history, we find a more crucial detail that’s always been ignored: Laszlo isn’t an ordinary retail investor—he’s one of the core pioneers in Bitcoin’s early days.
In that wild, early era, mining was still in the CPU competition stage. It was Laszlo who first solved the technical hurdles of GPU (graphics processing unit) mining, enabling a leap in computing power hundreds or even thousands of times. He also developed the first macOS version of the Bitcoin client, laying the groundwork for Bitcoin’s early network with his own hands.
Now, with that identity in mind, look back at the transaction.
When he exchanged 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas, was it really just that he was craving it—really just that he spent them as “money”?
This may not have been a simple act of consumption at all, but a great developer’s carefully considered, ritual-like performance art—and a stress test.
If Bitcoin were always just shuffling back and forth among geeks, it would forever be no more than an in-group mathematical game, a string of code with no real-world anchor. Only when it leaves the computer and is exchanged for a hot, filling pizza does it complete a closed loop in human real economic activity.
Laszlo wasn’t buying pizza—he was using this highly symbolic scene to loudly declare to the world: look, this thing called Bitcoin can truly be used as money.
He used those 10,000 “experimental chips,” which were nearly worthless at the time, to give Bitcoin—this newborn—an authentic birth certificate in the real world. Where is the greed? This is clearly a Promethean sacrifice. In fact, he spent a total of nearly 100,000 bitcoins to buy pizza, and later tested Lightning Network payments with only a very small amount of bitcoins—throughout, he was using action to probe Bitcoin’s payment capabilities from beginning to end.
And those obsessed with calculating “losses” are still trapped in the most mundane framework: measuring a rushing river with a static point. Let’s ask: if Laszlo hadn’t completed this pioneering feat, and if everyone had clung tightly to their coins since 2010, how could Bitcoin have survived until today? Your “if only back then” simply doesn’t exist.
There’s a cruel but true logic: precisely because someone spent it, Bitcoin has value.
What Laszlo ate wasn’t a cure for regret—it was Bitcoin’s most glorious coming-of-age ceremony. He didn’t become a standout name on the rich list, but he became a figure recorded in the history of the cypherpunk movement.
So, in future Pizza Days, instead of lamenting over two imaginary “sky-high priced pizzas,” it’s better to savor the genuinely profound lesson behind it:
In this circle, the ones who truly change the world are never the hoarders who excel at calculation and dream of getting rich overnight. It’s the builders with a childlike heart, who are willing to personally exchange “digital gold” for two hot pizzas.
His calm, ordinary life today is precisely the perfect ending to this story.
Don’t be the bystander who only regrets looking at historical candlestick charts. History has always been written by those who bury themselves in their work and know how to be content. $BTC