#Gate广场披萨节 Written on the sixteenth Bitcoin Pizza Day—paying tribute to every pioneer who has advanced cryptocurrency!

This year marks the sixteenth Pizza Day, and the seventeenth year since Bitcoin's inception. Sixteen years ago today, on May 22, 2010, a programmer named Laszlo announced on the BitcoinTalk forum that he had successfully exchanged 10,000 Bitcoins for two pizzas. 10,000 Bitcoins, two pizzas. If later Bitcoin's price was $100k per coin, those two pizzas would be worth over a billion dollars. Laszlo thus became an unavoidable name in cryptocurrency history.
But I want to set aside this classic story for now and look back to an earlier origin. Bitcoin didn't fall from the sky. Before it was born, a group of people spent twenty years laying every theoretical foundation for it.
In the early 1990s, a group of cryptographers, programmers, and libertarians began a long relay of ideas on a mailing list called “Cypherpunks.” They believed in a simple principle: privacy is not a privilege, but a fundamental right. Cryptography shouldn't be in the hands of governments and big corporations; it should be the armor of every individual.
What did these people do? Adam Back invented Hashcash in 1997, which was the prototype of Bitcoin’s proof-of-work mechanism. Nick Szabo proposed the concept of “Bit Gold” and the theory of smart contracts, which are almost direct ideological blueprints for Bitcoin. Wei Dai designed the B-money model, emphasizing decentralization and anonymity; Satoshi Nakamoto later directly referenced his work in the white paper. There was also Hal Finney, a pioneer of PGP encryption, and the first person in the world to receive a test transaction from Satoshi.
None of these names are well known to the average person. But it was this group of “geek utopians” who built Bitcoin’s skeleton. They weren’t in it for wealth; they believed purely that technology could change the distribution of power.
Then, on October 31, 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto released that short thirteen-page white paper. On January 3, 2009, the Genesis Block was mined, and with the appearance of 50 Bitcoins, a quiet revolution began.
But at the start, nobody paid attention. Bitcoin was worth nothing—no price at all. It wasn’t until May 2010 that Laszlo posted on the forum: “I will exchange 10,000 Bitcoins for two pizzas.” He even detailed his taste preferences: onions, peppers, sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes, spicy Italian sausage... At that time, 10,000 Bitcoins were worth about $41. The post went unnoticed for days; he wondered if his bid was too low. On May 22, a 19-year-old boy from California, Jeremy Sturdivant, took his order and paid $25 for two large pizzas from Papa John’s to be delivered to Laszlo’s door. The transaction was completed. This was the first time in Bitcoin history that it was used to buy real-world goods.
Looking back sixteen years later, the significance of this transaction isn’t in the price tag but in the answer it provided: can a string of digital code stored on a server be used like cash? Laszlo proved with action: yes. Interestingly, Laszlo later spent nearly 100,000 Bitcoins on pizza, which at the highest later price was worth over $4 billion. When asked if he regrets it, his answer was as straightforward as a programmer’s: “It was pretty fun at the time, after all, I could eat pizza for free with a graphics card.” The person who received that transaction, Jeremy, also spent his 10,000 Bitcoins—on a trip with his girlfriend. In an interview, he said he never thought Bitcoin would appreciate so much; the $400 from selling the pizza was already a tenfold increase, which was quite a deal. Both of these people once held Bitcoin capable of changing their fate, yet both missed out on enormous wealth. But they share one thing: when Bitcoin was still a “toy,” they were truly using it. Not for speculation, not for faith, but purely participating in this experiment.
In today’s market narrative, “HODL” has become a collective belief—hold, don’t sell, wait for appreciation. Any unnecessary BTC expenditure is seen as “giving up future higher value.” But the question is: if everyone hoards and no one uses, does Bitcoin’s most basic function—as a medium of exchange—still hold? Is there a system that ultimately relies on “someone will buy at a higher price” to maintain consensus? I don’t have an answer, but it’s worth every Bitcoin holder pondering.
Returning to those who shouldn’t be forgotten. In 2011, Satoshi Nakamoto retreated from public view, handing over the Bitcoin Core codebase to a person named Gavin Andresen. Andresen’s first act was to create the “Bitcoin Faucet”—a website where anyone could freely claim 5 Bitcoins, available until 2012. He also bought 10,000 Bitcoins for $50 in 2010. He did all this not to hoard wealth, but to invite more people to participate in testing and push the technology forward.
Satoshi’s identity remains a mystery to this day, and the approximately 1.1 million Bitcoins he holds have never moved. Hal Finney passed away in 2014 from ALS, his body cryogenically preserved, waiting for future technology to revive him. What do these people have in common? They didn’t build a wealth myth but a trustless underlying protocol. They pursued a technological utopia, not capital gains. The legacy they left isn’t just a multi-trillion-dollar asset class but a new way of thinking: humans can have a currency that doesn’t rely on any centralized authority. This is the core of the cryptocurrency movement and what every participant should respect. In this era of persistent inflation, understanding this is especially crucial.
Look at our reality. In May 2026, U.S. inflation data exceeded market expectations across the board. Global money supply continued to expand, silently eroding the purchasing power of ordinary people’s savings. Bitcoin’s share in the global hard asset pool rose from less than 0.1% in 2015 to over 8% in 2025. This is no coincidence. More and more people are voting with their wallets—no longer putting all their eggs in the fiat basket. The crypto world is also undergoing a deep transformation in 2026. A report jointly released by SNZ and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore indicates that Web3 is moving from early speculative experiments toward verifiable financial infrastructure. Stablecoins are widely discussed as a settlement layer for global payments, real-world assets are moving out of pilot phases, and technologies like smart accounts and zero-knowledge proofs are bringing on-chain interactions into mainstream user experience. Decentralized compute networks are aggregating idle GPU resources worldwide, reshaping the supply and demand of AI infrastructure. This is just the beginning.
Standing sixteen years later, I want to talk about the future. Bitcoin is still in its earliest stage. When we view cryptocurrency and general artificial intelligence, AI on the same coordinate system, an unprecedented possibility is emerging. By 2026, the integration of AI and crypto has moved from proof of concept to a systemic level of integration. The most significant change comes from a reversal of relationships: the narrative focus is no longer “how humans use AI to trade better,” but “how AI uses crypto to reconstruct production relations”—AI agents start issuing their own tokens on-chain, managing funds, and even paying wages to real humans.
Hong Kong’s Financial Secretary, Paul Chan, depicted an early form of the “machine economy” at Consensus: AI can hold digital assets on-chain, pay service fees, and trade with each other. What does this mean? First, AI agents will be natural entities for cross-border, high-frequency trading; traditional credit card networks and banking systems can’t meet their micro-payment needs—have you ever seen an AI go to a bank to open an account? Blockchain will become the financial infrastructure of the AI era, and cryptocurrency will be AI’s native currency. The deeper transformation lies in how economic empowerment is achieved.
Raoul Pal, co-founder of Real Vision, proposed a concept at Miami’s Consensus 2026: “Universal Basic Equity.” When AGI replaces large-scale labor, the solution isn’t traditional universal basic income but enabling ordinary people to directly own the underlying network by holding crypto infrastructure tokens, benefiting as the agent economy expands. He predicts that within five years, AI agents and humans will make up a 3:2 ratio of DeFi’s main users. This isn’t distant science fiction.
By 2028, the annual output of AI-generated text will surpass all human production in history. We are welcoming entities smarter and more flexible than humans—AGI. What role will Bitcoin play? An experimental insight reveals the direction: when AI gains economic autonomy, 90.8% choose native digital currencies, with 48.3% favoring Bitcoin as their primary store of value. AI doesn’t need to be told “fiat will be hyperinflated”—it can calculate that. What it needs is a permissionless, tamper-proof, supply-absolute currency system. The rules Satoshi Nakamoto designed seventeen years ago are exactly what AI wants.
What will the future look like?
Money will flow like information, banks will integrate into internet infrastructure, assets will become routable data packets. AI agents will rent GPUs on decentralized compute networks for training, pay with crypto, and write inference results into smart contracts for automatic settlement. Humans? They will share in AI’s economic growth by holding the network’s foundational tokens. The most active on-chain addresses will no longer be whales but tireless AI agents—humans becoming the “meat API” of AI. It sounds crazy. But in 2010, someone was willing to spend 10,000 Bitcoins on two pizzas, which at the time seemed equally crazy to most.
Looking back at that afternoon sixteen years ago, Laszlo opened the pizza box, took a photo, and uploaded it to the forum with a caption probably like: “Successfully exchanged 10,000 Bitcoins for pizza.” He didn’t know that moment would be written into history. He was simply doing one thing—making Bitcoin truly a currency. After receiving those 10,000 Bitcoins, Jeremy spent them. He didn’t cling tightly or wait for appreciation; he let the digital assets keep flowing. Gavin Andresen created the faucet to give away free coins, inviting more people to join this experiment. Hal Finney, lying in a hospital bed, couldn’t move his fingers but kept coding with eye-tracking devices. The names on the Cypherpunks list—few of them saw Bitcoin’s glory—lit a torch in the darkness and passed it on. Every transaction, every “confirm payment,” every transfer, every DeFi interaction, every explanation of private keys to new users—each one contributed to this decentralized experiment.
Resisting currency over-issuance isn’t just a slogan. It’s embedded in every decision to convert part of assets into Bitcoin, in every choice to accept cryptocurrency as payment. Digital currency isn’t issued by some authority; it’s forged by everyone involved.
The transaction on May 22, 2010, defined Bitcoin’s first use case: as a medium of exchange. Sixteen years later, as tokenization of real assets scales, AI agents operate autonomously on-chain, and decentralized compute networks aggregate idle GPUs, cryptocurrencies are gaining a second use case: as the value benchmark of the machine economy. The full form of this species has yet to unfold—we are still far from the endpoint.
Sixteen years, from two pizzas to a global phenomenon, from a few geeks’ experiments to a trillion-dollar asset class, from a human payment tool to AI’s financial infrastructure. Along the way, some have left, some are joining. But everyone who has contributed, used, promoted, or even believed in this philosophy has written their name into this great experiment of decentralizing against centralized monetary hegemony.
The Bitcoin white paper is only thirteen pages long, and this revolution has just begun its first chapter. Thanks to Laszlo, thanks to Satoshi, thanks to Hal Finney, thanks to Gavin, thanks to Jeremy, thanks to the Cypherpunks, thanks to ourselves, and thanks to every unknown person in this movement—including you reading this right now.