On May 22, the crypto community marks Bitcoin Pizza Day, the anniversary of the first widely documented purchase of a real-world item with bitcoin. In 2010, programmer and early miner Laszlo Hanyecz posted on Bitcointalk that he would pay 10,000 BTC to anyone who ordered him two pizzas. Student Jeremy Sturdivant accepted the offer and bought the Papa John’s order for roughly $40–$41.

At the time, the transaction was less about profit and more about proof of concept. Hanyecz wanted to show that bitcoin could function as money, not just as experimental software. Today, the same 10,000 BTC would be worth about $770 million at a price near $77,000 per coin. Even the 0.99 BTC transaction fee would now be worth almost $77,000.

One detail should be corrected: bitcoin already had early price references and trading venues by then, so saying it had “no exchange rate” is too strong. Still, the scale of the price change is historic. In 16 years, bitcoin moved from a niche experiment into a global asset with a market value of roughly $1.5 trillion.

Hanyecz’s role also goes beyond the pizza story. He contributed to Bitcoin’s early technical development, worked on the first MacOS client and helped pioneer GPU mining. That is why Bitcoin Pizza Day is more than a meme: it marks the moment digital money first touched the real economy.