On the evening of 22 May 2010, a programmer in Jacksonville, Florida posted an offer on the Bitcointalk forum: 10,000 bitcoin to anyone who'd have two large pizzas delivered to his door. A user in England took the deal, phoned a Florida Papa John's from across the Atlantic, and paid about US$41. The pizzas arrived. The coins moved. It was the first documented purchase of a physical thing with bitcoin, and the most expensive dinner in recorded history was eaten warm, with a toddler reaching for a slice in the photo.
The buyer was Laszlo Hanyecz, and he was nobody's mark. He was one of Bitcoin's earliest contributors — the man who more or less invented GPU mining, which is how he had 10,000 coins to spend on lunch. At the time, that was the point: coins were easy to make and impossible to spend. He wanted to prove you could buy something real with them. He proved it so hard the world is still talking about it sixteen years later.
The figure above is what those two pizzas cost, at today's price, refreshed hourly. Divide it by sixteen slices and try to enjoy your next lunch.
Here is the part the listicles leave out: he doesn't regret it. “It was a great deal at the time,” he's said, more than once, to journalists who keep arriving expecting a broken man. “I don't think anyone could have known it would take off like this.” He spent years avoiding the spotlight — partly, he's admitted, so nobody mistook him for Satoshi. The man bought the world's most expensive dinner and his main concern was being confused for someone more famous.
The crypto world now observes 22 May as Bitcoin Pizza Day, an annual holiday on which everyone recalculates the price of those pizzas and feels briefly better about their own decisions. It is, as far as the Bureau can establish, the only financial loss with its own feast day.
The Bureau's finding: the first documented case of crypto regret, except the subject reports none. We find this suspicious, and admirable, in that order. Case closed — the pizzas were, by all accounts, fine.