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An order for two pizzas was paid with 10,000 BTC on this date sixteen years ago, with this history etched in the sands of time.
On May 22, 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz made the first recorded commercial transaction with Bitcoin, buying two pizzas for 10,000 BTC. Today, that same order is worth over $771 million, given Bitcoin's current price of $77,173.
Hanyecz took part in Bitcoin's early technical development, creating the first MacOS client and discovering GPU mining.
Sixteen years ago, when the developer paid 10,000 BTC for the pizzas, the two Papa John's pizzas were worth about $40 at the time. The purchase marked the first real-world commercial transaction using BTC, a turning point for the cryptocurrency.
The transaction remains a cultural milestone, being celebrated widely across the crypto market as it showed that internet money could work as actual currency. Now, it's not just pizza being paid for with Bitcoin; property, cars, jewelry, and tickets can also be paid for with Bitcoin, among other items.
While the 10,000 BTC swapped for two pizzas is now worth millions of dollars today, Hanyecz shrugged off the missed fortune tag, saying that the transaction made Bitcoin "real" to him. The coins were mined when BTC was less than a penny, and few would have predicted that Bitcoin could become a trillion-dollar asset in the years to come.
Bitcoin history
At the time of writing, Bitcoin was trading at $77,153 after it reached an all-time high of $126,198 last October.
On May 22, 2010, when Hanyecz bought two pizzas for 10,000 BTC, the price of Bitcoin was about $0.004 per coin. The history of Bitcoin started with its invention and implementation by its pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.
On August 18, 2008, the domain name bitcoin.org was registered. Later that year, on October 31, a link to a paper authored by Satoshi Nakamoto titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System was posted to a cryptography mailing list.
On January 3, 2009, the Bitcoin network came into existence with Satoshi Nakamoto mining the genesis block of Bitcoin (block number 0), which had a reward of 50 bitcoins.
Dan Burgin
