It’s Bitcoin Pizza Day!
Today, May 22, marks the eighth annual Bitcoin Pizza Day, commemorating an important milestone in the journey to mainstream bitcoin adoption.
On this day in 2010, Florida-based programmer and early cryptocurrency enthusiast Laszlo Hanyecz enshrined his name in bitcoin lore by paying someone 10,000 bitcoins to order him two pizzas from his local Papa John’s restaurant. The purchase is believed to have been the first time that bitcoin was used in a real-world transaction. Today, those coins are worth nearly $82 million.
“It wasn’t like bitcoins had any value back then, so the idea of trading them for a pizza was incredibly cool,” Hanyecz famously said in a 2013 interview with The New York Times. “No one knew it was going to get so big.”
Hanyecz later christened the nascent Lightning Network (LN) with a similar purchase, though it cost him just 0.00649 BTC (~$53) this time around.
If you’re lucky, you can commemorate Bitcoin Pizza Day at a restaurant that accepts bitcoin directly (CoinMap curates a non-exhaustive list). Don’t worry, the going rate is no longer 10,000 BTC.
If not, you can use your BTC to purchase a gift card to your favorite pizza restaurant. Gyft and eGifter are two popular gift card providers that accept bitcoin — and the latter is currently running a sale on Dominos gift cards.
It was still a bit early for pizza in the Western Hemisphere at the time of writing, but cryptocurrency users on the other half of the globe have already shared pictures of their celebratory slices across social media.
Cryptocurrency trading platform and brokerage firm eToro sent a “literal bitcoin pizza” to the offices of financial publication Business Insider UK.
By Josiah Wilmoth
From CCN