Assets, Bitcoin

Did Someone Really Buy a Pizza With Bitcoin?

On May 22, 2010, a programmer bought two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoin. It was the first real-world bitcoin transaction.

And it might have been the last.

On that day, Laszlo Hanyecz made history. The Florida programmer spent 10,000 bitcoin on two Papa John’s pizzas.

It was the first time anyone had ever used the fledgling cryptocurrency to buy something in the real world.

Hanyecz’s landmark purchase was memorialized in the Bitcoin blockchain — the public ledger of all bitcoin transactions — as Block #170.

NOTE: This article discusses the possibility of someone buying a pizza with Bitcoin. While it is technically possible to purchase items with Bitcoin, it is important to remember that the value of Bitcoin can be extremely volatile and unpredictable. As a result, it is highly recommended that individuals not use Bitcoin to purchase items that have a fixed monetary value, such as pizza. There is no guarantee that the amount of Bitcoin spent on the purchase will remain equivalent in value to what was initially paid.

In the eight years since Hanyecz’s pizza buy, bitcoin’s value has skyrocketed. Those 10,000 bitcoins would be worth more than $100 million today.

Hanyecz’s pizza purchase is now widely considered to be the moment when bitcoin went from being an academic curiosity to a viable currency with real-world uses.

But there’s just one problem: we don’t know if Hanyecz’s story is true.

There is no way to verify Hanyecz’s story. The only evidence we have is his word and the entry in the Bitcoin blockchain.

And even that is not conclusive proof, as it is possible to fakedata in the blockchain.

So did Hanyecz really buy two pizzas with bitcoin? It’s hard to say for sure. But if he did, it was a momentous event in the history of both pizza and cryptocurrency.

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