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Bitcoin Pizza Day 2025 is here! Celebrate this historic moment in the Bitcoin community. What started with two pizzas shows how spending bitcoin can make history.
Look, Laszlo Hanyecz is a hero. We have to spend and replace BTC for the currency to become a viable medium of exchange. There’s no other choice. The infamous and legendary pizza transaction was the first step on that journey. Bitcoin Pizza Day celebrates just that. The Bitcoin community owes so much to Laszlo, and how do we pay our hero? By making fun of him for spending a gazillion dollars on two pizzas.
The truth is, without him, Bitcoin wouldn’t be dancing around $100K.
Which came first: the chicken or the egg? Laszlo did NOT spend more than $1000M on two pizzas. He spent $41, which was how much the 10K coins were worth at the moment of the transaction. Not a particularly good deal either, unless you consider that those two pizzas sparked a series of events that made Bitcoin a global phenomenon. Bitcoin Pizza Day celebrates just that.
The HODL meme was useful for a while and will always be valid, but we have to spend and replace. Let’s learn why through Lazlo and the story of Bitcoin’s first transaction for a good or service.
The story has been told a million times, but let’s lay down the facts once again for context. In Blink’s 2024 Bitcoin Pizza Day post, we said:
“On May 22, 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz famously bought two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins, which, at the time, held little significance. However, as Bitcoin's value increased over the years, those same bitcoins became worth hundreds of millions of dollars, highlighting the potential for significant returns from early investments in Bitcoin.”
Lazslo was a Mac developer who translated Satoshi’s code to allow Apple users to mine Bitcoin. He was also the coder and the first person to use GPUs to mine; that’s the reason he had that many coins. His original Bitcoin Talk post is from May 18, 2010, and said:
“I'll pay 10,000 bitcoins for a couple of pizzas.. like maybe 2 large ones so I have some left over for the next day. I like having left over pizza to nibble on later. You can make the pizza yourself and bring it to my house or order it for me from a delivery place, but what I'm aiming for is getting food delivered in exchange for bitcoins where I don't have to order or prepare it myself, kind of like ordering a 'breakfast platter' at a hotel or something, they just bring you something to eat and you're happy!”
On May 21, there were still no takers, and Lazlo posted, “So nobody wants to buy me pizza? Is the bitcoin amount I'm offering too low?” The historic transaction happened on May 22 through IRC chat; Lazslo posted. “I just want to report that I successfully traded 10,000 bitcoins for pizza” and Bitcoin Pizza Day was born. As Blink reported, Laszlo’s counterpart in that transaction was “a 19-year-old named Jeremy Sturdivant (username "jercos"),” another spend and replace pioneer. More on him later.
Once Lazslo bought that pizza and turned Bitcoin into money, the doors opened wide. We might take it for granted, but Bitcoin’s price run has been a once-in-a-lifetime event. Over a long enough period of time, Bitcoin’s so-called “volatility” always resolves on a decisive move upwards. Of course, past performance doesn’t guarantee future success, but we’re focusing on the past right now.
Historically, high-profile catalysts have propelled Bitcoin’s price. The COVID pandemic in 2020, Tesla buying Bitcoin and the Coinbase IPO in 2021, the Bitcoin spot ETF’s approval in 2024, and Donald Trump’s reelection are examples of this. The four-year cycle, the halving, and the inevitable supply shock mathematically guarantee that Bitcoin’s price will rise. However, real-life events like the ones mentioned magically accompany and seem to cause said rise.
The point is, number-go-up technology is embedded in the protocol, and additionally, concrete market forces aid the process. What event will be the catalyst for the next Bitcoin golden bull run? Stay tuned to find out.
Part of the Bitcoin Pizza Day lore is the fact that Jercos spent those 10,000 Bitcoin pretty quickly. “It's never felt like an investment to me, despite great opportunities for interested investors, rather it's a living currency,” Jeremy Sturdivant said in an interview. The man was the living embodiment of the spend and replace movement many years before it was created.
“Bitcoin as a currency is meant to be spent. Those 10,000 BTC made it back into the economy fairly quickly, around the time they were worth some $400. A ~10x ROI from simply trading in a different currency is quite good, even if that factor could have been higher had I held on to said currency longer. Naturally there will always be people hoarding coins, trying to get rich, and quite a few people did get quite rich, but they wouldn't have got that way without economic growth allowing it.”
Please don’t glide over Jercos’ last statement; the people using Bitcoin as money are creating economic growth. Without the spend and replace movement, Bitcoin becomes stagnant.
It’s as Jack Dorsey recently said, “I think if it doesn’t transition to payments and find that everyday use case, it just gets increasingly irrelevant. And that’s failure to me.” Luckily for everyone reading this, the transition is well underway. Through the Lightning Network, off-ramps, and an ever-increasing number of circular economies, Bitcoin is becoming a medium of exchange.
The spend and replace movement has the right idea, but there are significant obstacles on the way. First of all, let’s not kid ourselves, acquiring Bitcoin is still cumbersome. The replace part of the equation is much harder than just spending fiat money. Gresham's law dictates that people will prefer to spend the soft money first, and Bitcoin is the hardest money ever created. There’s a powerful incentive to spend fiat at play.
On the other hand, one of the Bitcoin network’s objectives is to create an alternative economy. To accomplish that, the community has to support Bitcoin-based businesses and services. If we don’t, they’ll simply cease to exist, and we’ll stay dependent on the traditional economy to function.
So, spending and replacing is uncomfortable and inconvenient, but we have to start doing it to generate economic growth and guarantee Bitcoin’s long-term value.
Bitcoin Pizza Day is not only Bitcoin’s most effective marketing gimmick, it’s also a symbol of the spend and replace movement. Sure, Bitcoin is gaining value, and in the future, it will seem funny we’re spending so much on a pizza, but that’s a fallacy. The fact of the matter is that we’re spending exactly what a pizza costs, plus fees, and we’re getting economic growth and an alternative economy as a bonus. That’s a tremendous deal.
