Bitcoin Pizza Day is the wrong story.
The creator of Bitcoin told Laszlo that it was bad for the Bitcoin network when he mined with a Graphics Card, so Laszlo sold the proceeds of his mining for pizza.
10,000 BTC for two Papa John’s pizzas. Everyone knows the number. Almost nobody knows what happened 12 days earlier.
On May 10, 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz posted the first working GPU miner for Bitcoin on BitcoinTalk. Until that day, everyone mined on CPUs. GPUs were orders of magnitude faster. By December 2010, Bitcoin’s total hashrate had jumped 130,000%.
Laszlo’s wallet received over 81,000 BTC between April and November 2010, almost all of it from his own GPU rigs. 10,000 coins sounds like a fortune. For Laszlo in 2010, it was about a week of mining.
He didn’t stop there. Laszlo later admitted he spent close to 100,000 BTC that year. Pizza, random stuff, more pizza.
The reason matters. Satoshi had messaged him privately, saying GPU mining was bad for the network. Fair distribution needed CPUs. Centralizing hashrate broke the design. Laszlo agreed. He said he felt guilty for “crapping up the project”.
So he cashed out. Not into fiat. Into anything that wasn’t BTC. Pizza was a convenient target.
The most famous transaction in Bitcoin history wasn’t a guy who didn’t get it. It was a mining pioneer apologizing for his own breakthrough, paid in the coins his invention let him mine.
This Friday, when the pizza memes start, remember the second story.