Laszlo Hanyecz.

Joining Bitcoin

Hanyecz joined the Bitcoin forum, today’s BitcointalkBitcointalkThe Bitcoin forum Satoshi Nakamoto opened in November 2009. Much of Bitcoin’s early history, from the pizza offer to Satoshi’s last post, happened there., on 14 April 2010: “Hi all, I’m a new Bitcoin user and I’m starting to generate some of my own coins.” A programmer in Jacksonville, Florida, he had worked with Linux, Mac computers and iPhones, and five days later he posted the first build of Bitcoin for the Mac. Satoshi Nakamoto added his fixes to the code that May, and the release notes for Bitcoin 0.3, that July, listed a “Mac OS X version (thanks to Laszlo)”.⁠^{[2][17][3][4][5]}

He also wrote a small speed counter for his own mining, which Satoshi built into the software as the “hashmeter”. Bitcoin, he says, was always a hobby: his main job, for years, has been running the computer systems of GORUCK, a maker of rucksacks.⁠^[6][16]

Mining with a graphics card

Mining then ran on a computer’s main processor. On 10 May 2010 Hanyecz posted a version that “will use your GPU to generate bitcoins”, meaning the graphics chip. His own tests showed it running about twice as fast as his processor. “As far as I know I was the first to release a GPU miner,” he wrote in 2014, and he mined everything that way.⁠^[7][10]

Satoshi had already asked the forum for “a gentleman’s agreement to postpone the GPU arms race”, and wrote to Hanyecz privately that graphics chips “would prematurely limit the incentive to only those with high-end GPU hardware”. “It’s inevitable that GPU compute clusters will eventually hog all the generated coins,” Satoshi added, “but I don’t want to hasten that day.” Hanyecz told Bitcoin Magazine in 2019: “So, I stopped advertising it after that.”⁠^[8][9]

The pizza

On 18 May 2010 he made his offer on the forum: “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.” Another member pointed out that the coins could be sold for about $41. Nobody took him up on it for three days. “So nobody wants to buy me pizza?” he asked on 21 May. “I just think it would be interesting if I could say that I paid for a pizza in bitcoins.”⁠^[1]

The next day a teenager in California, Jeremy Sturdivant, known on the forum as jercos, ordered two pizzas online for delivery to Hanyecz in Florida and paid with his own card. Hanyecz sent him 10,000 bitcoins in a payment recorded in block 57,043. “I just want to report that I successfully traded 10,000 bitcoins for pizza,” he posted that day. “Thanks jercos!” The pizzas, he wrote later, cost “about 25 dollars total, maybe 30 if you give the guy a nice tip”.⁠^{[12][13][11][1]}

More pizza, and no regrets

He kept trading bitcoins for pizza that summer, until in August 2010 he wrote that he had to stop: “I can’t generate thousands of coins a day anymore.” “Other than a little bit of single digit change, I spent everything I mined,” he wrote in 2014, and in 2019 he told CBS’s 60 Minutes that he estimated he had spent 100,000 bitcoins on various things, much of it on pizza.⁠^[1][10][14]

He has often been asked whether he regrets it. “You know, I don’t regret it,” he told Cointelegraph in 2018. “I think if it wasn’t me, somebody else would have come along.” He has kept a low profile since: “I don’t want that kind of attention, and I certainly don’t want people thinking I’m Satoshi,” he told Bitcoin Magazine.⁠^[15][9]

In February 2018 he bought pizza with bitcoin again, this time over the Lightning NetworkLightning NetworkA network built on Bitcoin for payments through channels, without recording every payment as its own blockchain transaction., a faster way to pay that is built on top of Bitcoin. Two pizzas cost him 0.00649 bitcoin, about $67, and the payment cost about 6 cents to send, Bloomberg reported. “I wanted to show that yes, you still can buy pizzas with Bitcoin,” he said. “But if it’s a $50 pizza and a $100 transaction fee, that doesn’t work.”⁠^[17]

Bitcoin Pizza Day

In October 2012 a member of the same forum thread wrote: “This needs to be a bitcoin holiday. we celebrate by buying pizza with bitcoins.” Another asked: “What do we call it, Bitcoin Pizza Day?” By 2014 the name was in the press, and 22 May is now marked every year.⁠^[18][19]