Bitcoin Twitter’s Skuld sang a historic moment, “first real world purchase” with Bitcoin, and critics etched the story into internet memories with headlines about the infamous Bitcoin pizza purchase.
But what if Hanyecz said he spent more than 10 times more Bitcoin after his historic purchase? And perhaps what if Honeyets said he did so as an ostensible repentance for his much more important contribution to Bitcoin in an uncertain childhood?
He was a technical pioneer in Bitcoin
The Penim Bra of Hanyecz’s Pizza Day Buying obscured his two important contributions to Bitcoin’s early technological development.
This post originally appeared in Blockspace Media, Editor-in-Chief by Colin Harper.
The first of these came on April 19, 2010, a few days after Hanyecz was registered with Bitcointalk. This is a forum founded by Nakamoto at, a watering hole for Bitcoin technical intellectuals (and still is). Hanyecz has created the first MacOS client for Bitcoin Core, the original and still dominant software implementation of nodes below the Bitcoin network.
Satoshi originally coded Bitcoin for Windows and Linux, but Hanyecz’s innovation allowed Macos devices to run software too. His contributions laid the foundation for all the following Macos-enabled Bitcoin wallets and applications.
But perhaps even greater than this was Honeyets’ discovery that he could minify Bitcoin with his computer’s graphics card (GPU). Up until this point, early adapters used computer processing units (CPUs) to mine Bitcoin, and the GPU is orders of magnitude more powerful than the CPUs of the task, so this innovation promoted Bitcoin mining forward much faster than Satoshi expected.
“I updated the Mac OS X binaries… I use GPUs to generate Bitcoin. This works very well if I have a good GPU like the Nvidia 8800.”
Discovery ignited Bitcoin’s first digital gold rush. Bitcoin’s total hashrate exploded 130,000% upward by the end of the year, and Bitcoin Miner has begun construction of a small mining farm for the first time. These setups, slapped together in basements, attics, garages and sheds, were prototypes for the industrial-scale Bitcoin mining farms that dominate today’s Bitcoin network.
Pizza was a tragedy
Hanyecz’s invention was so important that he himself acquired a virtual drop from Nakamoto atshi. And it is possible that the subsequent conversations influenced Honeyets’ famous pizza day purchase.
“The big attraction for new users is that anyone with a computer can generate free coins,” Satoshi wrote in Honeyets. “GPUs limit incentives early only to those with high-end GPU hardware. It’s inevitable that a GPU computing cluster will hog all the coins that were eventually generated, but we don’t want to speed up the day.”
In a 2019 interview with Bitcoin Magazine, Hanyecz told me, “I then stopped advertising (GPU mining).”
“I thought, ‘Man, I feel like I’ve crapped your project. Sorry, hey.’ He was worried that some people might be disappointed because they can’t mine blocks on the CPU,” Honeyts said.
Perhaps the conversation spurred it to serve 10,000 BTC on two big papajon pizzas on that fateful day, 15 years ago, May. In fact, he made multiple offers. In a 2019 interview, Hanyecz told me he spent nearly 100,000 BTC that year.
“I spent (all Bitcoin) on pizza a long time ago,” Honeyets wrote in a February 2014 Bitcointalk post. “Aside from changing a little single digit change, I spent everything I mined. You know, adapting to hash power is difficult, so in the end, mining wasn’t worth it.”
Hanyecz is looking at Hanyecz listed in the first Bitcointalk post that he received and spent on 81,432 BTC from this address from April to November 2010.
Laszlo Hanyecz’s Wallet 2010 History of Balance | Source: mempool.space
There’s no way to see if Hanyecz spent all of this on pizza, other items, or if he simply handed over Bitcoin to a new Bitcointalk member. However, he said it was an “open offer” in the original thread for buying pizza, but in August he said, “I can’t afford to continue doing that because I can’t generate thousands of coins a day. I’d like to thank everyone who’s already bought me pizza.”
The original purchase would be enough to wake up a sane person at night, with Bitcoin exceeding $100,000, let alone the repetitive ones that obviously occurred later. But at least in 2019, Hanyecz pissed the ordeal with humor. As he saw it, he committed culinary alchemy and converted his electricity and computing power into a cheap dinner. He didn’t think Bitcoin would command today’s price, so the deal was a victory for his book.
“We think both parties are doing a fair amount of trade, so there’s a trade happening,” he said. “I felt like I was defeating the internet and getting free food. “Man, I linked these GPUs together. Now I’m going to dig twice as fast. I’m just going to eat free food. I don’t have to buy food again…”
“So I mean, I coded this and mined Bitcoin and felt like I was beating the internet that day. I got pizza to contribute to open source projects. Usually my hobbies are time sink and money sink.