You know, there’s a story from crypto history that perfectly shows the mindset of early adopters. It’s about a guy who spent 10,000 bitcoins on two pizzas. Sounds like the most expensive meal in history, but for him it was a completely different story.

It all started on 18 May 2010 on the Bitcoin Talk forum. Laszlo just posted an offer: “I’ll exchange 10,000 bitcoins for two large pizzas.” Maybe someone was cooking them, maybe they’d order for takeout. He even described his taste preferences. Back then, Bitcoin was still an infant—just appeared, and people didn’t understand what it was at all. 10,000 bitcoins were worth about 30 bucks. Yes, you got it right—$30 for what is now worth hundreds of millions.

At first, nobody noticed the post. A few people agreed to help, but they were outside the United States, and everything came down to logistics. Laszlo even started to doubt whether his offer was too low. But four days later, on 22 May, he returned to the forum and posted a photo—the deal had been done. The pizzas were bought.

Why is this important? Because it was the first real Bitcoin transaction for something tangible. Before that, people just hoarded and stored it. Laszlo showed that it could work as a currency. It was an experiment, a hypothesis test. And it worked.

Later, Laszlo himself explained why he did it. For him, it was basically a free pizza. He wrote code, mined bitcoins, and felt like he’d won the Internet. His hobby literally bought him dinner. Usually hobbies require money and time, but here it was the opposite—he earned.

Here’s what’s interesting: Laszlo was a programmer and one of the first to realize the potential of graphics cards for mining. He quickly mined tens of thousands of bitcoins. According to blockchain data, in May 2010, his wallet reached a peak of 20,962 BTC, and then grew to 43,854 BTC in June. The 10,000 he spent on pizza were just a drop in the ocean for him.

After this transaction, people started tracking the price of pizza in bitcoins. As BTC’s value grew, everyone updated the numbers under his post. Laszlo admitted he didn’t expect such a surge. But what’s important is that he doesn’t regret it. No insomnia, no suffering. Back then, he was happy—and that’s what matters.

Later, it turned out that Laszlo spent only about 100,000 bitcoins on various purchases. Today, that’s more than $4 billion. But his position was the same: it was a hobby, a way to test the idea, part of developing the ecosystem.

The pizza seller was 19-year-old Californian Jeremy Sturdivant. He was also an early crypto enthusiast, mined thousands of bitcoins, and spent the same 10,000 on a trip with his girlfriend. Later, he didn’t regret it either. Even though he hadn’t expected the price to rise like that, he figured he’d made a long-term profit from the deal.

Laszlo still stays in the shadows. No social media, no desire to be famous. For him, Bitcoin remained the same as it was in 2010—a hobby, not a career. He didn’t want to attract attention, he didn’t want people to think he was Satoshi. He just wanted to stay out of the spotlight and enjoy the process.

In 2019, Bitcoin Magazine congratulated him for his contribution to development. He gave the Bitcoin Core community GPU mining on MacOS, and of course, the legendary pizza meme. On 22 May every year, for the crypto community, it’s Bitcoin Pizza Day. A delicious and memorable day.

That’s the story. A person bought pizza with bitcoins and forever entered crypto history. He doesn’t regret it because he understood what he was doing. It wasn’t a mistake—it was part of a bigger experiment that changed the world.