Laszlo Hanyecz mined around 100,000 BTC in total, and about half of it went to pizza. If we use the historical maximum price of $20,000, then 50,000 BTC comes out to $1 billion.
Hungary has plenty of famous people. For example, George Soros, famous investor and philanthropist. Then, you might have heard for famous actress Zsa Zsa Gabor or a magician Harry Houdini. However, we might just presume that you have heard for Laszlo Hanyecz. Sounds familiar, right. Hungarian truck driver Hanyecz became famous when in 2010 he spent 10,000 BTC for – a pizza. This became widely known as the first commercial Bitcoin transaction, and the poor Laszlo became known as the “Bitcoin pizza guy.”
A few days ago there was the tenth anniversary of Bitcoin Pizza Day. He told Cointelegraph that he mined around 100,000 BTC in total, and about half of it went to pizza. If we use the historical maximum price of $20,000, then 50,000 BTC comes out to $1 billion:
“I had mined a pool of about a hundred thousand [BTC] and I spent maybe half of it on pizza and the other half, giving away or selling it for other stuff. I maybe made a few thousand dollars altogether. I made enough to build a new computer for Bitcoin.”
I will just mention here that, in Taipei, in the W hotel there is something called ‘a million-dollar burger’. It is amazing and it costs around $80. It has beluga caviar, Angus beef, foie gras and golden leaves. Back then I thought it is crazy to give such money on a burger. Still, if we imagine a pizza slice worth 6,000 BTC, we could call a million-dollar burger pretty good of a deal.
Hanyecz conveyed this event when he didn’t have enough Bitcoin to purchase two slices of pizza, so he talked the seller into selling him a single slice for 6,000 BTC.
He said:
“I wasn’t stingy with it. And I didn’t mind overpaying, or whatever.”
Hanyecz Has No Regrets about His BTC
Hanyecz however doesn’t have regrets to go down as the guy who kind of spending $1 billion on pizza:
“With 100,000 Bitcoins, I would be a billionaire right now. But then I wouldn’t have gotten that pizza. In short, I paid bitcoin using the lightning network. I was given a bolt11 invoice which I decoded with the c-lightning cli to verify everything was as agreed… So is there any point in doing this instead of an on-chain transaction? For what I described here, probably not. The goal was just to play around with c-lightning and do something more than shuffling a few satoshi back and forth.”
Grant Blaisdell, co-founder and CMO of blockchain analytics company Coinfirm said that during the years the funds have moved across many addresses. Some BTC went to a now-defunct exchange, while some BTC remains in a highly-valued wallet.
Whoever owns that address also accumulated Bitcoin from elsewhere, as the wallet now totals close to $500 million in Bitcoin, Blaisdell added. “It’s potentially someone known and active early on in the bitcoin space,” he concluded, adding:
“We don’t know who controls the address as it doesnt seem to be tied to or owned by a commercial entity such as an exchange or wallet. The fact that the person is unknown is kind of cool in a mysterious Satoshi kind of way.”
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