Bitcoin Pizza Day Protagonist Once 'Earned Thousands of Bitcoins in a Day,' Spent Nearly 10,000 BTC on Pizza in 2010

BlockBeats News, May 22nd, according to Forbes report, programmer Laszlo Hanyecz, who famously spent 10,000 bitcoins on two Papa John's pizzas in 2010, was even more "extravagant" with his bitcoins than the public believed. Hanyecz may have additionally spent 79,000 bitcoins on later pizza purchases, which would be worth over 8.7 billion US dollars at current exchange rates. In an interview in 2019, Hanyecz stated that he spent nearly 100,000 bitcoins in total on pizza in 2010, and he didn't care about these transactions at the time. Hanyecz pointed out that at that time, users on the Bitcointalk forum would often give hundreds or thousands of bitcoins to newcomers.

To prove his claims, Hanyecz attached the Bitcoin address listed in his first post on Bitcointalk as evidence. The wallet records show that from the creation of the wallet on April 10, 2010, until the pizza transaction was closed on August 4, Laszlo sent out over 79,000 bitcoins. Ironically, the remaining bitcoins in the wallet now are only enough to buy a large pizza at the current exchange rate, and the last large transaction occurred in June 2011, with a total outflow slightly above 81,432 bitcoins.

Where did Hanyecz's bitcoins come from? Between 2009 and 2010, the Bitcoin block reward was 50 bitcoins per block (plus transaction fees). Calculating based on an average of one block every ten minutes, Hanyecz's 81,432 bitcoins accounted for approximately 1.5% of the total mined supply at that time. Hanyecz was an early Bitcoin developer who not only created the first MacOS Bitcoin client but was also the first person, after Satoshi Nakamoto, to discover GPU mining. After he publicized this discovery in May 2010, the Bitcoin network's hashrate surged 1,300 times by the end of the year. Ironically, it was the increased competition that prevented him from continuing to "earn thousands of bitcoins daily."