It’s Bitcoin Pizza Day, the day when the crypto community comes together to celebrate the first “real-world” bitcoin (BTC) transaction.
Back in 2010, Bitcoin OG Laszlo Hanyecz spent 10,000 BTC (worth $1.1 billion today) on two pizzas from Papa John’s.
In honour of the occasion, Protos has catalogued the price of BTC on May 22 every year since that day.
You can view the chart here.
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If you saved $41 worth of BTC bought on May 22 in either 2012, 2013, or 2014, you’d now have $908,000, $36,000, and $9,226, respectively. If you were to pay the same $41 price today, you’d need to use 0.0003703 BTC instead of 10,000 BTC.
BTC’s price has risen by nearly 2.8 billion percent since that famed pizza purchase, and today it hit an all-time high of $111,544.”
The bitcoin purchase was also big for Papa John’s, which tried to capitalise on its association with Hanyecz by offering free BTC with pizza orders throughout May 2021 in the UK.
However, the UK’s advertising watchdog later banned the advertisements, claiming it trivialized the high-risk investment to an audience “likely to be inexperienced in their understanding of cryptocurrencies.”
Coinbase also got some flak from some diehard bitcoin fans on last year’s Bitcoin Pizza Day when it accepted the stablecoin USDC for pizza instead of BTC. Onlookers with placards promoting BTCPay Server denounced the event as “shitcoin pizza day” while online users described Coinbase as “bad actors” for accepting USDC.