Who Is Laszlo Hanyecz? More Than the Bitcoin Pizza Guy

Laszlo Hanyecz is the Florida programmer who paid 10,000 BTC for two pizzas on 22 May 2010, the first widely documented purchase of a physical good with bitcoin. That's why 22 May is Bitcoin Pizza Day. But the pizza is only part of his story: he also built the first Mac OS X version of Bitcoin, credited by Satoshi in the 0.3 release, and he was among the first people to mine bitcoin with a graphics card.

We covered the transaction itself in Bitcoin Pizza Day: the 10,000 BTC transaction, verified on-chain. This post is about the man who sent it.

Laszlo Hanyecz at a glance

Forum name	laszlo (Bitcointalk)
Based in	Jacksonville, Florida, in 2010 (his own forum post)
Known for	Bitcoin Pizza Day, 22 May 2010
Code	First Mac OS X build of Bitcoin, shipped in v0.3 (July 2010)
Mining	Early GPU mining experiments, spring 2010
Lightning pizza	Bought two more pizzas over the Lightning Network, February 2018

The pizza: "I just think it would be interesting"

On 18 May 2010, Laszlo opened a Bitcointalk thread called "Pizza for bitcoins?" and offered 10,000 BTC for "a couple of pizzas.. like maybe 2 large ones so I have some left over for the next day." Another member replied that he could sell those coins for about $41 on an early exchange.

Three days later nobody had bitten, and he asked whether his offer was too low. When someone asked why he wanted it so badly, his answer was simple: "I just think it would be interesting if I could say that I paid for a pizza in bitcoins."

On 22 May he reported success and thanked jercos, the forum user who took the coins and had the pizzas delivered. Cointelegraph later identified jercos as Jeremy Sturdivant. The payment is still on the blockchain in block 57,043, and our block explorer guide shows you how to find it in a few minutes.

What most retellings skip: it wasn't a one-off. On 12 June 2010 Laszlo called it "an open offer" and said he'd trade 10,000 BTC for two more pizzas any time. By August he stopped, writing that he couldn't "generate thousands of coins a day anymore." He later told Bitcoin Magazine he spent something near 100,000 BTC on pizza that year.

The Mac: Bitcoin 0.3, "thanks to Laszlo"

Before the pizza, Laszlo was writing code. In early May 2010 he posted build instructions and a downloadable Mac app on Bitcointalk, noting that it was "Intel only" and "just a prototype." When Satoshi announced Bitcoin 0.3 on 6 July 2010, the release notes listed "Mac OS X version (thanks to Laszlo)."

That release mattered: a few days later it hit Slashdot and a wave of new users arrived, and for the first time Mac owners had an official build to download. In a 2018 Cointelegraph interview he summed up that period himself: he gave tech support on the forums, ported Bitcoin to macOS and fixed bugs.

The GPU: mining faster, and Satoshi's "go slow"

In 2010 everyone mined with their computer's main processor, the CPU. Laszlo realised that a graphics card, which does many simple calculations at once, suits Bitcoin's hashing much better. His Mac build post in May 2010 already mentions "adding OpenCL support," and Bitcoin Magazine reported that the switch gave him roughly a tenfold increase in hashpower.

Satoshi wasn't thrilled. In an email Laszlo later shared through journalist Nathaniel Popper (author of Digital Gold), Satoshi wrote:

"A big attraction to new users is that anyone with a computer can generate some free coins… GPUs would prematurely limit the incentive to only those with high end GPU hardware. It's inevitable that GPU compute clusters will eventually hog all the generated coins, but I don't want to hasten that day."

Laszlo said he stopped promoting it after that. He also told Cointelegraph that Satoshi shared his own unreleased GPU mining code with him, saying he kept it ready "in case he had to defend the network with it." That's Laszlo's recollection; the full emails have never been published, so treat the detail as his account rather than a documented fact.

This explains where the pizza money came from. Popper wrote that once the GPU was running, Laszlo went from winning at most one 50 BTC block a day to one or two blocks an hour. The 131 small inputs in the pizza transaction are what those mining rewards look like on-chain.

Does Laszlo regret the pizza?

No, by his own account, more than once:

• Cointelegraph, 2018: "You know, I don't regret it. I think that it's great that I got to be part of the early history of Bitcoin in that way."
• Bitcoin Magazine, 2019: "A trade happens because both parties think they're getting a good deal… I felt like I was beating the internet, getting free food." He called the coins "Monopoly money" at the time.
• 60 Minutes, 2018: asked whether the "what ifs" bother him, he said dwelling on it is "not good for me."

His point is worth keeping: someone had to spend bitcoin on something real to show it worked as money, and he did it on purpose.

Lightning pizza: doing it again in 2018

On 25 February 2018, Laszlo posted to the Lightning developers' mailing list that he'd bought two pizzas again, this time paying 649,000 satoshis (0.00649 BTC) over the Lightning Network. A friend in London accepted the payment and arranged delivery from a local shop. To make the swap fair, the driver asked "What is the preimage?" and handed over the pizzas only when Laszlo showed proof of payment, the first and last four characters of a code he could only get by paying.

Eight years after the first pizza showed bitcoin could buy things, the second showed it could do it fast and cheaply.

Where Laszlo fits in Bitcoin history

Laszlo sits between two dates printed on Mood shirts. The Genesis block started the chain on 3 January 2009; the pizza on 22 May 2010 gave it a price people could picture. Our Bitcoin history timeline 2008–2010 fills in the months between, and our Bitcoin anniversaries calendar has 22 May marked every year.