Bitcoin Pizza Day Tracker Released
Coindesk has released a new widget on the anniversary of Bitcoin Pizza Day. This new app can be added to any website and it will give a constant update on the price that was paid in Bitcoin for the two most expensive pizzas in the world.
What is Bitcoin Pizza Day?
May 22nd has come to be celebrated as Bitcoin Pizza Day. So what is so special about this day? Well, on May 22, 2010, a programmer called Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 BTC for 2 Papa John’s pizzas. At that time, Bitcoin and Blockchain technology was just over a year old and the value of 10,000 Bitcoin tokens was just about $25.
If we look at the price paid for those pizzas at Bitcoin’s highest value of $20,000 – which it reached in December 2017 – these would be the most expensive pizzas ever, being priced at $200 million! At the time of writing this article, those two pizzas would have cost about $79.66 million.
Why is Bitcoin Pizza Day Important?
Bitcoin Pizza Day is not celebrated because some programmer paid an eye-watering (by today’s standards) sum for just two simple pizzas. The reason this day is commemorated is because this was the day that the first ever transaction using a cryptocurrency was made.
The number of Bitcoins spent (though it hurts to think about it now) is not as important as the fact that with this transaction, a milestone had been reached in the evolution of the cryptocurrency world – the advent of cryptocurrency powered e-commerce.
In an interview with The New York Times later in 2013, Hanyecz said that at that time Bitcoin really didn’t have any value – which was absolutely true. However, being able to trade those tokens for a commodity was “incredibly cool”, he said, adding that no one knew at that time how big Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency industry would grow.
Then and Now
Since 2010 and the fateful pizza purchase, the world has changed a lot. Today, the cryptocurrency industry is growing exponentially growing, with thousands of types of cryptocurrency tokens in circulation and enterprises from almost all industries scrambling to understand and use Blockchain technology.
Blockchain transactions number in the hundreds of thousands per day and thousands of brick-and-mortar stores across the world accept cryptocurrencies as valid payment options. And it doesn’t stop there. Governments and central banks are looking at the utility of cryptocurrencies and some are even contemplating issuing their own cryptocurrencies.
This year, Hanyecz made history again when he became the first man to purchase – once again – a pizza, using the newly launched Lightening Network, the platform that many fans see as the liberator of Bitcoin’s scaling and payments issues.