On May 22, 2010, Floridian Laszlo Hanyecz ordered two pizzas from Domino’s. It’s not the kind of thing that usually makes the history books. Yet his name goes on a list that includes Max Pruss, the captain of the Hindenburg, and Fred Kaps, the magician who followed The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show – unfortunate men who will forever be remembered for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Laszlo Hanyecz’s mistake was to buy the pizzas with bitcoins, 10,000 of them, a value of about $41, the first recorded bitcoin purchase. Had he held on to his bitcoins for a few more years, he could have sold them for $100,000,000. Or bought 6,253,909 large pepperoni pizzas.
It is stories like this that suggest bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies may have once been silly, but now they matter.
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