Rewinding Bitcoin Pizza Day: A Tribute to Weird and Wonderful BTC Purchases

Happy Bitcoin Pizza Day, everyone! Here’s some trivia before you order a Margherita to honor the world’s first real-world Bitcoin transaction. A family vacation to Japan, a 50 Cent record, a steak supper, and a framed cat photograph all have something in common. Members of the Cointelegraph Bitcoin community paid for them all with Bitcoin (BTC)! And, like the 10,000 BTC Bitcoin pizzas that are now valued at more than $300 million, the community’s Bitcoin purchases have risen. Swan Bitcoin exchange’s VP of Engineering, Benjamin de Waal “I spent 7 BTC on a family trip to Japan a few years ago,” Bitcoin told Cointelegraph. 7 BTC is now worth far over $200,000, yet Ben is content because his children are content. Scammer vigilante Felix Crisan told Cointelegraph that in 2015, he spent 50 BTC (about $1.5 million) constructing a new software module for his firm. In 2016, Crisan added that. At the current market price of BTC, that’s a $30,000 wager. Jeffrey Albus, the editor of Cointelegraph, said that “sometime in 2011 or early 2012,” he splurged on a steak meal to illustrate Bitcoin’s peer-to-peer capabilities.

Worse, the value of 15 BTC back then was so low that it fell short of the whole cost, forcing Albus to top it up with good old greenbacks. The Bitcoiner-friendly steak supper is now valued at just under half a million dollars. Julien Liniger, CEO of Swiss Bitcoin exchange Relay–and a self-proclaimed Bitcoin maximalist–told Cointelegraph that he “purchased a bitcoin sweatshirt for 0.1 BTC back in the days, but that was the final item” — a $3,000 hoodie. “It then became too dumb of a thing for me to spend instead of stack sats,” he stated. For those curious about what happened to the 10,000BTC Hanyecz spent on pizzas, analysis shows that 5% of the total went to an extremely rich wallet, while “part of the money was presumably liquidated” on a bankrupt crypto exchange. The affluent wallet that ate a portion of Hanyecz’s BTC is among the top 15 wealthiest Bitcoin wallets, with over 53,000 BTC.  For a certified Bitcoin holder, the total spent or transmitted from the wallet is 0 BTC.

Read more: On May 22, PizzaDAO will throw the world’s largest pizza party to honour the first Bitcoin purchase.