What You Didn’t Know About Laszlo Hanyecz, the Bitcoin Pizza Day Legend

The skalds of Bitcoin Twitter have sung of the historic moment, the “first real world purchase” with bitcoin, and pundits have etched the story into the internet’s memory with headlines about the infamous Bitcoin Pizza Purchase, now dearly valued at more than $1 billion.But what if I told you that Hanyecz spent nearly 10 times more bitcoin following the historic purchase? And, what if I told you that perhaps Hanyecz did so as ostensible penance for his much more consequential contribution to Bitcoin in its uncertain infancy?He was a Bitcoin technical pioneerThe penumbra of Hanyecz’s Pizza Day purchase has overshadowed his two seminal contributions to Bitcoin’s early technical development.This post originally appeared on Blockspace Media, where Colin Harper is editor-in-chief. The first of these came on April 19, 2010, just days after Hanyecz registered for Bitcointalk, a forum established by Satoshi Nakamoto that was (and still is) a watering hole for Bitcoin’s techie intelligentsia source: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2025/05/22/what-you-didnt-know-about-laszlo-hanyecz-the-bitcoin-pizza-day-legend