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Crypto community celebrates bitcoin pizza day

We honestly don’t know what this whole blockchain industry would look like if this first transaction hadn’t been such a ringing success

Wednesday, May 22 is Bitcoin Pizza Day. That’s because on May 22, 2010, two pizza pies were bought by a person named Laszlo Hanyecz through a bitcoin forum. While the pies themselves were mundane, the transaction was revolutionary—they were bought with 10,000 bitcoins, worth roughly $41 at the time. Since then it has become blockchain’s pretty much only holiday.

But as of lunchtime here in New York those 10,000 bitcoins were worth $79,253,225—just a little lower than last Bitcoin Pizza Day.

On Bitcoin Pizza Day in 2011—only a year after the ~$40 transaction—10,000 bitcoins cost $81,400. By 2012, that went down to $51,200, but then shot up to $1,276,600 in 2013. It then spiked to $5,085,900 in 2014 only to tumble to $2,364,400 in 2015 and recovered a bit to $4,732,000 in 2016. Last Bitcoin Pizza Day, it went for $82,306,400, up from $20,509,958 in 2017.

We honestly don’t know what this whole blockchain industry would look like if this first transaction hadn’t been such a ringing success. Both users were happy with the process. The kid even got a slice. But just like the blockchain, we have no way of knowing what would happen if we could go back and delete that one transaction.

It is entirely possible that this entire system would have collapsed within a year without any utility.

This is a good way to check the bitcoin community’s temperature. Some might say that the bitcoin pizza is down from last year, but it is more than recovering from a low earlier this year. This year, we gained the ability to search Yelp for restaurants who accept crypto, but we also lost a bunch of the places that accept crypto. (We geniuses at Modern Consensus couldn’t find a pizza place near us that took crypto, so we paid for it the old fashioned way.)

But still, we owe a lot to that first transaction. “I think it made it real for some people, it certainly did for me,” Lazlo told Anderson Cooper on 60 minutes last week.

So wherever you are, we hope you’re having a great pizza party feeling.

[Note: ”Pizza Party” Music video was directed by Modern Consensus’ own Brendan Jay Sullivan.]

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Brendan Sullivan is a writer, producer, and author of the memoir Rivington Was Ours: Lady Gaga, the Lower East Side, and the Prime of Our Lives. Disclosure: he owns cryptocurrencies. Follow him on Twitter.