Culture, lore and fun facts

The most expensive pizzas in history

On 18 May 2010 a programmer in Jacksonville, Florida, posted an offer on the Bitcointalk forum. Laszlo Hanyecz would pay 10,000 bitcoin to anyone who would get two large pizzas delivered to his house. He was specific: he liked onions, peppers, sausage and mushrooms, no fish. For four days nobody took him up on it.

On 22 May a nineteen-year-old in California named Jeremy Sturdivant phoned in an order to a Papa John’s in Jacksonville, paid about $25 by card, and received the 10,000 coins. Hanyecz posted a photo of the pizzas on his table with a small child’s hand reaching for a slice. It was the first time anyone is known to have bought a physical object with bitcoin, and it proved a point that had been purely theoretical: this stuff could be exchanged for something real.

The 22nd of May is now Bitcoin Pizza Day, marked every year with pizza and with a ritual calculation of what those coins would be worth. Hanyecz has always said he has no regrets. He was mining thousands of coins on his graphics card at the time, the coins were worth nothing until someone accepted them, and somebody had to go first. He did it several more times that summer.

HODL: a typo becomes a creed

On 18 December 2013 bitcoin was in freefall. China had just barred its banks from touching it, and the price had dropped by more than a third in a matter of days. On Bitcointalk a user called GameKyuubi, who cheerfully admitted to having had some whisky, started a thread with the title in capital letters: “I AM HODLING”.

The post is a small masterpiece of self-aware panic. He knows he has misspelled it. He knows he is a bad trader. He reasons that in a market where skilled traders take money from unskilled ones, the only winning move for someone like him is not to play. So he will hold.

Within the hour the typo was a meme. Within a few years it was a philosophy: do not trade, do not panic, just hold. Later someone decided it stood for “hold on for dear life”, which it never did. It is probably the only investment strategy in history named after a spelling mistake, and it has outperformed most of the clever ones.

A short phrasebook

Laser eyes and other rituals

In February 2021, as bitcoin approached $50,000, supporters on Twitter began editing their profile pictures to give themselves glowing red eyes, under the slogan that the lasers would stay on until the price reached $100,000. Senators, chief executives and at least one head of state joined in. Within a few months the price had halved. It took until December 2024 to get there, by which time most of the lasers had been quietly switched off.

Other rituals have lasted better. Every 3 January, on the anniversary of the genesis block, the “Proof of Keys” campaign urges holders to withdraw their coins from exchanges, partly to practise and partly to check that the exchanges really have them. Every halving is celebrated with countdown parties. And for years the community kept a running tally of bitcoin’s published obituaries; the count of articles declaring it dead passed four hundred some time ago.

Lost fortunes

Because bitcoin has no recovery process, its history is littered with coins that are visible to everyone and reachable by no one.

Satoshi lore

• The birthday. On a forum profile Satoshi gave a date of birth of 5 April 1975. Enthusiasts noticed that 5 April was the date in 1933 when the United States ordered citizens to hand in their gold, and that private gold ownership became legal again at the start of 1975. Coincidence or a message, depending on your temperament.
• The name. Satoshi Nakamoto reads as a Japanese man’s name. Nothing else about the writing suggests Japan. The English is fluent, with British spellings and at least one very British expression.
• The unit. The smallest fraction of a bitcoin was named the satoshi by the community, not by Satoshi.
• The statues. A bronze bust with a mirrored face, so that viewers see themselves, was unveiled in Budapest in 2021. Others have followed.
• The unspendable 50. Because of the way the genesis block was written into the code, its 50 bitcoin reward can never be spent, by Satoshi or anyone else. People still send small amounts to its address as an offering.
• The name that did not stick. In the original source code the ledger is called the “timechain”.

Myths versus facts

Ten things people say about bitcoin. Tap or click a card to turn it over.

Fifteen facts for your next dinner party

1. The whitepaper never uses the word “blockchain”.
2. Three of its eight references are to work by the same pair of researchers, Stuart Haber and Scott Stornetta, on timestamping documents.
3. The total supply is not quite 21 million. It is 20,999,999.9769 BTC, or exactly 2,099,999,997,690,000 satoshis.
4. In August 2010 a bug let someone create 184 billion bitcoin in one transaction. The fix was live within five hours.
5. The first known exchange rate, in October 2009, valued a dollar at 1,309 bitcoin.
6. For bitcoin’s first eighteen months, mining a block of 50 coins could be done on a laptop.
7. The last bitcoin will be mined around the year 2140. By then the reward per block will be a single satoshi.
8. A block header is exactly 80 bytes, however many transactions the block holds.
9. The genesis block’s hash has two more leading zeros than it needed. Nobody knows why.
10. There were six days between the genesis block and block 1. Some people enjoy the biblical echo; the likelier explanation is testing.
11. The 20 millionth bitcoin was mined in March 2026. The final million will take another 114 years.
12. In a 12-word seed phrase the last word is partly a checksum, so not every combination of 12 valid words is a valid seed.
13. Hal Finney’s “Running bitcoin” post dates from January 2009 and is among the first mentions of bitcoin on social media.
14. The Bank for International Settlements, the IMF and most central banks have criticised bitcoin. Several governments now hold it anyway.
15. You are reading this at block …. By the time you finish the page, it may well be the next one.

For the serious history behind the stories, see the timeline. To test what you have picked up, try the quiz.