Eye-watering Bitcoin ‘Pizza Index’ graphic shows what each topping is worth after trader blew £250MILLION on Papa John’s
THIS eye-watering Bitcoin 'Pizza Index' reveals what each individual topping is worth after a trader infamously blew more than £250m on Papa John's.
American Laszlo Hanyecz made history when he conducted the first “real world” purchase with the crypto cash more than a decade ago.
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However, little did he know that when he spent 10,000 Bitcoin on two pizzas it would one day leave him hundreds of millions out of pocket.
He had no clue that 11 years on the coins - worth around £30 at the time - would today be worth a staggering £257,869,013.
It is a fortune which could have bought him a private island, a luxurious mansion, and several private jets.
As our chart reveals a single olive could buy a luxury five-bedrrom home and a slice of pepperoni could buy a fleet of Ferraris.
And one whole pizza - £129,760,706 - might even be enough to prise Harry Kane away from Tottenham.
Amazingly, Laszlo insists he has absolutely no sleepless nights over his impulse purchase one lunchtime in 2010.
He has said: "I don't regret it. I think that it's great that I got to be part of the early history of Bitcoin in that way.
"People know about the pizza...everybody can kind of relate to that and be [like] 'Oh my God, you spent all of that money!'"
The Florida man was an early contributor to Bitcoin’s software when it was barely a year old.
He even coded a programme that made it possible for fans to mine the currency using their computer’s graphics cards (GPU).
However, his life changed forever when he posted a message on a Bitcoin chat forum on May 22, 2010.
He wrote on Bitcointalk: "I'll pay 10,000 Bitcoins for a couple of pizzas.. like maybe 2 large ones so I have some left over for the next day.
"I like things like onions, peppers, sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes, pepperoni, etc.. just standard stuff no weird fish topping or anything like that.
"If you're interested please let me know and we can work out a deal."
Hit post caught the eye of another forum user called Jeremy Sturdivant who agreed to order two large supreme pizzas in return for 10,000 Bitcoin.
“I wanted to do the pizza thing because to me it was free pizza,” Laszlo later explained.
“I mean, I coded this thing and mined Bitcoin and I felt like I was winning the internet that day.
"I got pizza for contributing to an open-source project. Usually hobbies are a time sink and money sink, and in this case, my hobby bought me dinner.
“I was like, ‘Man, I got these GPUs linked together, now I’m going to mine twice as fast. I’m just going to be eating free food; I’ll never have to buy food again.’”
Laszlo believes his infamous fast food lunch even helped with the incredible explosion of Bitcoin.
He : "I'd like to think that what I did helped. But I think if it wasn't me, somebody else would have come along. And maybe it wouldn't have been pizza.
"But I think Bitcoin was kind of destined to get big, and I didn't know everything about bitcoin back then - I mean,
"I had only been playing with it a couple months, and I figured out how to mine, I actually wrote the first GPU miner - and that's how I got all those bitcoins that I was kind of giving away."
After the first transaction, Hanyecz would go on to do it many more times and spend a total of 100,000 Bitcoin on pizza that summer - now worth £2.5billion.
To commemorate Lazlo's legendary transaction, May 22 is dubbed Bitcoin Pizza Day.
Pizza providers worldwide offer discounts to bitcoin users to commemorate the incredible purchase.
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However, Laszlo says buying a pizza with crypto cash these days would be impossible.
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He said: "If everybody wanted to pay for pizza with bitcoin right now – it wouldn't work.
"They would try it, they'd realise that their transactions aren't confirming, and they'd lose interest."