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🍕 13 years ago today...

🍕 13 years ago today...

PLUS: White House predicts stock market crash

Alex M.
May 22, 2023

GM everyone. This is 2036, the tiny crypto newsletter with huge returns.

Here’s what we’re serving up today 🍲: the most iconic bitcoin purchase was made exactly 13 years ago. With 9-figure losses, there are two big lessons we can learn from it.

Let’s dig in.

🥔 Today’s meat and potatoes

Get smarter on crypto in 2 minutes

13 years ago, bitcoin was less than a year old and had only been spent once before. It was worth roughly $0.0041.

It was mostly the talk of a handful of cryptography enthusiasts on a forum called Bitcointalk.

Satoshi Nakamoto, the founder of bitcoin, was one of them.

Laszlo Hanyecz was another.

Laszlo was one of the earliest contributors to bitcoin. And on May 22, 2010 he posted this message online:

“I’ll pay 10,000 Bitcoin for a couple of pizzas… maybe 2 large so I have some left over for the next day”

A guy named Jeremy Sturdivat agreed to buy 2 pizzas from Papa John’s and deliver them to Laszlo.

And that kids, is how I met your moth… is how the first* bitcoin transaction was made.

Laszlo and his pizzas

At today’s prices, these pizzas would be worth $227 MILLION.

As it turns out - Laszlo kept the offer running until the price of bitcoin made 2 pizzas worth $600.

He spent 100,000 BTC on pizzas that summer ($2.7 BILLION today).

Now - it’s easy to ridicule Laszlo for spending bitcoin.

But it’s worth remembering that:

1/ Bitcoin’s vision has changed over time

At the time of the bitcoin pizza purchase, bitcoin was meant to become peer-to-peer cash.

In fact, that’s exactly what the bitcoin white paper calls it:

the bitcoin white paper

Today, bitcoin has evolved into digital gold - a Swiss savings account in the cloud and a settlement tool for large, secure transactions.

And it could evolve further:

Ordinals have exploded in popularity (more on that this week).
Microstrategy, one of the largest holders of bitcoin, wants to build apps on bitcoin, something inconceivable just 6 months ago.

2/ There have been 5 boom and bust cycles since bitcoin pizza day, but bitcoin is still up 150% per year on average.

Despite what the media tells you, crypto is not going anywhere.

In fact, it’s only getting bigger over time.

Right now, AI is the talk of the town. But every month in crypto, there are dozens of new protocols and opportunities. And we’re not even in a full bull market yet.

Your job is to strike a balance between long-term sustainability (bitcoin and Ethereum) and the occasional swing for the fences.

And we’ll be here to guide you through it all.

In the meantime, we wish you all a happy Bitcoin Pizza Day 🍕.

Give a man a pizza and he'll eat for a day. Let him buy pizza with bitcoin, and he’ll revolutionize the economy.

Said someone, somewhere on a forum.

***

*we only found out last week that the first bitcoin transaction was actually for a bitcoin picture (NFT?) in February 2010, three months before the pizzas.