Eight years ago, there was the first Bitcoin exchange for a consumer product, a couple of Papa John pizzas.
With a total cost of 10,000 Bitcoins, it was a milestone for the adoption of the cryptocurrency and that has since been commemorated as the celebration of May 22 as the "Bitcoin Pizza Day".
However, even the most superficial observation of Bitcoin Pizza Day is not complete without a calculation of exactly how much, in terms of dollars, those two pizzas cost. With that, Coindesk today launches a new widget that provides a real-time calculation that can be added to any website.
From the time of publication, that's about $ 83.7 million for the 2 pizzas, or $ 42 million each.
But why does this matter? To understand, one needs to delay the clock until 2010.
In mid-May of that year, a programmer named Laszlo Hanyecz sought to exchange some of his bitcoins earned by pizza, several days later, he was able to do so with the help of another user of Bitcointalk's online forum, then a central thread was created to the discussion about the cryptocurrency.
An agreement was reached: 10,000 BTC for two Papa John's pizzas. That dazzling amount was worth only $ 25 at that time, or a fraction of a penny each.
However, at that time, it was not so much the number of Bitcoins spent nor the product involved: the event was a milestone simply because the transaction had taken place. Although limited to 16 slices of pizza, the era of Bitcoin-driven commerce had begun, not to mention the silent grimace of spending millions of dollars on two pizzas.
"It was not as if the Bitcoins had value at that time, so the idea of exchanging them for a pizza was incredibly good," Hanyecz said in an interview in 2013 with The New York Times, adding:
"No one knew it was going to be that big."
Even so, the tradition is still alive, and the purchase is used to track other notable Bitcoin landmarks.
In fact, it was Hanyecz himself who later participated in what could one day be known as "Lightning Pizza Day" after he used the next-generation technology, currently under development, to buy a cake in February.