Bitcoin Pizza Day Protagonist Once 'Earned Thousands of Bitcoins in a Day,' Spent Nearly 10,000 BTC on Pizza in 2010

On May 22nd, according to a report in Forbes, Laszlo Hanyecz, the programmer who is famous for spending 10,000 bitcoins on two Papa John's pizzas in 2010, was even more "prodigal" with his bitcoins than the public had imagined. It is possible that Hanyecz spent an additional 79,000 bitcoins on later pizza purchases, which would be worth more than 8.7 billion US dollars at the current exchange rates. In an interview in 2019, Hanyecz stated that he had spent a total of nearly 100,000 bitcoins on pizza in 2010 and that he didn't pay much attention to these transactions at that time. Hanyecz pointed out that at that time, users on the Bitcointalk forum would often give hundreds or thousands of bitcoins to newcomers. To prove his claims, Hanyecz provided the Bitcoin address listed in his first post on Bitcointalk as evidence. The wallet records show that from the creation of the wallet on April 10, 2010, until the pizza transaction was completed on August 4, Laszlo sent out more than 79,000 bitcoins. Ironically, the remaining bitcoins in the wallet are now only enough to buy a large pizza at the current exchange rate, and the last large transaction took place in June 2011, with a total outflow slightly exceeding 81,432 bitcoins. Where did Hanyecz's bitcoins come from? Between 2009 and 2010, the Bitcoin block reward was 50 bitcoins per block (plus transaction fees). Calculating based on an average of one block every ten minutes, Hanyecz's 81,432 bitcoins accounted for approximately 1.5% of the total mined supply at that time. Hanyecz was an early Bitcoin developer who not only created the first MacOS Bitcoin client but was also the first person after Satoshi Nakamoto to discover GPU mining. After he publicized this discovery in May 2010, the Bitcoin network's hashrate increased by 1,300 times by the end of the year. Ironically, it was the increased competition that prevented him from continuing to "earn thousands of bitcoins daily."