Laszlo Hanyecz
Laszlo Hanyecz
Laszlo Hanyecz is a software engineer and early bitcoin investor. He is well known for spending 10,000 bitcoin to buy two Papa John's Pizzas. [1]
Overview
On May 17th, 2010 Laszlo Hanyecz placed a request to buy two pizzas with bitcoin, on May 22nd that request was fulfilled by Jeremy Sturdivant.
The coins were worth $41 dollars at the time, but at the time of bitcoin's highest price surge the transaction would have netted Laszlo nearly $200 million dollars.
Laszlo didn't just buy two pizzas over the years, he estimates that he's spent over 100,000 bitcoins on various items.
On May 16, 2019 Laszlo was interviewed by Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes in a segment about other prominent crypto-figures such as Federal Reserve Governor Lael Brainard; Neha Narula, director of the MIT Media Lab's Digital Currency Initiative; Marco Streng, the CEO of Genesis Mining; and Charlie Shrem, one of Bitcoin's first millionaires and convicted felons. When asked if he regrets the decision in an interview with CoinTelegraph, Laszlo said:
You know, 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, and people know about the pizza and it's an interesting story because everybody can kind of relate to that and be [like] - "Oh my God, you spent all of that money!" I was also kind of giving people tech support on the forums and I ported Bitcoin to macOS, and you know, some other things - fix bugs and whatnot, and I've always kind of just wanted people to use Bitcoin and buying the pizza was one way to do that. I didn't think it would get as popular as it has, but it's gotten to be a really catchy story for people.
Personal Life
Meet the man who spent 10,000 bitcoins on pizza
Laszlo lives in Florida and has two children, a son named Liam and a daughter named Amy. Laszlo is also known for making early changes to bitcoin's source code.