We all know the story of Laszlo Hanyecz and those 10,000 BTC spent on two Papa John's pizzas 15 years ago. It's the most expensive meme in Internet history. But what most people don't know is that Hanyecz did this nearly 10 times more after that purchase. And there's something deeper behind all of this.

It turns out that Laszlo Hanyecz was much more than just the pizza guy. He was literally one of Bitcoin's early technical pioneers, and he probably felt guilty about it.

In April 2010, just days after registering on Bitcointalk, Hanyecz created the first MacOS client for Bitcoin Core. Satoshi had coded Bitcoin only for Windows and Linux, but Hanyecz got it running on Mac. That was huge. It laid the groundwork for all the Bitcoin wallets that support MacOS today. But the most important thing was what he discovered afterward.

Hanyecz realized he could mine Bitcoin using his computer's GPU instead of the CPU. And it was no small difference—the GPUs are exponentially more powerful for this. When he published his discovery on May 10, 2010, he said something like: "I've updated the Mac OS X binary... It will use your GPU to generate Bitcoin. It's really effective if you have a good GPU like an NVIDIA 8800."

That triggered the first digital gold rush. Bitcoin's total hash rate skyrocketed 130,000% before the end of the year. Miners started building farms in basements and garages. It was the prototype of the mining megafactories that dominate Bitcoin today.

But here’s the interesting part: Satoshi wrote to Hanyecz worried about this. He told him that GPUs would centralize mining—that only those with high-end hardware could mine. And Laszlo Hanyecz apparently took it very seriously. In a 2019 interview, he literally said: "I thought, 'Oh my God, I feel like I’ve ruined his project. Sorry, buddy.'"

Probably that’s what happened afterward. Hanyecz spent nearly 100,000 BTC on pizza and other things in the following months. On his Bitcointalk address, he received and spent 81,432 BTC between April and November 2010. That’s now worth over $8.6 billion. No one knows exactly if it was all spent on pizza, other goods, or if he simply gave Bitcoin away to new users, which was common when Bitcoin was worth nothing.

What we do know is that when Bitcoin surpassed $100,000, Laszlo Hanyecz didn’t lose sleep over it. In 2019, he explained it like this: "An exchange was made because both parties thought they were getting a good deal. I felt like I was winning at the Internet, getting free food. I thought I had linked these GPUs and now I’d mine twice as fast, so I’d never have to buy food again."

For him, it was simple: he turned his electricity and computational power into free dinners. He didn’t know Bitcoin would be worth what it is today. From his perspective, it was a victory. And honestly, considering his fundamental technical contributions to Bitcoin in its early days, it was probably his way of making amends for accelerating something that worried Satoshi.