I just fell into a fascinating rabbit hole about the early days of Bitcoin, and there’s something almost everyone ignores about Laszlo Hanyecz, the guy behind the famous pizza purchase.

Yes, we all know that story: 10,000 BTC for two large pizzas from Papa John’s in May 2010. Now that would be worth over a billion dollars. It’s the perfect Bitcoin meme, right? The guy who “wasted” a fortune on food.

But here’s what will surprise you: Hanyecz didn’t just spend those 10,000 BTC on pizzas. According to a 2019 interview, he burned nearly 100,000 BTC the following year. Yes, almost 10 times that amount. In February 2014, he wrote on Bitcointalk: “I spent all I mined on pizza a long time ago. As everyone knows, the difficulty increased to match the hash power, so mining was no longer worth it for me.”

So why would he do that? Here’s where it gets interesting. Laszlo Hanyecz wasn’t just some random miner. He was a genuine tech pioneer.

In April 2010, just days after joining Bitcointalk, he created the first Bitcoin client for MacOS. Satoshi had coded Bitcoin only for Windows and Linux, but Hanyecz ported it to Mac. That laid the groundwork for all the Bitcoin wallets on MacOS that came afterward.

But his most explosive contribution was another: he discovered he could mine Bitcoin using his computer’s GPU instead of the CPU. He wrote on Bitcointalk on May 10, 2010: “I’ve updated the Mac OS X binary… It will use your GPU to generate bitcoin. This is really effective if you have a good GPU like an NVIDIA 8800.”

This sparked the first digital gold rush. Bitcoin’s total hash rate skyrocketed 130,000% by the end of the year. Miners started building the first mining farms in basements and garages. That’s what you see today, but on a massive scale.

Satoshi realized the impact and wrote to Hanyecz: “A big appeal for new users is that anyone with a computer can generate some coins for free. The GPU will limit motivation only to those with high-end GPU hardware.”

Laszlo Hanyecz himself admitted in that interview: “I thought, ‘Oh my God, I feel like I’ve ruined your project. Sorry, buddy.’ He was worried people would get discouraged because they couldn’t mine a block with a CPU.”

That’s the missing context. Maybe those 100,000 BTC he spent on pizzas and other things weren’t just waste. Perhaps it was his way of making amends, of keeping Bitcoin accessible to new users when it was still practically free.

Looking at Hanyecz’s Bitcoin address, he received and spent 81,432 BTC between April and November 2010. That would now be worth over $8.6 billion.

We can’t verify if all of it was spent on pizzas or if he simply distributed Bitcoin among new Bitcointalk members—something common at the time when it was almost worthless. But in his original thread, he mentioned it was “an open offer,” although he had to stop in August because “I can’t generate thousands of satoshis a day anymore.”

What hits me most is his perspective. In 2019, he said: “An exchange was made because both parties thought they were getting a good deal. I felt like I was winning on the Internet, getting free food. I coded this, mined bitcoin, and I felt like I beat the Internet that day.”

For Laszlo Hanyecz, turning his electricity and computational power into free dinners was a victory. He didn’t know Bitcoin would have the value it has today. That’s the real context: a technical pioneer who changed the foundations of Bitcoin, then spent his mined fortune in a way that made sense to him at the time.

Sometimes the most famous “mistakes” in Bitcoin have much deeper stories.