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What You Didn’t Know About Laszlo Hanyecz, the Bitcoin Pizza Day Legend

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The skalds of Bitcoin Twitter have sung of the historic moment, the “first real world purchase” with bitcoin, and pundits have etched the story into the internet’s memory with headlines about the infamous Bitcoin Pizza Purchase, now dearly valued at more than $1 billion.

But what if I told you that Hanyecz spent nearly 10 times more bitcoin following the historic purchase? And, what if I told you that perhaps Hanyecz did so as ostensible penance for his much more consequential contribution to Bitcoin in its uncertain infancy?

He was a Bitcoin technical pioneer

The penumbra of Hanyecz’s Pizza Day purchase has overshadowed his two seminal contributions to Bitcoin’s early technical development.

This post originally appeared on Blockspace Media, where Colin Harper is editor-in-chief.

The first of these came on April 19, 2010, just days after Hanyecz registered for Bitcointalk, a forum established by Satoshi Nakamoto that was (and still is) a watering hole for Bitcoin’s techie intelligentsia. Hanyecz created the first MacOS client for Bitcoin Core, the original and still-dominant software implementation for the nodes that underpin the Bitcoin network.

Satoshi originally coded Bitcoin for Windows and Linux, but Hanyecz’s innovation enabled MacOS devices to run the software too. His contribution laid the foundation for all MacOS-enabled bitcoin wallets and applications that would follow it.

But arguably greater than this was Hanyecz’s discovery that he could mine bitcoin with his computer’s graphics card (GPU). Until this point, early adopters used their computer processing units (CPUs) to mine bitcoin, and since GPUs are orders of magnitude more powerful than CPUs for the task, this innovation propelled bitcoin mining forward much faster than Satoshi expected.

“Updated Mac OS X binary…It will use your GPU to generate bitcoins. This works really well if you have a good GPU like an NVIDIA 8800 or something like that,” Hanyecz wrote in a May 10, 2010 Bitcointalk post.

The discovery ignited Bitcoin’s first digital gold rush. Bitcoin’s total hashrate exploded upward by 130,000% by the end of the year, and for the first time, bitcoin miners began constructing small-scale mining farms. These setups – slapped together in basements and attics, garages and sheds – were the prototypes for the industrial-scale bitcoin mining farms that dominate the Bitcoin network today.

The Pizza was penance

Hanyecz’s invention was so consequential that it earned him a virtual drop in from Satoshi Nakamoto himself. And it’s possible that the conversation that followed may have inspired Hanyecz’s famous Pizza Day purchase.

“A big attraction to new users is that anyone with a computer can generate some free coins,” Satoshi wrote to Hanyecz. “GPUs would prematurely limit the incentive to only those with high-end GPU hardware. It’s inevitable that GPU compute clusters will eventually hog all the generated coins, but I don’t want to hasten that day.”

In a 2019 interview for Bitcoin Magazine, Hanyecz told me that he “stopped advertising [GPU mining] after that.”

“I was like, ‘Man, I feel like I crapped up your project. Sorry, dude.’ He was concerned that some people might be discouraged because they can’t mine a block with a CPU,” Hanyecz said.

Perhaps this conversation spurred Hanyecz to offer 10,000 BTC for two large Papa John’s pizzas on that fateful day in May 15 years ago. In fact, he made the offer more than once. During the 2019 interview, Hanyecz told me that he spent nearly 100,000 BTC in the year that followed.

“I spent [all my bitcoin] on pizza long ago,” Hanyecz wrote in a February 2014 Bitcointalk post. “Other than a little bit of single digit change, I spent everything I mined. As you all know, the difficulty rises to adjust to hashing power, so eventually the mining wasn’t worth it for me.”

Looking at a Bitcoin address Hanyecz listed on his first Bitcointalk post, Hanyecz received and spent 81,432 BTC from this address from April to November 2010. This sum would be worth just over $8.6 billion today.

Laszlo Hanyecz’s wallet 2010 balance history | Source: Mempool.space

There’s no way to verify if Hanyecz spent all of this on pizza, other goods, or if he simply gave bitcoin away to new Bitcointalk members, a common practice back then when bitcoin was close-to worthless. But he did mention in his original thread for the pizza purchase that it was “an open offer,” although he reneged on this in August saying, “I can’t really afford to keep doing it since I can’t generate thousands of coins a day anymore. Thanks to everyone who bought me pizza already.”

The original purchase, let alone the recurring ones that apparently occurred after, would be enough to keep any sane person awake at night as bitcoin marches above $100,000. But in 2019 at least, Hanyecz stomached the ordeal with good humor. As he saw it, he committed culinary alchemy, transmuting his electricity and computing power into a cheap dinner. He had no idea that bitcoin would command the price it does today, so the transaction was a victory in his book.

“A trade happens because both parties think they’re getting a good deal,” he said. “I felt like I was beating the internet, getting free food. I was like, ‘Man, I got these GPUs linked together, now I’m going to mine twice as fast. I’m just going to be eating free food; I’ll never have to buy food again…»

«I mean, I coded this thing and mined bitcoin and I felt like I was winning the internet that day. I got pizza for contributing to an open-source project. Usually hobbies are a time sink and money sink, and in this case, my hobby bought me dinner.”

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GameStop Raising Another $1.75B for Potential Bitcoin Purchases

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GameStop (GME), the embattled video game retailer turned meme stock, announced Wednesday a $1.75 billion convertible senior note offering.

Proceeds will be used at least in part for «making investments in a manner consistent with GameStop’s Investment Policy,» per a company press release. Said investment policy is to add bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset, according to a March release from the company.

Today’s offering, only open to qualified institutional buyers, includes an option for purchasers to buy an additional $250 million in notes within two weeks of the initial issuance,. The notes carry no regular interest and will mature in June 2032 unless they are converted or repurchased earlier.

Following the March announcement of the bitcoin treasury strategy, GameStop raised $1.3 billion through another convertible note offering. The company subsequently purchased 4,710 bitcoin for roughly $500 million during May.

GME shares were lower by 10% in after hours trading.

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Safe Establishes New Development Firm to Attract Institutions and Tackle Crypto’s ‘Cyber Warfare’ Era

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Safe, the popular multiparty crypto wallet previously called Gnosis Safe, has launched a new development unit, Safe Labs, in a move aimed at consolidating its operations and sharpening its product roadmap after it was targeted in February’s $1.4 billion ByBit hack — the largest crypto heist to date.

The new entity will serve as the core development arm of Safe, which until now had outsourced technical work to a separate development firm, a structure commonly used across the crypto industry, Safe Labs Chief Executive Rahul Rumalla said on Wednesday. Safe Labs will operate directly under the umbrella of the Safe Foundation, a nonprofit organization.

In an interview with CoinDesk, Rumalla said the transition reflects a broader strategy shift toward building products that can meet both the ideological standards of cypherpunk culture and the practical demands of enterprise clients.

“This framework that we are forced to operate in — it actually forces you to compromise one over the other: If you want more security, you have to compromise on convenience, and if you want more convenience, you compromise on security,” Rumalla said.

“We at Safe Labs, we step back and we reject this framework. We don’t want to operate in this model where we have to compromise one over the other.”

Post-Hack Pivot

According to Rumalla, the ByBit hack was a “catalyst” for the creation of Safe Labs.

While Safe’s core smart contracts remained uncompromised, its user-facing web application was infiltrated with malicious code by North Korea’s Lazarus Group. That attack enabled the hackers to trick ByBit’s CEO into signing off on a transaction that rerouted funds into their control.

“What we saw with an attack like this is that our core values were used against us,” Rumalla said. “Anonymity, privacy, self-custody, transparency, open source — these were used against us.”

Despite the breach, Rumalla said user confidence in the Safe platform remained strong. The application saw “practically no churn” in the aftermath and continues to process 10% of all transaction volume across Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible networks.

“We’re not defending against cyberattacks,” Rumalla said. “We are defending cyber warfare, and that requires a mindset shift — not just at the project level, not at the company level, but as Ethereum or even crypto as a whole.”

From Ideals to Infrastructure

The move to formalize internal development echoes similar shifts by other major protocols, including Morpho and Polygon, which have both recently made moves to streamline decision-making and improve accountability with more traditional organizational structures.

In parallel, Safe Labs is also refocusing on product design. The team is currently working on a “V2” version of its wallet, which Rumalla described as more “opinionated” — meaning bolder product direction, particularly for institutional users.

“What we’re going to be launching and testing in the future is a subscription plan, essentially, that’s called Safe Pro — or Safe for enterprises, Safe for institutions — very much around that realm,” he said. “We’re going to basically package this opinionated product that’s more for the user segments that have higher security needs and more customization appetite.”

“We need to operate at startup speed,” Rumalla added. «That in itself is the premise of why we need to operate as a separate, independent entity. We need to align where we need to align, which is on the mission, but we need to be a bit more independent in terms of how we execute.»

With more than $60 billion in total value locked and over $1 trillion in historical transaction volume, according to Rumalla, Safe remains one of crypto’s most battle-tested self-custody platforms. The team, now roughly 40 strong and based in Berlin, is betting that its next chapter — one that embraces opinionated product design without sacrificing its open-source ethos — will help define how wallets look in a world heading toward a trillion-dollar on-chain economy.

«Our mission is simple: making self custody easy and secure,» Rumalla said. «That’s a win for everybody.»

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Tom Lee Mulls Roughed-Up Semler Scientific for ‘Granny Shot’ Portfolio

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The recent wave of companies adding bitcoin to their balance sheets has not yielded universally positive results. Semler Scientific (SMLR), a medical technology firm that pivoted into bitcoin treasury strategy, has seen its stock fall over nearly 50% in 2025 to nearly the level it was at a bit more than one year ago when it first began to accumulate BTC.

The company’s premium to its net asset value (NAV), often referred to as multiple-to-NAV (mNAV), has dropped below 1x. On a basic share count basis, its market cap sits at approximately $420 million compared to bitcoin holdings valued around $491 million (4,449 BTC), putting its NAV ratio at just 0.859x, according to Strategy-Tracker.

The mNAV being below 1.0 is crucial as Semler’s main mechanism for accumulating bitcoin is to raise capital via share sales. However, for the share sale strategy to be accretive to shareholders, the stock must trade at a premium to the value of the company’s bitcoin holdings. With the share price at or below NAV, issuing new shares would dilute existing shareholders without adding proportional value, effectively halting the company’s ability to pursue further bitcoin accumulation under the current strategy.

Bitcoin bull Tom Lee, Head of Research at Fundstrat, however, views Semler Scientific as an opportunity in his firm’s «Granny shot» research portfolio. Granny shot refers to an unconventional way of shooting free throws in basketball and Fundstrat’s Granny Shot (GRNY) portfolio is meant to emphasize the firm’s unusual approach to research.

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