While Bitcoin bros and cryptocurrency converts probably don’t think much about the history of digital currency (they’re probably too nauseous by its constant volatility), Bitcoin has been in the news lately after a New York Times reporter said he found the true identity of the currency’s founder.

While we knew that Satoshi Nakamoto, who published a white paper in 2008 that laid out what Bitcoin could be, was a fake name, the real identity of the person who, as noted by NPR, “outlined a vision for a decentralized currency system that did not rely on a central bank and that allowed participants to stay anonymous” had never been revealed.

Until, that is, New York Times investigative reporter John Carreyrou reported in April that he’s almost positive that a 55-year-old computer scientist named Adam Back is the real Satoshi (and, thus, the real creator of Bitcoin).

Though Back denied that, the potential solving of what Carreyrou wrote was “one of our age’s great enigmas” has thrust some of the history and mystique of Bitcoin back into the news.

Which is why I wanted to write about the 16-year anniversary of Bitcoin Pizza Day.

[AUTHOR'S NOTE: I’ve always loved history. I’ve always loved the idea of taking a peek into the past and studying it from the current-day perspective. The idea of time travel also fascinates me. With my passion for writing about finance, I’m combining all of it together in an occasional column for WCI called “The Financial Wayback Machine.”

I want to journey back in time and look at those supposedly great ideas that now seem ridiculous, all the good and terrible predictions (crystal balls have never not been cloudy), the doctors who did great (and shady) things, and all the seemingly minor news nuggets that ended up making huge waves. It’ll be fun, it’ll be silly, and maybe it’ll be a good lesson for what not to do with your money today.

After all, as WCI Founder Dr. Jim Dahle once said, “If you've never read history, you're destined to repeat it.”

Step into the Financial Wayback Machine with me, and let’s travel back in time.]

Happy Anniversary to Bitcoin Pizza Day

On May 22, 2010, a man named Laszlo Hanyecz made the most expensive pizza purchase in history. He just didn’t know it at the time.

While wanting to make dinner as easy as possible that night, Hanyecz let it be known that he would pay 10,000 Bitcoins, which was worth about $41 at the time, to anybody who could procure him two large pizzas. According to Coinbase, this was the first known real-world Bitcoin transaction.

But it wasn’t like Hanyecz could saunter up to his local Papa John’s franchise and use Bitcoin instead of a credit card or cash to get the pizza he so badly wanted on that day. Instead, as noted by Investopedia, he posted on the Bitcoin Talk forum asking for help.

“I’ll pay 10,000 Bitcoins for a couple of pizzas … like maybe 2 large ones so I have some left over for the next day,” Hanyecz, who was an early Bitcoin miner, wrote on the forum. “ . . . You can make the pizza yourself and bring it to my house or order it for me from a delivery place, but what I’m aiming for is getting food delivered in exchange for Bitcoins where I don’t have to order or prepare it myself.”

Hanyecz wasn’t choosy about his toppings either. He said he liked onions, peppers, mushrooms, sausage, and pepperoni, but he also could be just as happy with a pair of plain cheese pizzas. He was adamant about no “weird fish topping[s],” but otherwise, it seemed like he would go with the flow for whatever showed up at his doorstep.

Another forum member took him up on the deal, paying $25 for the pizza and then taking Hanyecz’s 10,000 Bitcoins as reimbursement.

The value of Bitcoin was only $0.0041 on that day, but nine months later, 1 Bitcoin was worth $1, meaning that Hanyecz had paid $10,000 for his pizzas. Five years later, the pizzas were worth $2.4 million. At its highest level in 2025, when a Bitcoin was worth about $126,000, that round pile of crust, sauce, cheese, and toppings would have been valued at $1.26 billion. Today, when Bitcoin is around $75,000, the pizzas would be worth $750 million.

It could almost make a guy feel sick (and that doesn’t even include eating too much Papa John’s pizza!).

But apparently Hanyecz, who told Forbes that he actually spent 100,000 Bitcoins total for his pizza needs in all of 2010, hasn’t experienced heartburn from the deal he made 16 years ago. At least he didn’t feel any regret when he talked to the New York Times in 2013.

“It wasn’t like Bitcoins had any value back then, so the idea of trading them for a pizza was incredibly cool,” he said. “No one knew it was going to get so big.”

Six years later, he still felt OK about the transaction.

“A trade happens because both parties think they’re getting a good deal,” he said in 2019, via CoinDesk. “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 [Bitcoin] 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.”

A dinner that turned out to be (probably) the most expensive ever recorded.

Losing Money on the Railroad Bubble

I recently read a book called The Barn, written by Wright Thompson, one of the best sports writers of the day. This is not a sports book. It’s about the murder of Emmett Till and the barn where he was killed in 1955.

This book, though, is about so much more than the murder of a 14-year-old boy who was basically lynched because he whistled at a white woman. It’s about the history of the Mississippi Delta, and one of the aspects of the book I found interesting was the steep rise and fall of the local railroad—starting in the late 1800s and ending in 1942—and who made and lost money on the deals.

Recently, Ben Carlson at A Wealth of Common Sense wrote about the Railway Bubble of the 1800s, where 500 new railway companies were created, where 8,000 miles of new track (which is about 20 times the length of England) was considered for Great Britain, and where Charles Darwin lost 60% of his investment.

The investing world has talked incessantly in the past few years about the potential AI bubble and how unnerving and dangerous it will be if and when that bubble bursts. When the British railway bubble burst, it was painful for those who had invested in it. Thanks to lax British regulations in the mid-19th century, some businesspeople who ran Ponzi-like schemes with railroad dividends, and too much optimism about what the railroads could do and how much they could make, the railway stocks, by 1850, had dropped 65% from their peak only five years earlier.

As Reuters writes:

“In Engines that Move Markets: Technology Investing from Railroads to the Internet and Beyond, Alasdair Nairn writes that tech bubbles are characterized by the emergence of a technology about which extravagant claims can be made with apparent justification. New publications uncritically promote the invention. Entrepreneurs create new companies to meet demand from investors, who suspend normal valuation criteria. The technology is often immature. There follows a huge over-commitment of capital, forcing down potential rates of return.

“Britain’s railway mania fits Nairn’s description. So does the current AI boom. The main difference is that by 1840s railways were firmly established, whereas AI is in its infancy.”

What that means, well, we don't know. And it's a bit unnerving.

Another Weird Doctor Commercial

I always have a good time watching doctors from the 1950s and 1960s hawk cigarettes in TV commercials, so today, let’s turn our attention to a candy-loving doctor who tries to take a bunch of candy from his patient. OK, it’s not a real doctor who’s basically assaulting the patient so he’ll drop his Airheads candy, but this commercial was a little too weird not to include in this column.

And there’s also one that features a dentist.

Previous Wayback Machine columns:

How This Respected Doctor Tried to Bring George Washington Back to Life

How a Morally Dubious Dentist Changed The Beatles’ Sound

A Doc Created the Coolest Shoe in the Whole World

The Most Athletic Doctor Ever

Money Song of the Week

As I’ve gotten older, I care less and less about new musical trends and tastes. This is probably normal. My dad kept listening to classic rock (Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix) and jazz while I was gorging myself on heavy metal, grunge, and punk in the 1990s. Do you think he made an effort to listen to Rancid or Nirvana or Metallica? Maybe he enjoyed some of my music, but he probably didn’t care (and didn’t care to understand) why that music had become more popular than, say, Yes or Cream.

The same with his dad. Do you think my grandfather could understand why the kids were listening to the Beatles or the Rolling Stones when he simply enjoyed experiencing Glenn Miller or Lawrence Welk on the radio?

That’s how I feel about much of today’s pop music. I don’t get it, and I don’t care to get it.

But it was hard not to be impressed recently when my family and I were at a Mamma Mia Broadway series show, and the sidewalks and roads around the concert hall were clogged by young people afterward as a concert by Twice, a mega-popular K-pop band, was letting out at the same time from the nearby arena.

Thus, in honor of K-pop and my aggressive ignorance toward the genre, let’s listen to the song Money by Lisa (aka Lalisa Manobal) and see what she can teach us. And what she teaches us is basically . . . BAM, she’s rich and BAM, she’s going to spoil the crap out of herself!

Fair warning: Lisa curses a little in this tune.

Want to know how popular Lisa is (and how out of touch I am)? That video has 1.2 billion views, and she has 107 million Instagram followers. She’s also a member of the K-pop group Blackpink, which has a bonkers 24 million monthly listeners on Spotify.

As she raps,

“It's the end of the month and the weekend/I'ma spend this check, everything on me, yeah/I'ma tip myself, I'ma spend it on myself/I'ma drop it like it's pourin', I'ma pour it on myself.”

My only encounter with Lisa was watching her on Season 3 of The White Lotus, and in her story arc [SPOILER ALERT!], she loses interest in a potential suitor because he doesn’t have enough career ambitions for her liking (although they eventually get together after the guy she's talking to kills a man and then becomes an important bodyguard).

Whatever, it doesn’t matter. The song and the lyrics speak for themselves. What matters is that I liked the song, I liked all of the dancing, and I also kind of liked her rapping, especially the “dun, dun-dun-dun-dun-dun, dun/Droppin' on you” in the outro.

Despite the generation gap, I get why this genre of music is popular and how it transcends the globe. Would I have ever known anything about South Korean punk or Japanese metal when I was a kid? No. But it’s cool that these days, American kids can fill an arena to watch a group from 7,000 miles away and then cause traffic jams that frustrate the parents who don’t understand or care about the music but who are forced to pick up their children from the concert anyway.

From generation to generation, it’s a tale as old as time.

More information here:

Every Money Song of the Week Ever Published

Tweet of the Week

This is always a good reminder.

Have you ever used Bitcoin as actual currency? Was it convenient? Is using Bitcoin as payment still the wave of the future?