The Pizza Story Is True, and Almost Everything Said About It Is Not

There are three records of this event and they are not the same record. There is a chain, which is checkable. There is a forum thread, which is archived and readable and hosted by somebody. And there is the retelling, which is annual, enormous, and made almost entirely of material that appears in neither of the first two.

Taking them in that order is the whole method of this site, so this is a good place to demonstrate it on the most retold anecdote in the subject.

The thread

Forum topic 137, in the Marketplace board, titled “Pizza for bitcoins?”. The opening post is stamped 18 May 2010, 00:35:20, from a user posting as laszlo:

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. I like having left over pizza to nibble on later.

Three days pass and nobody takes it. On 21 May, at 19:06:58:

So nobody wants to buy me pizza? Is the bitcoin amount I’m offering too low?

And two and a half hours later, when another poster asks why he wants this:

I just think it would be interesting if I could say that I paid for a pizza in bitcoins

That sentence is the actual documented motive, in the buyer’s own words, and it is not the motive the parable assigns him. He is not making a bet, expressing a philosophy, or testing a monetary theory. He wants to be able to say a sentence.

On 22 May, at 19:17:26:

I just want to report that I successfully traded 10,000 bitcoins for pizza. Pictures: (a URL, on a personal web host) Thanks jercos!

That is the entire report. One sentence, a link and a thank you addressed to a forum handle. The counterparty is named nowhere in it except as that handle.

The chain

A transaction confirmed at 18:16:31 UTC on 22 May 2010, in block 57043:

txid     a1075db55d416d3ca199f55b6084e2115b9345e16c5cf302fc80e9d5fbf5d48d
inputs   131, totalling            1,000,099,000,000 sat
output   1, a single P2PKH output  1,000,000,000,000 sat
fee                                       99,000,000 sat
size                                        23,620 bytes

One hundred and thirty one inputs, swept into one output of exactly ten thousand coins, at a cost of a fee just under one coin. Twenty three kilobytes, which for 2010 is an enormous transaction. The fee is the detail nobody mentions in any retelling I have seen, and it is right there.

The join between them is an attribution, not a record

The thread contains no transaction identifier. It never has. The pairing of that chain entry with that forum post rests on later attribution by other people, plus the fact that a transfer of exactly ten thousand coins confirmed about an hour before the report was posted.

That is good circumstantial reasoning and it is not the same kind of fact as the two records it joins. I could not find the link asserted by either party in the thread itself, and this piece will not present the join as though the participants made it. Notice how quickly the distinction disappears in ordinary retellings, where “the pizza transaction” is spoken of as a single documented object.

What the retelling adds

A restaurant. The received version names a chain. Page one of the thread, which contains the offer, the nudge, the motive and the report, never names the restaurant the pizzas came from. There is exactly one brand mentioned before the trade, in a post four days earlier about how to place an order, where the buyer notes that a lot of pizza places have online ordering and that he and his wife sometimes use one particular chain’s. That is a remark about ordering methods, made before anybody had agreed to anything, and it has been quietly promoted into a fact about the delivered food. I read page one of seventy three, and I am telling you that so you know the bound on the claim.

A single transaction. The record says it was a standing offer that ran for months. On 12 June 2010:

This is an open offer by the way.. I will trade 10,000 BTC for 2 of these pizzas any time as long as I have the funds (I usually have plenty).

And on 4 August 2010, closing it:

Thanks to everyone who bought me pizza already but I’m kind of holding off on doing any more of these for now.

Everyone who bought me pizza, plural, already. The anniversary treats one transaction as the event. The thread describes a repeated arrangement that the buyer eventually stopped because, in his words, he could not “generate thousands of coins a day anymore”.

A number in later money. This is the part the site will not supply, and the reason is not squeamishness. Restating the amount in a later figure prices a 2010 decision using information that did not exist in 2010, which is the purest form of hindsight distortion available in this subject, and the parable is built entirely on that one move. Remove it and there is no parable left, only a trade.

What the participants could actually tell at the time

The thread answers this directly, which is unusual and valuable, because the sums were discussed openly on the day of the offer. A poster replied to the opening post, hours after it went up:

10,000… Thats quite a bit.. you could sell those on (an exchange URL) for $41USD right now..

good luck on getting your free pizza.

And the buyer himself, in the June post, gives his own figure for the goods:

the 2 pizzas are only about 25 dollars total, maybe 30 if you give the guy a nice tip

Those are quotations from the record. No arithmetic has been done here and none needs to be. Both sides of the trade had a number, both numbers are in the thread, and the participants were entirely capable of comparing them. The offer was made anyway, and it was made because the buyer wanted the sentence more than he wanted the margin.

That destroys the version of the story in which somebody unknowingly gave away a fortune. He knew what the amount was, roughly what one venue would quote for it, and what the pizzas cost. What he could not know is the only thing the parable actually turns on, and no available information in May 2010 contained it.

What it is evidence of, which is smaller and better

Strip out the restaurant, the singular, and the later number, and what remains is this: on 22 May 2010 somebody accepted the thing in exchange for a delivered good, and somebody else was willing to be paid in it.

That is not nothing. It is the moment a unit that so far had a quotation on a handful of improvised venues acquired a second kind of evidence for being money: not a quote, a purchase. Getting from “somebody will exchange this for currency” to “somebody will hand me a physical object for this” is a real step, and it required no exchange, no merchant processor and no agreement beyond two people in a thread. It also required a marketplace board, which is worth noticing, because the venue that made it possible was a forum, and a forum is a host.

The first thing this history can verify without an intermediary is the chain. The second is what somebody wrote on a forum, which is only as durable as whoever is paying for that forum. This story needs both, and the retelling needs neither, which is how it drifted so far.

What was expanding, what was contracting

What expanded is the set of things the unit could be exchanged for, from a quotation to a delivered object. One item is a small set and it is infinitely larger than zero, and the direction was set that afternoon.

What contracted, invisibly, is the window in which ten thousand of them was an ordinary quantity to offer for lunch. The thread shows that window closing in real time: an open offer in June, and by 4 August the same person writing that he cannot keep doing this. Eleven weeks, in his own posts, from a standing offer to a withdrawn one.

And who could tell at the time is the sharpest part. They could all tell. The amount was public, the quotation was public, the price of pizza was public, and a poster did the comparison in the thread on day one and then wished him luck. The folklore requires that nobody understood what was happening. The primary source shows a group of people who understood the arithmetic perfectly well and found the experiment more interesting than the arithmetic, which is a better story and the one the record actually supports.