ON 22 MAY 2010, an American software developer named Lazlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 bitcoins for the delivery of two pizzas. At the time, these bitcoins were worth about $41; today, they are valued at hundreds of millions of dollars. This day has since been called “Bitcoin Pizza Day”, commemorating not only the first real-world transaction using bitcoin, but also the world’s most expensive pizza.
In 2021, El Salvador signed the bill to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, making it the first country to adopt cryptocurrency. President Nayib Bukele bet on the disruptive innovation of bitcoin, hoping that it would promote financial inclusion for a majority of the population who are unbanked, as well as ease the cost of remittances for money sent home by citizens abroad.
The journey of cryptocurrencies has come a long way. While these events have demonstrated the use cases of Bitcoin as a payment system and as a form of legal tender, Bitcoin’s extreme volatility proved a fundamental challenge to its use as a reliable medium of exchange.
