Bitcoin Pizza Day has an appropriate name for this celebration. The occasion commemorates an early user of cryptocurrencies who bought two pizzas with Bitcoin on May 22, 2010. This was the first time someone is believed to have used Bitcoin to purchase physical goods (as far as we know).
The person in question was a Floridian programmer named Laszlo Hanyecz, who was also an early Bitcoin miner.
Before the first Bitcoin halving in 2012, each successful miner was rewarded with 50 BTC for discovering a new block. That meant you only had to mine 200 blocks to earn 10,000 BTC, which wasn't terribly difficult considering there weren't that many people competing to mine blocks at the time.
On May 18, Hanyecz announced on a forum called Bitcointalk.org that he wanted to buy a pizza - preferably two large ones - with Bitcoin. He offered 10,000 BTC to anyone willing to order it, pick it up, and bring it to him. Someone pointed out to him that he could get $41 for those Bitcoins on a certain exchange website, since the price of BTC is less than half a cent per coin.
In a 2019 interview with CBS, Hanyecz told Anderson Cooper he believed the transaction "made [bitcoin] real for some people. It certainly did for me."
By May 21, he still hadn't found anyone to complete his bitcoin pizza transaction with. The next day, someone finally accepted his offer. It was a move that would later go down in history.
"I just want to report that I successfully exchanged 10,000 Bitcoins for pizza. The pizzas were made by Papa John's, but Hanyecz had bought them used from a 19-year-old named Jeremy Sturdivant (username "jercos").
Needless to say, those Bitcoins appreciated quite a bit over the next decade. Had Hanyecz hypothetically sold his entire stash at Bitcoin's peak of $68,990, he would have made about $690 million - enough to buy 46 million large Papa John's pizzas at $15 each.
In light of this historic event, the global crypto community comes together every year on May 22 to celebrate the first physical Bitcoin transaction and remind Hanyecz that he could have become one-tenth as rich as Melinda Gates.