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As Bitcoin Pizza Day turns 15 years old, the on-chain analytics firm Glassnode has revealed how coins from back then are still being moved.
Bitcoin Realized Cap Data Shows Recent Movements From 10+ Years BTC
Bitcoin has managed to achieve a new all-time high (ATH), but it’s not the only thing cryptocurrency community members are celebrating today. Back on May 22nd, 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz exchanged 10,000 BTC for two pizzas, in what was perhaps the first example of the asset being used as a mode of payment in a real-world purchase. Given the significance of this event, the date has come to be celebrated as “Bitcoin Pizza Day.”
The pizzas that Laszlo purchased were worth around $40. Fifteen years on, the same amount of BTC translates to a whopping $1.1 billion. Here’s a chart shared by the analytics firm CryptoQuant that shows how this figure has looked on every Bitcoin Pizza Day in history:
Naturally, no one could have possibly foreseen just how big Bitcoin would eventually become. But even if they did, transactions like these were probably necessary in bringing the asset to where it’s at today. As CryptoQuant says, “It’s a high price, but it’s the price that was paid to turn Bitcoin into a means of payment.”
That said, while many like Laszlo would have actively spent their BTC, some holders didn’t. Whether that’s by accident or a product of willful HODLing is impossible to say for sure, but a chunk of the supply is now aged more than ten years old, meaning the owners of those coins haven’t involved them in a single transaction since then.
The analytics firm Glassnode has shared the data for the Realized Cap share of this specific part of the Bitcoin circulating supply.
Looks like the value of the metric has seen a notable decline recently | Source: Glassnode on X
The Realized Cap basically tells us about the total amount of capital that the Bitcoin investors as a whole have used to purchase their coins. In the chart, the percentage of this metric occupied by the supply aged more than ten years is displayed.
Last year, this value hit a peak at 0.045%. Today, the indicator has come to just 0.033%, following steep drawdowns between December and February, and another since April 20th. Based on the trend, Glassnode notes, “15 years after Laszlo bought pizza for 10,000 $BTC – now worth over $1.1B – some of that era’s coins are still moving.”
Coins that are this old are more likely to have reached that age by being lost than through HODLing conviction, so it’s possible that the old Bitcoin being moved now was just recently rediscovered, either by the original investor or someone else who happened to come across the forgotten wallet keys.
BTC Price
At the time of writing, Bitcoin is floating around $111,400, up over 7% in the last seven days.
Featured image from Dall-E, Glassnode.com, chart from TradingView.com
Keshav is currently a senior writer at NewsBTC and has been attached to the website since June 14, 2021.
Keshav has been writing for many years, first as a hobbyist and later as a freelancer. He has experience working in a variety of niches, even fiction at one point, but the cryptocurrency industry has been the longest he has been attached to.
In terms of official educational qualifications, Keshav holds a bachelor’s degree in Physics from one of the premier institutes of India, the University of Delhi (DU). He started the degree with an aim of eventually making a career in Physics, but the onset of COVID led to a shift in plans. The virus meant that the college classes had to be delivered in the online-mode and with it came free time for him to explore other passions.
Initially only seeking to make some beer money, Keshav unexpectedly landed clients offering real projects, after which there was no looking back. Writing was something he had always enjoyed and to be able to do it for a living was like a dream come true.
Keshav completed his Physics degree in 2022 and has been focusing on his writing career since, but that doesn’t mean his passion for Physics has ended. He eventually plans to re-enter university to obtain a masters degree in the same field, but perhaps only to satiate his own interest rather than for using it as a means to find employment..
Keshav has found blockchain and its concepts fascinating ever since he started going down the rabbit-hole back in 2020. On-chain analysis in particular has been something he likes to research more about, which is why his NewsBTC pieces tend to involve it in some form.
Being of the science background, Keshav likes if concepts are clear and consistent, so he generally explains the indicators he talks about in a bit of detail so that the readers can perhaps come out having understood and learnt something new.
As for hobbies, Keshav is super into football, anime, and videogames. He enjoys football not only as a watcher, but also as a player. For games, Keshav generally tends towards enjoying singleplayer adventures, with EA FC (formerly FIFA) being the only online game he is active in. Though, perhaps due to being ultra-focused on the game, he is today a semi-pro on the EA FC scene, regularly participating in tournaments and sometimes even taking back prize money.
Because of his enthusiasm for anime and games, he also self-learned Japanese along the way to consume some of the untranslated gems out there. The skill didn’t merely remain as just a hobby, either, as he put it to productive use during his exploration for small-time gigs at the start of COVID, fulfilling a couple of Japanese-to-English translation jobs.
Keshav is also big into fitness, with agility and acceleration-related workouts making a big part of his program due to the relevance they have in football. On top of that, he also has a more traditional strength based program for the gym, which he does to maintain an overall fitness level of his body.
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