It Was a Developer's World: Bitcoin Pizza Day
These days, Web3 brings to mind NFTs, tokens, exchanges, and wallets. It spans everything from marketing to business development, event management to community moderation.
These days, Web3 brings to mind NFTs, tokens, exchanges, and wallets. It spans everything from marketing to business development, event management to community moderation. It’s become a billion-dollar market, with new business models popping up almost daily.
But once upon a time, at the heart of this world, there was just one thing: Code.
And when the first steps of this structure were being taken, at the beginning, middle, and end, there was only one community: Developers. A group of people who wanted to question the completely centralized and dependent systems we lived in.
By writing code, they tried to create new systems where only the code mattered and the code was the law. Systems that worked like banks but weren’t banks, apps you could use without showing ID, structures where the community made decisions together… From developers, a community formed that believed in this manifesto. That was the essence: solving the need for trust with code.
Bitcoin, as I’ve detailed in previous articles, was born right after the 2008 crisis. (From “The Big Short” to Blockchain)
Satoshi Nakamoto’s first text criticized the traditional finance system’s reliance on intermediaries and trust. This “don’t trust, verify” system initially caught the interest of only a curious developer community. There wasn’t a market yet, no investors, no thousands of different projects with their unique marketing methods. Just a few people who believed in this technology and manifesto.
No one was sure if this system would work. And then… May 22, 2010, came.
🍕 May 22, 2010: 10,000 BTC = 2 Pizzas
Bitcoin Pizza Day is a symbol of that era. A developer in Florida, Laszlo Hanyecz, paid 10,000 BTC for two pizzas. Today, that amount is worth billions, but back then it was just part of an experiment. This event wasn’t just the “first real-world purchase with cryptocurrency”, it was also the first moment an idea turned into economic reality. It showed that the Web3 world first had to create value.
Today, crypto projects grow with marketing strategies, funding rounds, and partnership deals. But back then, the only way to create value was to write code. And value only emerged over time.
From Code to Product, Product to Experience
The developer who got two pizzas that day unknowingly started a chain reaction. As Bitcoin’s price rose, Ethereum emerged, wallets developed, and the concept of Web3 spilled beyond the tech world. After the initial step of Bitcoin, this almost self-creating world slowly, gradually, step by step, moved forward over the years.
Thousands of similar or different projects grew, stitch by stitch, with each line of code, into a huge market and ecosystem, exploring how the system idealized by the manifesto could become part of our lives and spread.
The systems developers tested are now products; complex interfaces have been simplified, user experiences have become smoother. Entering Web3 used to require technical knowledge like setting up a wallet, recording a “private key,” and manually interacting with the chain. Now, thanks to interfaces where you can log in with social media and transact with a few clicks, even users without technical infrastructure knowledge can join the ecosystem. But this simplification brings another question:
Does making it easier to use remove ownership and responsibility?
For many users today, Web3 applications are as easy as a click. But this ease makes the system’s logic, the idea of users managing their own assets, disappear. Services that store your wallet’s “private keys” for you, platforms that automate DAO decisions, structures that “think for you” in interfaces…
This might not be good or bad, but it’s different. And this difference shows where the system is evolving: Web3 is no longer just a developer’s world.
Today, Web3 brings to mind NFTs, tokens, exchanges, and wallets.
What Does This Mean for Our World?
Web3 is no longer just a playground built by developers. It started as an ideal, then became technical, then a product. And now it’s poised to become a tool for cultural change. Today, corporate structures are looking at this world, trying to understand and adapt.
But maybe to understand Web3, you first need to know its story.
This new world isn’t just a technology. It carries a philosophy. It has a concept of ownership. A way of making decisions, a relationship with data and users.
So for someone coming from Web2, the critical question might be: At what stage of this transformation are we, and this time, will we just be users, or will we be among those shaping it?