NY Bitcoin Group together with Papa John’s and Ronald McDonald House Charities of the Capital Region (RMHC) are launching a charity event to help children and their families on 22 May, the day when Bitcoin Pizza Day is celebrated.

On that day children and families at the RMHC will receive slices of pizza, reads an article by CoinReport.

Anybody can take part in the event. Each slice of pizza costs a dollar's worth of bitcoin, which can be sent to Papa John’s via BitPay even now. On 22 May the slice you have bought will come to one of the children at RMHC.

According to Paul Paterakis, one of the co-founders of the NY Bitcoin Group, the campaign has been launched following the success of the last year’s event that took place on the same date. At that time pizza was delivered to patients of a children’s hospital.

“Last year was simply amazing. We had a chance to showcase bitcoin’s technological strength by delivering pizza to the families and children at the Bernard and Millie Duker Children’s Hospital,” he said. “We had folks buying slices from as far as Russia and India.”

Last year representatives of the bitcoin community and some pizzerias took part in the celebrations. CoinFox reported back then that Rustica Pizza in Las Vegas offered discounts to its customers, while Baladi Manousche restaurant in Hague combined gastronomy with education, entertaining guests with a talk from a bitcoin expert. Bitcoin startups celebrated the date with pizza dinners, and Nejc Kordic, co-founder and CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange Bitstamp, bought his team a giant pizza that cost one bitcoin (equivalent to $240 at that moment).

The celebration is historically connected with the first ever real-world bitcoin transaction. Six years ago, on 22 May 2010, an American programmer Laszlo Hanyecz paid another user 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas. In those days the sum equaled about $25, while now it would be more than $4.5 million. As the programmer said in an interview to the New York Times in 2014, "It wasn’t like bitcoins had any value back then, so the idea of trading them for a pizza was incredibly cool."

Andrew Levich