On May 22, 2026, Bitcoin Pizza Day returned once again. Community members gathered to celebrate, merchants rolled out discounts, and Crypto platforms launched all kinds of marketing plans—everything across the industry was lively. But a curious phenomenon is emerging: in a festival named after Bitcoin, participants’ actual payment behavior is quietly sidestepping BTC in unison. People use USDT to buy pizza, use ETH to settle, and even use Exchange Tokens to join in—yet BTC is excluded from the payment scenario. This paradox forms a subtle metaphor: we commemorate a history about “using Bitcoin,” but the act of commemoration itself is excluding the use of Bitcoin.
On May 22, 2010, the programmer Laszlo Hanyecz bought two pizzas from Florida’s Papa John‘s with 10,000 BTC. At the time, the deal was worth roughly $25; based on Bitcoin’s 2025 all-time high of about $100,000, its equivalent value exceeded $1 billion. It was this transaction that first granted BTC the identity of “payment currency” in the real world. However sixteen years later, as the community celebrates that history with HODL at its core belief, the once-proven payment function has been carefully sealed away inside wallets.
How HODL Culture Has Been Misaligned from an Investment Strategy into the Biggest Obstacle to Payment Scenarios
The term HODL traces back to a misspelling made by a Bitcoin Forum user in a drunken state in 2013. The original meaning was “long-term holding, not selling due to short-term volatility.” In the market environment at the time, this was simply a rational investment strategy—when facing a highly volatile asset, holders needed to overcome the psychological impulse to panic-sell. Yet after multiple market-cycle evolutions, HODL has risen from a behavioral suggestion into a community-wide collective belief totem.
At the heart of this cultural distortion is this: when “holding” itself becomes the goal, an asset’s utility value gets systematically marginalized. Participants in the community will actively avoid making any non-essential transactions with BTC, reasoning that “spending BTC is equivalent to giving up future higher value under a long-term uptrend expectation.” This psychological mechanism turns Bitcoin Pizza Day into a sarcastic closed loop: we celebrate a transaction as historically significant precisely because someone was willing to spend BTC; but today everyone is avoiding becoming “the next Laszlo.”
Miles Suter, Head of Bitcoin Products at Block Inc., stated at Bitcoin 2026 in Las Vegas in 2026 that if Bitcoin cannot circulate as point-to-point cash and is only left sitting on a balance sheet, it will lose the core trait that makes it transformative. This warning reveals a deeper issue: HODL culture is undermining Bitcoin’s most basic validation mechanism—without a circulating economic system, the consensus ultimately has to rely on external narratives to persist.
The Economic Contradiction of Bitcoin Payments: The Gap Between Small Transfer Costs and Real-World Niche Payment Scenarios
Bitcoin’s economic predicament in payment scenarios can be examined from two dimensions: on-chain fees and user experience. According to data from the Gate platform, as of May 20, 2026, BTC’s current price is about $77,400, up slightly 0.6% over the past 24 hours. At this price level, making a typical on-chain BTC transfer requires an average miner fee of roughly $2.5 to $4. In periods of higher network activity, this fee can rise further. Taking a $25 pizza purchase as an example, on-chain fees alone could account for more than 10% of the transaction amount.
Compared with Bitcoin’s early network stage, the historical evolution of fees shows a steep upward curve: in the initial days after the network launched in 2009, on-chain transactions were scarce, miners relied mainly on block rewards rather than fee income, and real transaction costs were nearly zero; during the first bull market in 2013, average fees rose to about $1.5; in April 2021, average fees in peak periods approached $60; and during congestion peaks caused by protocols such as Ordinals and Runes, average fees surged to the $20 to $30 range multiple times. As of February 2025, the average on-chain transfer cost has stabilized in the $4 to $7 range—far below bull-market peaks, but still well above the less-than-$1 level in 2020.
From a unit economics perspective, when transaction amounts are small while fixed costs are relatively high, Bitcoin payments struggle to maintain basic economic rationality in mainstream consumption scenarios. Compared with the almost “zero-cost” pizza transaction in 2010, today’s BTC has increasingly fallen behind stablecoins and other low-fee blockchain solutions in payment efficiency. This also explains why, in the activities commemorating Bitcoin Pizza Day, participants generally choose to complete real settlement using USDT or ETH—because they offer a fee structure and confirmation speed that better match everyday consumption needs.
What On-Chain Data Reveals: A Drift in Positioning from High-Net-Worth Holding Systems to Decentralized Cash
On-chain data provides a key perspective for understanding how Bitcoin’s functions have evolved. As of May 1, 2026, the share of BTC supply controlled by long-term holders has exceeded 73.77%—meaning BTC held by groups of addresses that have not moved for more than 155 days. In typical market cycles, the proportion of long-term holders usually peaks during the bottoming phase of bear markets, then declines near the top of bull markets as coins are distributed to new entrants. However, this high proportion appears in the context of prices still being relatively elevated, meaning these holders have not chosen to massively sell at this price level.
Exchange balance data also presents a clear signal of “value hoarding.” The total BTC reserves held by global centralized exchanges have dropped to about 2.68M BTC, the lowest level since December 2017. From on-chain tracking, the BTC flowing out of exchanges mainly goes to three directions: self-custody cold wallets, spot ETF custody accounts, and addresses of long-term holders. In Q1 of 2026, the supply of Bitcoin held steadfastly by long-term holders rose sharply from about 2.13 million BTC to 3.6 million BTC, an increase of 69%, reaching the highest accumulation level since 2020.
Meanwhile, on-chain activity indicators show a corresponding downward trend. The number of Bitcoin daily active addresses has fallen to about 531,000, the lowest in nearly two years. Santiment, an on-chain analytics firm, noted that the current price increase is built on a relatively sparse base of participants, meaning the market is not being driven by broad inflows of new and old users, but by the behavior of participants within a smaller range. Taken together, these data paint a picture: Bitcoin’s on-chain participation is shrinking, the holding structure is concentrating toward long-term behavior, and the asset’s usage frequency continues to decline—network activity is transitioning from a “high-frequency payment network” to a “low-frequency settlement layer.”
Can the Lightning Network Bridge the Payment Split? A Natural Hierarchical Separation from Daily Bitcoin Use to Large-Value Clearing
Given the high cost and low efficiency of on-chain payments, the Lightning Network—Bitcoin’s Layer-2 scaling solution—has been seen as highly promising. By mid-May 2026, the total public channel capacity of the Lightning Network has exceeded 5,600 BTC; if private channels are included, the total capacity is estimated to exceed 12,000 BTC. In transaction scale, the monthly transaction volume in November 2025 reached about $1.17 billion, processing around 5.22 million transactions. On the merchant adoption side, more than 4 million merchants worldwide have accepted Bitcoin payments via the Lightning Network, and about 25% of Bitcoin transactions are routed through the Lightning Network.
However, the distribution of Lightning Network payment scenarios reveals another structural trait. Although it is often marketed as a solution for small frequent daily payments, actual data shows a different trend: in November 2025, the average Lightning Network transaction amount was about $223, far higher than the “buy a cup of coffee” small-ticket scenario people imagine. Industry observers point out that the main driver of transactions on the Lightning Network today is not point-to-point small payments, but fund settlement between exchanges or between enterprises. Nearly 29% of Bitcoin transfers flow through the Lightning Network, and some large exchanges route about 15% of their transaction volume to this network.
This means the Lightning Network is gradually delivering its technical value, but its positioning seems closer to channels for large amounts and institutional-level settlement rather than a daily payment tool for ordinary consumers. Bitcoin’s functional layering is naturally forming: the main chain handles large-value scenarios such as high-net-worth transfers and on-chain asset issuance, the Lightning Network serves fund flows between B2B parties and exchanges, and the gap in retail payment scenarios is filled by stablecoins and other low-fee blockchain solutions.
Bitcoin Narrative Dilemma: When “Digital Gold” Squeezes Out the Survival Space of “Peer-to-Peer Cash”
The title of Bitcoin’s whitepaper is “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” Its core vision was to build a decentralized payment network that does not require intermediaries. Yet sixteen years of development has led Bitcoin in a distinctly different direction. Starting with the choice of a small-block approach in the scaling debate, Bitcoin’s real positioning gradually diverged from its original payment vision. The launch of spot ETFs and the entry of institutions further strengthened the “digital gold” narrative, bringing Bitcoin closer to a macro asset allocation tool rather than a medium for everyday transactions.
The cost of this narrative shift is that Bitcoin has lost the most important mechanism for validating its function as money—circulation. When an asset’s primary use shifts from “payments” to “store of value,” its supporting system shifts from “network effects” to “consensus narratives.” Once this narrative is challenged, the system faces the risk of loosening its value anchor. The widespread discussion in 2026 about a Bitcoin identity crisis is a direct reflection of this vulnerability.
In the special context of Bitcoin Pizza Day, this dilemma is amplified in a dramatic way. We are commemorating a “consumption” transaction, and we are practicing a culture of “not consuming.” This contradiction may not be resolved through technical upgrades; it touches a more fundamental question: if a currency’s core social contract is not to use it, then in what sense is it still money?
Conclusion
The Bitcoin Pizza Day paradox is not a problem about technology, but a problem about how consensus evolves. From buying two pizzas with 10,000 BTC to today’s “store but don’t spend,” Bitcoin has gone through a transition path from a payment experiment to a store-of-value asset. This transition brought substantial value growth, but also a deep split at the functional level. Technical solutions such as the Lightning Network are trying to repair the cracks in payments, but the data shows these tools are more focused on serving large-value settlement layers rather than everyday consumption layers. Bitcoin’s true usability—whether in payment scenarios or in large-value clearing systems—ultimately depends on how market participants redefine its social contract.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Why do people use stablecoins instead of BTC to pay on Bitcoin Pizza Day?
A: Mainly for three reasons: first, BTC on-chain transfer fees are usually in the $2.5 to $4 range, which is too high a cost proportion for small-ticket consumption; second, under HODL culture, participants generally do not want to “spend” BTC that may appreciate in the future; third, stablecoins such as USDT provide a fee structure and price stability that better match everyday consumption scenarios.
Q: Can the Lightning Network make Bitcoin a daily payment tool again?
A: The Lightning Network’s technical direction is correct—it significantly reduces transaction costs and improves speed. But the data shows that the Lightning Network’s main use cases today are settlement between exchanges and enterprise-level fund transfers, not fragmented payments for ordinary consumers. The gap in retail payment scenarios is currently mainly filled by stablecoins.
Q: What does it mean that the share of long-term holders exceeds 73%?
A: It means that more than seventy percent of BTC in the market has not moved for more than 155 days. This signal indicates that a large number of coin holders treat BTC as a store-of-value asset rather than a transaction tool, systematically reducing on-chain activity—this is also direct evidence that Bitcoin’s payment function has been weakened.
Q: If Bitcoin isn’t used for payments, how would its long-term value be affected?
A: The value of money is built on circulation. If BTC is completely decoupled from payment scenarios and relies only on the “digital gold” consensus narrative to support its value, the system’s fragility will rise accordingly. Consensus assets lacking validation through usage scenarios have rarely survived long-term in history.
