On 22 May 2010, American programmer Laszlo Hanyecz completed a deal he had offered on an online forum: 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas delivered to his home. It was the first documented purchase of a physical good with the cryptocurrency. Those bitcoins were worth about $40 at the time. When bitcoin passed $100,000 in late 2024, they were worth more than a billion dollars. 22 May is now known as 'Bitcoin Pizza Day'.
That's the estimate from a WHO-led study published in The Lancet in 2024, covering the half-century since the Expanded Programme on Immunization was launched in 1974. It works out to about six lives saved every minute, mostly infants. The measles vaccine alone accounts for around 60% of those lives.
According to the World Gold Council, about 216,000 tonnes of gold have been mined in all of human history. Because gold is so dense (19.3 tonnes per cubic metre), it would fit in a cube about 22 metres on each side, roughly the height of a seven-storey building. Strikingly, about two-thirds of it has been mined since 1950.