10,000 Bitcoin for Two Pizzas

In May 2010, Bitcoin was a little over a year old, and almost nobody used it for anything. Its users were a few hundred enthusiasts on an online forum. Coins could be created by running software on a home computer, and they had no agreed price because nobody sold anything for them.

Laszlo Hanyecz, a programmer in Jacksonville, Florida, wanted to change that. He was an early contributor to Bitcoin’s software. In April 2010, days after joining the forum, he released the first version of the Bitcoin program for Apple’s Mac computers.

He also found a much faster way to mine. Everyone else ran the mining software on an ordinary computer processor. In May 2010 Hanyecz published a version that used a graphics card instead, and it produced coins far faster. He later told Bitcoin Magazine that Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s anonymous creator, emailed him to ask him to go easy on it, because graphics-card mining could crowd out ordinary users. He stopped promoting it.

That left him with a lot of coins and very little to do with them. What he wanted was to prove they could buy something real.

So, on May 18, 2010, he went to the Bitcointalk forum and offered 10,000 bitcoin to anyone who would get him two large pizzas.

The offer nobody wanted

For four days, nobody took it up. The deal sounds absurd now, but in 2010 it wasn’t obviously generous. Forum users pointed out, according to Bitcoin Magazine, that he could sell the coins for about $41 in cash.

Then, on May 22, a 19-year-old forum user named Jeremy Sturdivant, known online as “jercos,” agreed. He contacted a Papa John’s in Jacksonville, used his own card to order two large pizzas, and had them delivered. Hanyecz sent him 10,000 bitcoin.

“I just want to report that I successfully traded 10,000 bitcoins for pizza,” Hanyecz wrote on the forum, as quoted by CoinDesk.

It is widely described as the first known purchase of a physical good with bitcoin. For the first time, the coins had a price in something you could eat.

What the coins became

Nobody involved thought it was a bad deal. Sturdivant reportedly spent most of the coins over the following months. Hanyecz kept his offer open and went on buying pizza with bitcoin.

The 10,000 coins were only the start. Hanyecz told Bitcoin Magazine in 2019 that he spent close to 100,000 bitcoin that year, on pizza and other things. An analysis of the wallet address he posted on the forum found that it received and spent 81,432 coins between April and November 2010 alone. When he went on 60 Minutes in May 2019, Anderson Cooper did the arithmetic for him: about $800 million worth of pizza at that day’s price.

Then the price of bitcoin took off, and the numbers stopped being funny.

In October 2025 bitcoin reached about $126,200 at the peak of a bull market. At that price, CryptoPotato calculated, the 10,000 coins that bought two pizzas were worth $1.26 billion.

Prices fall as well as rise. By May 21, 2026, a day before the trade’s 16th anniversary, bitcoin was trading at $77,848, according to Blockchain.News. The pizza coins were worth about $778 million, still a fortune for two pizzas, but hundreds of millions less than seven months earlier.

Bitcoin Pizza Day

The date became an annual event. Every May 22 the crypto industry marks Bitcoin Pizza Day with meetups, promotions and, inevitably, pizza. Bitcoin Magazine describes the revaluation of the 10,000 coins each year as one of the cleanest benchmarks in crypto: the same fixed number of coins, priced at that day’s market.

Hanyecz has never sounded sorry. “With 100,000 bitcoins, I would be [a billionaire] right now,” he told Cointelegraph. “But then I wouldn’t have gotten that pizza.” He has described the purchase as part of an experiment: bitcoin only works as money if people spend it.

The man who received the coins has said he doesn’t regret the trade either. Sturdivant never treated the 10,000 bitcoin as an investment. He spent them as money, mostly on a road trip across the United States with his girlfriend, while a coin was still worth a fraction of a dollar. He told Fox Business that if he had treated it as an investment, he might have held on a bit longer. He also told The Telegraph he had never imagined the same number of coins could one day buy something on the scale of real estate.

There was a third person in the trade, and he got paid in dollars. The driver who brought the pizzas to Hanyecz’s door received an ordinary tip. Fox Business headlined its story on him “Infamous Bitcoin pizza guy who squandered $365M haul has no regrets.”

What the record shows

• Spending gave the coin its value. Before the pizza trade, bitcoin had no price in goods. A currency nobody spends is only a theory.
• Hindsight is not foresight. The trade looks foolish only because of what happened later. In 2010 the coins were worth about $41, and the buyer was happy to swap them for dinner.
• Volatility is part of the story. The same 10,000 coins lost hundreds of millions of dollars in value between October 2025 and May 2026.
• Every purchase has an opportunity cost. The real cost of anything bought is what the money might have become if it had been kept, a cost almost nobody can see at the time.

The theme of value seen only in hindsight runs through other stories in this archive. Warren Buffett put a $200 billion price on a decision he made over 12.5 cents. Merrill Lynch sold a $30 million stake for more than $4.6 billion. Early decisions look small until the numbers grow around them.