The Most Expensive Pizza Ever: How $41 Became $600 Million

On May 18, 2010, developer Laszlo Hanyecz posted on the Bitcointalk forum: "I'll pay 10,000 bitcoins for a couple of pizzas... I like things like onions, peppers, sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes, pepperoni, etc. Just standard stuff, no weird fish topping or anything like that." Three days later, he grew impatient: "So nobody wants to buy me pizza? Is the bitcoin amount I'm offering too low?"

On May 22, 2010, 19-year-old Jeremy "Jercos" Sturdivant ordered two Papa John's pizzas delivered to Hanyecz's home in Florida and received 10,000 BTC in return — worth about $41 at the time. It was the first real-world purchase of any good ever made with Bitcoin, which itself was barely a year and a half old, Fortune reports.

Hanyecz didn't stop at one trade: he kept the offer open until August 4, 2010, and over that stretch sent more than 79,000 BTC in total across various trades — mostly because mining new coins was easy back then and the price was measured in cents. Closing the offer, he wrote on the forum: "I can't afford to keep doing it since I can't mine thousands of coins a day anymore."

In February 2014, with Bitcoin trading around $600, Hanyecz was asked if he regretted the trade. His answer was blunt: "I mean people can say I'm stupid, but it was a great deal at the time." In a 2015 interview on 60 Minutes, he added: "It made it real for some people — I mean it certainly did for me."

The upshot: at today's price of roughly $63,000-64,000 per coin, those 10,000 BTC would be worth more than $600 million — a figure the industry now marks every May 22 as "Bitcoin Pizza Day," the birthday of Bitcoin as a means of paying for real goods, not just a digital experiment.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.