Before its heyday, Bitcoin was largely unknown and had little to no practical use. It was mostly traded as an experimental cryptocurrency and only made splashes in niche communities of tech and cryptography enthusiasts. It had no official value, and those in the know mined it out of curiosity and traded it in forums. Some used it for tipping each other or for pure fun, but it has never actually been used for purchasing anything tangible. But that changed on a fateful day in 2010. While the history of cryptocurrencies is filled to the brim with stories worthy of telling, there’s one event that changed it all: the Bitcoin Pizza Day, which is celebrated on May 22 and marks the anniversary of the first-ever documented transaction where Bitcoin was used to buy two Papa John's pizzas for 10,000 BTC, showcasing Bitcoin's proof of concept as a payment method. The transaction was initiated in 2010 by programmer Laszlo Hanyecz, who purchased the pizzas from a user on Bitcointalk.org, known as jercos. Had he held onto that Bitcoin, it would be worth around $900 million today, making those pizzas the most expensive ever bought.
The Early Days of Bitcoin
The events leading up to Bitcoin Pizza Day form a maze tough to navigate. This PlasBit article is not about giving a full recap on crypto history as a whole, but some context won’t hurt to understand Bitcoin Pizza Day a bit better. In October 2008, an anonymous figure known as Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. It outlined all the perks of cryptocurrency we know and love today: decentralization, transparency, and secure storage, all running on a blockchain. Shortly after, Nakamoto mined the Genesis Block, which was the first-ever Bitcoin block. In the first couple of years, Bitcoin was exclusively mined by crypto and tech enthusiasts: they would trade it amongst themselves on small forums like Bitcointalk. Folks used it to test the system and have some fun with it: it was a sandbox for those interested in the technical and moral aspects of the novel currency. BTC didn’t carry any value: whenever it was traded, its worth was determined on the fly by forum enthusiasts. There was no centralized market nor consistent demand, so assigning a real financial value would have been impossible, and we were miles away from seeing anyone who accepts cryptocurrency as payment. Despite the early attempts that tried to quantify the worth of BTC, people generally assigned subjective value to it - and it remained unchanged for the first two years.
Bitcoin Pizza Story: 2 Pizzas Worth $1 Billion
On May 22, 2010, everything changed: this day marks the first time real financial value was assigned to Bitcoin. It later became known as the Bitcoin pizza story, the first ever documented transaction where programmer Laszlo Hanyecz bought two Papa John's pizzas for 10,000 BTC from a user known as jercos on Bitcointalk.org, showcasing Bitcoin's proof of concept as a payment method. Had he held on to the 10,000 Bitcoin he sold that day, they would've been worth around $900 million today.
Laszlo Hanyecz with pizzas worth a billion USD today
Naturally, at the time, 10,000 BTC was worth much less and Bitcoin could not be used as real money. The two pizzas actually cost around $25 at Papa John’s, but Laszlo’s offer was quite generous as 10k BTC was worth around $41 at the time. You might think Jeremy Sturdivant, aka. jercos made the deal of the century and held onto his Bitcoins, but as the story goes, that was not how things played out. Sturdivant used his BTC to cover his expenses while traveling in the USA with his girlfriend. If he had traveled on a budget and saved his BTC, he would have been able to rent out the top luxury resort Amangiri in Utah for 18,000 days or 49,3 calendar years. While you’re shaking your head in disbelief, picture this: jercos spent even more of his own BTC on gaming. Looking back, he reckons that things would’ve been much different had he treated his Bitcoins as investments rather than pocket money to burn on commodities. Alas, that was not the case, and the man who got 10,000 BTC for 2 Papa John’s pizzas now works as a product development engineer at a manufacturer of professional radio broadcast equipment. But what happened with the man who initiated the transaction and is responsible for Bitcoin Pizza Day being celebrated around the world today?
Bitcoin Pizza Transaction: 10,000 BTC For a Full Meal
Laszlo Hanyecz worked as a software developer. It’s a lesser-known fact, but he personally made contributions to Bitcoin’s source code in the past as he was one of the first 5 developers to work on the project. Naturally, he then managed to pile up a pretty neat stack of BTC, only to dish out most of it. The Bitcoin pizza transaction happened on May 22nd 2010: Laszlo Hanyecz bought two pizzas for 10,000 Bitcoin, by sending them to the bitcointalk forum user jercos who then bought the two pizzas and had them delivered to Laszlo's house. This marked the first ever purchase made using Bitcoin, and in the upcoming months, Laszlo spent around 100,000 Bitcoins on pizzas. Before we rush to condemn Laszlo for his seemingly haphazard action, you need to understand that owning any BTC back then had different optics. There was no financial value associated with it, no official exchange for trading, and people mined it for fun but then couldn’t really do much with it. BTC was worth pennies and nothing indicated that it would change in the future. As for Laszlo, little is known about his background. He is regarded as somewhat of a trailblazer for mining BTC using GPUs well before it was cool: he was making over 700 BTC a day by using specialized hardware made for gaming.
Satoshi Nakamoto didn’t quite approve of his approach, though: he believed that mining BTC should be available to anyone and feared that using GPUs just creates more division. It’s easy to admit - once high-end GPU hardware is used for mining more BTC, those who don’t have access to it will inevitably end up lagging behind. Laszlo heeded Satoshi’s otherwise prophetic words and acted fast. He took an excerpt from the Bitcoin FAQ to give back to the community: after finding a section on baking pizzas and cutting hair, he knew what he had to do. He was going to give back some of the BTC he mined with his GPU, in the spirit of the inceptor of Bitcoin. As for present-day Laszlo, he’s poor now according to his x.com bio, although it is not clear whether he had kept more BTC in his wallet or spent it all on pizzas. Some suspect he had sold it all back when one BTC was worth a couple of hundred dollars, thinking that it finally had reached its peak; others theorize that he had lost access to his wallet, rendering his Bitcoins inactive.
How Much Was Bitcoin Worth On Pizza Day?
Laszlo made headlines once BTC’s value soared, which was years after his notorious pizza purchase, and if you want to know how much was Bitcoin worth on Pizza Day, on May 22, 2010, one Bitcoin was worth $0.0041. The 10,000 Bitcoin Laszlo used to buy the two pizzas were worth $41 on Pizza Day, and has since grown in value by over 3 billion percent. It didn’t take too long for Laszlo to witness history: BTC had jumped from $0.008 to $0.08 by July, which would have gotten him 40 Papa John’s pizzas. In 9 months, BTC hit the symbolic $1 mark. Somewhere in Florida, a man called Laszlo Hanyecz realized that his Bitcoins would’ve been worth 500 pizzas.
We made a quick rundown of the numbers here at PlasBit and this is what his prematurely spent fortune would’ve looked like, if exchanged for Papa John’s pizzas:
- June 2011 (BTC $30): 15,000 pizzas
- Late 2011 (BTC $2): 1,000 pizzas
- April 2013 (BTC $100): 50,000 pizzas
- November 2013 (BTC $1,000): 500,000 pizzas
- December 2017 (BTC $20,000): 10,000,000 pizzas
- April 2021 (BTC $64,000): 32,000,000 pizzas
- December 2024 (BTC $100,000): 50,000,000 pizzas
While the last figure exceeds what all Papa John’s restaurants bake in a year in the entire US, it’s worth noting that Laszlo’s fortune (assuming he held) would put him in the top 2650 richest people on Earth. That’s right - according to Forbes, dollar billionaires are still relatively rare, and while Laszlo wouldn’t make it to the top 100, it would place him in the 0.0000326% richest percentile globally. We can only hope those two pizzas tasted heavenly back in 2010. Although Laszlo’s pizza purchase might be the most recognized early Bitcoin transaction today, there are a bunch of other instances that laid the foundations for wider adoption. Next up, we compiled a selection of some of the most well-known transactions.
Like Pizza Day But Better: The Top Early Bitcoin Transactions
It’s tough to claim that any transaction is more renowned than the Bitcoin Pizza Day purchase, but there are several iconic instances over the course of crypto history where people bought something other than food with crypto. Here’s a quick and dirty list with the most memorable ones:
- Lamborghini purchases: Peter Saddington is probably the only person in the luxury brand’s history who managed to buy a Lambo for around $115. Okay, we were not being specific enough: Saddington bought BTC for slightly more than 100 bucks in 2011. In 2017, prices were soaring, and he decided to pick up a Huracán worth around $200,000. This purchase became a meme in the crypto community (“When Lambo?”), symbolizing success.
- A house in Essex, England: An unnamed buyer purchased a house for 63 BTC or £350,000 (cca. $450,000). And why is this exciting? It was the very first time someone used cryptocurrency to purchase a home.
Located in Colchester, Essex, this 4-bedroom home became the first property sold for BTC
- The $500 million bet: All right, we promised you things bought with crypto, but you can’t really ignore Michael Saylor’s eye-popping crypto bet. The former MicroStrategy CEO claims he has actually spent billions on crypto, hoping to speed up institutional adoption.
- Jack Dorsey tweet: We could have a separate list with all the insane NFT purchases, but we now have to make do with this item. Crypto entrepreneur Sina Estavi bought former Twitter CEO Dorsey’s first-ever tweet as an NFT for 1,690 ETH (around $2.9 million at the time). Ironically, it lost most of its value after the NFT bubble burst.
- A ticket to space: Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, made commercial flights with Virgin Galactic purchasable with Bitcoin. The first ever person to buy a ticket with BTC was a flight attendant from Hawaii. According to Branson, she made quite a fortune by buying BTC early on - something we would’ve guessed based on the $250,000 price tag paid for a single ticket.
- Teslas (for a while): Elon Musk announced back in 2021 that Tesla is investing $1.5 billion in BTC, and shortly after, people could buy Teslas for Bitcoins. That is, only until May 2021, when Tesla suspended BTC payments citing environmental concerns.
While many people might want to use crypto to buy groceries, as you can see, there’s pretty much no limit to your imagination (only to your wallet).
HODL: How Laszlo Paved a Way To a Crypto Philosophy
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that HODL became a meme soon after Laszlo’s pizza purchase. Just three years after Bitcoin Pizza Day, BTC prices soared and the crypto community exploded. The whole market was worth around $1 billion with around 300,000 to 1.3 million people trading on a daily basis. One of them was Bitcointalk user GameKyuubi, who, fueled by alcohol and disappointment in equal amounts, posted his rant, riddled with typos. Here’s an excerpt of the now-legendary rumination:
While we can’t be sure whether many traders are making “a millino bucks” with ease, GameKyuubi’s frustration is a common theme for many people who are getting into crypto.
HODL is not for the faint-hearted
HODL became an overnight sensation, and forums were swarmed by HODL memes. But the typo’s rise to fame didn’t quite stop there. Soon, HODL became synonymous with a simple strategy that suggests holding onto your assets no matter what. Now it’s also an acronym, meaning “Hold On For Dear Life”. This school of thought echoes GameKyuubi’s sentiment: beginners usually try to time the market and then miserably fail whereas they should be waiting without selling any of their coins. And there’s more. HODL is now more than just a beginner’s mantra. If you want to play the waiting game, some suggest that you should HODL up until governments replace their fiat currencies with cryptocurrencies, eventually making you rich beyond imagination. HODL essentially became a tenet of cryptocurrencies as it embodies the trust asset owners have in crypto for decades to come. So even though HODL came 3 years after Laszlo’s purchase, Bitcoin Pizza Day inadvertently provided the first cautionary “HODL” tale to those who lose faith too quickly and dump assets prematurely.
Unlike Laszlo, Would You Have Held?
Seasoned crypto holders consider Laszlo’s story to serve as a source for self-reflection. It’s easy to say that we would’ve HODL (HEDL?) if we were him. But to become extra rich, we should’ve held for years, not just months. Would you have held onto your assets in early 2015 when prices plummeted to $200 from $1000? Would you have held onto your assets in 2017, just before the 2017 Bull Run when BTC finally crept back from the lowest depths to $1,000, only to witness prices soaring up to $20,000? There are plenty of more “what if” scenarios, and it’s safe to say most of us are excellent at Monday morning quarterbacking but generally suck at prime-time balling. As for Laszlo and his contemporaries, seeing BTC double or triple in price after months or even years of holding no substantial value seemed like a great deal. They sold BTC. You most probably would’ve sold your BTC as well.
Bitcoin Pizza Day: Celebration Or Commemoration?
In retrospect, saying that Laszlo has acted prematurely seems logical. But considering all the circumstances, it’s not as easy to pass judgment. Bitcoin was nowhere near to realizing its potential: coin owners probably thought it was always going to be worth peanuts. With no place to exchange them and no official value assigned to them, Laszlo was one of the few dozen people mining BTC. Seeing that 10,000 BTC is worth 2 pizzas probably felt like a bargain. Is Bitcoin Pizza Day a day to be festive and upbeat, celebrating the quick rise to fame and its still dormant potential that could transform the way we look at money? Or is it simply a parable for the dangers of making ill-timed moves on the crypto market? While the jury is still out there, here at PlasBit we believe that Bitcoin Pizza Day encapsulates the rich, erratic, often unpredictable nature of crypto as a whole, and as such, it should serve as a road sign for both beginners and long-time veterans.
