$780 million for two pizzas He has never said he regrets

On the early morning of May 18, 2010, in Jacksonville, Florida, a 28-year-old programmer posted a message on a forum with only 230 members.

His name was Laszlo Hanyecz. In the post, he said he was willing to pay 10,000 bitcoins and asked someone to help order two large pizzas delivered to his home. The toppings should be onions, green peppers, and sausage—absolutely no anchovies.

This wasn’t impulsive spending. It was the first time Bitcoin’s price was fully discovered in history.

Those two pizzas were a welding rod.

Sixteen years later, the two ends of that welding rod moved in completely opposite directions. Back then, those 10,000 bitcoins were worth $41—enough to buy two Papa John’s pizzas. Today they’re worth $780 million—enough to buy a fleet of mid-sized private jets.

And Papa John’s is still the same Papa John’s, and pizzas are still a few dozen dollars each.

Those two pizzas welded a piece of digital code into the physical world for the first time. From that moment on, Bitcoin was no longer just a toy traded among miners.

01 A forum post that sat idle for 4 days

The post stayed up for 4 days with no one taking the offer.

The forum had 230 members, most of whom were scattered outside the United States. Ordering pizza across regions had barriers. Even Hanyecz couldn’t help replying, asking whether the bid was too low.

On the fifth day, a 19-year-old student in California saw the post.

His name was Jeremy Sturdivant, and his forum ID was jercos. After they worked things out on IRC, Sturdivant didn’t have a channel to settle in Bitcoin either, so he simply took out his debit card and placed an order at a Papa John’s on Atlantic Avenue in Jacksonville across state lines. He paid roughly $41 up front himself. The pizzas themselves only cost $25 to $30.

On May 22, the pizzas were delivered to Hanyecz’s home. Hanyecz sent Sturdivant’s wallet 10,000 bitcoins, and he also added 1 extra bitcoin as a miner’s fee. The 10001 BTC transfer is permanently recorded in block 57043 of the Bitcoin blockchain.

Sturdivant didn’t hold on to them. When Bitcoin rose to around $400, he exchanged those coins for fiat currency, took a trip with his girlfriend, and used it to upgrade his computer components. At today’s prices, the opportunity cost of that trip was $780 million.

Interestingly, Sturdivant never said he regretted it. In later interviews, he said that at the time, no one really treated those 10,000 coins as money—just as a slightly interesting experiment.

It was the first time a decentralized asset stepped out of code and landed in a paper box holding hot pizza.

02 Hanyecz was definitely not a fool

Mainstream media likes to portray Hanyecz as that greedy, foolish geek who lost hundreds of millions. This narrative simply doesn’t hold up.

Hanyecz wasn’t a typical user—he was a developer. He was one of Bitcoin’s early code contributors, and the first person in the industry to get a full node running on a Mac system. More importantly, he was the first on the entire network to write GPU mining code and open-source the code to the community for free.

When GPUs entered mining, computing power was parallelized by several multiples. Once that door was kicked open, the whole arms race of mining machine hardware began.

In the summer of 2010, the block reward was still 50 BTC, and the total network hash rate was very low. Hanyecz set up several GPU miners and mined almost blindly. His wallet reached a peak of 43.9k bitcoins around June 2010.

For him, 10,000 bitcoins was just the production from 200 blocks.

So that pizza transaction wasn’t a loss—it was a clever dimensionality-reduction arbitrage. He swapped his own mined, nearly zero-cost digital code for hot, filling, physical food. For a geek, it was more exhilarating than making money.

He repeated it several more times. Throughout the summer of 2010, he accumulated by exchanging between 80,000 and 100,000 bitcoins for pizzas. His wallet was completely emptied by June 2011, and most likely the coins were moved to cold storage.

In August, he voluntarily closed the pizza offer. The reason wasn’t regret—it was that the network’s total hash rate had risen, changing the marginal cost of mining.

Looking back at that transaction, he only said one thing: if nobody was willing to accept it, Bitcoin simply wouldn’t be what it is today.

03 Eight years later, he bought pizza again

On February 25, 2018, Hanyecz made another move.

This time, he bought two pizzas for only 0.00649 bitcoins, which was about $60. The payment method had changed: he used the Lightning Network. At that time, the Lightning Network had just gone live for mainnet testing, and very few people used it day to day. Once again, Hanyecz played the role of the first person to try it.

With the mainnet’s 1MB block size and a 10-minute block interval, calculations work out to only about 7 transactions per second. That kind of throughput simply couldn’t support everyday high-frequency consumption, and once fees got high, buying even a cup of coffee became unrealistic.

The Lightning Network moved transactions off-chain: near-instant settlement with almost zero fees, with settlement to the main chain only when channels are opened or closed.

The symbolic significance of this pizza transaction was the same as the one in 2010. It told the world that Bitcoin could indeed support small, high-frequency spending scenarios.

But one old problem never got solved: Papa John’s itself simply didn’t accept Bitcoin. In both transactions, the merchant received fiat currency after intermediary conversions.

The last mile—from 2010 to 2018—was never crossed.

04 After 16 years, you can’t buy pizza anymore

Now fast forward to May 2026, the 16th anniversary of Pizza Day.

Bitcoin’s price fluctuated between $77k and $78k. Early in the year, a burst of high CPI sent the price sliding from $82k to around $76.8k, and it was soon stabilized by on-chain buying and Nvidia’s earnings report.

This is no longer a game for a small forum of 230 people. The number of global Bitcoin holders has already reached the hundreds of millions.

The most aggressive example is MicroStrategy. This publicly traded company, reshaped into a Bitcoin treasury by Michael Saylor, as of May 17 had accumulated 843,700 bitcoins, accounting for more than 4% of total supply, with a book value of $65.3 billion.

Just in the week from May 11 to May 17, they added another 24.9k bitcoins at an average price of $81k.

The Wall Street gateway is fully open as well. The total size of US crypto spot ETFs is approaching $120 billion. In particular, Bitcoin ETFs alone have net assets of $1037.85 billion, with cumulative historical net inflows of $587.18 billion.

MSBT, newly established by Morgan Stanley in April, charges a management fee of 14 basis points, directly challenging BlackRock’s IBIT at 25 basis points. Back when ordering a pizza in Jacksonville required forum coordination, the assets were then just sitting in the clearing accounts of traditional brokers.

05 Summary

The other side of the story is in Africa.

For ordinary people there, Pizza Day isn’t a financial joke—it’s an awakening from local currency devaluation and from the predatory take on cross-border remittances.

Every year on Pizza Day, cold wallet manufacturers repeat the same line over and over: if it’s not your private key, it’s not your coin.

Hanyecz never said he regretted it. He himself said the meaning of that transaction was never about how much two pizzas cost.

Papa John’s, cut into eight pieces, has long gone cold, and the packaging box has probably ended up in the trash long ago. But the record on Block 57043 is still there.

That weld point is still burning hot.