Bitcoin Pizza Day: 10,000 BTC for Two Pizzas

At 12:35 in the morning on 18 May 2010, a programmer in Jacksonville, Florida, posted a short request on the Bitcoin forum. Laszlo Hanyecz, then 28, wrote that he would pay 10,000 bitcoins for a couple of pizzas, ideally two large ones so there would be some left for the next day. He did not mind who made them or what was on them. He just wanted to swap his coins for food delivered to his door.

Nobody bit for four days. On 22 May, Hanyecz posted again: he had successfully traded 10,000 bitcoins for pizza, and he thanked a forum user called "jercos". That was Jeremy Sturdivant, a 19-year-old student in California, who placed an order with Papa John's in Jacksonville, paid for it on his own card and had two large pizzas delivered to Hanyecz's house. In return he received 10,000 BTC.

What 10,000 bitcoin was worth

On the day of the offer, another forum member pointed out that the coins could be sold for about $41 on one of the tiny exchanges of the time. Hanyecz later put the cost of the pizzas at about $25, maybe $30 with a tip. So Sturdivant made a small profit on paper, and Hanyecz paid a little over the odds. Nobody in the thread thought it was remarkable.

To put that price in context: Bitcoin was then about 16 months old. An exchange is a marketplace where coins are swapped for ordinary money, much like a broker for shares, and in 2010 there was barely one worth the name. The first published bitcoin price, set in October 2009 by a website called New Liberty Standard, was $1 for 1,309.03 BTC, and it was worked out from the cost of the electricity used to create the coins, not from any trading. There was no shop that took bitcoin. Hanyecz wanted to prove that someone, somewhere, would accept it for something real.

The value of those 10,000 coins has since become the most quoted number in Bitcoin folklore. One bitcoin first reached $1 in early 2011. At Bitcoin's record high of about $126,000 in October 2025, the pizza coins would have been worth about $1.26 billion. At about $82,000 a coin on 16 October 2026, they would be worth about $820 million. The deal is widely cited as the first known purchase of physical goods with bitcoin, which is why 22 May is now marked every year as Bitcoin Pizza Day.

The man behind the order

Hanyecz was not a speculator who got unlucky. He was one of the early people who made Bitcoin work. In May 2010, the same month as the pizza post, he showed the forum that a computer's graphics card could create new bitcoin far faster than its main processor. Creating new coins is called mining: computers compete to solve a maths puzzle that secures the network, and the winner is paid in fresh bitcoin. Graphics chips are built to do thousands of simple sums at once, which suits the puzzle exactly. Bitcoin Magazine reported that Hanyecz got about ten times more mining power from a 2010 MacBook this way. He also built and released the first version of the Bitcoin software for Apple's Mac computers.

Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin, was not pleased. In an email published in Nathaniel Popper's book Digital Gold, Satoshi wrote that graphics cards would "prematurely limit the incentive" to people with expensive hardware, when a big attraction for newcomers was that anyone with a computer could earn some free coins. Hanyecz stopped promoting the method, though others soon picked it up. Today almost all bitcoin is mined on specialist machines in industrial warehouses, which is the future Satoshi was trying to delay.

Mining that fast left Hanyecz with far more coins than he needed. He told Bitcoin Magazine in 2019 that he spent "something near 100,000 BTC" in 2010, on pizza and other things. On 12 June 2010 he called his pizza deal an open offer and said he would trade 10,000 BTC for two pizzas any time. By 4 August he wrote that he could not really afford to keep doing it.

No regrets, on either side

Hanyecz has said many times that he does not regret the deal. In a 2019 interview with Bitcoin Magazine he described it as a win: he felt as if he was beating the internet by getting free food. In comments reported by the New York Post in 2021, he said it was great to be part of Bitcoin's early history and that he would like to think what he did helped, adding that if it had not been him, somebody else would have come along.

Sturdivant did not keep the coins either. He told the Telegraph in 2018 that he spent them, largely on travel around the United States, and that if he had treated it as an investment he might have held on a bit longer. Neither man became rich from the 10,000 coins.

In February 2018 Hanyecz repeated the stunt with new technology. He used the Lightning Network, a system built on top of Bitcoin for small, fast payments, much like a bar tab that is settled with one bank transfer at the end of the night. He paid 0.00649 BTC, about $67 at the time, to a friend in London, who had two pizzas delivered to him in Florida. Bloomberg and Fortune both reported the purchase, and Hanyecz announced it to the Lightning developers' mailing list as a test that the system worked.

Why the pizzas still matter

Every year on 22 May, exchanges, wallet companies and pizza chains run promotions, and someone posts the updated dollar value of the two pizzas. The joke is about the money. The point Hanyecz was making was different: money that nobody spends is not money. For most of its life bitcoin has been treated as something to hold rather than something to spend, which makes a 2010 pizza order look stranger every year. It remains the clearest record of the moment Bitcoin went from a program on a few hobbyists' computers to something a stranger would accept in exchange for dinner.