Bitcoin Pizza Day
On May 22, 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 bitcoin for two Papa John’s pizzas, the first documented time bitcoin bought a real-world good. At the time the coins were worth about 41 dollars. Today they would be worth hundreds of millions. The usual takeaway is that he made a terrible trade. The better one is that someone had to spend bitcoin first for it to become money at all, and this was the day it happened. This is education, not financial advice.
The most expensive lunch nobody stops talking about
In the spring of 2010, bitcoin was barely a year old. It had no exchange rate to speak of, no shops that took it, and a following you could count on one forum. It was traded and mined by a small group of programmers testing an odd idea, money that runs on software instead of banks. One of them was Laszlo Hanyecz, a programmer in Jacksonville, Florida, who had figured out how to mine bitcoin with a graphics card while most people were still using slower processors, which left him holding a great many coins that had cost him almost nothing.
On May 18, 2010, Laszlo posted an offer to the peer-to-peerA network where computers connect directly to one another and pass data along, with no central server in between. Bitcoin relays transactions and blocks peer to peer, so there is no middleman to shut down. community’s forum, BitcoinTalk. He would pay 10,000 bitcoin to anyone who would get him a couple of pizzas, “maybe two large ones so I have some left over for the next day.” Four days later, a teenager using the name jercos took him up on it and arranged for two Papa John’s pizzas to arrive at Laszlo’s door. The bitcoin changed hands. At the going rate, roughly four tenths of a cent per coin, the whole thing was worth about 41 dollars.
It was not a blunder, it was the proof
Grant the joke first, because it is a good one. Measured against today’s price, trading 10,000 bitcoin for lunch looks absurd. But the price everyone laughs about did not exist yet, and part of the reason it came to exist is trades exactly like this one. Before May 22, 2010, bitcoin had never been exchanged for a physical good. It could be mined, sent between users, and argued about on a forum, but no one had shown it could reach into the ordinary world and come back with a pizza.
That is what Laszlo proved. He turned an abstract experiment into a medium of exchangeMoney used to buy and sell things, rather than to store value or price them. One of the classic functions of money., which is one of the core jobs any money has to do. A currency that has never been accepted in exchange for anything has not yet shown one of money’s essential functions, no matter how elegant its design. The pizza was bitcoin’s first real answer to the only question that finally matters for a currency. Will someone accept this for something they actually have? On that day, for the first time, the answer was yes.
How something becomes money in the first place
It helps to see what actually happened underneath the story. No one decreed that a bitcoin was worth four tenths of a cent. That number came from a trade, two people agreeing on what a pile of coins would buy on a particular afternoon. This is how monetizationThe slow process of something becoming money, as more people hold it for its own sake and it takes on a monetary premium. starts. A thing becomes money slowly, one voluntary exchange at a time, as more people decide it is worth holding and spending. There is no committee that flips a switch.
Laszlo’s pizza was one of the earliest of those exchanges, and it gave bitcoin a real-world reference for what it was worth, something it had never had before. Once one trade sets a price, the next negotiation has a starting point, and the one after that, and a market slowly assembles itself out of thousands of small agreements. Gold underwent a similar process over centuries. Bitcoin went through it in a compressed decade, and this was one of the first steps. You can trace the whole case for where bitcoin has value back to ordinary moments like this, where someone was simply willing to trade.
Why the most expensive pizza story is misleading
The “most expensive pizza in history” line does one quiet thing that is worth noticing. It takes a 2026 price and staples it onto a 2010 decision. In May 2010, no one knew bitcoin would be worth anything at all. Plenty of smart people expected it to go to zero. Laszlo was not handing over a fortune, he was spending 41 dollars of experimental internet money that he had mostly mined himself, on a bet that the thing might actually work as money. Judging that choice by a price that took more than a decade to appear is hindsight dressed up as a lesson.
Laszlo also did not stop. He bought pizza with bitcoin again over that summer, spending far more than 10,000 coins in total before the price climbed. Asked about it years later, he has said he does not regret it, that dwelling on the later price only drives a person crazy, and that he is proud the trade helped show bitcoin could work. The teenager who received the coins, jercos, spent them too, on ordinary things, back when a bitcoin still cost less than a dollar. Neither of them held on and got rich. That is not a tragedy in this story. It is the point. Early bitcoin got spent, because spending it was the only way to find out whether it was money.
It is tempting to read Pizza Day as a warning about spending too soon. But look at who was involved. A programmer who mined coins that almost no one wanted, and a teenager happy to arrange a pizza for internet money worth pocket change. They treated bitcoin the way you treat money you actually use, which in 2010 is exactly what it was. The version of this story where everyone quietly holds and waits is a version where bitcoin never gets a price, never gets a market, and never becomes the thing worth holding in the first place. Someone has to go first.
Why Bitcoin Pizza Day still matters
Bitcoin Pizza Day endures because it captures a truth about money that is easy to miss when you only ever use the finished kind. Dollars feel like money because a whole economy already accepts them. Bitcoin had to earn that from nothing, and it earned the first piece of it on a Saturday in Florida with two pizzas. Every money has a first transaction. Most are lost to history. Bitcoin’s happens to have been documented on a public forum, timestamped, and celebrated every year with lunch.
The story also quietly answers a worry that stops a lot of newcomers. If a whole bitcoin now costs tens of thousands of dollars, is it too late, and do you need to buy one whole coin. No, on both counts. A bitcoin divides into 100 million satoshiThe smallest unit of Bitcoin, one hundred-millionth of a bitcoin (0.00000001 BTC). Named after Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator., so the same pizza that once cost 10,000 whole coins would today cost a small pile of sats. You buy and spend the amount that fits you, which is why you do not have to buy a whole bitcoin. Laszlo spent coins because that was the usable unit then. Today the usable unit is smaller, and that flexibility is a feature, not an accident.
Underneath the pizza is the same thing that made the trade possible at all, two strangers moving value directly, with no bank clearing it and no company’s permission required. That is the mechanism worth remembering, the ability for bitcoin to move peer to peer without a bank in the middle. The pizza is the friendly face of a serious idea. Once a year it reminds people that this money did not arrive fully formed. It got up, walked into the world, and bought lunch.
The pizza was never the expensive part. The expensive thing would have been a money that no one was ever willing to spend.All Roads Lead to Bitcoin
Keep going
If a first trade gave bitcoin a price, where does its value actually come from?
Why does bitcoin have value?Common questions
What is Bitcoin Pizza Day?
Bitcoin Pizza Day is May 22, the anniversary of the first documented purchase of a real good with bitcoin. On May 22, 2010, a programmer named Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 bitcoin for two Papa John’s pizzas, worth about 41 dollars at the time. Bitcoiners mark the date every year because it was the moment bitcoin stopped being a pure experiment and was used as money for the first time.
How much were the 10,000 bitcoin pizzas worth?
At the time, in May 2010, 10,000 bitcoin was worth about 41 dollars, because a single bitcoin traded for roughly four tenths of a cent. The pizzas themselves cost around 25 dollars, and Laszlo paid the rest for the trouble of arranging them. The same 10,000 bitcoin would be worth on the order of 600 million dollars at mid-2026 prices, though bitcoin’s price moves constantly, so that number is a snapshot rather than a fixed figure.
Who paid for the Bitcoin pizza?
Laszlo Hanyecz, a programmer in Jacksonville, Florida, offered the 10,000 bitcoin on the BitcoinTalk forum. A teenager who used the forum name jercos, later identified as Jeremy Sturdivant, accepted the offer and arranged for two Papa John’s pizzas to be delivered to Laszlo’s home. Sturdivant spent his bitcoin on ordinary things over the following months, while it still traded for less than a dollar.
Does Laszlo Hanyecz regret the pizza purchase?
By his own account, no. Laszlo has said in interviews that he is glad he did it, because it showed bitcoin could work as money, and that thinking about the later price only drives a person crazy. He also mined many of those coins himself when almost no one else was mining, and he went on to buy more pizzas with bitcoin that same year. He treated the coins as spending money, which at the time is exactly what they were.
Why is Bitcoin Pizza Day important?
It marks the moment bitcoin crossed from theory into use. Before that day, bitcoin had no proven real-world price and had never bought anything. The pizza trade helped establish one of the earliest widely remembered real-world exchange rates and proved that a money with no bank or government behind it could still be spent between two strangers. Every currency needs a first purchase before it can have a price, and this was bitcoin’s.
So raise a slice on May 22. Not because a man overpaid for lunch, but because two strangers on the early internet proved that a money answering to no bank could still buy something a person wanted. The price came later. The proof came first, and it came with pepperoni.
Further reading
The primary sources behind the claims here, for anyone who wants to check them directly.
- Pizza for bitcoins?, the original BitcoinTalk thread, 2010. Laszlo Hanyecz’s offer, the exchange, and his follow-up “thanks jercos” post confirming the pizzas arrived.
- Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, Satoshi Nakamoto, 2008. The design that made a bankless payment between two strangers possible in the first place.
- Bitcoin price. A live reference for converting 10,000 bitcoin into today’s dollars, which is what makes the present-day figure a moving number.
- Happy Bitcoin Pizza Day, the sixteenth anniversary, Bitcoin Magazine. Context on the transaction, the people involved, and how the date became an annual tradition.
Everything on this site is for educational purposes only. It is not financial, investment, tax, or legal advice. Bitcoin carries real risk. Prices move, sometimes sharply. Do your own research, think for yourself, and speak with a qualified professional before acting on anything you read here.