Every year on May 22, the crypto world celebrates a pizza. This isn't a restaurant opening or a new recipe; it's perhaps the most expensive food order in history. In 2010 a programmer in Florida paid 10,000 bitcoin for two large pizzas. That amount was worth a few dozen dollars that day. Today it is hundreds of millions of dollars.
A forum post: "10,000 bitcoin for pizza"
The hero of the story is Laszlo Hanyecz, a Florida programmer and one of Bitcoin's earliest miners. According to CoinDesk, on May 18, 2010 he posted an offer on the Bitcointalk forum: he would pay 10,000 BTC to whoever brought him pizza.
At that time Bitcoin wasn't yet an investment vehicle but a testing ground for enthusiasts. It had almost never been seen used to buy something in the real world. Hanyecz's question was actually simple: does this digital money have value in exchange for a real product?
May 22, 2010: the pizzas arrive
As Guinness tells it, the offer was open to anyone who would order two large pizzas for him; where the pizza came from didn't matter.
A few days later the offer was accepted by Jeremy Sturdivant, known on the forum as "jercos". According to CoinDesk, Sturdivant was 19 at the time. He ordered two large pizzas from Papa John's, had them sent to Hanyecz's address and received 10,000 bitcoin in return. According to Guinness World Records, Sturdivant paid about $25 for the pizzas.
On May 22, Hanyecz left a note on the forum: "I just want to report that I successfully traded 10,000 bitcoins for pizza."
Guinness recorded this exchange as the "first commercial Bitcoin transaction" and lists its location as Jacksonville, USA. On that day 10,000 BTC is calculated to have been worth about $41 on an exchange.
$41 then, hundreds of millions of dollars now
Since prices change every day, we need a dated source here. According to Fortune, on the morning of October 21, 2026 (8:00 a.m. US Eastern time), 1 BTC was $83,404.81. At that price 10,000 BTC comes to about $834 million. The "$800 million" in the video is a rounded version of that magnitude. In other words, the amount that was worth $41 that day has appreciated roughly 20 million times at October 2026 prices.
For comparison: Guinness recorded that the same 10,000 BTC was worth $350,160,000 on February 24, 2022. The figure rises and falls with prices, but in every case it is an unimaginable sum for two pizzas. At the October 21, 2026 price, each of the pizzas, that is 5,000 BTC, is worth about $417 million on its own.
A caution is also needed here: "what would it be worth today?" calculations like this are a game played in hindsight. In 2010 nobody knew Bitcoin would reach these levels, and that day 10,000 BTC really was worth about $41.
| Then (May 22, 2010) | Now (at October 21, 2026 prices) |
|---|---|
| 10,000 BTC ≈ $41 | 10,000 BTC ≈ $834 million |
| Cost of the pizzas ≈ $25 | Still two large pizzas |
| Bitcoin was a forum experiment | A global investment vehicle |
Regret or history?
This story is usually told with the joke "the world's most expensive pizza". But the real value of the transaction isn't monetary. Hanyecz and Sturdivant were the first to prove that Bitcoin could be exchanged for a real product. It's easy to look at the price chart and say "if only he hadn't spent it". But if nobody had spent bitcoin that day, nobody could have known whether Bitcoin worked as a means of payment. For money to be money, someone had to accept it; that day a pizza did it.
Today, May 22 is marked every year as Bitcoin Pizza Day in the crypto community. Perhaps the nicest part is this: both sides of the story thought they were just running an experiment that day.
If you had been in Laszlo's place in 2010, would you have eaten those pizzas?