On May 22, 2010, a programmer named Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 Bitcoin for two large pizzas delivered to his house in Florida. At the time, those coins were worth roughly forty-one dollars. Today, they are worth over one billion dollars. It is the most expensive meal in recorded history — and one of the most important transactions ever made. This is the full story of Bitcoin Pizza Day: who did it, why they did it, why it was actually a brilliant move, and what it still teaches us about money, value, and the strange art of being early to something extraordinary.
By CryptoAcademy Team | Published: 2026-04-10 | 20 min read time read | Category: Educational
The year is 2010. Bitcoin is fourteen months old. It has no price. It has no exchange. It has no app. It exists almost entirely as a curiosity among a very small group of programmers and cryptography enthusiasts who spend their time on obscure internet forums arguing about whether this strange new digital money could ever be worth anything at all.
There are no headlines. No celebrities promoting it. No governments worried about it. No hedge funds buying it. Just a handful of people running software on their personal computers, mining coins that nobody had ever spent on anything real.
Into this scene steps a Florida-based programmer who decides he wants pizza and has an idea.
That idea would go on to become one of the most famous transactions in financial history.
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Laszlo Hanyecz was a software developer living in Jacksonville, Florida. He was an early contributor to the Bitcoin project itself, which means he was not just a casual observer — he was one of the people actually building and improving the Bitcoin software in its earliest days.
He had been mining Bitcoin since very early on, which meant he had accumulated a significant number of coins simply by running his computer and participating in the network. At the time, mining Bitcoin required no special equipment. A regular home computer could do it. Laszlo was reportedly quite good at it and had mined tens of thousands of Bitcoin.
But here is the thing: those coins sat on his computer doing absolutely nothing. They had no established price. There was nowhere to spend them. There was no exchange where you could trade them for dollars. They were, for all practical purposes, digital tokens with theoretical value and zero real-world utility.
Laszlo wanted to change that.
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On May 18, 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz posted a message on the Bitcointalk forum — the main gathering place for the early Bitcoin community. The post was titled simply: "Pizza for bitcoins?"
The message read, in essence: I will pay 10,000 Bitcoin to anyone who orders me two large pizzas. I want them delivered to my house. They can be from a restaurant or homemade, I do not care. I just want to eat pizza and not have to make it myself.
He suggested that 10,000 Bitcoin seemed like a fair trade for about twenty-five dollars worth of pizza. At the time, there was no official Bitcoin price, but rough estimates from peer-to-peer trades put the value of one Bitcoin at somewhere between zero and a fraction of a cent. Ten thousand of them was worth, if anything, around forty to fifty dollars at the absolute most generous estimate.
The forum was intrigued. A few people responded. Most were curious rather than eager. This had never been done before. Nobody had ever actually bought something tangible with Bitcoin. The idea that these digital tokens could be exchanged for a real physical good — even something as humble as a pizza — was genuinely novel.
For four days, the post sat there with interest but no takers.
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On May 22, 2010, a fellow forum user named Jeremy Sturdivant — known online as jercos — took Laszlo up on the offer. Jeremy ordered two large pizzas from Papa John's and had them delivered to Laszlo's house in Jacksonville. In exchange, Laszlo sent Jeremy 10,000 Bitcoin.
The pizzas arrived. Laszlo ate them. He reportedly shared them with his family, including his young daughter, and posted a photo of the pizzas on the forum with the simple message: "I just want to report that I successfully traded 10,000 bitcoins for pizza."
And just like that, Bitcoin had a price. Not an official one, not one set by an exchange, but a real, demonstrated market price established by an actual transaction. If 10,000 Bitcoin bought two pizzas worth roughly forty-one dollars, then one Bitcoin was worth approximately 0.0041 dollars.
It sounds almost comically small. But the significance was enormous. For the first time, Bitcoin had been used to purchase something in the real world. It had demonstrated, in the most concrete possible way, that it could function as a medium of exchange.
That is the whole point of money, after all. Money is useful precisely because you can trade it for things. Until May 22, 2010, Bitcoin was a theoretical form of money. After that date, it was a real one.
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Here is where it gets genuinely difficult to process as a human being.
At the time of the transaction in May 2010, the 10,000 Bitcoin were worth approximately forty-one dollars. Two large pizzas for forty-one dollars. Slightly overpriced for pizza, maybe, but not outrageously so.
By the end of 2010, Bitcoin had risen to around twenty-nine cents. Those 10,000 Bitcoin were now worth about two thousand nine hundred dollars. Still two pizzas, but now the most expensive two pizzas most people had ever bought.
By 2011, Bitcoin crossed one dollar. Ten thousand dollars for two pizzas.
By 2013, Bitcoin hit one thousand dollars for the first time. Ten million dollars for two pizzas.
By late 2017, Bitcoin reached nearly twenty thousand dollars. Those two pizzas had crossed the two hundred million dollar mark.
By late 2021, when Bitcoin hit its all-time high of around sixty-nine thousand dollars, those 10,000 Bitcoin were worth approximately six hundred and ninety million dollars.
As of early 2025, with Bitcoin trading above one hundred thousand dollars, those same coins are worth over one billion dollars.
One billion dollars. For two pizzas.
Let that sink in for a moment.
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Here is the take that you do not hear often enough: what Laszlo did was not stupid. It was, in its own way, an act of genuine contribution to the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Think about it this way. In May 2010, Bitcoin had zero proven real-world utility. It was a fascinating technical experiment, but it had never been used to buy anything. For Bitcoin to ever become valuable — for it to ever justify the enormous price it would one day reach — it first needed to prove that it could work as money.
Money only has value if people use it. A currency that nobody spends is not really a currency. It is a collectible at best, a curiosity at worst.
By spending his Bitcoin on pizza, Laszlo did something that nobody else had done: he proved the concept. He demonstrated that Bitcoin could facilitate a real economic transaction between two real people for a real product. That proof of concept was worth far more to the Bitcoin ecosystem than the coins themselves.
Laszlo has said in interviews that he understood this at the time. He was not naive about what he was doing. He was deliberately trying to establish Bitcoin as a functioning currency, not just a digital asset that people hoarded and never spent.
In a very real sense, those two pizzas helped launch Bitcoin from being a forum experiment into being a monetary network. The headline price of the coins today is irrelevant to that contribution. Laszlo knew what he was doing — he just could not have known quite how valuable those coins would one day become.
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After the transaction, May 22 became an informal anniversary within the Bitcoin community. People would mention it on forums each year, sharing a collective laugh (or wince) at the scale of what had happened.
But it was not until Bitcoin started gaining mainstream attention around 2013 and 2014 that Bitcoin Pizza Day became a proper annual celebration. As the price climbed and the story grew more extraordinary with each passing year, the date took on greater cultural significance.
Today, May 22 is one of the most widely observed dates in the crypto calendar. Crypto exchanges run promotions. Pizza brands run Bitcoin-themed campaigns. Conferences and events are organized around the date. News outlets publish retrospectives. Social media lights up with pizza and Bitcoin content.
Some companies have leaned into it hard.
> Real-world example:
> In 2021, the crypto exchange Binance celebrated Bitcoin Pizza Day by partnering with local pizza vendors in multiple cities around the world to offer free or discounted pizza to customers who paid with cryptocurrency. The campaign generated significant press coverage and served as a clever marketing exercise that connected the historic transaction to everyday crypto usability.
> Real-world example:
> Domino's Pizza has run Bitcoin Pizza Day promotions in certain markets, offering discounts and prizes tied to the date. The fact that a mainstream global pizza chain is now running promotions linked to a fifteen-year-old forum post is perhaps the clearest possible illustration of how far Bitcoin has travelled from its origins.
> Real-world example:
> Every year on May 22, the price of Bitcoin gets discussed in the context of what those original 10,000 coins are now worth. In 2024, when Bitcoin was trading around sixty to seventy thousand dollars, financial media around the world ran the calculation — approximately six hundred million dollars for two pizzas — generating enormous public interest and conversation about Bitcoin's journey.
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You might expect Laszlo Hanyecz to be bitter. To have spent fifteen years haunted by the thought of what those coins would eventually be worth. To resent the pizza, the decision, or the timing.
But in every interview he has given over the years, he has been remarkably philosophical and good-humoured about the whole thing.
In a 2019 interview with The Telegraph, Laszlo said he did not regret the transaction. He understood that without people actually using Bitcoin to buy things, it might never have developed the momentum it needed to become what it is today. He saw himself as having contributed to that momentum, not as having made a catastrophic financial mistake.
He has also pointed out, quite reasonably, that if he had not spent those coins on pizza, he probably would have spent them on something else eventually. Or he might have lost them, as many early Bitcoin holders did. The idea that he would have carefully preserved 10,000 Bitcoin from 2010 all the way to today, through every crash and bear market and moment of doubt, is probably not realistic.
What is clear is that Laszlo has become a genuinely beloved figure in the Bitcoin community. Not as a cautionary tale, but as a pioneer. Someone who believed in what Bitcoin could be before anyone else had proven what it was.
He also made a second notable Bitcoin pizza purchase in 2018, buying pizza with Bitcoin over the Lightning Network to demonstrate that the technology had matured enough to handle fast, cheap everyday transactions. The man is consistent, if nothing else.
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Bitcoin Pizza Day is the most famous early transaction, but it was not the only one that shaped Bitcoin's early history.
> Real-world example:
> In October 2009, just months after Bitcoin launched, a user sold 5,050 Bitcoin to another user for five dollars and two cents via PayPal. This was the first ever recorded Bitcoin purchase using dollars, establishing an implied price of around 0.001 cents per Bitcoin. The buyer in that transaction later became one of the founders of the New Liberty Standard exchange, the first Bitcoin exchange ever created.
> Real-world example:
> In 2010, a programmer named Martti Malmi — one of Bitcoin's earliest contributors after Satoshi himself — sold 5,050 Bitcoin for five dollars. He has spoken openly about the fact that he does not regret it, because at the time, nobody imagined Bitcoin would reach the prices it eventually did. His contribution to the early Bitcoin codebase was arguably more valuable to the ecosystem than holding those coins would have been.
> **Real-world example: