Have you ever heard of the “Bitcoin Pizza Day” or the “$460 Million Pizzas”?
Here we go: On May 22, 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 Bitcoin to have 2 Papa John’s pizzas delivered to his house. At the time, those 10,000 Bitcoin were valued at $41. He became the first person ever to use Bitcoin for a commercial transaction. This moment is celebrated every year as “Bitcoin Pizza Day.” On each anniversary, we like to point out what those 10,000 Bitcoin would be worth today: $460 million.
Those 2 pizzas are arguably the most expensive pizzas in history.
Hanyecz posted his offer of 10,000 Bitcoin in exchange for someone delivering 2 large Papa John’s pizzas on the Bitcoin.org forum on May 18, 2010. It took 4 days before an individual, Jeremy Sturdivant, took him up on the offer. At the time, Bitcoin was trading at $0.004. Many people thought Sturdivant got the raw end of the deal. Many thought that he delivered the pizzas for free and would never make money out of this transaction. But Sturdivant sold those 10,000 Bitcoin for a total of $400 and nearly a 1,000% return just a few months later.
He would have been sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars today if he’d held them. But that merely demonstrates how much has changed for digital currencies over the past decade. Much more has changed than just the price!
Sven Franssen