Ten thousand Bitcoin buy two pizzas, completing the first documented commercial transaction

MAY 22 2010 · 12:00

Video: Bitcoin Pizza: History of the first pizza paid with Bitcoin equaling $100 million | Action News Jax Date: 2010-05-22 · Type: bitcoin · Tags: pizza-day, laszlo-hanyecz, first-commercial-transaction, gpu-mining, bitcointalk, price-history I just thought it would be interesting if I could say that I paid for pizza in bitcoins. Laszlo Hanyecz, a programmer who had ported Bitcoin's mining code to GPU and thereby turbocharged the network's hash rate ahead of the rest of the field, posted on BitcoinTalk on May 18 2010 offering 10,000 BTC to anyone who would deliver him two pizzas. A British user named Jeremy Sturdivant, operating under the handle "jercos," accepted, ordered two large Papa John's pies on Hanyecz's behalf, and pocketed the coins. The transaction completed on May 22. The cultural afterlife of the event is disproportionate to its technical significance. Every May 22, exchanges run "Pizza Day" promotions; analysts compute the retroactive dollar value at various Bitcoin highs (at the November 2021 peak, $69,000 per BTC, the 10,000 BTC would have purchased approximately $690 million worth of pizza). Hanyecz himself has described the purchase as deliberate publicity rather than mere hunger — he wanted to demonstrate that the coins could clear a real-world transaction, and they did. What the transaction actually proved was narrower and more interesting: that a buyer and seller could find each other, agree on a price in BTC, and complete a deal without a payment processor or a conversion mechanism that the counterparty was legally required to trust. The coins had no exchange rate most people recognized; their value was purely internal to a community of a few hundred people. That the community was willing to treat them as money — willing to order pizza against them — was the demonstration. The denominations are beside the point. The willingness was everything. Facts • Forum post: 'Pizza for bitcoins?', BitcoinTalk, May 18 2010; transaction completed May 22 • 10,000 BTC at the May 22 2010 rate (~$0.0041): approximately $41 • Delivered from a Papa John's in Jacksonville, Florida • Counterparty 'jercos' (Jeremy Sturdivant) placed the order and received the BTC • Hanyecz had previously GPU-mined at substantially higher efficiency than CPU miners • At Bitcoin's all-time high of ~$69,000 (Nov 2021), the 10,000 BTC would be worth ~$690M Primary Documents • BitcoinTalk: 'Pizza for bitcoins?' original thread — https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137.0