The guy who spent billions (in bitcoin) on pizza

Laszlo Hanyecz was hungry.

It was the summer of 2010, and the 28-year-old computer programmer from Jacksonville, Florida, pondered a novel solution: bitcoin – a digital currency, then barely a year old, whose theoretical premise of decentralisation enthralled a tight-knit community of geeks and cryptographers alike. (1) (2) (3)

An early adopter, Hanyecz carried cache in that subterranean morass. He, after all, was the first enthusiast to deploy graphics processing unit (GPU) cards for bitcoin ‘mining’ – the process by which new tokens are allocated upon the solving of complex math problems. Once, standard central processing units (CPUs) were used for mining, but Hanyecz blew them away by greatly expanding his ‘hash rate’ – the number of attempts required to solve the blockchain’s cryptographic puzzles and, thus, supplement his bitcoin horde. (2)

Using GPUs and trailblazing MacOS software, Hanyecz mined tens of thousands of bitcoins per month. By 2010, in fact, he held up to 1.5% of the entire bitcoin supply. (4) It was complicated work; the kind that worked up an appetite. And so, at 12:35 am on 18 May 2010, a peckish Hanyecz fired up Bitcointalk, an embryonic crypto forum with around 230 members (2), and posted a pioneering proposition:

“I’ll pay 10,000 bitcoins for a couple of pizzas. Like maybe 2 large ones so I have some left over for the next day. I like having left over pizza to nibble on later. You can make the pizza yourself and bring it to my house or order it for me from a delivery place, but what I’m aiming for is getting food delivered in exchange for bitcoins where I don’t have to order or prepare it myself, kind of like ordering a ‘breakfast platter’ at a hotel or something, they just bring you something to eat and you’re happy! I like things like onions, peppers, sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes, pepperoni, etc. Just standard stuff no weird fish topping or anything like that. I also like regular cheese pizzas which may be cheaper to prepare or otherwise acquire. If you’re interested please let me know and we can work out a deal.” (5) 

At the time, such a transaction had never been attempted. When Hanyecz posted, bitcoin had never been exchanged for a physical good. Accordingly, despite interest among forum members, nobody took up Hanyecz’s offer for days – until Jeremy Sturdivant, a 19-year-old Englishman living in California, took a punt. (2) (6) 

Posting under the online username of ‘jercos,’ Sturdivant liaised with Hanyecz via Internet Relay Chat and cobbled together a deal. (7) At 07:16 on 22 May 2010, Hanyecz sent 10,000 bitcoins to Sturdivant, who ordered two large cheese pizzas – paying less than $50 on his credit card – from a Papa John’s pizzeria on Atlantic Boulevard in Jacksonville. (8) (9) Those pizzas were delivered to Hanyecz’s house, completing a piecemeal transaction that became the first exchange of cryptocurrency for a tangible item. (2) “I just want to report that I successfully traded 10,000 bitcoins for pizza,” Hanyecz updated the Bitcointalk forum. “Thanks jercos!” (10)

When Hanyecz sent those 10,000 bitcoins, they were worth $41. (2) In subsequent years, however, as bitcoin gained exposure, buzz and credibility – partly catalysed by the pizza stunt – that value rose exponentially. By May 2025, for instance, 10,000 bitcoins equated to $1.1 billion – about $165 million less than Papa John’s entire market capitalisation. (11) (12) That is some serious dough – if you will excuse the pun. No matter how you slice it.

Contrary to popular mythology, though, Hanyecz actually made multiple bitcoin pizza transactions in 2010. Laszlo kept his pie proposition as a standing offer, and subsequent forum posts suggest he spent closer to 80,000 BTC on pizza that year. (5) Hanyecz later told Bitcoin Magazine the figure was closer to 100,000 BTC – equivalent to $8.8 billion today. (13)

Ironically, Hanyecz provoked that self-sabotaging surge, as media interest in his pizza story spurred an uptick in bitcoin intrigue and, by extension, dilettante mining. Combined with widespread adoption of Hanyecz’s GPU techniques, hash rate continued to explode, creating a competitive field that suppressed the bitcoin bounties of individual miners.

From a peak of 43,854 BTC in June 2010, Hanyecz’s crypto wallet was totally drained by June 2011. (14) He closed his standing offer to trade bitcoin for pizza in August 2010, and his wallet has made minimal transactions since. All-time, though, Hanyecz made 81,432 BTC in payments – a large swathe of which was presumably related to pizza. (5)

Nevertheless, far from expressing regret, Hanyecz remained steadfastly nonchalant when asked about his seemingly myopic expenditure. Laszlo viewed the entire pizza scheme as a progressive proof of concept that affirmed bitcoin’s claim to real-world relevance while stoking interest in crypto more broadly. “I wanted to do the pizza thing because, to me, it was free pizza,” Hanyecz told Bitcoin Magazine. “I got pizza for contributing to an open-source project. Usually, hobbies are a time sink and money sink, and in this case, my hobby bought me dinner.” (13)

“I think it’s funny when people look at it that way,” Hanyecz continued, when asked about potential regrets. “I think it’s one of those things where it’s a good thing to get people’s attention. But I think anyone who gets genuinely interested understands. It’s the same thing as, ‘oh, let me go back in the past and buy Apple stock.’ At the time, it was Monopoly money. Nobody cared. People would just give you some [bitcoin], so I didn’t figure I needed to be greedy with it.” (13)

Modesty aside, however, there has long been a sense that Hanyecz deployed the kind of duplicitous façade, shrouded in esoteric and conceited irony, that came to define crypto culture writ large. “I didn’t feel bad about it,” he told Wired in 2012. “The pizza was really good.” (15) Such snark – pithy, knowing, and alluding to arrogant inside jokes – characterises crypto discourse, mediated by trolls and meme artists with an absurdist drive to spread satire by mimicking normie literalism.

In one sense, then, Laszlo Hanyecz was a troll; buying pizza with bitcoin his way of provoking the kind of inevitable criticism from ‘no-coiners’ that fuels crypto evangelists. And even if not a fully-fledged troll, Hanyecz is still held aloft as a comedic martyr; his purchases undermining doomer dystopia with something as mundane as pizza.

Furthermore, Hanyecz’s pizza transactions remain symbolic of bitcoin’s perilous, fraught journey from fringe theory to practical currency. To this day, the amorphous ‘bitcoin pizza’ phenomenon is rote among crypto adherents – many recalling it fondly, others humorously, but all considering it a permanent reminder of how far bitcoin has come from its jerry-rigged genesis.

To that end, a separate channel off the main blockchain – unimaginatively dubbed Layer 2 – later became popular for bitcoin micropayments, offering a quick funnel between buyers and sellers with reduced fees and confirmation times. Fittingly, Hanyecz also played a pioneering role in Layer 2 adoption, using the Lightning Network to buy two further pizzas in February 2018. Tellingly, those pizzas cost only 0.00649 BTC, equivalent to around $600 today – a useful barometer of the interim value increase. (16)

Ultimately, it remains unclear whether Hanyecz benefitted financially from the appreciation wrought by his stunts. Evidently, the guy was incredibly intelligent, and his trailblazing contributions revolutionised bitcoin mining, so it is certainly possible that he stockpiled bitcoin in different wallets. Such pseudonymity is a key selling point of crypto, and Hanyecz may have made prescient preparations. Indeed, while often attributed to naivety – the misguided trope that Laszlo did not know what he was doing and, thus, squandered a fortune – the apparent insouciance with which he spent bitcoin may have actually been grounded in superfluity. Hanyecz may have had so much bitcoin that splurging 100,000 of it on pizza barely mattered.

While unsubstantiated, such theories have gained traction on the crypto gossip mill, with some even triangulating Hanyecz’s credentials while trying to decipher the mysterious identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, who invented bitcoin in 2009. On the contrary, however, or perhaps conspiratorially to some, Hanyecz has maintained a low profile in recent years. Save for an incongruous appearance on 60 Minutes with Anderson Cooper, Laszlo rarely puts his head above the parapet. (17)

“Honestly, I just kinda stay out of it because there’s so much buzz,” he previously told Bitcoin Magazine. “I don’t want that kind of attention, and I certainly don’t want people thinking I’m Satoshi. I just figure it’s better to keep it as a hobby. I have a regular job. I don’t do bitcoin full-time. I don’t want it to be a professional thing that I’m on the hook for. I’m glad that I was involved to the extent that I was.” (13)

Appropriately, indeed, Hanyecz was inducted into the Bitcoin Hall of Fame – or the opportunistic attempts to create such a thing – on 22 May 2025, exactly 15 years after his famous transaction. (18) In fact, that date is now known globally as Bitcoin Pizza Day, on which enthusiasts celebrate with block parties, communal gatherings, and – yes – pizza bought with bitcoin. (19) That is far easier today than in 2010, with a host of legitimate intermediaries – including BitPay, Coinbase and CryptoPay – facilitating bitcoin transactions between consumers and mainstream merchants.

And as for Sturdivant, the fleshy forebear to BitPay? Well, he used his bitcoin wallet as a makeshift checking account, from which he bought video games and funded trips with his girlfriend before any real value could be realised. (6) (20) Sturdivant continued to work a regular job as a product development engineer for Inovonics Inc., a manufacturer of radio broadcast equipment (20), and the current BTC balance of his only known crypto wallet equates to ‘just’ $228.92. (21) That is enough, perhaps, to buy 10 pizzas, though Sturdivant may also have additional reserves yet to be uncovered.

Regardless, both Sturdivant and Hanyecz – two halves of the world’s first bitcoin purchase – are shadowy figures nowadays. They are rarely seen nor heard from in a community seeded by their tongue-in-cheek ingenuity. Nevertheless, they walked so the current crypto bros could run, and their out-of-the-pizza-box enterprise should never be forgotten.

Sources

1. Massie, Graeme. Independent. [Online] May 26, 2021. https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/bitcoin-pizza-sell-crypto-jeremy-sturdivant-b1854212.html.

2. Vigna, Paul and Casey, Michael. The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order. 2015.

3. Jones, William. Satoshi's Secret: The Hidden Story of Bitcoin's Genesis. 2024.

4. Seward, Zack and Sanasie, Jennifer. Bitcoin Season 2 podcast. [Online] May 24, 2025. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/bitcoin-season-2-the-real-bitcoin-pizza-day-story/id1414384043?i=1000709686737.

5. Harper, Colin. Forbes. [Online] May 22, 2025. https://www.forbes.com/sites/colinharper/2025/05/22/the-man-behind-bitcoin-pizza-day-spent-more-bitcoin-than-you-think/.

6. Stokel-Walker, Chris. The History of the Internet in Byte-Sized Chunks. 2023.

7. Mezrich, Ben. Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal and Redemption. 2019.

8. Blockchain.com. [Online] https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/a1075db55d416d3ca199f55b6084e2115b9345e16c5cf302fc80e9d5fbf5d48d.

9. News, CBS 47 Action. YouTube. [Online] November 1, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j28hkTJMuTA.

10. Bitcoin Wiki. [Online] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Jercos#:~:text=page%20bitcointalk.

11. Malwa, Shaurya. CoinDesk. [Online] May 22, 2025. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/05/22/bitcoin-pizza-day-is-now-a-11b-celebration.

12. Yahoo! [Online] https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/quote/PZZA/.

13. Harper, Colin. Bitcoin Magazine. [Online] May 22, 2019. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/the-man-behind-bitcoin-pizza-day-is-more-than-a-meme-hes-a-mining-pioneer.

14. BitInfoCharts. [Online] https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/address/1XPTgDRhN8RFnzniWCddobD9iKZatrvH4.

15. Wallace, Benjamin. Wired. [Online] January 2012. https://archive.org/details/wireduk2012jan/page/n149/mode/2up?q=%22hanyecz%22.

16. Floyd, David. Investopedia. [Online] February 26, 2018. https://www.investopedia.com/news/bitcoins-pizza-guy-repeats-trick-lightning-network/.

17. Minutes, 60. YouTube. [Online] March 22, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWU3O3X5kKE.

18. Maldonado, Jennifer. Bit2Me Crypto News. [Online] May 26, 2025. https://news.bit2me.com/en/laszlo-hanyecz-ingresa-al-salon-de-la-fama.

19. The Defiant. [Online] May 22, 2025. https://thedefiant.io/news/blockchains/bitcoin-hits-109439-ahead-15th-anniversary-laszlo-hanyecz-s-10000-btc-pizza-d47a5215.

20. Bitcoin Who's Who. [Online] 2015. https://www.bitcoinwhoswho.com/jercosinterview#:~:text=Q,for%20a%20living.

21. Blockchain.com. [Online] https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/17SkEw2md5avVNyYgj6RiXuQKNwkXaxFyQ.