Author: Plain Language Blockchain
In the early morning of May 18, 2010, in Jacksonville, Florida, a 28-year-old programmer posted a thread on a forum with only 230 members.
His name is Laszlo Hanyecz. The post says he's willing to pay 10,000 bitcoins to have two large pizzas delivered to his home. He wants onions, green peppers, and sausage as toppings, but absolutely no anchovies.
This is not an impulse purchase. This is the first complete price discovery in Bitcoin's history.
Those two pizzas were actually a welding rod.
Sixteen years later, the two ends of the welding rod have gone in completely opposite directions. Back then, 10,000 Bitcoins were worth $41, enough to buy two Papa John's tickets. Today, they're worth $780 million, enough to buy a mid-sized private jet fleet.
Papa John's is still Papa John's, and the pizzas are still several tens of dollars each.
Those two pizzas, for the first time, soldered a piece of digital code into the physical world. From that moment on, Bitcoin was no longer just a toy that miners gave to each other.
01. Forum posts that had been silent for 4 days
The post has been up for 4 days and no one has answered it.
The forum has 230 members, most of whom are scattered outside the United States, making it difficult to order pizza from a different location. Hanyecz himself couldn't help but reply, asking if the price was too low.
On the fifth day, a 19-year-old student in California saw the post.
His name was Jeremy Sturdivant, and his forum ID was jercos. After negotiating on IRC, Sturdivant, who didn't have a Bitcoin payment option, simply pulled out his debit card and placed an interstate order at Papa John's on Atlantic Avenue in Jacksonville, paying about $41 upfront. The pizza itself was only worth $25 to $30.
On May 22nd, the pizza was delivered to Hanyecz's house. Hanyecz transferred 10,000 Bitcoins to Sturdivant's wallet, and casually paid an extra 1 Bitcoin as a miner's fee. This 10,001 BTC transaction was forever recorded in block 57,043 of the Bitcoin blockchain.
Sturdivant didn't hold on. When Bitcoin reached $400, he converted it into fiat currency, used it to travel with his girlfriend, and upgraded his computer. At today's prices, the opportunity cost of that trip would be $780 million.
Interestingly, Sturdivant never expressed regret. He later said in an interview that at the time, nobody really considered those 10,000 coins as money; they were just treating it as an interesting experiment.
That was the first time decentralized assets stepped out of code and landed on a cardboard box containing a hot pizza.
02. Hanyecz is not a fool at all.
The mainstream media likes to portray Hanyecz as a foolish geek who lost hundreds of millions due to his gluttony. This narrative simply doesn't hold water.
Hanyecz is not a user, but a developer. He was one of the early code contributors to Bitcoin and the first person in the industry to successfully run a full node on a Mac system. More importantly, he was the first person on the entire internet to write GPU mining code and then open-source it to the community free of charge.
When GPUs entered the mining industry, computing power was directly parallelized several times over, which kicked the door to the entire mining machine arms race.
In the summer of 2010, the block reward was still 50 BTC, and the network hashrate was extremely low. Hanyecz installed several GPU mining rigs and mined almost blindly. His wallet reached a peak of 43,900 BTC in June 2010.
For him, 10,000 Bitcoins are just the output of 200 blocks.
So that pizza deal wasn't a loss for him; it was a triumphant arbitrage opportunity. He traded his nearly zero-cost digital code for hot, filling food. For a geek, this was more satisfying than making money.
He repeated this several times later. Throughout the summer of 2010, he exchanged between 80,000 and 100,000 bitcoins for pizzas. The wallet was completely emptied by June 2011, with most of it likely moved to cold storage.
In August, he proactively closed the pizza offer. The reason wasn't regret, but rather that the overall network computing power had increased, changing the marginal cost of mining.
Looking back at that transaction, he only said one thing: "If no one had been willing to take it, Bitcoin would not be where it is today."
03. Eight years later, he bought a pizza again.
On February 25, 2018, Hanyecz made another move.
This time, he bought two pizzas for only 0.00649 bitcoins, equivalent to about $60. The payment method had changed; he used the Lightning Network. At that time, the Lightning Network had just launched its mainnet test, and very few people used it daily. Hanyecz once again acted as a pioneer.
With its 1MB blocks and 10-minute block interval, the mainnet can only process 7 transactions per second. This throughput is simply insufficient to support high-frequency daily consumption; with high transaction fees, even buying a cup of coffee becomes impractical.
The Lightning Network moves transactions off-chain, with instant settlement and almost zero fees, settling with the mainnet only when the channel opens or closes.
The symbolic significance of this pizza transaction is just as heavy as that of the one in 2010. It tells the world that Bitcoin can indeed handle small-amount, high-frequency transactions.
However, one old problem remains unresolved: Papa John's itself doesn't accept Bitcoin. In both transactions, the merchants received fiat currency converted by the intermediary.
The last mile remained uncrossed from 2010 to 2018.
04. Sixteen years later, pizzas are no longer selling well.
Fast forward to May 2026, the 16th anniversary of Pizza Day.
Bitcoin prices fluctuated between $77,000 and $78,000. A surge in CPI at the beginning of the year caused prices to slip from $82,000 to around $76,800, but were quickly supported by on-chain buying and Nvidia's earnings report.
This is no longer a game for a small forum of 230 people. There are now hundreds of millions of Bitcoin holders worldwide.
The most radical example is MicroStrategy. This publicly traded company, which Michael Saylor transformed into a Bitcoin treasury, held a total of 843,700 Bitcoins as of May 17, accounting for more than 4% of the total supply, with a book value of $65.3 billion.
In the week of May 11 to 17 alone, they added another 24,900 coins at an average price of $81,000.
The gateway to Wall Street has also been fully opened. The total size of U.S. cryptocurrency spot ETFs is approaching $120 billion, with Bitcoin ETFs alone having net assets of $103.785 billion and a historical cumulative net inflow of $58.718 billion.
Morgan Stanley's newly established MSBT in April has set its management fee at 14 basis points, directly challenging BlackRock's IBIT's 25 basis points. Assets that once required forum connections to order a pizza in Jacksonville are now sitting in traditional brokerage clearing accounts.
05 Summary
The other side of the story is in Africa.
For ordinary people there, the Pizza Festival is not a financial joke, but an enlightenment that allows them to escape the devaluation of their local currency and the exploitation of cross-border remittances.
Every year at Pizza Hut, cold wallet vendors repeat the same phrase: If it's not your private key, it's not your coin.
Hanyecz never said he regretted it. He himself said that the deal was never about how much the two pizzas were worth.
The Papa John's, cut into eight pieces, is long gone, and the packaging is probably in the landfill by now. But the record at Block 57043 on the blockchain still exists.
That solder joint was still hot.
