Bitcoin Pizza Day: Recalling the Florida man who spent $365 million worth of crypto on two pies
Jacksonville, Florida - This week marks the 11th annual Bitcoin Pizza Day, marking the first Bitcoin transaction, a pizza delivery that would be worth $365 million today.
In 2010, Jeremy Sturdivant was a 19-year-old student in California when he came across a bizarre request on an internet forum for cryptocurrencies: 10,000 Bitcoins in exchange for two large pizzas.
The offer came from then 28-year-old Laszlo Hanyecz of Florida.
In the post on bitcointalk.org, he wrote: "I like things like onions, peppers, sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes, pepperoni, etc. just standard stuff, no weird fish toppings or anything."
Sturdivant took the deal and sent Hanyecz two large pizzas from a local Papa John's.
What neither could have guessed at the time was how that simple delivery would go down in cryptocurrency history.
To this day, the crypto scene takes Sturdivant's and Hanyecz's deal as an occasion to celebrate Bitcoin Pizza Day on May 22 every year as the day of the first Bitcoin transaction.
And Hanyecz even overpaid! Two pizzas with tip would have come out to less than $30 at the time he said, but he offered $41 worth of Bitcoins for the funny favor.
Laszlo Hanyecz went on to spend 100,000 Bitcoins on pizza in one summer
Instead of earmarking the 10,000 Bitcoins as an investment for the future, Sturdivant spent them all on a road trip with his girlfriend at the time. Today, that would be worth a whopping $365 million.
"I had no idea how huge Bitcoin would become," Sturdivant told the Telegraph, but despite the huge loss, the now 30-year-old says he is "proud to be a part of the global phenomenon."
"If I'd treated it as an investment I might have lasted a bit longer, I would never have thought that the same number of bitcoin would have a purchasing power on the order of real estate."
Hanyecz also holds no remorse today. "I wanted to do the pizza thing because, to me, it was free pizza," Hanyecz said. "I mean, I coded this thing and mined Bitcoin and I felt like I was winning the internet that day. 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," he told Bitcoin Magazine.
He said that he went on to spend over 100,000 Bitcoins on pizza alone that summer, a total estimated to be worth over $3.8 billion today.
"I think it's great that I was able to be part of the early history of Bitcoin in that way."
Cover photo: 123rf/ andreha; 123rf/ 민형 박