Bitcoin’s first known purchase of a physical good began with a forum offer that sounded ordinary: two pizzas, some left over for the next day, and a payment in coins. Laszlo Hanyecz posted it:
Laszlo Hanyecz (BitcoinTalk post, May 18, 2010, 12:35:20 AM UTC)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.
On May 22, 2010, Jeremy Sturdivant (forum handle “jercos”) accepted the offer; he later said he had been following Bitcoin since late 2009, “when I would have been 18.” He ordered two large pizzas from Papa John’s, had them delivered to Hanyecz’s home in Jacksonville, Florida, and received 10,000 BTC in return. Hanyecz confirmed:
Laszlo Hanyecz (BitcoinTalk post, May 22, 2010, 7:17:26 PM UTC)I just want to report that I successfully traded 10,000 bitcoins for pizza.
Four days earlier, a forum reader had priced the offer: the 10,000 BTC could be sold on bitcoinmarket.com “for $41USD right now.” Sturdivant later said the coins “made it back into the economy fairly quickly, around the time they were worth some $400.”
Previous Bitcoin transactions had been digital-only — exchange rate calculations and peer-to-peer transfers, such as Martti Malmi’s October 2009 sale of 5,050 BTC for $5.02, the first known Bitcoin-to-fiat exchange. The pizza transaction proved that Bitcoin could function as a real-world medium of exchange.
Hanyecz, a pioneer of GPU mining, kept the offer open through the summer, thanking “everyone who bought me pizza already” when on August 4 he called a halt: he could no longer “generate thousands of coins a day.” In a 2019 interview with Colin Harper for Bitcoin Magazine, as Harper recounted in CoinDesk in 2025, he said he spent nearly 100,000 BTC in the year that followed.
In February 2018 Hanyecz ran the trade again over the Lightning Network. A friend in London took a Lightning payment of 0.00649 BTC for two pizzas and had a local shop deliver them, and the driver handed them over only after asking “What is the preimage?” and checking the first and last four characters Hanyecz had written down: 7241-a8c1. His write-up to the Lightning-dev mailing list ended by asking whether there was any point to it over an on-chain payment: “For what I described here, probably not.”
An interviewer put the 10,000 BTC at around $80 million and asked whether he ever regretted paying it for two pizzas. The answer:
Laszlo Hanyecz (Cointelegraph interview, May 2018)You know, I don’t regret it. I think that it’s great that I got to be part of the early history of Bitcoin in that way, and people know about the pizza and it’s an interesting story because everybody can kind of relate to that and be [like] - ‘Oh my God, you spent all of that money!’ I was also kind of giving people tech support on the forums and I ported Bitcoin to MacOS, and you know, some other things - fix bugs and whatnot, and I’ve always kind of just wanted people to use Bitcoin and buying the pizza was one way to do that.
May 22 is now celebrated annually as “Bitcoin Pizza Day” by the Bitcoin community worldwide. Wired’s 2011 feature “The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin” cited the trade, alongside Gavin Andresen’s giveaways through the Bitcoin Faucet, as one of the earliest signs that the currency could move in the real world.
At 2025 prices exceeding $100,000 per BTC, those 10,000 bitcoins would be worth over $1 billion — often called the most expensive pizzas in history. In this trade, Satoshi’s design worked exactly as built, and the same trade already showed why bitcoin would later stop being spent: no one pays for today’s pizza with something worth more tomorrow.
Hanyecz’s path from the macOS port and GPU mining, through the May 22 trade, to his later years is traced in the Laszlo Hanyecz biography.
The historical weight of the trade does not come from the later dollar conversion. It comes from the delivery: protocol value left the screen, bought food, and entered an ordinary household transaction. The price comparison became the loudest part of the story, but the record itself is about Bitcoin crossing into the physical world.
