Bitcoin Pizza Day

On May 22, 2010, a programmer named Laszlo Hanyecz posted on the Bitcoin Talk forum offering 10,000 BTC to anyone who would order him two pizzas. Another forum user, Jeremy Sturdivant (known on Bitcoin Talk as "jercos"), took him up on it, called Papa John's, and had pizzas delivered to Laszlo's house in Florida. Laszlo sent jercos 10,000 BTC.

This is the first known commercial transaction in Bitcoin's history. At the BTC price of the time (roughly $0.004 per BTC), the pizzas cost about $41 total. At any BTC price you'd care to mention since 2017, those pizzas would be worth multiple lifetimes of pizza.

The other side of the trade

The story is usually told from Laszlo's perspective. The other party, jercos, who actually called the pizzeria and received the 10,000 BTC, was rarely heard from until May 2026. Jercos posted a short handheld video on X giving his own account of the trade, and gave LearnBitcoin permission to quote it here:

My name is Jeremy, or jercos. I was the other party in the Bitcoin pizza transaction.

I've always been interested in decentralized currencies to some degree, starting off with e-gold, going through Open Transactions, which resembles a modern token economy somewhat but never took off nearly as much.

So when I encountered Bitcoin, I didn't know it was going to be the one, but I knew it - or something like it - would be an important part of the infrastructure of the future.

I'm incredibly pleased to see it take off like it did, and yeah, I couldn't have set a better goal for it.

Obviously I would have held on to that if I knew where it was going. But at the same time, the spirit of it... Just lock it away and never look at it again?

I spent it on a road trip I've mentioned, but that wasn't originally the plan. Kind of ran out of money on the road trip and things happened anyway.

This is real me, real nature. Don't think AI's very good at interactions with nature. One cut of course.

Source: jercos on X, May 2026.

Two things stand out in his account:

• He saw Bitcoin (or something like it) as inevitable infrastructure before there was reason to think it would be the one. He'd been paying attention to e-gold and Open Transactions for years. Bitcoin fit a pattern he was already watching for.
• He doesn't regret the spend, and the framing is the point. Yes, he'd hold if he could go back. But the spirit of the experiment was to actually use it - "Just lock it away and never look at it again?" - and that spirit is what made the transaction historically meaningful in the first place.

How the story gets told

The pizza day story is told two different ways:

• "Most expensive pizza ever" - the conventional gag, retold every May 22. Worth a chuckle. Misses the point.
• "First proof that Bitcoin actually worked as money" - the version Laszlo himself has consistently offered in interviews, and the version jercos's account corroborates. Without someone willing to actually spend BTC for goods, Bitcoin is just an interesting database. Laszlo and jercos did the experiment, on the open internet, for two pizzas. They paved the road that every later BTC payment uses.

Laszlo went on to be the first person to mine Bitcoin on a GPU (a major performance jump at the time) and made several more BTC-for-pizza trades through 2010. He's said publicly he doesn't regret it.

May 22 is now Bitcoin Pizza Day - celebrated with pizza-themed meetups, sat-denominated pizza promotions from Lightning-enabled vendors, and a recurring reminder of how far the network has come. In 2026 you can still order a pizza with sats via Lightning at any number of merchants. The thing Laszlo and jercos did experimentally in 2010 now takes 30 seconds and a QR code.

See Journey Chapter 5 for the modern version of "actually spending bitcoin."