On May 22, 2010, the crypto world unwittingly minted a legend: 10,000 Bitcoin bought two large Papa John’s pizzas. The buyer, Florida programmer Laszlo Hanyecz, announced the swap on the Bitcointalk forum four days after posting his offer, writing, “I just want to report that I successfully traded 10,000 bitcoins for pizza. Thanks jercos!” The counterparty was 19‑year‑old Jeremy Sturdivant — forum handle “jercos” — who paid for the pizzas with his credit card and accepted the BTC.
At the time those 10,000 BTC were worth roughly $40–$41; the pizzas themselves cost less than $50. What began as a casual, experimental trade has since become the annual Bitcoin Pizza Day on May 22, a moment for the community to reflect on the network’s earliest days and the evolution of price discovery in crypto.
But few remember the man who received the coins. Sturdivant didn’t sit on the windfall — he treated it as spending money. In a 2016 interview titled “A Living Currency: An Interview With ‘Jercos’,” he said he cycled the BTC back into the tiny Bitcoin economy as prices nudged upward, using proceeds on goods and travel rather than hoarding them. His attitude was deliberate: he saw Bitcoin’s value in being used as “a living currency,” not locked away as a speculative trophy.
The decision looks striking in hindsight. By the 2021 bull peak, 10,000 BTC would have been worth roughly $690 million at about $69,000 per coin; more recent rallies have pushed Bitcoin above $76,000 and driven its market capitalization past $1.5 trillion. Hanyecz himself spent tens of thousands more BTC on pizzas that year, while Sturdivant largely stepped out of the spotlight, resurfacing mainly in retrospective pieces on Pizza Day.
Crypto historians and commentators continue to treat the pizza trade as a pivotal moment for price discovery and early adoption — a real‑world use case that revealed both the promise and the paradox of Bitcoin: should it be spent to bootstrap a living economy, or hoarded as a long‑term store of value? There’s no evidence Sturdivant rebuilt a significant BTC stash after spending that original 10,000 coins, which means the teenager who briefly held what would later be worth hundreds of millions of dollars chose to cash out long before Bitcoin reached those heights.
Bitcoin Pizza Day endures as a reminder of how far the ecosystem has come — and of the different philosophies that shaped its earliest adopters.
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