On May 22, 2010, a Florida programmer named Laszlo Hanyecz posted on the Bitcointalk forum offering 10,000 BTC to anyone who would buy him pizza. Four days later, an English user named Jercos took him up on it. Two large Papa John's, delivered to Laszlo's door, paid for in bitcoin. Bitcoin's first real-world commercial transaction.
That was 16 years ago. Bitcoin was worth about $0.0041 per coin, putting the pizzas at roughly $41 in 2010 money. Today those same coins would be worth several hundred million dollars. May 22 is now celebrated as Bitcoin Pizza Day.
The transaction is still on chain. Let's go look at it.
Approximate height
The pizza was paid for around block 57,043 (May 22, 2010). We can read the block header and confirm the timestamp:
Look at the time field. Convert from Unix time and you'll land
in late May 2010, exactly when the pizzas were ordered.
The transaction
The pizza transaction's id is
a1075db55d416d3ca199f55b6084e2115b9345e16c5cf302fc80e9d5fbf5d48d.
Fetch it with full verbosity:
Notice the output: 10,000 BTC in a single output. No mixers, no decoys, no privacy preservation. This was a casual transaction in 2010, when nobody was watching the chain except a handful of cypherpunks.
The recipient address — 17SkEw2md5avVNyYgj6RiXuQKNwkXaxFyQ,
belonging to Jercos who arranged the delivery — eventually broke the
10,000 BTC into smaller chunks and forwarded them on. You can follow the
trail with subsequent getrawtransaction calls if you have the
patience.
What it would be worth now
Bitcoin today trades for tens of thousands of dollars per coin. Multiplying out, those two pizzas, in 2026 dollars, cost the equivalent of a major skyscraper.
Laszlo, when asked about it in interviews, has been remarkably zen: he points out that without someone willing to spend bitcoin on real goods in 2010, Bitcoin would never have crossed the threshold from "interesting protocol" to "monetary system." The pizzas paid for proof-of-utility. He thinks it was worth it. Most of us would.
The bigger lesson
The chain is permanent. Every transaction you ever sign is recorded forever. In 2010, this was a feature: it gave Laszlo's pizza order legitimacy. In 2026, it's a feature for different reasons: forensic accountability, pricing discovery, and historical preservation.
Don't sign anything you wouldn't want a thousand years of researchers reading.
Read more: The Genesis Block, The Inflation Bug, or The Halvings.