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10,000 BTC for Two Pizzas

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On May 18, 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 American 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 10,000 BTC 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.

The block

The pizza transaction was mined in block 57,043 (May 22, 2010). We can read the block header and confirm the timestamp:

Open in playground → the block that holds the pizza tx
Open in playground → confirms timestamp ~ May 22 2010

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:

Open in playground → the famous tx itself

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 — broke the 10,000 BTC into two smaller chunks in the very next block, about ten minutes later, 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 says he doesn't regret it, and that if it hadn't been him, somebody else would have come along. 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.

Sources

Corrected October 2, 2026. An earlier version dated Laszlo's offer to May 22, 2010; he posted it on May 18, and May 22 is the day the trade was completed. It also described Jercos as English; he is American. It said the 10,000 BTC was eventually moved on; it was spent in the next block, about ten minutes later. It had Laszlo saying Bitcoin would never have become money without the purchase; in a 2018 interview he said that if it had not been him, somebody else would have come along.

Read more: The Genesis Block, The Inflation Bug, or The Halvings.