What do you think of this fact?
The most expensive pizza order in the world didn’t happen at a fancy restaurant, it happened on an internet forum. And in the end, completely normal pizzas showed up.
An offer on a forum
In May 2010, bitcoin was a toy for nerds. You could create the coins and send them around, but there was hardly anything you could buy with them. US programmer Laszlo Hanyecz wanted to change that.
He posted on the Bitcointalk forum that he’d pay 10,000 bitcoins for some pizza. According to TechCrunch, his words were: “I’ll pay 10,000 bitcoins for a couple of pizzas.” On May 22, 2010, someone took him up on it, ordered 2 large pizzas for about 25 dollars and had them delivered to Hanyecz in Jacksonville. In return, they got the 10,000 bitcoins.
According to Guinness World Records, it was the first commercial bitcoin transaction, the first time someone paid for a real product with bitcoin. The coins were worth about 41 dollars at the time.
A price that went through the roof
Then bitcoin rose. And rose. According to TechCrunch, the 10,000 coins were already worth about six million dollars at a peak in 2013. Guinness did the math in February 2022 and came up with more than 350 million dollars.
Hanyecz himself says he doesn’t regret the purchase. Someone had to start actually spending bitcoin.
Bonus fact: May 22 is still celebrated as “Bitcoin Pizza Day” in the bitcoin world, with pizza, of course.
The story shows how strange new money is at the start. Nobody knew what a bitcoin should be worth, so you traded it for whatever you wanted at the time. In this case: dinner.
At 2022 prices, that works out to more than 175 million dollars per pizza. Hopefully there was plenty of cheese.