The most expensive pizza ever in the history of people eating pizza was bought on an ordinary day in May 2010 by a Jacksonville, Florida, man.
Today, a single slice of that pizza is worth millions. But at the time, both pizzas together were worth just $41.
The purchase was part of a publicity stunt planned by Laszlo Hanyecz, who had decided to order the pizza using this brand-new digital currency called bitcoin.
As was common at that time, Hanyecz posted his idea rather informally in an online forum with other bitcoiners.
He recalls that post going something like this in various news media articles: “You know, if anybody’s interested, I’m offering 10,000 bitcoins in exchange for some pizza.”
Before too long, someone named Jeremy Sturdivant, who hails from England, decided to take Hanyecz up on the offer.
Once he received Hanyecz’s bitcoins, Sturdivant used a conventional credit card to order and pay for the pizza from a Papa John’s in Jacksonville, Florida, where it was delivered right to Hanyecz’ doorstep.
Hanyecz, who was hoping to raise awareness of bitcoin, then sent out press releases about the stunt to media outlets across the country, including a little newsroom in Park Hills, Missouri, where this reporter worked at the time.
The press release went largely ignored. It was an event that took place in Florida with no obvious local angle in Missouri, using something obscure no one had yet heard of. It went straight to File 13, never to be seen again.
But three years later, that little pizza purchase was worth astronomically more than $41. It was worth around $750 million in 2013.
Heck, even in the bear market of 2023, the pizza purchase was still worth $268 million.
The value has just continued to rocket up, and Hanyecz is frequently called upon to recall his pizza stunt on May 22, which has become known as Bitcoin Pizza Day.
In today’s dollars, the pizza purchase is worth a cool $814,464,800, according to CoinLedger, which offers accounting services for cryptocurrencies.
Most Expensive Crypto Purchase Ever
Those pizzas aren’t even the most expensive item ever purchased with bitcoin, though.
That honor goes to a Trump SoHo condo hotel worth $2.08 billion in 2024. Today known as The Dominick, the 46-story condo hotel was listed for sale in 2013 with a stipulation that the purchase had to be 100% bitcoin.
The transaction, when it finally occurred, was for 25,500 bitcoin (BTC) which had a value of about $2 million at the time. Today, however, those same bitcoins are worth $2.67 billion, making it the most expensive bitcoin purchase on record, according to CoinLedger.
It’s quite possible that there are other eye-poppingly expensive transactions that no one really knows about. That’s because in the early days of bitcoin, people were just trying to use the digital currency, exploring how it worked for one, and trying to make sure it remained viable for another.
Among those who recalls that time is Wyoming’s Caitlin Long, today the CEO of Custodia Bank, which handles digital assets like bitcoin and has pioneered a financial runway that can transfer bitcoin to digital and/or physical U.S. dollars and back to bitcoin again.
“Every year on Bitcoin Pizza Day they always ask (Hanyecz) for a comment about that because those pizzas are worth almost a billion dollars now,” Long said. “And he has the same approach to it that I do. You can’t look at it that way. The network wouldn’t be where it is today if somebody hadn’t started using bitcoins in transactions like that one.”
Ultimately, it is a measure of just how far Bitcoin has come since it was invented in 2008 and a quietly registered domain appeared called bitcoin.org, followed up with a little white paper on Bitcoin in 2009, which was distributed to a little-known crypto mailing list by one Satoshi Nakamoto.
The name is thought to have been an alias, and the person or people behind it have yet to be identified. Nakamoto disappeared in the spring of 2011, with billions, and not a whisper has been heard since.
Lots of people have put forward theories on who he or she or they might have been, but the mystery today remains unsolved.
Bitcoin Trades Helped It Become What It Is Today
Long was just getting started with Bitcoin in 2012, but she had her own sort of pizza pie moment in 2014.
“I saw that Overstock.com was the first big brand-name business getting involved with bitcoin,” she recalled. “So, I wanted to support them, and, back then, everyone was trying to figure out — because Mount Gox had just failed — whether bitcoin was going to survive.”
Mount Gox was a Tokyo-based exchange that handled about 70% of bitcoin trades at the time. They failed after hackers broke in and stole thousands of bitcoins. Long, like a lot of bitcoiners at the time, was looking for ways to help this new cryptocurrency platform survive what had been cast at the time as a catastrophic failure for cryptocurrencies.
So, she decided to buy Christmas gifts with some of her bitcoin that year. With a single bitcoin trading around $320 at the time, a $640 purchase would be 2 bitcoins. Today that’s worth around $208,000.
“I like don’t want to even think about it, but that’s the point is, you can’t look at it that way,” she said. “It’s almost the same thing as donating appreciated bitcoin in 2017 to fund the endowment for female engineers. Had I waited, I could have funded more endowment today, but there were many students who benefitted from that money by me funding it in 2017. And that was also part of making bitcoin what it is today. If nobody ever used it, you would never get the network effects.”
Those network effects make Bitcoin resilient today, Long believes. It’s like the Internet. There are enough different distribution points that it can no longer be shut down by a single state actor. It would take a concerted effort, and even then, Long doesn’t believe it would succeed. That decentralization was part of the point behind the whole system.
The endowment fund Long wanted to contribute bitcoin to is what spurred her involvement in Wyoming’s digital asset laws. She was unable to make her donation at the time without legislative changes.
Here To Stay?
Despite Long’s pragmatic view, however, even she confesses to occasionally wishing, just a little bit, that she’d put a little more money into bitcoin at the time.
“We’d all be rich,” she says, laughing.
One reason Long didn’t put more money into it at the time is the same reason a lot of financial investors have long advised giving cryptocurrency a pass.
Long remembers losing some of her coins when Mount Gox failed in 2014.
“I got some of the money back 10 years later,” Long said. “But it was a fraction of the bitcoins I’d bought.”
Cheyenne-based financial advisor Bryan Pedersen also remembers the Wild West days of bitcoin, when it was first starting out.
“In 2011, I had a very good friend of mine who, today is a partner at a major nationwide accounting firm,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “And I asked him at the time what he was doing and he goes, ‘Oh I’m mining this coin off the internet.’”
Pedersen couldn’t believe his ears at the time.
“I was like, ‘What are you doing, you Dungeons and Dragons nerd?’” Pedersen recalls saying. “Are you going to get this fake coin off the internet to buy like a shield for your wizard in Dungeons and Dragons?’”
But today, Pedersen’s friend has a few million dollars from his bitcoin mining days.
“I guess we all could have, should have, would have, but remember, there’s so many cryptos that have collapsed,” Pedersen said. “And if you picked the wrong one, you got zero.”
Pedersen isn’t quite as negative about bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as he was then.
“I do think there’s a place for crypto in the future,” he said. “I’m not negative on it like was in 2011, when I just didn’t understand it. But I don’t know how that comes to fruition and whether it’s government-controlled or it’s free market or whatever the case may be.”
But he has also watched as BRICS countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates — have pushed to find a non-dollar denominated security to trade with.
“We tell the whole world they have to trade with U.S. dollars, and then we just print more of them,” Pedersen said. “So, we devalue our dollar but still tell the rest of the world that they have to trade with it.”
The move toward crypto is something Pedersen believes is in response to that devaluing and has become something of a new economic arms race.
“If the new game is crypto, we need to own it,” Pedersen said. “So that we’re still the world leader because the U.S.’s largest export is the dollar … It makes the world banking system. So, if the world switches to any type of cryptocurrency, whether that’s led by BRICS nations or us, we still need to have a say. And that’s what owning a sovereign crypto company would do.”
That’s the reason Pedersen believes cryptocurrencies are here to stay, whether it’s Bitcoin, or some other system.
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
