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Sixteen years after programmer Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 Bitcoin (BTC) for two Papa John’s pizzas, the transaction remains one of the defining moments in Bitcoin’s history, illustrating how a digital asset once worth pennies grew into a trillion-dollar asset class. At Bitcoin’s current price near $77,000, the same 10,000 BTC would be worth about $770 million, turning a meal that originally cost around $41 into a benchmark for measuring crypto’s growth.
The anniversary, celebrated each year on May 22 as Bitcoin Pizza Day, has become a reference point for tracking Bitcoin’s growth from an experimental digital currency to a mainstream financial asset. It offers a snapshot of how dramatically Bitcoin’s purchasing power has changed since its earliest days.
On May 18, 2010, Hanyecz posted on the Bitcointalk forum, offering 10,000 BTC to anyone willing to arrange the delivery of two large pizzas. Four days later, a user accepted the offer, ordered the pizzas from Papa John’s, and received the Bitcoin in return.
At the time, Bitcoin had almost no commercial use. The transaction mattered because it demonstrated that people were willing to exchange goods for a digital currency that existed outside the traditional banking system.
The purchase is often portrayed as a missed fortune, but Hanyecz has repeatedly said he doesn’t regret it. In later interviews, he explained that Bitcoin had little established value at the time and that spending it helped demonstrate a practical use case for the network.
Those pizzas didn’t cost 10,000 $BTC.
They gave 10,000 $BTC a price.The first real-world Bitcoin purchase.
The first proof of concept.🍕 Happy #Bitcoin Pizza Day pic.twitter.com/KmVS0emt8L
— HashKey Group (@HashKeyGroup) May 22, 2026
Using a Bitcoin price of $77,000, the original 10,000 BTC stack is worth approximately $770 million today.
That amount could buy more than 9,000 homes based on the latest US median home prices. It could also acquire dozens of luxury hotels, purchase several private jets, or fund the annual salaries of thousands of workers.
The comparison becomes even more striking when broken down further. Trust Wallet recently calculated that if the two pizzas were divided into eight slices, each slice would represent about $96 million at current Bitcoin prices.
Using $77k per BTC at today’s price, the 10,000 BTC pizza order would now be worth about $770 million.
If the pizza had 8 slices:
🍕 1 slice = roughly $96.25 million.
Happy Bitcoin Pizza Day. pic.twitter.com/npviuceQ5D
— Trust Wallet (@TrustWallet) May 22, 2026
The comparisons illustrate how dramatically Bitcoin’s purchasing power has changed since 2010. Few assets have recorded comparable gains over 16 years.
The transaction’s significance extends beyond the value of the coins.
Without people willing to spend Bitcoin, the network would have struggled to prove it could function as a medium of exchange. The pizza purchase created one of the first widely documented examples of Bitcoin being used to obtain a real-world product.
The financial landscape surrounding Bitcoin has also changed dramatically since 2010. US spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) launched in January 2024, bringing billions of dollars into regulated investment vehicles. Public companies, including Strategy and Metaplanet, now hold Bitcoin on their balance sheets, while asset managers such as BlackRock and Fidelity offer spot Bitcoin ETF products.
Hanyecz’s purchase remains one of the earliest documented commercial Bitcoin transactions. Sixteen years later, the 10,000 BTC used in that exchange is worth roughly $770 million at current market prices.
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