Bitcoin's Record Price Puts Cost Of Two Papa John's Pizzas In 2009 At $1.06 Billion
Well, it finally happened. The infamous cryptocurrency transaction involving 10,000 Bitcoins for a pair of Papa John's pizzas back on May 22, 2010 has surpassed the $1 billion mark. It reached that mark when Bitcoin breached the $100,000 mark, and at the time of this writing, it's trading at over $106,000 for a new all-time high. That puts the value of the pizza transaction from 14 years ago at over $1.06 billion (and climbing).
Talk about a figure that is hard to swallow! Even before the recent surge in crypto valuations, and especially Bitcoin, the Papa John's pizza purchase still ranked as one of the biggest all-time investment fumbles. Not that Laszlo Hanyecz, the individual credited with the first documented Bitcoin purchase, could have known that his crypto would see such a meteoric rise in the years that would follow.
During a 2019 interview with Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes, Laszlo, then a computer programmer living in Florida, explained that put up a forum post asking if anyone was interested in selling him a pizza for 10,000 Bitcoin.
A person responded, took his Bitcoin, then phoned in a pizza order for two pies, paid with their credit card, and had it delivered to Laszlo's house. Laszlo estimated that the actual cost of the Papa John's pizza was around $40. At the time of the interview, the Bitcoin he used would have been worth in the neighborhood of $80 million, he says, and now it's ballooned to over $1 billion.
The transaction is celebrated each year on May 22, a date that's become known as Bitcoin Pizza Day. Laszlo has taken it all in stride, because as he pointed out in the interview, 10,000 Bitcoin wasn't worth all that much at the time of his purchase. Getting two pizzas out of the deal seemed like a score at the time.
Unfortunately for him, Bitcoin's value would skyrocket by epic proportions over the decade and a half since then. Even worse, he estimates that he spent around 100,000 Bitcoin on various things at the time. At today's valuation, he would be a multi-billionaire (over $10.6 billion). That's still a fraction of what tech moguls like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg are worth, but definitely enough to live comfortably, even with rising grocery costs.
Top Image Source (modified): Flickr via Horosho.Gromko.(CC by 2.0)
