How the deal went
In May 2010 Laszlo Hanyecz, a programmer from Jacksonville, Florida, wrote on the bitcoin forum that he would pay 10,000 coins for two large pizzas. You could bake them yourself or order them from a pizzeria; what mattered was that they were delivered to his home and had plenty of toppings. For four days nobody took him up on it. Then a nineteen-year-old student from California who went by jercos ordered him two pizzas from Papa John’s with his own money, about 25 dollars, and got 10,000 bitcoins in return. Hanyecz posted photos of the boxes on the forum, and of his daughter reaching for a slice (chapter “Ten Thousand for a Pizza”).
Ten thousand coins were not much of a fortune for him. Two weeks before the pizza he had posted a program that mined bitcoin on a Mac’s graphics card, dozens of times faster than the processor. Satoshi emailed him and gently asked him not to rush: the main lure for newcomers was that anyone with a computer could generate a few coins, and graphics cards would hand that chance to owners of expensive hardware too early. Hanyecz liked the pizza enough to repeat the order several times, and by his own count ate his way through about 100,000 bitcoins that summer.
Why the pizzeria never got a bitcoin
Papa John’s saw no bitcoin at all. The student paid it in dollars, through the very financial system bitcoin promised to rid the world of, and Satoshi’s network only moved 10,000 coins from one wallet to another to settle that payment (same chapter). The first purchase with the new middleman-free money went through a middleman, and in that sense it predicted the next fifteen years better than any white paper.
Fifteen years later the biggest buyer of bitcoin was the biggest middleman on the planet. Clients of the American exchange-traded funds, BlackRock’s among them, hold no keys and send no coins; they own shares in a fund, and the bitcoins of almost all those funds are kept by one company, the Coinbase exchange (chapter “An Index of Money Laundering”).
What those bitcoins would be worth now
I was mining that summer myself, on a MacBook’s processor, and my hundred coins on Mt.Gox, which opened a few days after the article on Habr, were worth a few cents each. In February 2011 bitcoin reached parity with the dollar for the first time. At the peak in autumn 2025 my hundred coins would have been worth more than 12 million dollars, so at the same price Hanyecz’s pizzas cost more than a billion.
Hanyecz has said in interview after interview that he does not regret the pizza. Every year on 22 May the crypto community orders pizza and works out what those 10,000 coins would be worth today. You can work it out here too, in the experiment “What the pizza cost”: it has the prices the book mentions, from May 2010 to autumn 2026, and a field for today’s.
What else happened that summer
On 15 August 2010, three months after the pizza, a transaction appeared in block 74,638 that created 184 billion bitcoins out of nothing, almost nine thousand times more than could ever exist under the rules. Someone had found an overflow bug in the program. In under five hours Satoshi and the other developers released a fixed version, the network rebuilt the chain from the block before the bug, and the extra coins vanished (same chapter).
They were right to do it; otherwise bitcoin would have ended in 2010. But the story already held everything people later tiptoe around when they talk about code being its own law. When the code was wrong, a few developers chose the true history, and the network agreed with them. How the sum of two outputs wrapped to zero and passed the check is shown in the experiment “184 billion out of nothing”.
