- Bitcoin Pizza Day celebrates its 10th anniversary
- Laszlo Hanyecz’s two pizzas are now worth $96 million
- The fate of Hanyecz’s ₿10,000 is unknown, but thought to have been split up and siphoned off over the years
Bitcoin supporters around the world are celebrating another Bitcoin Pizza Day today, but this is a very special anniversary – this year marks 10 years since Laszlo Hanyecz spent ₿10,000 on two Papa John’s pizzas. It has become tradition on Bitcoin Pizza Day to convert the value of the purchase to today’s Bitcoin prices, but there is another aspect to the story that is rarely covered – what happened to Hanyecz’s ₿10,000?
Hanyecz’s $96 Million Pizzas
Today, Hanyecz’s pizza purchases are worth a staggering $96 million, up from $80 million the year before thanks to Bitcoin’s prize rise. Contrary to popular belief, Hanyecz didn’t actually buy the pizzas from Papa John’s direct – instead, he took to BitcoinTalk to place his order.
At the time, Hanyecz was a developer who put curiosity over his stomach, simply wanting to see if it was possible to buy something with Bitcoin rather than expecting dinner to arrive that night. Buying goods with Bitcoin is second nature now, but back then Bitcoin was a little over a year old, and the idea for exchanging it for a real world product was somewhat fanciful.
On May 18, Hanyecz posted that he wanted to pay ₿10,000 for two pizzas to be delivered to his house, just to say he had done it. They could even be homemade:
There were plenty of dissenting voices, with many saying that Hanyecz would be better off selling his Bitcoin for cash, which would have been about $40 at the time. Hanyecz persisted but met with no offers, even suggesting he was ready to up the price, until four days later another BitcoinTalk user, Jercos, bought the two Papa John’s pizzas for $25 in cash and had them delivered to Hanyecz:
Hanyecz confirmed the transaction on May 22, 2010, a Bitcoin transaction that quickly went down in history:
What Happened to the ₿10,000?
One element of the story that is not usually discussed is the fate of the ₿10,000 which, let’s not forget, was suddenly sitting in the wallet of a British Bitcoin investor, ₿4,000 of which was pure profit. This profit is now worth $38 million today – not bad for two minutes’ work.
As for where the $10,000 is now, it was split up and hopped from wallet to wallet over the following months, at one point joining another ₿112,000 in a single wallet, before being farmed out across several wallets again. Up to ₿40,000 was shifted from wallet to wallet at regular intervals, with hundreds of bitcoins being siphoned off with each wallet move.
It is likely then that the ₿10,000 Bitcoin Pizza Day money continued to be split up and siphoned off, meaning that it is now sitting in hundreds or even thousands of wallets worldwide. While Laszlo Hanyecz is the face of Bitcoin Pizza Day, it is tempting to think that there is another Bitcoin old hand sitting in a small apartment in Britain, regretting his own profligacy and remembering the time he once has ₿122,000.
