The first known crypto transaction was 10,000 Bitcoin for two pizzas; 13 years on, its ingredients alone equate to millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin.
It’s been 13 years since programmer Laszlo Hanyecz made the first commercial transaction with Bitcoin (BTC) on May 22, 2010, buying two supreme pizzas from Papa John’s for a whopping 10,000 BTC, or $266 million at current prices.
That day is known and celebrated as Bitcoin Pizza Day.
To commemorate the occasion, Cointelegraph sought to find out the answer to one more burning question. How much did it cost to construct these two famous pizzas?
To answer this, it is assumed that Hanyecz ordered Papa John’s “The Works” pizza, which is the pizza chain’s version of a supreme pizza.
Considering the amount required and the price of ingredients at the time, here’s what it would have cost to put together just one of the Bitcoin Pizzas, not including labor, overhead and the pizza base.
- Pepperoni: 244 BTC = $6.5 million
- Bacon: 146 BTC = $3.8 million
- Italian sausage: 97 BTC = $2.5 million
- Onions: 24 BTC = $640,000
- Green peppers: 36 BTC = $960,000
- Mushrooms: 63 BTC = $1.6 million
- Black olives: 121 BTC = $3.2 million
- Cheese: 730 BTC = $19.4 million
Total cost of ingredients: 1,461 BTC, or $39 million. Talk about an expensive feast.
History of Bitcoin Pizza Day
“Bitcoin Pizza Day” marks the world’s first transaction for real-world goods using Bitcoin and celebrates the massive rise in the value of the cryptocurrency since then, which was worth only $0.0041 in May 2010 and is now worth over $26,500 at current prices.
In the end, Hanyecz’s pizza order was delivered four days after he posted his request on May 18, 2010, on the Bitcointalk forum.
Related: Primordial NFT? Someone tried to sell a JPG for BTC months before Bitcoin Pizza Day
“I'll pay 10,000 bitcoins for a couple of pizzas,” he wrote, saying those who take up the request “can make the pizza yourself and bring it to my house or order it for me from a delivery place.”
13 years ago tomorrow the first #Bitcoin purchase was made. Two pizzas were bought for 10k BTC, which at that time was equivalent to $40.
— Pentoshi euroPeng (@Pentosh1) May 21, 2023
Bitcoin pizza day ahead. celebrate with a slice! pic.twitter.com/owdaA2AtBj
Jeremy Sturdivant, a 19-year-old university student at the time, delivered the now-famous pizzas for the Bitcoin haul on May 22, 2010. He told Cointelegraph in 2018 that he sold them to afford a holiday and had “never seen Bitcoin as an investment.”
Hanyecz said he didn’t regret it, and his early work on Bitcoin led him to code a program that made it possible to mine the cryptocurrency on computer graphic processing units.
Magazine: $3.4B of Bitcoin in a popcorn tin — The Silk Road hacker’s story
