Ever heard of Bitcoin Pizza Day? It's basically marking the anniversary of a dude who paid 10,000 Bitcoins for two Papa John's pizzas.
Back in 2010, a 19-year-old guy named Jeremy Sturdivant read on a cryptocurrency web forum a guy named Laszlo Hanyecz was offering 10,000 Bitcoins to someone who could get them two large pizzas delivered to them.
Sturdivant decided to take him up on the offer, and received the 10,000 coins after putting in an order to Papa John's, marking what would be the first physical purchase made with Bitcoin in history. Back then, they were worth about $41.
Sturdivant chose not to hold on to the currency though, instead using them to travel. But he has no regrets about spending them, despite 10,000 Bitcoins being worth about $393M now.
Of course, back then no one had any idea what Bitcoin would become. One Bitcoin became equivalent to one US dollar in 2011. Since then, it has climbed to a value of roughly $39,000. On April 13 of this year, those 10,000 were worth a staggering $636M.
"If I had treated it as an investment, I might have held on a bit longer," Sturdivant said in 2018. "I would have never thought that the same number of Bitcoin would have a purchasing power on the order of real estate."
Hanyecz has no regrets either. "I wanted to do the pizza thing because to me it was free pizza," he said in 2019. "I got pizza for contributing to an open-source project. Usually hobbies are a time sink and money sink, and in this case, my hobby bought me dinner."
He says he spent about 100,000 Bitcoins in the summer of 2010 on pizzas, worth nearly $4 billion now.
"I'd like to think that what I did helped. But I think if it wasn't me, somebody else would have come along."
Source: NYPost.com