Here’s everything you don’t know about “Buying Pizza with 10,000 BTC”

The programmer who used 10,000 bitcoins to buy pizza did not pay the bitcoins directly to the pizza shop or the delivery man as we thought. Instead, he went through many twists and turns and a lot of irony before he got two pizzas worth $25.

This article will sort out the story behind the "10,000 Bitcoins to buy pizza" incident and the current situation of both parties involved in the incident.

The truth about the pizza incident

Back to May 18, 2010 at 12:35:20 p.m., a programmer named Laszlo (real name Laszlo Hanyecz) posted a help post on the Bitcoin Forum, asking for 10,000 bitcoins in exchange for two pizzas. The content, after being translated into Chinese, is roughly as follows: I like pizza and hope to use 10,000 bitcoins to exchange for pizza. The pizza can be store-bought or homemade, but I need you to deliver the pizza to my doorstep.

Six hours after Laszlo made his request, he received a reply from a netizen named bitcoin2paysafe asking for the address of his request to exchange Bitcoin for pizza.

However, after Laszlo responded, bitcoin2paysafe never responded again. Although the exchange of 10,000 bitcoins for pizza attracted a lot of attention, until three days later on May 21, there was no concrete progress in the whole incident, and some people only ridiculed Laszlo's behavior.

So, at 7:06 pm on May 21, Laszlo also posted a post saying bluntly: "So no one wants to buy me pizza? Is the amount of Bitcoin I provided too low?"

Shortly after Laszlo raised the question, a user left a message saying, "It is very convenient to use a credit card to make online reservations in the United States. If you are hungry, you should consider other ways to buy pizza." When faced with the question of "Why use 10,000 bitcoins" to buy pizza, Laszlo replied at around 9 o'clock that evening: "I just think it would be interesting if I could say that I paid for pizza with Bitcoin."

On May 22, after 4 days of waiting, Laszlo posted a successful transaction at 5:17 pm that day: I just want to report that I successfully traded 10,000 Bitcoins for pizza, thanks to jercos (real name Jeremy Sturdivant)!

At this point, the feat of exchanging 10,000 bitcoins for pizza was finally declared over after 4 days, 4 hours and 42 minutes.

In fact, byjercos, who chose to receive 10,000 bitcoins, had not participated in any discussion before, but silently chose to pay after seeing the request for help.

On May 22, a netizen named Sirius left a message: Congratulations to Laszlo for reaching a great milestone. Later, with the rise of Bitcoin prices, this forum, which was rarely visited at the time, has attracted millions of visitors and has a message discussion of 73 pages today.

Laszlo and Jercos were included in the history of Bitcoin’s birth because they participated in exchanging 10,000 BTC for two pizzas worth $25. However, after eight years of circulation, the details of this story have become quite vague, and many media have turned it into a matter of directly buying pizza with 10,000 Bitcoins.

But in real history, this was much more difficult than we imagined.

Laszlo's innovation was to try to consume something that was similar to game currency at the time as real money, rather than giving Bitcoin its first price.

How is the person who bought pizza and received 10,000 Bitcoins doing now?

Calculated based on today's price of $30,000, Laszlo spent $300 million to buy pizza. Therefore, these two pizzas are called the most expensive pizzas in history.

Faced with the missed tens of millions of wealth, 37-year-old Laszlo said in an interview in May 2018: "Looking back today, maybe people think I am stupid, but the situation was very good at the time. I don’t think anyone could have known that it would take off like this, so I don’t regret exchanging 10,000 bitcoins for pizza."

Jercos, who received 10,000 bitcoins, did not keep the wealth until December 2017. As Jercos recalled in May 2018, “I turned this $25 investment into a trip worth hundreds of dollars, and at most I owned 40,000 bitcoins.”

Today, Laszlo and Jercos are ordinary people living in daily life. Although we have no way of knowing how much crypto wealth they have now, at least they are still living their own way.

Laszlo is still a programmer at the online retail company GoRuck in Florida, which is exactly the same job he had when he spent 10,000 bitcoins to buy pizza 8 years ago. Because according to Laszlo: "When the value of Bitcoin reached $1, he cashed out all his money and earned a new computer."

He was content with this because his parents always told him that money doesn't grow on trees.

The younger Jercos is different from Laszlo. Jercos has transformed from an ordinary person in other industries into a crypto enthusiast. He has purchased multiple tokens such as Ethereum, Litecoin and Dogecoin, and has enjoyed himself in them.

In an interview, Laszlo proudly said: "I spent several months studying Bitcoin out of interest, and figured out how to use a computer to mine it, so I should be the first GPU miner in the history of Bitcoin."

In fact, when mining costs gradually increased, Laszlo had already given up mining in 2013. Because he confessed in an interview that although he was still optimistic about Bitcoin, the increase in computer computing power made mining an additional burden that disrupted his normal life.

So despite missing out on Bitcoin, Laszlo was not discouraged by the rising price of Bitcoin.

In sharp contrast to Laszlo, in the United States, a teenager named Bonerz bought 15,000 bitcoins in 2012. However, in 2013, due to the Mt. Gox incident, he chose to sell all of them before the end of the year.

At the end of 2013, as the price of Bitcoin reached $1,200, Bonerz began to madly blame himself in front of his family, and he has been mentally abnormal since then. In 2017, as Bitcoin broke through $10,000, Bonerz finally chose to commit suicide because of the lost wealth.

His story was revealed by his younger brother on the forum, and he became the first person to die due to the rise of Bitcoin.

Faced with wealth, Laszlo is even more proud of being a creator of history, because he has confessed many times that buying pizza with Bitcoin was just an attempt out of curiosity.