May 22 marks the 16th anniversary of the first documented commercial Bitcoin transaction — a day now celebrated as Bitcoin Pizza Day. Back in 2010, developer Laszlo Hanyecz sent 10,000 BTC to Jeremy "jercos" Sturdivant, who used the coins to buy two Papa John's pizzas. That transaction, worth roughly $41 at the time, is now valued at over $770 million at current prices around $77,787 per BTC.
The 10,000 BTC that started a tradition
Sturdivant didn't hoard the coins. After receiving them, he spent the entire 10,000 BTC on a cross-country road trip when he ran out of cash. He treated Bitcoin as functional currency rather than a speculative asset — a choice that, with hindsight, looks extraordinarily expensive. At Bitcoin's all-time high of roughly $126,000 in October 2025, those same coins would have been worth over $1.26 billion.
No regrets, even at $770 million
Sturdivant has repeatedly said he has no regrets about the spend. "It was just money to me at the time," he told the community in remarks amplified this week by Blockstream CEO Adam Back. The 2010 transaction wasn't an investment — it was a way to buy dinner and later fund a road trip. The fact that those coins could now buy a small country doesn't change his view.
The philosophical debate Back amplified
Adam Back, a prominent cypherpunk and CEO of Blockstream, used Sturdivant's story to highlight the ongoing divide in Bitcoin culture: is Bitcoin meant to be spent as cash, or held as a hard monetary asset? Back's comments leaned into the transactional side, noting that the early adopters who actually used Bitcoin for purchases helped bootstrap the network. The tension between "spend and replace" versus "hodl" remains one of the community's oldest arguments, and Pizza Day is its annual reminder.
Bitcoin Pizza Day has become a ritual — exchanges offer deals, memecoin projects airdrop slices, and old-timers retell the story. But no one expects another 10,000 BTC pizza order anytime soon. For Sturdivant, the episode is a footnote in crypto history. For the rest of the market, it's a lesson in the cost of treating a future trillion-dollar asset as pocket change.
