Every May 22 the crypto community marks Bitcoin Pizza Day — and behind the meme is an often-overlooked participant: Jeremy Sturdivant, the forum user who received 10,000 BTC in exchange for two pizzas in May 2010.
The trade began on May 18, 2010, when Florida programmer Laszlo Hanyecz offered 10,000 BTC on the Bitcointalk forum for someone willing to deliver “a couple of pizzas.” Four days later Hanyecz confirmed the deal: “I just want to report that I successfully traded 10,000 bitcoins for pizza. Thanks jercos!” The counterparty, Jeremy “jercos” Sturdivant, paid for two large Papa John’s pies with his credit card and accepted 10,000 BTC in return.
At the time, the entire 10,000 BTC haul was worth roughly $40–$41 while the pizzas themselves cost under $50 — a snapshot of how experimental and informal Bitcoin’s early days were. Today, of course, BTC trades in five figures, briefly topping $76,000 in recent data and pushing the asset’s market cap past $1.5 trillion.
Sturdivant never became the poster-child crypto millionaire. In a 2016 interview titled “A Living Currency: An Interview With ‘Jercos’,” he said he treated those coins as spending money, cycling them back into the fledgling Bitcoin economy as the price inched upward. He spent the funds on everyday goods and travel and argued that Bitcoin made the most sense when used as “a living currency,” not hoarded as a speculative trophy.
The contrast is striking: by the 2021 bull market peak, 10,000 BTC would have been worth roughly $690 million at about $69,000 per coin. Crypto historians note that Hanyecz himself spent tens of thousands more BTC on pizzas that year. Sturdivant, meanwhile, largely stepped out of the spotlight and has resurfaced mostly in retrospectives marking the anniversary.
Bitcoin Pizza Day has become more than a quirky origin story — it’s a moment the community uses to reflect on price discovery, early adoption, and the long-running tension between using bitcoin as money versus viewing it as a long-term store of value. As for Sturdivant, there’s no public evidence he rebuilt a comparable stash after spending the original 10,000 coins, meaning the teenager who once held a fortune that later dwarfed most fortunes cashed out long before Bitcoin reached its modern highs.
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