The 19-Year-Old Who Sold 10k Bitcoin For Two Pizzas Spent Every Last Coin Before BTC Hit $1

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Oh, for God’s sake, if I’d known Bitcoin would one day be worth more than a small country’s GDP, I would have held onto the £20 I spent on a frozen pizza and a bottle of cheap wine last night instead of eating it. But no-let’s talk about Jeremy Sturdivant, the very unfortunate 19-year-old who got handed 10,000 Bitcoin in May 2010 for two Papa Johns pizzas, and then did the unthinkable: he spent almost all of it long before anyone even knew what cryptocurrency was, let alone before BTC crossed even $1, let alone the five-figure levels it hits today.

Quick recap for anyone who’s still trying to work out how a pizza delivery turned into a half-billion dollar mistake:

  • Back in 2010, 10,000 BTC was worth about $40 to $41, which bought two large Papa Johns pizzas for Laszlo Hanyecz, a programmer living in Jacksonville who clearly had no idea what he was about to accidentally make the world’s most embarrassing financial mistake.
  • Sturdivant later said he spent almost all the coins on travel and random bits and bobs as Bitcoin’s price crept up from fractions of a cent to still under $1 per coin, because obviously 19-year-olds with sudden windfalls do not think about long-term savings, they think about going to Ibiza and buying too many band t-shirts.
  • At Bitcoin’s November 2021 peak near $69,000 per coin, that same 10,000 BTC would have been worth around $690 million. Let that sink in. I once cried for three hours because I lost a £10 note in a nightclub, so I am physically unable to process this level of “oops”.

For anyone who’s been living under a rock and doesn’t know what Bitcoin Pizza Day is (no judgment, I still don’t fully understand how crypto works either, and I once tried to buy an NFT of a cat and accidentally donated £15 to a random donkey sanctuary), Jeremy Sturdivant, who went by the very cringey 19-year-old forum alias “jercos” on Bitcointalk, was the counterparty to Laszlo Hanyecz’s now legendary 10,000 BTC pizza purchase on May 22, 2010.

How did Jeremy Sturdivant end up with 10,000 BTC for pizza?

The deal that turned into Bitcoin Pizza Day kicked off on the Bitcointalk forum (the 2010 equivalent of TikTok, but for people who spent too much time on their computers and not enough time talking to actual human beings) on May 18, 2010, when Florida programmer Laszlo Hanyecz put out a call: 10,000 BTC to anyone willing to get him “a couple of pizzas” delivered to his house. Four days later, he popped back on the forum to say “I just want to report that I successfully traded 10,000 bitcoins for pizza. Thanks jercos!” confirming that Jeremy “jercos” Sturdivant had stepped up, paid for two large Papa Johns pizzas with his credit card, and got the 10,000 BTC sent his way. At the time, the 10,000 BTC was worth roughly $40 to $41, while the two pizzas cost less than $50, which really underscores how informal and entirely unplanned the whole thing was. No one involved had any clue this would be a story people would still be talking about 16 years later, let alone that Bitcoin would one day be worth more than a small island nation.

As Bitcoin Magazine so perfectly put it in a 2026 tweet, because of course the only people who care about this are crypto bros on Twitter:

Everyone talks about the guy who paid 10,000 bitcoin for two pizzas, but no one talks about the guy who received the 10,000 bitcoin.

Meet Jeremy Sturdivant, the man who got paid 10,000 BTC for selling two pizzas on this day in 2010.

“I had no idea how huge it would become” ✨

– Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) May 22, 2026

Now, every May 22, crypto traders mark Bitcoin Pizza Day, which is basically the crypto community’s version of that embarrassing childhood story your mum brings out at every Christmas dinner to embarrass you in front of your new partner. crypto.news even did a big 15th anniversary feature looking back at how both Laszlo and Jeremy feel about the whole thing all these years later, and let me tell you, Jeremy’s take is a lot less “I’m a secret billionaire” and a lot more “oh for God’s sake, I was 19 and I wanted to go travelling, leave me alone”.

For anyone who’s still not getting how much of a disaster this whole thing is: Bitcoin now trades in the tens of thousands of dollars per coin, and recently hit over $76,000 per BTC in market data tracked by crypto.news. That’s more than the average UK house price, for the record. I’m not bitter, I’m just saying.

What did Sturdivant do with the 10,000 BTC and where is he now?

So what did Jeremy actually do with the 10,000 BTC, and where is he now, you ask? (Other than hiding in a hole somewhere sobbing into his old credit card statements?) Spoiler alert: he did not become a Bitcoin billionaire, because he never held the coins for long. In a 2016 interview titled “A Living Currency: An Interview With ‘Jercos’” (a title so cringey it makes my eyes hurt, but 2016 was a different time), he explained that he treated the 10,000 BTC like pocket money, and cycled it back into the tiny, fledgling Bitcoin economy as its price climbed from fractions of a cent to still under $1 per coin. He said he used the windfall on travel and random goods instead of hoarding it like a dragon sitting on a pile of gold. This fit perfectly with his broader view of Bitcoin at the time: he argued that Bitcoin only made sense if you actually used it, not if you treated it like some weird speculative trophy you locked away forever and never touched. He said he wanted to see it behave as “a living currency” rather than a get-rich-quick scheme for people who wear too much Patagonia and spend all day posting about market caps on Twitter.

The contrast between what he thought Bitcoin was and what it actually became is so stark it’s painful. By the 2021 bull market peak, when Bitcoin hit nearly $69,000 per coin, that original 10,000 BTC would have been worth about $690 million. More recent rallies have pushed Bitcoin above $76,000 per coin, with a total market capitalization over $1.5 trillion. That’s more money than the entire global film industry made last year, for the record. I once spent £50 on a concert ticket I couldn’t go to, so this level of financial regret is very familiar to me, just on a slightly smaller scale.

Crypto historians have since noted that Laszlo Hanyecz, the guy who actually paid for the original pizzas, went on to spend tens of thousands more BTC on more pizzas that same year, because of course he did. Jeremy, meanwhile, faded into the background, moved on with his life away from all the crypto spotlight chaos, and only pops up every now and then in retrospective pieces about Bitcoin Pizza Day, presumably to answer the same stupid question ten thousand times a year from random crypto bros asking him if he regrets it. (Spoiler: he absolutely does.)

crypto.news has revisited the whole pizza saga more times than I’ve rewatched the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (the only one that counts, fight me) to talk about how the Bitcoin community uses the anniversary to reflect on price discovery, early adoption, and the very weird tension between using Bitcoin as actual money versus hoarding it forever as a long-term store of value. It’s the kind of thing that makes you feel very stupid for ever spending any money on anything ever, ever, but what can you do.

One recent explainer on Bitcoin’s evolution from a weird novelty payment method you could use to buy pizza, to the massive global asset it is now, also situates the whole pizza trade as a key moment in its price discovery history, linking it to all the later phases where BTC broke above $100, then $1,000, and eventually those insane five-figure levels it hits today.

And as of today, there’s no evidence that Sturdivant ever built up a significant new stash of BTC after spending the original 10,000 coins, which means the 19-year-old who once held what would later be hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin cashed out of his entire position long before the asset ever reached those insane levels. I’m going to go eat a pizza now and try not to think about it. Or I’ll try to buy a pizza with Bitcoin, if I can figure out how that works, which I probably can’t, because I still think crypto is just magic beans for people who spend too much time on the internet.

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2026-05-23 00:11