Jeremy Sturdivant, the 19-year-old who earned 10,000 Bitcoin for pizza pies in May 2010, spent almost all of it long before Bitcoin surpassed $1, let alone today’s five-figure levels.
summary
- In 2010, 10,000 bitcoins were worth about $40 to $41 and bought two slices of Papa John’s pizza for Laszlo Hanyecz in Jacksonville.
- Sturdivant later said he spent the coins on travel and goods as the price of Bitcoin rose from fractions of a cent to less than a dollar.
- At Bitcoin’s November 2021 peak near $69,000, the same 10,000 Bitcoins were worth about $690 million.
Jeremy Sturdivant, known as “jercos” on the Bitcointalk forum, was the counterparty for Laszlo Hanyecz’s legendary 10,000 Bitcoin pizza purchase on May 22, 2010.
How did Jeremy Sturdivant get 10,000 Bitcoin for pizza?
The deal that turned into Bitcoin Pizza Day It began on the Bitcointalk forum on May 18, 2010, when Florida programmer Laszlo Hanec offered 10,000 bitcoins to anyone willing to have “a couple of pizzas” delivered to their home.
Four days later, Hanitsch posted, “I just want to let you know that I successfully traded 10,000 Bitcoin for pizza. Thank you, Jericho!” It confirms that forum user Jeremy “Jercos” Sturdivant stepped in and paid for two large Papa Johns pizzas using his credit card, receiving 10,000 Bitcoin in return.
At the time, these 10,000 bitcoins were worth around $40 to $41, while the pizza itself cost less than $50, underscoring how informal and experimental the trade really is.
Cryptocurrency traders now celebrate the transaction on May 22 each year on Bitcoin Pizza Day, a cryptocurrency news tradition highlighted in a 15th anniversary feature that looks at how Hanyecz and Sturdivant viewed the deal years later.
Bitcoin today (Bitcoin) are trading at tens of thousands of dollars per coin, with the asset surpassing $76,000 in recent market cap data tracked by crypto.news.
What did Sturdivant do with 10,000 BTC and where is he now?
Sturdivant did not become a Bitcoin billionaire because he did not hold the coins for long.
In a 2016 interview titled “Live Coin: An Interview with ‘Jercos'”, he explained that he treated the 10,000 BTC as spending money and put it back into the mini-bitcoin economy as its price rose, saying he used the windfall on goods and travel rather than hoarding it.
This stance fit his broader vision for Bitcoin at the time. In the same interview, he argued that bitcoin only had meaning as something used, not sacred, saying he wanted to see it behave like a “living currency” rather than a locked-in speculative prize forever.
The contrast is stark with the subsequent trajectory of the original. By the peak of the bull market in 2021, the original 10,000 Bitcoins were worth about $690 million at roughly $69,000 per coin, while more recent highs have pushed Bitcoin past $76,000 with a market cap of more than $1.5 trillion.
Cryptocurrency historians have since noted that Hanich went on to spend tens of thousands of bitcoins on pizza that year, while Sturdivant’s role declined as he continued his life out of the spotlight, appearing primarily in retrospective articles about Bitcoin Pizza Day.
Crypto.news has revisited this episode repeatedly in its Bitcoin Pizza Day coverage, including reporting on how the community used the anniversary to reflect on price discovery, early adoption, and the tension between using Bitcoin as money versus treating it as a long-term store of value.
One recent interpretation of Bitcoin’s evolution from a new payment method to a major asset also places pizza trading as a key moment in the history of price discovery and links it to later stages where… Bitcoin It broke above $100, $1,000, and eventually five-figure territory.
As of today, there is no evidence that Sturdivant had accumulated a significant new stash of BTC after spending the original 10,000 coins, meaning that the teenager who later owned what would later become hundreds of millions of dollars in Bitcoin cashed out of his position long before the assets reached those levels.
