12 years ago, on May 22, an American student named Jeremy Sturdivant saw a strange request on the internet.
Someone paid 10 thousand bitcoins , valued at the time at 40 dollars, for two pizzas sent to his address.
Sturdivant sent two large pizzas to the user and received the 10,000 bitcoins, in what would become the first cryptocurrency transaction in history .
Those 10 thousand bitcoins, which marked Bitcoin Pizza Day every May 22, are currently valued at more than 300 million dollars, but they no longer exist in the subject’s wallets.
What happened?
“I had no idea how big it would become,” Sturdivant told the New York Post . But despite losing unlimited riches, the now 30-year-old said he is “proud to have played a part” in the “global phenomenon”.
“If he had treated it like an investment, he might have held out a little longer,” Sturdivant said of spending his winnings on a road trip with his girlfriend. “I never would have thought that the same number of bitcoins would have purchasing power on the order of real estate.”
“Looking back,” Sturdivant admitted to Bitcoin Who’s Who , it’s “crazy” to think that anyone has that much bitcoin today.
But there is also the other side of the coin: the person who bought it, Laszlo Hanyecz .
“I wanted to do the pizza thing because to me it was free pizza ,” he told Bitcoin magazine in 2019. “I got pizza for contributing to an open source project. Hobbies are usually a drain on time and money, and in this case, my hobby bought me out to dinner.”
“I would like to think that what I did helped,” he added. “But I think if it wasn’t me, someone else would have come.”