Purchase started the Pizza Day tradition; Jeremy Sturdivant would have R$3,850,000.000 billion today if he had not sold the Bitcoin he received shortly after.

Exactly 13 years ago, a 19-year-old Californian named Jeremy Sturdivant watched in front of his computer the frustration of a man who wanted to buy two pizzas using Bitcoin and had no one fulfill his order.

In a post on the Bitcointalk forum, Laszlo Hanyecz offered to pay 10,000 BTC to have two large pizzas delivered to his home in Jacksonville, Florida.

Those involved did not yet have a very clear idea, but that would become a historic moment: the first purchase made using the cryptocurrency created by Satoshi Nakamoto, which would start the tradition of Pizza Day, celebrated annually on May 22 – as is now the case this Monday.

The request was modest: The pizza could be made by anyone and could be of any flavor — although Hanyecz listed the ingredients he liked, such as onions, peppers, sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes, pepperoni, he said he would be happy even if he received a regular cheese pizza.

For four days, Hanyecz’s request was ignored, and those who responded complained about the difficulty of paying for and ordering a pizza from outside the United States. At one point, he asked if they thought his offer was too low. At the time, 10,000 bitcoins could be exchanged for $41. Today, they are worth $270 million (about R$1.3 billion).

Still unaware that bitcoin would be so valuable in the future, young Sturdivant, known by his nickname “Jercos”, decided to take action to ensure that Hanyecz received the much-desired pizzas at his doorstep that Saturday, May 22, 2010.

From California, Jeremy called a Papa John’s pizza restaurant to order two pizzas to be delivered across the country for Laszlo. He paid for the pizzas with his debit card and, after letting Laszlo know he had accepted the offer, received the promised 10,000 BTC in his bitcoin wallet.

“It seemed fair to both parties and, well, who doesn’t like pizza?” Jeremy recalled eight years later in an interview with The Telegraph. “Even after fees, it might be possible to convert the 10,000 BTC back to the original cost, and I didn't see bitcoin as likely to collapse completely, although I had no idea how big it would become.”

If he had known the dimensions that Bitcoin would take in the following years, perhaps Jeramy would have thought twice before selling the 10,000 bitcoins immediately afterwards to pay the costs of a trip he took to the United States with his girlfriend at the time.

And so Bitcoin Pizza Day was born

The exchange of favors between Laszlo and Jeromy has become a veritable holiday for the crypto community. Every year on May 22, bitcoiners around the world eat pizza to celebrate the first time Bitcoin was used to purchase a real-world “good.”

Bitcoin Pizza Day, therefore, celebrates the important moment when people realized that bitcoin had real value and was much more than just code running on the computers of some curious nerds.

Jeromy, who won the 10,000 BTC in exchange for two pizzas, said years later that he “certainly” regrets selling the cryptocurrencies shortly after receiving them, but explained that at the time he was only thinking about helping a fellow bitcoiner.

“If I had treated it as an investment, I might have held on a bit longer, but surely I would have sold at a lower price, perhaps at the now famous 1 BTC = $1 mark? With full knowledge of the future, I would have acted differently, but that could be said of anyone,” he told The Telegraph in 2018.

During the interview, he said he had never imagined that those 10,000 BTC, used to buy pizzas, could be used years later to make purchases of the order of real estate. More than the fact that Bitcoin has astronomical prices, he marvels at the fact that cryptocurrency has become an important part of a new era of economic freedom.

“I believe the overall power of cryptocurrency is for good, empowering individuals and businesses to conduct local and international trade in a fair and traceable manner, and that is exactly what I see [bitcoin] bringing to the future.”

Regrets aside, Jeromy says he is proud to have been part of one of the most memorable events in bitcoin history.

“While I cannot take any responsibility for the success of bitcoin, I am proud to have played a role in something that went from an interesting conceptual project to a global phenomenon so quickly.”

Just like him, the bitcoiner who paid 10,000 BTC for the two pizzas 13 years ago also tries to think about the positive side instead of the money that didn't make him give up cryptocurrency any time soon.

“I try not to think about it. Firstly, because there’s no point, and secondly, it would just drive me crazy thinking about it,” Laszlo Hanyecz told The Telegraph years ago when he told the story.

“I mined that Bitcoin and at the time it was like I was getting free food. It wasn’t worth much at the time. I wouldn’t have spent $100 million on pizza, right? But if I hadn’t done that, maybe Bitcoin wouldn’t have become so popular.”