Jeremy Sturdivant, the 19-year-old who received 10,000 Bitcoin for two pizzas in May 2010, spent almost all of it long before BTC even crossed the dollar, let alone current five-figure levels.
Summary
- In 2010, 10,000 BTC was worth between $40 and $41 and bought two Papa Johns pizzas 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 $1.
- At Bitcoin’s peak in November 2021, near $69,000, those same 10,000 BTC would have been worth about $690 million.
Jeremy Sturdivant, known as “jercos” on the Bitcointalk forum, 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 became Bitcoin Pizza Day It began on the Bitcointalk forum on May 18, 2010, when Florida programmer Laszlo Hanyecz offered 10,000 BTC to anyone who wanted to have “a couple of pizzas” delivered to their home.
Four days later, Hanyecz posted: “I just want to report that I successfully exchanged 10,000 bitcoins for pizza. Thanks guys!” confirming that forum user Jeremy “jercos” Sturdivant intervened, paid for two large Papa Johns pizzas with his credit card and received 10,000 BTC in return.
At the time, those 10,000 BTC were valued at roughly $40 to $41, while the pizzas themselves were under $50, underscoring how informal and experimental the trade really was.
Cryptocurrency traders now commemorate that transaction every May 22 as Bitcoin Pizza Day, a tradition that crypto.news highlighted in a 15th anniversary article that looks at how Hanyecz and Sturdivant view the deal years later.
Today Bitcoin (btc) trades at tens of thousands of dollars per coin, and the asset tops $76,000 in recent market cap data tracked by crypto.news.
What did Sturdivant do with the 10,000 BTC and where is he now?
Sturdivant didn’t become a Bitcoin billionaire because he never held the coins for long.
In a 2016 interview titled “A Living Coin: An Interview with ‘Jercos,’” he explained that he treated the 10,000 BTC as spending money and fed it back into Bitcoin’s small economy as its price rose, saying he used the windfall on goods and travel instead of hoarding it.
That stance dovetailed with his broader view of Bitcoin at the time. In the same interview, he argued that Bitcoin only made sense as something used, not idolized, and said he wanted to see it behave as “a living currency” rather than a speculative trophy locked up forever.
The contrast with the asset’s subsequent trajectory is stark. By the peak of the 2021 bull market, the original 10,000 BTC would have been worth about $690 million at roughly $69,000 per coin, while more recent rallies have pushed Bitcoin above $76,000 with a market cap of over $1.5 trillion.
Cryptocurrency historians have since noted that Hanyecz spent tens of thousands of BTC more on pizzas that year, while Sturdivant’s role diminished as he moved on with his life away from the spotlight, resurfacing mostly in retrospective pieces about Bitcoin Pizza Day.
Crypto.news has revisited the episode repeatedly in its Bitcoin Pizza Day coverage, including a report on how the community is using 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.
A recent explanation of Bitcoin’s evolution from a novel payment method to a major asset also places pizza trading as a key moment in its price discovery history and links it to later phases in which btc It surpassed $100, $1,000, and finally five-figure territory.
As of today, there is no evidence that Sturdivant built up a significant new stash of BTC after spending the original 10,000 coins, meaning the teenager who once held what would later become hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin cashed out his position long before the asset reached those levels.
