Florida man would have $5 billion in Bitcoin, if he hadn't traded it for pizza

It seemed like a great deal at the time.

Florida man Laszlo Hanyecz would give away something that cost him nothing but time to obtain, in exchange for two large pizzas.

But if Mr Hanyecz had held on to the 100,000 Bitcoins he had in 2010, he would now be worth close to $5 billion.

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Mr Hanyecz was a very early adopter of Bitcoin, which at the time was seen as a hobby by nerds, rather than a serious financial prospect.

And trading the Bitcoin he had personally mined for two pizzas seemed like an extraordinary deal.

"I'll pay 10,000 bitcoins for a couple of pizzas," Mr Hanyecz wrote on a Bitcoin forum in 2010.

"You can make the pizza yourself and bring it to my house or order it for me from a delivery place, but what I'm aiming for is getting food delivered in exchange for Bitcoins where I don't have to order or prepare it myself, kind of like ordering a 'breakfast platter' at a hotel or something, they just bring you something to eat and you're happy."

He didn't even specify a flavour, just some toppings he liked, and some he didn't like.

At the time, 10,000 Bitcoins would be worth $41. Today they would be worth $493,000.

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Mr Hanyecz eventually found a buyer who ordered him a pair of pizzas from Papa John's.

And over the course of the next year, he would trade 100,000 Bitcoins for pizza.

If he'd held onto the Bitcoins, he could sell them today for an incredible A$4.9 billion.

In 2018 Mr Hanyecz told Cointelegraph that he didn't have regrets over the sale.

"I think that it's great that I got to be part of the early history of Bitcoin in that way," he said.

"I've always kind of just wanted people to use Bitcoin and buying the pizza was one way to do that."

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But the 19-year-old Los Angeles man who got Mr Hanyecz's 10,000 Bitcoins for two pizzas didn't make the most of it either.

Instead, Jeremy Sturdivant frittered the Bitcoin fortune away on travel expenses, well before it became a global cryptocurrency behemoth.

Bitcoin has surged in the past day, jumping 15 percent off the back of a tweet from Elon Musk.

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