Story of a $580 Million Pizza

What is the maximum amount anybody ever spent to buy a pizza?

Imagine that you are hungry. You reached your mobile and ordered a pizza from a nearby store, but you lack cash, so you decided to resort to the ancient tradition - barter. You traded the pizza with an item you hold. Let’s assume the item is collectible. At that point, the item didn’t worth much, but years later you find out that the price of the collectible has inflated so much that you would rather starve yourself to death than trading it for any food.

That is close to how it happened.

Laszlo Hanyecz, a Florida-based computer programmer, ordered a pizza from Papa Jon’s on May 22, 2010. However, he paid the price of the pizza which was about $35 in bitcoin. How many Bitcoins did he spend? Ten thousand. He is reportedly known as the first person to ever use Bitcoin to purchase a physical good.

Eleven years later, the value of Bitcoin is sky-high. It has become a unicorn. The price of Bitcoin is staggering $58k, which means Hanyecz's pizza cost him $580 million. That is one expensive pizza. Laszlo had posted his order in the Bitcoin forum, where he expressed his will to spend 10,000 BTC for a couple of pizzas. His wish was reciprocated by another Bitcoin enthusiast, and the rest is history.

This bizarre story is often remembered on the internet. Every time Bitcoin makes headlines, this story resurfaces. Surely, Laszlo didn’t expect to make history when he devoured the pizza. Maybe that’s why gluttony is regarded as a grave sin?

 

$450 Million Thrown in Dump

 

James Howells

Well, Laszlo Hanyecz at least tasted the pizzas. James Howells just threw away 7500 Bitcoins in 2013, and he clearly regrets it.

James Howells is an IT engineer from wales. He was a Bitcoin miner. Howells claims he accidentally threw away the wrong hard disk that contained the cryptographic keys which are required to access his BTCs. According to Howells, he had two identical hard drives. He dumped the wrong hard drive when he was clearing his house. James had mined 7500 Bitcoins at that time. Currently, his possession is around worth $450 million.

James has been trying to recover his drive for a long time. He has been repeatedly appealing to the city council to allow him to search the landfill, where the drive was eventually dumped. But the local authority keeps refusing to allow him access, citing that excavation would breach regulation and might cause environmental damage.

James has offered 25% of the amount in a desperate attempt to get permission. He has the backing of hedge fund companies to run the search program. James argues that the city council will not run out of money, and if the hard drive is ultimately found, it will help everybody.

James strongly believes that the data inside the hard drive still remains intact. We don’t know if James will ever find his hard drive, but his story is quite heart-breaking.