Bitcoin surpassed the $100,000 threshold for the first time. At approximately 9:39pm ET this evening, the cryptocurrency’s value reached six digits, surpassing the milestone for the first time in its nearly 16-year history. As of the morning of December 5th, the price was hovering well above $100,000, and Bitcoin’s overall value has been steadily rising over the past month or so. There is no guarantee that this will remain the case, but clearly the moment has come.
It also means that the legendary Bitcoin pizza order is now worth $1 billion. For those uninformed, a Florida man paid 10,000 BTC for two Papa John’s pizzas over 14 years ago in what is believed to be the first commercial transaction in cryptocurrencies.
Laszlo Hanecz wrote on a crypto forum on May 18, 2010, “I’ll pay 10,000 Bitcoins to buy a few pizzas…maybe two large pizzas, and then I’ll save for the next day.” I’ll leave it for a while,” he posted on a cryptocurrency forum. He accepted the offer. That amount was worth only $45 at the time. (And the British man only paid $25 from Papa John’s!) But just nine months later, the deal had jumped to $10,000.
Hanietz told The New York Times in 2013 that he had no regrets about ordering the then-$6 million pizza. “Bitcoin didn’t have any value at the time, so the idea of exchanging Bitcoin for pizza was incredibly cool,” he said. “No one expected it to become this big.”
Does the Florida man regret it now that he paid $1 billion for two Papa John’s pizzas?
Looking at it another way, Papa John’s current market cap is $1.567 billion. So if Hanyec had saved his crypto instead of ordering those two pizzas, he could have bought nearly two-thirds of the company that baked the pies today.
And then there’s the story of a writer who helped a friend recover (at the time) $200,000 worth of Bitcoin from a broken laptop in 2017. 40 Bitcoins that were stored in a multibit wallet for three and a half years are worth more than $4 million today (as long as the cryptocurrency is worth more than $100,000).
Updated at 10:35 a.m. ET: This article has been updated with details about Bitcoin’s current value after reaching the $100,000 mark.
