Every May 22, Bitcoin Pizza Day, the crypto world revisits the same story. In 2010, a programmer named Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 BTC for two pizzas. Most content uses this to calculate what those coins would be worth today and to make a point about holding for the long term.
That calculation is the least useful part of the story. A more instructive question is whether holding those coins would actually have been possible to do, and what the years in between can teach you about managing a position.
That is what this article looks at.
A quick recap of the trade
On May 18, 2010, Hanyecz offered 10,000 BTC for two pizzas on a Bitcoin forum. Four days later, on May 22, another user accepted and arranged for two Papa John’s pizzas to be delivered to him in Florida. At the time, 10,000 BTC was worth roughly $41. The transaction is widely cited as the first real-world purchase made with Bitcoin. The detail worth studying is not the trade itself but what happened to the asset over the following years.
The pizza index: 10,000 BTC on every May 22
The table below shows the approximate value of 10,000 BTC on or near each Bitcoin Pizza Day since 2010.
One note on accuracy first, because it affects how you should read this. Bitcoin had no reliable price feed before 2012, and the major data platforms hold no clean figure for May 22, 2010. The earliest values here are estimates, and sources disagree on them. The numbers are rounded deliberately, and they are presented as estimates rather than precise figures.
|
Pizza day
|
Approx. BTC price
|
10,000 BTC worth
|
Market context
|
|
2010
|
~$0.004
|
~$41
|
The original transaction
|
|
2011
|
~$7.50
|
~$75K
|
First speculative bubble forming
|
|
2012
|
~$5
|
~$50K
|
Quiet accumulation period
|
|
2013
|
~$124
|
~$1.24M
|
After the first mania and crash
|
|
2014
|
~$520
|
~$5.2M
|
Aftermath of the Mt. Gox collapse
|
|
2015
|
~$235
|
~$2.35M
|
Deep bear market
|
|
2016
|
~$525
|
~$5.25M
|
Second halving, base building
|
|
2017
|
~$2,000
|
~$20M
|
Bull run beginning
|
|
2018
|
~$8,000
|
~$80M
|
Hangover after the 2017 peak
|
|
2019
|
~$8,000
|
~$80M
|
Partial recovery
|
|
2020
|
~$9,200
|
~$92M
|
Coiling before the next bull market
|
|
2021
|
~$38,000
|
~$380M
|
Selloff during the China crackdown
|
|
2022
|
~$30,000
|
~$300M
|
Start of the bear market
|
|
2023
|
~$27,000
|
~$270M
|
Recovery after the FTX collapse
|
|
2024
|
~$70,000
|
~$700M
|
ETF era and new highs
|
|
2025
|
~$111,000
|
~$1.1B
|
All-time high, reached on the day itself
|
|
2026
|
~$77,000
|
~$770M
|
Below the highs amid macro pressure
|
The instructive part of this table is not the size of the final number. It is the movement between the rows.
What the year-over-year changes reveal
Consider the period from 2021 to 2023. The value of the position moves from roughly $380 million to $300 million to $270 million. That represents two years of holding through one of the most severe bear markets in Bitcoin’s history, ending well below where it started. The annual snapshots also understate the difficulty. Within that window, the peak-to-trough decline was approximately 50 percent, and it persisted for around eighteen months before recovering.
A similar pattern appears more recently. In 2025, the position reached an all-time high of about $1.1 billion on the anniversary itself. A year later, it had declined by roughly 30 percent.
This is the central lesson, and it differs from the one usually drawn. Holding Bitcoin from 2010 to the present was not a steady climb. It was a series of large gains interrupted by severe declines, frequently within the same eighteen-month period. The individuals remembered as long-term holders were generally those with unusually high conviction, or those who had simply lost access to their coins. Survivorship bias accounts for much of how the story is told afterward.
It is also worth noting that very few holders actually held. Most of the original coins were spent or sold over the years, often by people who were confident at the time that they were taking sensible profits, and equally confident later that they had sold too early.
There are two distinct mistakes at work here, and they are easy to confuse. One is selling an entire position at the first significant decline. The other is holding an entire position through a drawdown severe enough to cause financial or psychological damage before any recovery arrives. Unmanaged conviction and unmanaged risk produce different outcomes but stem from the same underlying problem: the absence of a plan. The goal for a trader is to avoid both.
Applying this to how you manage a position
The practical lesson is about structure rather than belief. Conviction without a framework behaves like speculation, regardless of how strong the underlying thesis is.
Position sizing
A position sized so that a 50 percent drawdown remains survivable, both financially and emotionally, is a position that can be held through the moments when others are forced to exit. A position sized on the assumption that the thesis is certain tends to be closed at the worst possible point. The 2021 to 2023 period is not an argument against holding Bitcoin. It is an argument for not holding more of it than a plan can absorb.
Having more than one instrument available
In 2010, a holder had only two choices: keep the entire position or sell all of it. Traders today are not limited in that way. A spot position can express a long-term thesis intended to be carried through market cycles, while derivatives can be used to hedge that position through an anticipated drawdown, or to take a shorter-term view without disturbing the core holding. The objective is not to trade more frequently. It is to avoid forcing a single instrument to perform a function it was not designed for. On YEX, spot and derivatives are accessible in the same place, which makes that kind of structuring more straightforward.
Profit-taking plan
The pizza story is usually framed as the cost of selling too early. It is more accurately understood as the cost of selling with no framework at all. Profit taken according to a predefined plan is a strategy. Profit taken in reaction to fear, or deferred because a narrative has become compelling, is not. Tools such as staged exits and structured orders exist so that these decisions are made in advance, before the emotional pressure of the moment arrives.
Final thought
Hanyecz did not make an error by spending the Bitcoin. He made a reasonable trade based on the information available at the time. The recurring error is in how the story is retold each year, when a lesson about uncertainty and risk is reframed as a parable about the rewards of faith.
Bitcoin’s price history does not reward belief on its own. It rewards structure, appropriate sizing, and a plan, and it penalizes their absence along the way. Each May 22 offers a choice about which version of the lesson to take from it.
Holding a position you can survive, hedging a thesis rather than simply enduring it, and taking profit according to a plan rather than in response to panic are all achievable with tools that already sit in one place. That, rather than the pizza, is the part worth remembering.
Markets are volatile. This article is for educational purposes and is not financial advice. Trade according to your own plan and risk tolerance.
