The $1.2 Billion Pizza

What the Most Expensive Meal in History Teaches Us About Catching the Next Big Opportunity

Fifteen years ago today, a programmer named Laszlo Hanyecz made what's arguably the most expensive food purchase in human history. On May 22, 2010, Hanyecz posted on a Bitcoin forum offering 10,000 Bitcoin for two pizzas.

At the time, those Bitcoins were worth about $41. A fellow Bitcoin enthusiast took him up on the offer, ordered two Papa John's pizzas to Hanyecz's Florida home, and Bitcoin's first real-world transaction was born.

Laszlo enjoying a $1.1 billion lunch with his kids. | Source: X

Today, that Bitcoin stash would be worth over $1.1 billion.

To mark the occasion, crypto fans now refer to May 22 as Bitcoin Pizza Day. It’s part meme, part milestone, part monument to the opportunity most people never saw coming.

Note: What makes this story even more remarkable is that Hanyecz didn't stop there. He continued making similar trades, ultimately spending around 100,000 Bitcoin on food over the following months. At today's prices, that's roughly $11 billion worth of cryptocurrency exchanged for pizza and other meals.

The One That Got Away

In a way, I can relate to the pizza story.

I was first introduced to Bitcoin in Buenos Aires back in 2011 when I attended a Phyle meeting. If you don’t know what a Phyle is, the term comes from Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age. Doug Casey helped popularize it to describe small, borderless tribes of like-minded individuals who meet to exchange ideas and build freer, more intentional lives. We have one at Crisis Investing, too.

Anyway, I met a bunch of fascinating people at that Buenos Aires gathering—some of whom I still keep in touch with. One of them was an Argentine named Marcelo, who wouldn’t stop talking about this thing called Bitcoin. His eyes practically glowed as he spoke: digital gold, money without governments, freedom baked into code. A way out of the monetary tyranny we’d seen firsthand in Argentina. You couldn’t have shut him up at gunpoint.

I remember walking away from that meet-up thinking, "Interesting concept... worth keeping an eye on."

In the months that followed, I did end up buying some Bitcoin. The infrastructure was practically nonexistent—no Coinbase, no easy exchanges, just a handful of sketchy websites and peer-to-peer trades that felt like digital back-alley deals. Still, with Bitcoin trading at just $3 a coin, I figured it was worth a shot. I ended up with about 50 bitcoins (worth roughly $5.5 million at today’s $110K price).

Where are those coins now?

Gone. Lost to the ether. Vanished across a trail of old laptops, external hard drives, early wallet sites like MyBitcoin.com (and an early scam, as it turned out)—and probably spent on pizza-like things just as silly.

They’re part of the 3 to 4 million BTC believed to be lost forever.

Why?

Because I didn’t get it.

I didn’t really understand the magnitude of what was in front of me. I was too distracted by the day-to-day. Too lazy to dig deeper. And—I'll admit it—too stupid to invest the time needed to really understand what I was dealing with.

I treated Bitcoin like a lottery ticket rather than what it actually was: a paradigm-shifting technology that would fundamentally change how we think about money, value, and financial sovereignty.

The Real Lesson

The bigger story behind Bitcoin Pizza Day—and the personal anecdote I just shared—isn’t really about Bitcoin at all. It’s about how easily we miss life-changing opportunities simply because we fail to recognize what’s staring us in the face.

Bitcoin. Investments. Career moves. Relationships. Raising kids. It’s the same pattern, over and over again.

My point is, if you want to avoid missing the next opportunity, you’ve got to put in the effort to understand—deeply, not just at the surface level. Whether you’re going it alone or drawing on the experience of those who’ve been down the road before matters less than simply caring enough to dig in.

That’s where the opportunity is.

Because most people simply won’t do it.

Think about it… if everyone in the world suddenly knew and understood Bitcoin to the degree that people like billionaire and Bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor, and macro strategist Lyn Alden do, it would already be worth millions of dollars per coin.

But the world doesn’t yet understand it. So it’s not worth millions.

And that, again, is where the opportunity lies. Call it psychological arbitrage, call it something else—but what this is, is a massive gap between what Bitcoin really is and what most people think it is.

Now, you may disagree. You might even think Bitcoin is a scam or a bubble waiting to pop. But if so, ask yourself honestly: Do you actually understand how it works? Have you looked under the hood—its monetary math, the game theory behind its security, or the economic principles that could make it superior to traditional money?

Because if you have, you shouldn’t have much trouble seeing why it’s already trading above $110,000—and why it’s likely on its way to seven figures in the next decade.

But of course, if most people truly understood Bitcoin at that level, the psychological arbitrage would already be gone.

Understanding Is Leverage. Ignorance Is Expensive.

Bitcoin’s just the example.

The real point is: understanding is in short supply. Whether it’s Bitcoin, energy policy, monetary theory, or basic economics—most people have no idea what’s going on. And the less they know, the louder they seem to yell.

You see it everywhere. Most people have been so dumbed down they can only digest the simplest, most surface-level information. (Social media, I’m looking at you.) Add to that the cognitive handicap handed down by the Department of Education, and it's no wonder a huge chunk of the population can’t grasp anything with real depth.

And heck—forget “most people”…

Here’s a clip of Jared Bernstein—former Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers—struggling to explain why the U.S. government borrows money when it can just print it. The man was literally Biden’s top economic brain.

Can this be fixed?

Maybe. But I’m not holding my breath.

What I am doing is trying to capitalize on it. And you should too.

Because if you’re one of the rare few willing to cross the understanding gap—if you’re willing to really dig in—you can position yourself far ahead of the herd.

That’s true with Bitcoin. It’s true with gold. It’s true with any of the asymmetric opportunities we talk about in these pages.

Understanding is leverage. Ignorance is expensive.

Regards,

Lau Vegys