Bitcoin price breaks $100,000 for the first time

Bitcoin has crossed the $100,000 threshold for the first time. Tonight around 9:39 p.m. ET, the cryptocurrency’s value hit six figures, surpassing the milestone for the first time in its nearly 16-year history. As of the morning of December 5th, the price remained well above the $100,000 mark and Bitcoin’s value has generally risen steadily over the past month or so. That’s no guarantee it will stay where it is, but it clearly has time.

This also means that the legendary Bitcoin pizza order is now worth $1 billion. For those out of the loop, a Florida man – because he was a Florida man, of course – paid 10,000 BTC for two pizzas from Papa John’s over 14 years ago, in what is considered the cryptocurrency’s first commercial transaction.

“I’ll pay 10,000 Bitcoins for a few pizzas…maybe two large ones so I have some left over for the next day,” Laszlo Hanyecz posted on a crypto forum on May 18, 2010. Four days later a Brit accepted the offer. This amount was only worth $45 at the time. (And the Brit only paid Papa John $25!) But just nine months later, the value of the transaction shot up to $10,000.

Hanyecz said The New York Times in 2013 that he didn’t regret the pizza order, which was then worth $6 million. “Back then, bitcoins had no value, so the idea of ​​exchanging them for a pizza was incredibly cool,” he said. “Nobody knew it was going to be this big.”

I wonder if Florida Man now regrets that his fee for those two Papa John’s pizzas is worth a billion dollars.

In other words, Papa John’s current market cap is $1.567 billion. So if Hanyecz had saved his crypto instead of ordering those two pizzas, he could have bought almost two-thirds of the company that baked his cake today.

Then there’s the story of a writer who helped a friend recover $200,000 worth (at the time) of Bitcoin from a broken laptop in 2017. Those 40 Bitcoins, stuck in a MultiBit wallet for three and a half years, are now worth more than $4 million (as long as the cryptocurrency stays above the $100,000 mark).

Update, 10:35 a.m. ET: This story has been updated with details about Bitcoin’s current value after it hit $100,000.