The most expensive pizzas ever ordered
On May 22, 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz — a Florida programmer — paid 10,000 Bitcoin for two Papa John's pizzas delivered to his house. At the time, Bitcoin was trading around $0.0041 per coin, making the total value of those pizzas about $41. As of today, 10,000 BTC is worth roughly $650 million. That meal is now folklore: Bitcoin Pizza Day is celebrated every May 22 in the crypto community, and the "what if" problem it illustrates is the single most effective argument against spending Bitcoin you expect to appreciate.
This calculator lets you plug in any historical purchase — a $50 coffee bought with BTC in 2013, a $200 TV bought with ETH in 2017, anything — and see what that same BTC or ETH is worth now. The result is usually humbling.
The Gresham's law of crypto
There's an old monetary principle called Gresham's Law: bad money drives out good. If you have a dollar that's losing value to inflation and a coin that's appreciating, you'll spend the dollar and hoard the coin. This is why Bitcoin is rarely used as a medium of exchange — it's too good a store of value. Anyone who has run this calculator even once tends to pay with fiat and hold crypto. That behavior is rational individually, but it's why Bitcoin payments never took off as a consumer use case.
The opportunity cost framework
Every purchase has two costs: the sticker price and the opportunity cost of not investing that money. For a $1,000 TV paid for with an S&P 500 index fund redemption, the opportunity cost over 10 years is about $1,600 (the forgone 10% CAGR compounding). For a $1,000 TV paid for with Bitcoin that has compounded at 50% CAGR, the opportunity cost over 10 years is $56,000. Crypto amplifies both the upside and the opportunity cost of every dollar you spend.
When spending crypto is actually rational
Spending crypto on consumption isn't automatically wrong. It's wrong only relative to the alternative — which might be holding an underperforming asset. Three scenarios where spending makes sense: (1) you're already overallocated to crypto and need to rebalance; (2) it's a small percentage of your holdings (1-2%); (3) you're in a jurisdiction where spending defers tax better than selling. Our portfolio rebalance and crypto tax calculators can help you size those trades.
Historical Bitcoin prices you can plug in
For quick reference: Bitcoin was $0.003 in July 2010, $1 in February 2011, $10 in June 2012, $100 in April 2013, $1,000 in November 2013, $5,000 in October 2017, $20,000 in December 2017 (peak), $3,200 in December 2018 (trough), $10,000 in October 2020, $69,000 in November 2021 (peak), $16,000 in November 2022 (trough), and $100,000+ in late 2024. Plug any of these into the calculator for a classic what-if.
The cost of panic-selling
The pizza story is famous, but the quieter tragedy is people who sold at the bottom. Someone who bought 5 BTC at $1,000 in 2013 and sold at $200 in 2015 lost $4,000. If they had held, those 5 BTC would be worth $325,000 today. Running this calculator with historical bottoms is a useful reminder that the biggest wealth destroyer in crypto is volatility-induced selling, not spending.
Dollar-cost averaging as insurance
If you find yourself obsessively running what-if calculators, the answer isn't to time the market — it's to DCA mechanically. Our dollar-cost averaging calculator shows what consistent monthly buying would have produced through the same volatile periods. The answer is usually "most of the gains without the regret."
Should this change your behavior?
Mostly, yes. People who see the opportunity cost tend to (1) spend less crypto, (2) size their positions more carefully, and (3) stop trading and start holding. The pizza calculator is a teaching tool disguised as entertainment. Plug in your worst past decision, feel the sting, and use it to calibrate the next one.