I Bought a Pizza for $5,000 with Bitcoin 🤦‍♂️

I’ve bought many things over the years with Bitcoin... Now before you jump up and down crying, ‘BITCOIN? Why on earth would you send Bitcoin if its price is going to shoot higher?’ there’s a good reason why I would.

Author

Adam Atlantic
March 19, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

I was down at my local shopping mall this week. I parked the car in the underground car park, walked over to the escalator to get up to shop level, and as I rose up the escalator, I saw it in all its glory…

This isn’t the first Bitcoin ATM I’ve seen. But I am seeing them increasingly around town.

I’ve seen them at this shopping mall, another not far away, a couple in the city centre, they’re appearing seemingly everywhere. It’s little things like this, which demonstrate the progress of adoption of Bitcoin amongst individuals, consumers, the ‘retail’ market.

I didn’t use the ATM. I didn’t need to. I was at the mall to withdraw cash. Ugh, I know, cash. Yuck.

I needed to pay a tradesperson. He suggested a slightly better price if I were to pay cash (nice to know the shadow economy still exists).

Had he suggested I send him Bitcoin via a decentralised wallet, I’d have been more than willing too.

Now before you jump up and down crying, ‘BITCOIN? Why on earth would you send Bitcoin if its price is going to shoot higher?’ there’s a good reason why I would.

I’ve bought many things over the years with Bitcoin. Some examples include a pizza (which cost me 0.05 BTC at the time!), a holiday (best holiday ever), and even an Antminer Bitcoin mining rig.

I’m comfortable with this (even though in hindsight that pizza cost me $5,000), as my view is that we will eventually end up with a Bitcoin standard.

In that world, we need to earn it, save it, spend it like we would fiat currency. It will never reach its full potential if all we do is hoard it – then it is just digital gold.

To utilise it as Satoshi envisioned, a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, that’s how we get to a Bitcoin standard. We need all aspects of society and the economy to embrace and adopt Bitcoin.

We know that adoption story has made huge progress with individuals. But now the proverbial snowball is rolling down the hill with the corporate world too.

Who’s Buying Bitcoin?

In 2019 there was not one, single publicly listed company (that wasn’t a Bitcoin miner) that had bought Bitcoin to add to its balance sheet.

Note: I’m not counting Bitcoin miners in this. They typically mine, not buy. Albeit in 2018, many of them bid at auction for Bitcoin that had been seized by U.S. Marshals.[1]

Then in 2020, Strategy (then MicroStrategy) bought its first batch of Bitcoin, adopting it’s now famous ‘Bitcoin strategy’.

Shortly after, Block Inc (then Square) bought Bitcoin for its balance sheet. Then Tesla decided to buy $1.5 billion. And one after another after another, in the five years since Strategy first bought, listed companies have been stacking Bitcoin onto their balance sheets.

More recently companies have been issuing debt to get more Bitcoin as fast as possible. From Semler Scientific to Metaplanet, and even RIOT (the Bitcoin miner) to buy Bitcoin on top of what they keep from mining!

According to data from Bitcoin exchange River, 80 public companies are buying (or at least have bought) Bitcoin for their balance sheets.

Source: River via X.com[2]

They say two years ago, it was only 33 companies. And in another two years’ time? 200? 500? Everyone?

Clearly this is a trend. Now with major regulatory clarity emerging in the U.S., the idea of every publicly listed company in America owning some Bitcoin on their balance sheet, isn’t such a wild idea.

This is how we get towards a Bitcoin standard. This is how Bitcoin’s purchasing power surges past $1 million. And eventually, this is how Bitcoin wins.

Trust in crypto,
Adam Atlantic