Two Pizzas for 10,000 XRP

On 22 February 2013 a bitcointalk user called ribuck posted a thread titled “Pizza for ripples?” It was not an original thought and it was not pretending to be one. Almost three years earlier, on 18 May 2010, a user called laszlo had posted “Pizza for bitcoins?”, offering 10,000 BTC for a couple of pizzas. Four days later he reported that somebody had taken him up on it. That trade is what the crypto world now marks every 22 May as Bitcoin Pizza Day, and it is generally taken as the first time bitcoin bought a real-world thing.

ribuck took laszlo's post and re-typed it. Not the gist of it — the post. Character for character the two are 97.83% identical, and the difference comes to exactly three swapped words.

The restaging was the point. When the pizzas finally arrived, ribuck opened his confirmation with laszlo's own sentence — “I just want to report that I successfully traded 10,000 ripples for two large pizzas” — and noted that the garlic and herb dip that came with them looked like the dip in laszlo's 2010 photo. He also mentioned he had wanted to put a physical Casascius Ripple in the picture, could not find one, and used a Casascius Bitcoin instead.

Not an investor, not a Ripple person, and nobody's idea of a crypto figure. He was a British hobbyist — bitcointalk user 58607 — who found bitcoin in the summer of 2012 and spent the next two years mining it, building small things with it, writing the instructions other people needed, and giving a fair amount of it away. He joined on 6 July 2012 and introduced himself in one line: “Hello I am Peter I mine BTC and LTC and gamble it all on Dragons Tale!!” He signed off as Peter for years afterwards, usually with his bitcoin address underneath, so the name is his own and he published it himself.

None of which was about Ripple. Count his posts by what each one is about and XRP finishes last, on 25 of 1,421 — behind BBQCoin, behind Freicoin, behind a coin named after barbecue. (A widely-shared thread has since claimed XRP appears only once in those posts. It appears in 25, fifteen of them in the pizza thread — we went through the same history and the same wallet in The Real FuzzyBear.)

The first of those 25 is dated 7 February 2013, and it is not the post of an early believer:

Two weeks later Ripple ran its giveaway thread on bitcointalk — post an address, receive XRP. He posted his at 08:38 on 21 February: “Yes please rjh37Ura…”. At 23:23:20 that night, Ripple's giveaway wallet sent 50,000 XRP to rjh37Ura…, and with that payment the account came into existence. Fourteen hours and forty-five minutes from asking to funded.

The following afternoon ribuck posted his pizza offer. FuzzyBear replied an hour later with the only qualification that mattered: “I make pizzas myself... tell me u based in the UK??” He was in the south of England and ribuck was in the north-west, which is the entire reason this trade found anybody to take it at all — somebody had to be able to place a delivery order to a British address.

One last thing about him, because it frames everything above. His final post on bitcointalk is dated 28 April 2025, nearly thirteen years after his first, and it is in the same Dragon's Tale thread he introduced himself with — explaining what became of the game and who owns it now. Dragon's Tale was a bitcoin-denominated MMO casino built by Teppy, the developer behind A Tale In The Desert: you wandered an island shaking coconut trees and, in FuzzyBear's own pitch for it, tried “ur luck at tipping a cow”. He posted about it when the servers went down, when it started taking credit cards, and about the arc every gambler knows — “it always more fun when u win... as opposed to the feeling when ur balance is back to SAT”. The XRP pizza is a three-week interruption in the middle of a thirteen-year hobby.

FuzzyBear did not simply want to buy the pizzas. He wanted the trade to be shared, so he proposed collecting bitcoin from anyone who wanted a cut of the 10,000 XRP and ordering the pizzas out of the pot. Tirapon — who had spent the previous hour arguing the price was absurd — was the one who suggested the mechanism and the first to put money behind it:

FuzzyBear posted a bitcoin address at 23:16. Tirapon posted “Sent” at 23:31. The 0.1 BTC confirmed on the bitcoin blockchain at 00:44:30 the next morning — and in the thirteen years since, that address has never received another deposit. One contributor, 0.1 BTC, and that was the whole fund.

A second man, BrannigansLaw, turned up wanting in. What happened next is a small thing that the ledger records perfectly: FuzzyBear replied to him at 01:36:40 on 24 February, and two minutes and forty seconds later sent him 1,000 XRP. That payment was BrannigansLaw's account's first transaction, which is to say FuzzyBear created his wallet for him. Two days later the 1,000 XRP came back.

Nobody else paid in. On 5 March, FuzzyBear gave up waiting:

What makes this trade unusual is not that it happened. It is that all three record-keepers involved — a public forum, the XRP Ledger and the bitcoin blockchain — were writing at the same time, and nobody has been able to edit any of them since. Put them on one axis and they line up to the minute.

Two of those gaps are worth staring at. The forum post telling BrannigansLaw how to join is followed by the payment that creates his wallet 160 seconds later. And Tirapon's one-word “Sent” is followed by a bitcoin confirmation 73 minutes later, which is roughly what a 2013 confirmation cost you. Neither timestamp was chosen by anybody; the forum's clock, the XRP Ledger's and bitcoin's were each keeping their own time, and they agree.

Six transactions carry the whole affair. Four are on the XRP Ledger, two are on bitcoin, and every one of them can be opened right now.

The wallet that paid the 10,000 XRP, rExpG8Nj…, deserves its own line. It was created by the same Ripple giveaway wallet on 25 February 2013 with 40,000 XRP, and in the thirteen years since it has sent exactly one payment: this one. Somebody claimed free XRP from a forum thread, spent a quarter of it on dinner, and never touched the account again.

Read left to right, the deal is three inbound payments and two outcomes. The pizzas were real, they were ordered from a British delivery shop and paid for in pounds, and the 0.1 BTC covered a fraction of the bill — FuzzyBear said he would make up the rest himself, and the collection address shows he had to. The dashed red line is the one leg the ledger does not confirm, which the next section is about.

On 6 March at 20:27:40, ribuck's 10,000 XRP landed. FuzzyBear noticed the following afternoon, placed the order, and posted the sentence that dates the trade:

They took twenty-four minutes. At 19:27 ribuck confirmed delivery at 18:28, described the toppings, thanked FuzzyBear and Tirapon, and posted the two photographs further down this page. Five hours later the 0.1 BTC left the collection address, and the affair was closed.

Whether this was the first time XRP bought a physical thing is not something any ledger can settle — absence of an earlier trade is not proof there wasn't one, and most real-world spending leaves no note on chain saying what it bought. What can be said is that the people doing it believed they were first and said so at the time: Tirapon put his 0.1 BTC in because he “liked the idea of getting the chance to be part of the first trade”, and FuzzyBear took the job on because he “just like[d] the historic moments”.

There were two photographs of the XRP pizzas, and for a while it looked as though they were gone. Both were hosted on tinypic, which shut down in 2019. Neither tinypic URL was ever archived — ask the Internet Archive for either one directly and it has nothing, which is the answer that makes you stop looking.

They survived anyway, thanks to a quirk in how bitcointalk shows pictures. It does not point at the picture on the other website. It serves its own copy, from its own web address — and that address contains a code the forum changes from time to time. The address the thread uses today is not the address it was using in 2016.

The Internet Archive saved page two of this thread on 10 March 2016, three years before tinypic closed, and it saved the two pictures under the address the page was using that day. Ask the archive for today's address and you get nothing, which is what we did the first time. Ask it for the 2016 one and both photographs come straight back — 640×480, about 100 KB each.

The Marguerita. Garlic and herb dip top right, Casascius bitcoin bottom right.18:25:21

The half-and-half: ground beef one side, veggie supreme the other.18:25:43

They are exactly what he described: a Marguerita, and a half-and-half with ground beef on one side and veggie supreme on the other. The pot of garlic and herb dip he had never met before is in the first frame. So is the Casascius bitcoin he used because he could not find a Casascius Ripple.

And the files themselves carry a fourth clock. Every camera writes hidden details into the photo file — the make and model, the settings, and the date and time it thought it was. Nobody had stripped that out. These two were taken on an Olympus XZ-1 at 2560×1920, shrunk down before uploading, and stamped 18:25:21 and 18:25:43 on 7 March 2013.

ribuck told the forum the pizzas arrived at 18:28. The camera says he was photographing them at 18:25. Three minutes apart — a camera clock nobody had set carefully, against a forum clock in another country — which is a great deal closer than it had any obligation to be, from the one device in this story that had no idea it was corroborating anything.

The lesson outlives the pizzas. When a picture looks like it was never saved, ask the archive for the address the page was using at the time, not the address of the site the picture originally came from. Otherwise a forum that serves its own copies will quietly hide its own history from you.

An earlier version of this article reported these photographs as lost. They were recovered on 2026-08-18 after a reader asked whether the Internet Archive might have them after all. It did.

Seven minutes after announcing the order, FuzzyBear settled up with his one contributor in public:

Tirapon never did confirm, and the ledger does not show it. His address, rKcvQj8Uu…, has nine transactions in its entire history: the 50,000 XRP it received from Ripple's giveaway, five outgoing payments in June 2013, two payments of almost nothing, and a final transfer in 2014. No inbound 1,000 XRP, from FuzzyBear or from anybody else, ever. And on the other side, FuzzyBear's wallet made exactly one outbound XRP payment in its life — the 1,000 to BrannigansLaw on 24 February, which came straight back.

Two honest caveats. Tirapon could have given a different address by private message, which is not something the chain can rule out. And he plainly did not mind: he reappeared in the thread six months later with “Wow, completely forgot about this! Glad to see it was completed”, which is not the tone of a man chasing a debt. What can be said precisely is this: of every promise made in that thread, this is the only one the ledger cannot corroborate — and it is worth $997 today.

The comparison people reach for is laszlo's, and it is not close: 10,000 BTC is now $643,423,400, which is why that trade gets an anniversary. But the more interesting number on this page is Tirapon's. His 0.1 BTC was, in his own words, “like 2 quid” — a throwaway side-bet on somebody else's stunt. Today it is worth $6,434, which is more than the 10,000 XRP the whole trade was about.

He kept the XRP for ten months and then, on New Year's Day 2014, started selling. Over three days he gave his account permission to hold Bitstamp's bitcoin (219D71B501400E1A…), placed a ladder of sell orders on the exchange built into the ledger itself, and moved the proceeds out as bitcoin — including one neat trick where he paid himself, routing 2,880.55 XRP through the order book and receiving 0.1 BTC back in the same transaction (BCCBC6FB8DAD83AD… — the transaction offered up to 2,909.36, the order book filled it for less). He came back in late November 2014 to place more offers and move another 0.1 BTC out (FB5881D646B1536E…), and one of those offers was still standing when it filled on 9 December (48659D7C30861FBD…). The last thing the account ever signed was a bitcoin withdrawal on 24 February 2015 (AFF96E32537F6719…).

The totals: 59,964.93 XRP left the account through those sell orders and 2.0839 BTC was withdrawn — an average of about 0.00003475 BTC per XRP, which was the going rate. That was worth roughly $1,582 at the time.

He never posted a word about any of it. Not one of his 101 forum posts in 2014 mentions XRP, Ripple, or selling anything.

Thirty-nine signatures, every one of them inside twenty-four months, and then nothing for eleven years. The bars below the axis are what has happened to the wallet since: a trickle of payments it received but never answered, culminating in 132 in 2025 — almost all of them 0.123 XRP arriving nightly from a single address, which is spam, not activity.

Set his forum output against his ledger output and the two are almost perfectly out of phase. 2013 is the year he was loudest — 914 posts, the pizza trade, the giveaway — and he signed exactly one transaction. 2014 is the year he actually moved money, 37 signatures in it, and his posting collapsed to a ninth of the previous year with not a single mention of what he was doing.

This is the practical argument for reading chains rather than forums. The forum tells you what somebody wanted said; it is a complete record of the intent and a useless record of the outcome. The January 2014 liquidation — by far the most consequential thing this wallet ever did — is invisible in thirteen years of his writing, and it took about four minutes to read off the ledger.

rjh37UraJGNsxTLuXRQVCT7wvhzfVF4ig is still there, holding 55.475602 XRP. It has signed nothing since 24 February 2015, when its balance was 34.988 XRP; the 20.487602 XRP difference is eleven years of small change arriving from strangers. All that is still attached to it is the old Bitstamp permission, holding a rounding error of BTC, and a link somebody else opened in February 2026 that declares this address the issuer of a token called FUZZY — no supply, no holders, closed again a day later. You cannot issue a token from a wallet whose owner stopped signing eleven years ago, which is presumably not the conclusion that person reached.

One clarification, because the names collide. This FuzzyBear is bitcointalk user 58607, a British miner who claimed 50,000 XRP from a giveaway in 2013 and bought somebody dinner with a fifth of it. He is not the XRPL account behind the modern FUZZY memecoin — nothing on any of these chains connects the two, and the only thing they share is a handle.

Nothing here needs special access. Four checks cover all of it.

1. The forum side. Open bitcointalk topics 145984 (Pizza for ripples?), 137 (laszlo, 2010), 145506 (the Ripple giveaway) and 146298 (BrannigansLaw's contest). Every quotation above is from one of those four.
2. The XRP Ledger side. Ask any XRPL server that keeps the whole history. The command is account_tx; on rjh37Ura… it returns 193 entries, which is the account's entire life. We asked three independent servers and all three gave the same answer.
3. The bitcoin side. Look up 1H8ufWVChTBqPXwuNiJnrahqqAQzUPXBv7. Two transactions, 0.1 BTC in and 0.1 BTC out, February and March 2013.
4. The copy. Put the first post of topic 137 next to the first post of topic 145984 and read them side by side. Three words differ.

Prices in this article were measured on 2026-08-18: XRP at $0.9972 from our own oracle (median of eleven venues) and BTC at $64,342.34. Today the 2.0839 BTC he swapped into is worth $134,083 and the 59,964.93 XRP he gave up would be $59,797 — so the exit, which looked like the end of his XRP story, was the better half of the trade by a factor of 2.24.

More reconstructions like this in XRPL Insights, including the 2011–2013 history this trade sits inside and the oldest position still open on the ledger.