A fictional American man named Merano Mettbach has become the center of an extraordinary cryptocurrency dispute after attempting to hold McDonald’s responsible for a Bitcoin payment he says he made for a Big Mac meal in 2013. According to Mettbach’s account, he was experimenting with Bitcoin during the early years of the cryptocurrency and wanted to use it for an ordinary real-world purchase rather than simply leave the coins sitting in a digital wallet. The meal itself was forgettable. The transaction was not. More than thirteen years later, Mettbach says the Bitcoin connected with that purchase would be worth approximately $3 million at current prices, turning what he remembers as a routine fast-food order into one of the most expensive fictional Big Macs ever purchased.
In 2013, Bitcoin was still a radically different asset from the globally traded market it has become today. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts were actively looking for opportunities to demonstrate that BTC could function as actual money rather than simply an experimental internet token. Small retailers, online businesses and independent merchants were beginning to accept Bitcoin, and users often celebrated every real-world transaction as proof that decentralized currency could eventually become practical. CoinDesk documented several U.S. retailers accepting BTC that year, including San Francisco food and specialty stores, illustrating how early adopters were deliberately spending coins because adoption itself was considered important.
In Mettbach’s fictional version of events, he encountered a McDonald’s location experimenting unofficially with digital payments and decided to purchase a Big Mac, fries and a drink using Bitcoin. The process was far less polished than the payment applications people use today. Instead of tapping a phone against a terminal and seeing an immediate fiat conversion, Mettbach says he was shown a wallet address and asked to authorize the transfer manually. He claims that confusion over the amount, exchange rate and wallet interface resulted in him sending approximately 36 BTC, far more than the value of the meal itself.
At the time, Mettbach says he noticed that the number of coins transferred looked unusually large but assumed the difference involved fees, conversion mechanics or a display issue. Bitcoin wallets in the early 2010s were far less familiar to ordinary consumers, and exchange-rate information was not integrated into every application the way it is now. According to the fictional account, the restaurant accepted the payment, handed him the food and the transaction disappeared into Bitcoin’s public ledger along with thousands of other early experiments in cryptocurrency commerce.
For years, Mettbach barely thought about it.
Bitcoin continued to rise and fall dramatically. He sold other coins, moved between wallets and eventually stopped thinking about the McDonald’s transaction as anything more than an amusing story about the early days of cryptocurrency. Then, while reviewing an old wallet history, he found the transaction again and calculated its modern value.
At Bitcoin’s current price of roughly $83,600, approximately 35.9 BTC would be worth around $3 million.
The number changed the way Mettbach viewed the memory.
What had once been a funny example of using futuristic internet money suddenly looked like an extraordinary financial loss. He began describing the meal to friends as “the $3 million Big Mac” and eventually, approached lawyers about whether there was any possible basis for recovering part of the lost value.
His argument centers on the payment process rather than Bitcoin’s appreciation alone. Mettbach claims the transaction interface failed to make the dollar value sufficiently clear and that the restaurant should have noticed that the number of coins being transferred was wildly disproportionate to the price of a fast-food meal. He argues that accepting dozens of BTC for a Big Mac should have triggered some kind of warning or confirmation before the transfer was finalized.
The attempted lawsuit would face enormous legal obstacles.
Future appreciation does not normally change the validity of a completed transaction. If someone voluntarily uses an asset to pay for a product, the fact that the asset becomes dramatically more valuable years later does not generally require the merchant to return it. The same principle applies outside cryptocurrency. Someone who sold shares in a technology company before the stock increased tenfold cannot sue the buyer simply because holding the shares would have produced a much larger profit.
