After the 2010 pizza purchase, he continued to spend his mined Bitcoin on other items for several months. He estimated in 2018 he had spent nearly 100,000 BTC in total.
In the years leading up to 2025, his story has been reframed not just as a "loss," but as the foundational act of creating a real-world economy for Bitcoin.
As of 2025, Hanyecz is celebrated as a pioneer who enabled GPU mining, which vastly increased the network's computing power.
Laszlo Hanyecz, the Florida-based programmer famous for spending 10,000 Bitcoin on two Papa John’s pizzas in 2010, remained a low-key software developer as of 2022 and beyond, having no regrets about his historic transaction.
Laszlo Hanyecz—The First Person to Buy Pizza with Bitcoin - Binance
He kept his life low-key and continued working as a programmer, often fading from the public spotlight while his legacy as "the Bitcoin pizza guy" grew.
Hanyecz has maintained in interviews that he does not regret spending the Bitcoin—which would be worth over $1 billion by 2025—because he viewed it as a fun experiment to make the currency useful.