He has already said the hint of surrendering with his claim. We will never see him take what he has promise so it's likely that he just did it on a purpose telling few years ago that bitcoin will reach $1,000,000.
But I'm sure that many is counting on that price but it will take a lot of time before seeing that. AFAIK, he's in real trouble now and it's not about the prediction but he's something up with the US gov't that he's fleeing.
What he recently said is that he doesn't plan to eat his dick, his promise was made to attract people and he said he succeeded in that. He said that whoever believed in such nonsense that he will eat his dick is a fool! He added something about Bitcoin, how it's old technology now and that something new will replace it. I think if you scroll down his tweets you will find a tweet about that. It's from the last 30 days more or less!
Yes, it was clearly a publicity stunt on his part. So I don't know why people started to believed that he will do it. To be honest, once he predicted that bitcoin will be $1 million, I completely laugh because I know that it won't happen in the near future.
Just imagine the price, do we really think that people or some big investors are going to let it happen? Governments are going on our necks, specially on tax liabilities. At least he admitted it and we may know go and move on and not to believed on John anymore.