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John McAfee’s Wildest Quotes About Bitcoin And Cryptocurrencies

The highly controversial and highly entertaining John McAfee is dead. As our sister site Bitcoinist informed, “According to a spokeswoman for the Superior Court of Catalonia, former crypto promoter John McAfee was discovered dead in his prison cell near Barcelona, Spain at the age of 75.” A cybersecurity pioneer and an eccentric millionaire, McAfee became obsessed with cryptocurrencies in the latter part of his life.

He went from giving Bitcoin the highest praise to bashing it every time he could. Launched a failed hardware wallet. Pioneered DEXes and briefly operated a trading platform. McAfee ended up promoting every altcoin that had a cheque for him, and virtually none of those succeeded. Quite a colorful crypto career. 

Related Reading | After Trashing Bitcoin, McAfee Is Promoting These Three Altcoins

Of course, you all know what his wildest quote about Bitcoin was. But, what did he think about the big subjects in the crypto space? Let’s pass the mic to the fallen king, and let him rip everything apart using his own words.

John McAfee On Bitcoin

As we already told you, he started with the highest praise possible. To our very own newsdesk, he said:

Bitcoin will become the gold standard. Bitcoin will always be that standard, that you can keep in a wallet offline somewhere and think, this is my retirement income. It is the grandfather; it will always be the best. When people were taught about cryptocurrencies, they were made to say Bitcoin instead of currencies. That’s how prominent it is.

And a few years later ended up bashing it, while showing a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology and its value to the world:

 I am not a Bitcoin maximalist. I don’t know what the maximalists are thinking. I mean, there’s zero privacy in Bitcoin. Bitcoin doesn’t have smart contracts, and Jesus, there’s nothing. It’s an ancient, arcane technology and yet it’s still going to be worth a fortune.”

“As a store of value and cryptocurrency, it’s the standard. However, it does not do much that the world needs from blockchain today. It’s simply a cryptocurrency.

So yeah, even though he saw the store of value aspect, he missed the point entirely about what Bitcoin means for humanity. However, he always maintained the $1M price target for BTC’s price: 

“It can’t be otherwise. Look at the Bitcoin supply and its usage. It is so artificially compressed in value right now. It will simply get out of the artificial constraints to where it should be. I mean, there will only be 21 million coins ever, and seven million of them are lost.”

About Blockchain Technology

He was on point with this one:

Well, in 2014 I decided that the blockchain was probably the most revolutionary software technology that I had seen in my 50 years of doing computer science.

No argument there. And to think, it’s only a little part of what makes Bitcoin special.

He Was All-In On Altcoins

The man, the myth, the legend was convinced that Altcoins were the next step.

The altcoins are obviously where the real action is, and there are some super brilliant people there. Things like DAI, the only real stablecoin. It never varies more than 1% up or down from the US dollar. And I dabbled in it, I’ve been watching it, and it’s astonishingly based on smart contracts.

And he was especially interested in stablecoins and privacy coins:

I think there are two things that will survive no matter what is coming in the cryptoworld. Those are privacy coins, true privacy coins where no one can know anything about a transaction. And stable coins, like DAI, that do not vary in value. From a stable item, or an unstable item like the US dollar. DAI has never varied more than one penny from the US dollar. 

XMRUSD price chart for 06/24/2021 - TradingView

Monero price chart on Bitfinex | Source: XMR/USD on TradingView.com

John McAfee On DEXes

One of McAfee’s last projects was a Decentralized Exchange. He was convinced that the world needed it:

We have to have distributed exchanges as users of cryptocurrencies created by the people like Bitcoin and Monero-based or otherwise that’s going to die. Because as China proved two years ago, in 24 hours, they shut down every exchange in China. Overnight. It’s a piece of cake. We have an address where the office is, we go in and we turn off the electricity, or arrest everybody, or you know, just whatever. Easy. So without distributed exchanges we’re lost, because without an exchange what are all these disparate currencies if we have no way to trade between.

Related Reading | Why The Dark Net’s Most Active Market Ditched Bitcoin For Monero

And about governance and decentralization in general, he thought:

I think developers make whatever decision they want with open source code. So problem is open-source. I mean if you wanna change it and put your name on it, and change the wallet addresses to some wallet belonging to you, please god, do so! That’s your fundamental right, all right?!

If you make it open source, you can’t complain about what people do with than after.

So, do we need governance? No!

And, to close this off and finish his thoughts on governance, McAfee had this beautiful insight:

No, we don’t need that to, we trying to get away from it, we trying to develop a system of mathematics that eliminates the need for trust and the need for control.

Rest in peace, John McAfee.

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Can Elon Musk Go To Prison For Manipulating Prices And Shilling Shitcoins?

Elon Musk’s tweets have been a bone of contention for a while now. Every time the billionaire tweeted about a coin, the price of that coin skyrockets. The CEO of Tesla has been promoting coins that are fondly referred to as “shitcoins” on Twitter.

Musk has started with Doge in February when he tweeted out Doge. Then followed up with Doge is the people’s crypto. This immediately sent the price of the coin rocketing as people start buying into the coin. Elon would continue to do these with other altcoins.

One hotly debated topic is the legality of these tweets which seemed to be aimed at manipulating market prices.

Related Reading | Ledger Scam: Scammers Mail Hacked Ledger Devices To Steal Crypto

Some people have called this a version of insider trading. But there is nothing like insider trading laws yet in the crypto space due to cryptocurrencies still being heavily unregulated. There are no laws governing market manipulation. With high volatility, digital assets are very prone to be manipulated.

This is not the first time a prominent person has used their platform to shill coins. John McAfee was notorious for shilling ICOs without disclosing he was paid to do so. Which led to his subsequent arrest in Spain.

John McAfee’s Arrest

During the last bull market which started in 2017, ICOs were the big thing. Dozens of ICOs were being released each day and the market became saturated.

In order to get their coins in front of more eyes, the people behind the ICOs went the route of getting influential people to tweet about them. John McAfee was the obvious choice.

He alleged that he collected $105,000 to tweet about a coin or ICO. According to the SEC, McAfee made $23 million for shilling ICOs.

Bitcoin chart from tradingview.com

Bitcoin price | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView.com

His arrest was not directly for shilling but it was a part of it. Since there were really no laws regarding shilling, the SEC had to go the route of tax evasion. Charges of failure to disclose income from the ICOs and routing his earnings through cryptocurrency to avoid paying taxes were brought against him.

McAfee was arrested on October 5th, 2020, in Spain at the request of the SEC. He is currently being held in Spain. His extradition has not been determined yet. With McAfee claiming he would die in prison is extradited to the States.

Elon Musk’s Tweets

This is not the first time that Musk’s tweets have been a problem. Back in 2018, the SEC requested that Elon Musk be held civil contempt due to misleading facts tweeted by the CEO about his company Tesla.

The tweets included things like claiming the automaker would build 500,000 cars a year. Also claiming that he had secured funding when he hadn’t. These tweets are said to have manipulated the stock price of the company.

Related Reading | Bitcoin Mining Council: We Need To Tackle Negative Media Narratives

In response to these, Elon Musk said that his tweets were part of his right to free speech. And that he was free to tweet whatever he wished.

The ensuing lawsuit led to the outcome that the CEO would have the freedom to use Twitter, with certain limitations. His tweets that are material to shareholders need to be reviewed before being allowed to be posted.

But cryptocurrencies are not included in the list of restricted topics for the billionaire. And so, he has taken to shilling coins on his Twitter account. His latest shilling project being the coin Cumrocket which has absolutely no use case besides being a money-grab. The coin rose over 70 percent after Musk tweeted about it.

There have been no legal steps taken against Musk regarding the tweets. This being that there are no laws that can be said to have been violated at this point.

Featured image from Robb Report, chart from TradingView.com