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.
Whichever Bitcoin Maximalist came up with the term "Shitcoin" for all other coins;
Was brilliant.
But we all know that the future of Crypto rests with the Alt Coins.
Bitcoin –
Old, clunky, no security, no smart contracts, no DAPs ….
Is the true Shitcoin.
— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) January 29, 2020
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.
Here's what I find funny: Ethereum is trashed more than any currency, and yet no currency is more necessary and central due to It's smart contract platform that is used by more than 50% of all new altcoins. It's like everyone values water, but not the containers it is carried in.
— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) March 29, 2018
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.
Does anyone else see the insanity of virtually all of crypto being tied to the value of Bitcoin?
Why for example, should Monero, whose value is its Privacy, be tied in any way to a coin that has ZERO privacy — Bitcoin?
— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) May 1, 2020
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.
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
A CHALLENGE TO MEMBERS OF GONGRESS
Are you willing to be tokenized on the Blockchain – meaning every penny that comes into or leaves any of your accounts must be digital, and every penny placed on the blockchain so the American people can forever see its movement?
If not, why?
— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) January 7, 2020
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!
The SEC and IRS tell me I was wrong to create an anonymous and unrestricted DEX for use by law abiding citizens because criminals may also use the exchange. That's like saying automobiles can't be built because bank robbers will use them as getaway cars.https://t.co/HdSEYi9krq
— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) November 12, 2019
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.