From $2 million to Zero : What John McAfee Thinks of Bitcoin? What’s His New Favoured Crypto?

You may know John McAfee as one of the biggest supporters and defenders of Bitcoin. The former security software engineer-turned-crypto-influencer has been very vocal and bullish about the leading cryptocurrency for the past few years.
He has appeared on numerous TV interviews on mainstream media and crypto vlogs, always making bold statements about the future of Bitcoin.
In 2016 and 2017 he was betting on ‘bitcoin going to $500,000 by 2020. In late 2017 he even doubled that figure to $1 million in an epic tweet that goes down in history as one of the most ludicrous statements ever made:

When I predicted Bitcoin at $500,000 by the end of 2020, it used a model that predicted $5,000 at the end of 2017. BTC has accelerated much faster than my model assumptions. I now predict Bircoin at $1 million by the end of 2020. I will still eat my dick if wrong. pic.twitter.com/WVx3E71nyD

— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) November 29, 2017

He didn’t even stop there. He kept doubling down on his prediction and it was just last year (2019) when during the AIBC summit in Malta he made his boldest Bitcoin prediction by far:

“If Bitcoin is less than $2 million by the end of 2020, then mathematics itself, is a flawed discipline.”

Strange how only a few months later, we find John McAfee making a complete 180, stating that Bitcoin is now worth nothing.

It’s as if his interest in Bitcoin ended with the demise of his mining business.

Indeed, 2020 was supposed to be the big year of Bitcoin according to the eccentric entrepreneur.
Instead, he forgot about it altogether.

He first hinted on this at the start of 2020, when he retracted his bet in another public tweet where he called it a ruse this time. Then he took a more direct approach in April with this response:

I have no clue

Bitcoin is worthless.

— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) April 4, 2020

And now we saw him solidify this opinion during a recent interview that he did with The Cointelegraph, published in May, just days before the third Bitcoin Halving, in which he discussed several topics, including his threat to reveal Satoshi Nakamoto’s true identity and why Bitcoin is of no interest to him all of sudden:

“Every job that I take on, I get paid in crypto… why bother with fiat. Why bother with a bank? We don’t have such things anymore… All I do is Monero. Monero or Dai. Bitcoin in no way, shape or form is remotely interesting to me. I don’t pay attention to it. Bitcoin is a useless coin, guys. Always has been… It’s got no privacy. You cannot put a smart contract on it. So what the hell is a blockchain for? And if you can’t run distributed apps on it. It’s an ancient use… if you think it’s not? Find anybody that takes Bitcoin anymore. Nobody. Go on the dark web, which used to be all Bitcoin. Not a single vendor will accept Bitcoin. It’s 99.9% Monero. Monero is the most widely used coin in the world. You go: “Oh, but Bitcoin is.” No. Nobody uses it.”

At this point it comes as no surprise that McAfee – a fugitive from the US government for quite some time now, would be in favour of a privacy-oriented cryptocurrency and to endorse Monero in such a direct way should have caused major impact on its market value. Alas, it didn’t. The truth is, McAfee has lost a lot of his credibility since his random shilling of coins during the 2017 boom of crypto. Gone are the days when a single tweet from him would cause a price jump of 100% or more. In addition to that, his numerous Bitcoin predictions have also diminished his influence in the crypto community, most of these have become nothing but funny twitter memes.

As for his promise to reveal the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto (yet another controversial tweet he made in 2019), he had this to say:

“People think Satoshi designed Bitcoin. Nonsense. It was a team of 11 people over a period of 5 years, that came up eventually with this. How they decided who would write the white paper? I don’t have a clue. But anybody who wants to know who it is, I mean… You know who the options are. You got Craig Wright – it wasn’t him. I’m not going to name anybody else, so you’ll figure it out. But somebody wrote the white paper. Well, if you read the white paper, number one: It’s totally clear he’s English. Every single word that has a different spelling in English and American is English.
Number two: He left “tells” – there’s only 5% of the population that has 2 spaces after a period. Everything was two spaces after a period. And the format of that the document was identical to documents that he had published, professional academic publications. Identical. So now, if you buy a $200 authorship program and you take the white paper and you run it through and you take any one of the papers that this guy wrote…and all of those people wrote papers, by the way. Only one comes out 99.9% probability it’s him.
So I have spoken with him on the phone. I was actually going to divulge who he was. Why? Because all of this nonsense was just stupid. People wasting time over nothing. I was gonna say: Listen, it’s this guy.
You know what he told me? He said: Ok, what if you’re wrong?
Because if you’re right, that Satoshi is gonna have to 50 security guards and change his life. Or else he will die. You know, this is going to happen. Why? Everybody is going to want a piece of him, including the governments that demanded he pay taxes. Ok, that’s if you’re right, then that person has the ability to do so.
But what if you’re wrong? You would have destroyed an innocent man’s life forever and probably caused his death.
And at that moment I said; I understand. I will say no more. And your name will never leave my lips, which is why I never continued to ask Craig Wright (to stop) because the name would have to leave my lips.
So if you want to know, figure it out yourself.”

At least we can rest assured that for now Satoshi stays anonymous.

That’s a relief… for now.