John McAfee Found Dead
CRYPTODAY 009
John Mcafee was found dead in his prison cell in Barcelona a few hours ago in an apparent suicide. My older readers will probably know him as the founder of that antivirus software that you can never seem to fully uninstall from your PC, but he actually reinvented himself as a professional crypto evangelist in 2017. Since then his life has been a rollercoaster ride that the crypto community has followed with rapt interest. Famously, he made a bet that Bitcoin would hit $500,000 by June 2020, or he would “eat his own dick on national TV” … a claim that I lampooned in this old Cryptopop cartoon:
To say that McAfee was a divisive figure in the crypto world would be an understatement. With about a million followers on Twitter, he launched his “Coin of the Day” initiative back in December 2017, a daily post featuring altcoin projects that he liked. His picks became pump-and-dump extravaganzas, in what the community started referring to as “the McAfee effect.” It was later revealed that he was charging $105,000 per tweet. This article from Coininsider highlights some of his earliest picks and compares them to current market prices. He was arrested in October 2020 in Spain for fraud and tax evasion, and had been scheduled to be extradited to the US prior to his suicide. Very recently, his wife compared Elon Musk’s recent market-moving tweets to McAfee’s, saying that the latter faces the “possibility of dying in prison,” while the former continues to do so “with impunity.”
The conspiracy theorists are now running wild regarding the circumstances of his death. From @officialMcAfee on Oct 16, 2020: “Know that if I hang myself, a la Epstein, it will be no fault of mine.” His Twitter feed becomes a rather depressing (although still fascinating) read once you know how it all ended up.
I couldn’t come up with a good transition here that wouldn’t seem supremely disrespectful, so I’ll just segue ungracefully into this very interesting Twitter thread from my friend Eric Wall, that started out as a miner Q&A but transitioned into a takedown of the “Stock-to-Flow” Bitcoin price model and a reminder that “markets are people.”
If you don’t know what S2F is, it’s an attempt to forecast Bitcoin’s price performance by looking primarily at its supply and issuance. My personal opinion on S2F is that it’s empirically wrong, and is marketing fluff masquerading as academic research. There are a couple of great takedowns of S2F all over the Internet, but this one is nice and straightforward.
My friends at BitRefill are expanding to the Philippines, and are looking for a customer ambassador to focus on our market and community. If you’re a Bitcoiner and know your way around the local community, check them out! https://careers.bitrefill.com/jobs/1226658-customer-ambassador-philippines
It’s NFT day! I’m launching my new work “T4N6” on the brand new Binance NFT marketplace at 3pm today (Thurs, 24 June). Yesterday I did a show with local stock trading guru Marvin Germo for his Youtube channel where we talked about NFTs and how I think it’s opening up a lot of doors for up-and-coming Filipino artists. There was also a really detailed article on BusinessWorld featuring my work and the growing Philippine NFTart scene.
See you all later at the launch, cryptofam! Head on over to https://nft.binance.com at 3pm Manila time and check out all the great stuff from a hundred different Asian and European creators.