The passing of John McAfee, the antivirus software magnate turned libertarian rebel, puts us in mind of the time Euromoney went to see him speak at a bitcoin conference on a beach in Thailand.
As we reported in ‘Up bit creek’ in 2018, the conference happened to coincide with a plunge in the cryptocurrency, but McAfee, a keynote speaker, was not deterred.
In his 20 minutes on stage, he took the opportunity to call the US dollar a fraud, advocate the decriminalization of marijuana, call 90% of crypto white papers scams, talk about a new scheme to help a collective of US prostitutes develop their own token system, and to attack Jamie Dimon, the US government, every other government as well, and all of banking.
We reported: “‘I spent two months evading an entire army in central America,’ he says in a low baritone, sounding and even looking a bit like Chuck Norris. ‘Do you think angry words are going to bother me?’”
Arrested
In the end, it was not the central American army – that of Belize, which was searching for him after his neighbour there was found shot dead, before he was instead arrested in Guatemala – that did for him.
He died in a prison cell in Spain after a ruling that he would be extradited to the US on tax evasion charges. He used to say, with great pride, that he had paid no tax anywhere for eight years, calling it “unconstitutional and illegal”. And now, he never will.
This ends a flamboyant and colourful life, and though his views drifted to the almost perversely contrary – “a man so libertarian he once sought the US presidential nomination for the Libertarian Party but lost for being too libertarian”, as we wrote then – he was across issues of regulation and theory that have become steadily more relevant over time.
“Someone said governments are going to ban all cryptocurrencies,” he said on that beach. “It’s a great thing to say, but how? Tell me how you can create a law that will not be enforced? Bitcoin is permission-less.”
