John McAfee is Dumb as Hell

John McAfee is a British-American programmer and businessman best known for his creation of the first commercially available antivirus software, McAfee. He is an eccentric personality on social media with a following that adores his viewpoints. Over the last year, McAfee has reached a newer, more hungry audience, that of the crypto-enthusiast. He now offers a $105,000 price tag to tweet about an ICO (initial coin offering) or other blockchain project.  He has made a name for himself in the crypto community because of his tweets on certain tokens, and the resulting market movement. Known as “The McAfee Effect”, he boasts about his influence on the community with his website he has dedicated to cryptocurrency: 

Within the cryptocurrency industry, nothing can match the power of a McAfee tweet. Frequently, a single tweet has resulted in more than a million dollars of investment into an ICO, and multiple currencies have increased more than 100% in price from a single tweet.

Now this sounds just fine and dandy doesn’t it? Is there anything wrong with causing such rapid market movement with tweeting? In short, yes. The first thing we must look at is the makeup of his followers:

McAfee caters to a following of “crypto traders”. From my experience of talking with people who idolize McAfee’s tweets, most have not the slightest clue about how blockchain works or care to learn why it’s important. It’s a money game. 

If we take a look at the “McAfee Effect” result we can see a spike when he tweeted about a token, in this case Electroneum:

The token rose in value nearly 60% immediately, and was followed by a series of pump and dumps as the price began a trend downwards. 

This does nothing to help legitimate companies progress. What is the interest of a company to receive promotion from McAfee? Raising capital is the only result, very few of these “McAfee Effect” drones are looking to use a token to benefit from a decentralized platform. This does more harm than good in crypto and it’s clear to anyone in traditional markets that the subsequent “pumping” following a tweet is dangerous market manipulation. 

Anyone who is new to crypto will see this in one of three ways: 

1. This is a great way to get rich quick
2. This smells and discourages me from involvement in this ecosystem 
3. This really smells but if you look past it there is legitimate technology 

I subscribe to option 3 personally. Partly because I like tech, but also because I fully believe that “get rich quick” is neither real nor sustainable. 

On McAfee’s website he breaks down the pricing structure for ICO teams that would like to experience the bliss of the “McAfee Effect”:

Individual tweets, whether created in Mr. McAfee’s voice or by the company whose products we are promoting, cost $105,000 per tweet. Unless there are special circumstances we will do no more than seven tweets per promotion” additionally, “We turn down over 90% of all companies wanting to buy our services. The reason is that only products and services that Mr. McAfee truly believes in will be promoted. These are products or services that Mr. McAfee has personally purchased or used and is pleased enough with to engage in promotions, or ICOs whose white paper describes a vision in line with Mr. McAfee’s vision and the company producing it has passed our thorough audit.

If McAfee truly believed in the success of projects he “promotes”, it would be better suited not to promote them to a population of new “traders” looking to chase a pump. Those people don’t care about progression other than that of their own wallet balance. Furthermore, auditing projects is fantastic, but blindly following a tweet with the trust of a person’s audit is dangerous, and is more often than not just manipulation. 

Having a basic understanding of ICOs and blockchain use-cases is a good way to start your own personal “audit”. Figuring out applicability and speculating whether or not a project is capable of executing on its idea is extremely difficult. On top of that, scam projects put in a lot of work to make it seem like they are legitimate. 

The Blockchain ecosystem moves at a mile a minute. The predominant reason is because there is massive monetary incentive for innovation in the space. This opens up great opportunities, but also attracts those who are trying to make a quick buck. It will always be hard to deter those who are in it purely for the money and nothing else, but this shows why education is really necessary in the blockchain ecosystem. 

TL;DR: Don’t follow McAfee, or anyone that pumps projects for payment. Do your own research. Ask yourself if you’re in it to actually learn or do you just want money fast?