John McAfee: I Could Bring Down the US Government

My first question is actually about Libra from Facebook. You tweeted today, a little bit earlier today, that Libra is a grotesque distortion of the original intent of cryptocurrency, economic freedom. And I was just wondering if you could expand a little more on that thought.

Okay. If you read the white paper at the very end, the intent of the foundation is not so much the cryptocurrency, but that the use of the cryptocurrency on their specific blockchain is going to allow the gold, sort of the holy grail of monitoring people. That is a universal digital identification that's going to be rolled into the cryptocurrency, meaning that everything that you do with that currency can be monitored and traced back to you. Now, I'm a firm believer in privacy and even anonymity when it comes to our financial transactions. I believe they should be private. We each have the right to earn a living and to do what we wish with the money that we earned. I mean, if not, then we are still under the control of the financial system we are trying to escape from. I mean, that is the purpose of digital currency, to give control of currency back to the people rather than to governments and institutions that can control the currency that we use. And you need to understand how important currency is to get that freedom. We have to have a decentralized system, and we have to have a system that provides a degree of. Of privacy, because without privacy, then we still are controlled. The reverse of privacy is a system where everything that you do is known. That is, you have a mark on your forehead, your id, your unique genetic stamp that identifies you so that wherever you go and whatever you do is known. This is what Facebook has produced. Please, God, people, we cannot. We cannot tolerate this. Now, they can produce it, but we do not have to use it. Please understand that using Facebook is the abdication of everything that we have worked for, for almost 10 years. So understand what it is. Let them do what they want, but please, God, do not accept it as your standard of currency. It will be the end of your freedom and the end of your privacy.

Can you explain your stance a little bit more about income tax? Because it's put you in this clearly unique position of living in different places, living kind of in exile. I know you have a boat that you live on. Can you talk about, like, why. Why you make that statement that you think income tax is illegal in the.

US I'm talking about America, which is my home country. Our Constitution states very clearly, Congress shall pass no laws to inhibit, restrict or in any way hinder an individual's ability to earn a living. Now, if you're taking 25% of my money, if you're making me work for you, the government, for one quarter or one third of the year, I insist that is inhibiting my ability to make a living, and it is. There are many people in America who believe this. The Libertarian Party is based largely on income taxes. Illegal. It's illegal. They're doing it. They're taking my money. I finally said I'm going to stop talking about it and do something. Eight years ago, I stopped paying. Now they left me alone because the government that was poking me is going to create some sort of backlash. When I started talking about cryptocurrency and how privacy, coins and distributed exchanges could alleviate a person's need to pay taxes. Because the government can never find out who you are, what money you made, and what you did with it. It's not possible. When I started speaking on the national and international stage about that, then they came after me because I am now a direct threat to the system of government in America.

Okay, so you've already sort of touched on the reasons why you chose to be in Cuba in particular, but I just want to come back to that a little bit. So you're running for president, and sort of the base of your campaign and your personal ideals is economic freedom, as you've been describing. Cuba is actually very low on the international list of economic freedom, the index. And I'm wondering if you see any contradiction in that.

Well, not in the least, because let me ask you, who creates that index? Is Cuba asked about it? Do people come to Cuba and actually study what's happening here? Let me tell you something. This is the most entrepreneurial society I have ever been in. Yes, the government does restrict absolutely everything in terms of your making a living. However, there is an undercurrent, sort of a. Not even a dark part. It's just below that is an economic entrepreneurial system which I have never seen before. And it's the same thing in every communist country. In Russia, it was the same. So, you know, people are making $20 a month, and yet they're buying cars that cost $60,000. Now, how do you do that? Ask simple questions. All right? They're doing it by being creative, by adhering to the laws of the government, and at the same time managing to make a good living. So, Jesus, no, this is the most entrepreneurial place I've ever seen. Do not buy America's garbage. Propaganda.

Gotcha. I want to Ask a little bit more about your plan to run for President of the US I'm wondering how you see cryptocurrency in particular fitting into your role, potential role as president.

Now, I could not possibly be president even if I had a platform, even if I. Even if I wanted to, even if I dressed in a business suit and didn't curse no matter what I did, I can't be president. Jesus God. I'm John McAfee. However, I can certainly run for president. So let's not talk about what I would do the first day in office. Let's talk about what I'm going to do while running, which is to raise awareness not just in the US but around the world. Because, believe me, everybody around the world is. Is interested in US Politics. I want to educate people about how fiat currencies are their prison and the means that governments use to make a society of slaves. And this is what I want to educate people about. How do we get out of that prison? We take control first, of our economy, of our currency, of our ability to survive, buy food, clothes, and shelter. Without the currency, you cannot do that.

I want to talk a little bit more about your relationship with the U.S. government. So you last month tweeted about having terabytes of incriminating data on corruption in governments. Plural?

Yes.

Could you go into a little more detail about what kind of data we're talking about? How did you get the data? Can you share some of it or reveal some of it?

Let me give you an example of the kind of data. Now, in order to give a shot across the bow. I was in the Bahamas. The US Government had manufactured these charges against me to get me extradited from the Bahamas so they could try me for IRS crimes. The people who cooperated illegally with the US Government in the Bahamas was the head of the police force and the head of the armed forces in the Bahamas. So I outed those people. They both had secret bank accounts. I published the bank, the name of the bank, the account numbers of the secret accounts, the deposits that came in to these accounts, the dates, the amount and from whom, and the withdrawals in cash totaling many times their annual salary. And believe me, I could bring down the US Government.

So if you have. You've been harassed by the CIA, for example. CIA is interacting with a local government. But have you been, like, personally harassed? You have stories of getting kind of like, calls or emails or contact or something from the US Government.

I'm watched everywhere I go. I'm followed, and I have been for 15 years. Everywhere I go, someone's following me. My security sees them all the time. They alert me to them. This car is firing us. I said, we'll get the license number, I'll have it checked out. And it's always owned by some obscure element of the US government. I haven't released anything. However, if anything happens to me, absolutely, I've got dead man switches everywhere. Within a day of my disappearance or untimely death, there will be every newspaper in the world pouring through more documents that they could, that they could have a hundred people pour through in 100 years. So no, it will be chaos. But right now, I just want to be able to live happily, try to make a better world for my children and grandchildren and fish.

From time to time, you've openly spoken about promoting projects, and often on your Twitter, you'll do a video about a particular company. And I'm wondering, can you talk a little bit about your vetting process for these companies and projects specifically? Because as you know, our industry is kind of infamous for having a high scam rate of scams, or at least having companies that don't exactly deliver what they've promised. So in that environment, given that environment, what's the process you go through?

I would say 90% of what's happening in crypto is a scam. The problem with that is since it is trolls and others can point to anything and say that's a scam and people will believe it. It's a very complex and subtle interchange of energies. But first thing I do is, are you real? Are you people will and have the people checked out. It's a very trivial thing. You ever been in jail? You ever. Have you ever run out on another company and left people hanging and said so on and so forth? But before I even do that, it has to be a project which appeals to me. And sometimes my job is promotion. So of course I charge people for promotion, but sometimes I don't. Sometimes there are projects that really appeal to my heart.

What needs to happen for people to use cryptocurrency on a mass scale, in your opinion?

We have to have more friendly user interfaces. You're not going to get the average plumber and give him a mycelium wallet or any wallet, and say, this 150, 50 digit number is an address that means something and you must copy it somehow or take a picture of this. No, please, God, that scares people. Okay, we need something that has a name. Frank Smith. Okay, I want to send Frank Smith 50, 50 bitcoins or five or a fifth or whatever. And something that provides a common interface rather than having to go to Binance, there's one interface and Kucoin, there's another interface. And suddenly, because no one exchange carries all the coins, so you have to jump around and we need the same thing in wallets. We need the same thing in every aspect of crypto.

Can you give a timeline prediction for how many years do you think that's going to take for when we'll see a little bit more of what you're describing?

Five years. I think the majority of the people in the world will be using crypto for the majority of their purchases. I think in two years time we're going to see a quadrupling of both the number of businesses that accept crypto and the number of people who are using it not to trade, but to actually buy and sell things.

So as pointed out by crypto market analyst Mati Greenspan, there's currently about an 86% chance that Bitcoin will be worth less than 50,000 by 2020. Are you at all concerned about fulfilling your promise?

The growth of Bitcoin? Take the growth of bitcoin, the number of users, the fact that it's going to be three times as large by the end of 2020, if it's not worth a million dollars, then something's wrong with math. I can't lose this bet. Not possible. Mathematically, the market, understand the market is an artificial thing. Right now, as bitcoin gets more and more utility, it will be less artificial and more real. And it's getting that way right now. So those who go, nah, that's impossible, please go back to school.

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