After JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon came out swinging against Bitcoin, calling it a “fraud” for not being backed by a legal tender, several Bitcoin investors refuted him. Perhaps one of the most vocal of this opposition is John McAfee, the former CEO of McAfee Antivirus, and now the CEO of MGT Capital Investments.
McAfee says that the war on cryptocurrencies by world governments has begun by the likes of China’s Bitcoin exchange crackdown and Venezuela’s banning of any Bitcoin trading or mining. The news of China’s recent crackdown drove the price of Bitcoin down and caused a major Bitcoin conference to flee from China to Hong Kong.
Despite this, McAfee believes Bitcoin is here to stay. It should be noted that McAfee’s company MGT is heavily involved in Bitcoin mining: “I’m a Bitcoin miner. We create the bitcoins. It costs over $1,000 per coin to create a Bitcoin. What does it cost to create a US dollar? Which one is the fraud? … We have put massive amounts of super-computing power and electricity into creating these coins. Surely there’s some value in that work we did to create the coin.”
McAfee has also gone on record predicting that Bitcoin will grow to $500,000 within the next three years, an extremely bullish call. Ultimately, McAfee doesn’t see a way for governments to effectively stop the rise of Bitcoin. According to him, the trend is too strong, cryptocurrencies are easy to use, and too many people now believe in their legitimacy.
“How do you stop something like this?” he asks. “Government doesn’t have enough people to regulate it.” Further, he says governments will “have to face reality and find another source of revenue.”