John McAfee was a larger than life character before he dived into cryptocurrencies. The various obituaries that have been written since his death give a fascinating glimpse into the life of a deeply troubled man with a pent for grand spectable and show boating.
While many will remember him for his various business successes (McAfee antivirus being prominent among them) he will also be remembered as a man that has been on the run from the law for a large portion of his life.
There have been multiple allegations of criminal activity over the years but it was his refusal to pay his taxes that landed him in a Spanish prison at the end of his life with an extradition to the US having been finalised.
McAfee will never be charged but that doesnt mean that the US government wont go after his estate for the money they believe he owes. McAfee has previously been open about not paying taxes as he believed ‘taxation is theft’.
Unfortunately for the US government (very fortunate for their lawyers) McAfee has apparently hidden great amounts of his wealth in different tax jurisdictions, under other peoples names and in crypto currencies.
Piecing together his estate will take years and with the inbuilt privacy of cryptocurrencies we wonder whether the tax will ever be fully paid. To prove which accounts are owned by McAfee we expect prosecution will need communication threads to evidence his ownership (communication threads someone as tech savy as McAfee might have destroyed). To claim the tax they will then need the seed keys to access his accounts (something else that might not be available). Chances are they will never claim his crypto so may take what is due from his other assets.
Dead Man Switch
There is a conspiracy theory doing the rounds that McAfee may have created a dead mans switch. This is in practice a protocol that executes if he (or someone with the keys) does not engage with it frequently. The idea in McAfee's case is that on his death this switch will release terrabytes of incriminating data he has stored on powerful people over the years. McAfee claims he was able to harvest 31 Terrabytes of data after he gifted a large number of laptops to the US government which allowed him to track everything they did.
Wealth Gap Verdict
We dont feel this one has any legs. Technically storing 31 Terrabytes on the Ethereum Blockchain isnt feasible. Storing web links or text is one thing but 31 Terrabytes is a lot so this information (if it exists) wouldnt be stored in this manner.
Ethereum has been used to store censorship resistant data recently though. Someone created a smart contract and laid out the source code in the shape of a monument in memory of Dr. Li Wenliang, the whistleblower of China’s coronavirus outbreak, who died of the disease. This might not seem like much but this little memorial can not be taken down by anyone unless they control the Ethereum network.
The problem with John McAfee is that he had a history tall stories and not so humble brags. We documented in a recent article how he said he would ‘eat his d**k’ if Bitcoin did not reached $200,000 by June 2020 here. Unsurprisingly he refused to see through that particular promise.
Until next time
The Wealth Gap