Today is John McAfee’s 75th birthday.
John was born in 1945 in an American base in England, in Cinderford where his father worked. His mother was English, but he grew up and lived in America in Salem, Virginia.
His father passed away prematurely due to alcohol problems, committing suicide when John was only 15 years old, which affected him during those years, bringing him closer to alcohol and drug abuse.
But that didn’t ruin his career, quite the contrary. In 1967 John received a degree in mathematics from Roanoke College, which earned him a place at NASA’s Institute of Space Studies in New York until 1970.
Over the years he worked in various computer companies such as Xerox, Booz en Hamilton and eventually Lockheed where he worked to defeat the infamous Brain, a virus for MS-DOS systems.
And so in 1987, he founded McAfee Associates, specializing in antivirus. Over the years, the company made a lot of progress until Intel itself bought the entire division in August 2010, maintaining the McAfee name until 2014 and then re-branding it into Intel Security.
After that John participated in several projects such as Tribal Voice, PowWow, QuorumEX, Future Tense Central and also in the development of the DCentral application.
In 2016 he joined MGT Capital Investments as CEO, moving from social gaming to cybersecurity.
John McAfee enters the crypto world
And it was here, at MGT, that he started mining Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. In this way, he came into contact with the blockchain industry.
In 2018 he left MGT and joined Luxcore.
McAfee is best known in the crypto world for his Bitcoin price predictions. According to him, sooner or later Bitcoin will reach one million dollars, although a couple of months ago he discredited the whole project by calling it a shitcoin.
His latest projects include Ghost, the privacy coin using the PoS (Proof of Stake) consensus protocol, but last month he abandoned it due to disagreements with the team.
Another thing to mention is a film that is being made about his life, starring Zac Efron.
McAfee’s political career
Not even a political career is missing in McAfee’s life: in fact, in September 2015 he announced his candidacy for the US presidential elections. Obviously, he didn’t succeed, as he himself explained in an interview stating that he was running not because he thought he would win but to attract media attention.
