by John Walters
Last July cybersecurity pioneer and magnate and iconoclast John McAfee boldly predicted on Twitter that if the price of Bitcoin did not reach $500,000 by the end of 2020, “I will eat my own dick on national television.”
A little over a week ago, on November 29th, McAfee doubled down on his wager:
When I predicted Bitcoin at $500,000 by the end of 2020, it used a model that predicted $5,000 at the end of 2017. BTC has accelerated much faster than my model assumptions. I now predict Bircoin at $1 million by the end of 2020. I will still eat my dick if wrong. pic.twitter.com/WVx3E71nyD
— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) November 29, 2017
We here at MH are not proponents of self-mutilation, but we do enjoy a brazen proclamation. That’s why we’ve created the John McAfee “Eat My Own Dick” Meter. We’ve assembled a team of mathematicians, plus one Wexford composition book and our iPhone calculator, to determine just how much the price of a Bitcoin must rise each day to keep McAfee ahead of his goal, which we’ve taken the liberty to assume is to NOT eat his own dick on January 1st, 2021.
So here’s the quick math: There are 366 days in 2020, 365 days in 2018, 365 days in 2019, and including today, 25 days remaining in 2017. That is a sum of 1,121 days.
Now, we checked the price of Bitcoin right now and it is $15,506. If you subtract that from $1 million, that leaves $984,494. Unless our mathematicians have erred (please tell us), that means if we divide $984,494 by 1,121 we will reach the average number of dollars bitcoin must rise each day to keep McAfee on schedule. Remember, bitcoin does not take Saturdays and Sundays off. The price is subject to change 24/7/365.
So, our McAfee Magic Number izzzzzzzzzzzzz………. $878.
So, if you’re paying attention, McAfee is waaaaaaaay behind schedule right now. But then that depends on where you delineate the slope of increase. For example, between January 2nd ($899) and November 6 ($6,066), the price of Bitcoin rose $5,167, or an average per day of $16.78.
However, between November 6 and today, the price of Bitcoin has risen an average of $308 per day. That’s still less than 1/2 of what McAfee needs to keep his eggplant emoji, but it’s nearly a rate of 20 times greater increase in the past month than the first 10 months of the year. At that rate of increase, McAfee will blow past his goal of $1,000,000 by 2020 easily.
In peril?
As you may have guessed now, none of the MH staffers ever took a statistics course in college. However, we’ll do our best to make the John McAfee “Eat My Own Dick” Meter at the forefront of the analytical vanguard. Each day we will recalibrate the rate of return McAfee must meet to maintain (or catch up to) pace in order to retain his member.
So while he needs to average $878 per day today, that number is subject to change each day based on the previous day’s performance. I think this is where calculus kicks in. Anyway, we look forward to bringing you the John McAfee “Eat My Own Dick” Meter each day as part of It’s All Happening!