John McAfee, creator of the antivirus of the same name, is both one of the most prominent figures in the world of cryptocurrencies, and a man with often against current and excessive opinions; this is precisely the case of the latest statements, released during an interview with the news agency The Hill a couple of days ago, which differ markedly from the statements, normally very diplomatic and formal, of all the other important exponents blockchain industry. In fact, John McAfee has declared that it is not the responsibility of fintech companies to prevent crimes committed through cryptocurrencies and they can be expected to be regulated by law to help the authorities counter this type of crime. It is genuinely difficult to blame McAfee when it states that:

"Freeing people from the excessive intrusiveness of an overloaded and corrupt government is more important than countering which small part of crime that uses this technology to commit crimes; you can't expect me to take on this responsibility as an entrepreneur. You can't ask me to help you prevent what could be a future crime "

While McAfee has no problem supporting a thesis that, more or less explicitly, in the community of cryptocurrency enthusiasts we share almost all of us in the blockchain industry, companies are actually committing themselves to comply with government requests by providing support in the fight to phenomena such as money laundering, which, however, inevitably ends up undermining the right to privacy of transactions of all honest people, who are the majority, who routinely use cryptocurrencies. Mind you, no one likes the idea of ​​creating an infrastructure that proves useful to terrorists, large international tax evaders and mafias, however it must also be said that the current regulatory framework has already proved largely ineffective in countering these phenomena for which governments should take advantage of the opportunity represented by the rise of cryptocurrencies to develop new and more effective law enforcement strategies instead of stubbornly defending the existing one, demanding that the same regulatory framework that regulates banking be extended to blockchain companies. It is true that the monitoring of capital flows remains the easiest and most immediate method to bring to light criminal and criminogenic phenomena, just as true however that this type of strategy to date has produced poor results; if we think of evasion it is clear that the best way to combat it is to use the databases adequately and we could continue at this pace for a very long time.

In short, before undermining the privacy of citizens, we should be concerned about bringing into play all those strategies of law enforcement that can legitimately be used to counteract certain phenomena without thereby moving our society towards Orwellian mass control. Once again, therefore, McAfee may appear politically incorrect, but it is almost impossible to say, in all honesty, that what it claims is wrong.