The John McAfee Twitter hack and the crypto exchange chaos

A few days ago, something odd happened in the crypto world that made me ROFL. If you don't know the full context, it is already pretty funny. But wait till you hear the rest....

It started some time before this happened:

Urgent: My account was hacked. Twitter has been notified. The coin of the day tweet was not me. As you all know... I am not doing a coin of the day anymore!!!!

— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) December 27, 2017

So cybersecurity pioneer John McAfee gets hacked... Oh, the irony! It made the news, ofcourse. But I couldn't find many reports covering the full story.

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Lately, John McAfee had the crypto market on its toes because he started posting "Coin of the day" recommendations on Twitter. A recommendation would (in a split second) result in a huge price pump of that coin on the exchanges with a soon following dump back down.

Not everyone was that happy with that. It made those coins unstable and many (mostly n00b) traders just were too late and ended up buying into a coin way too high, losing a lot of money. Rumours were going around that McAfee was getting paid to manipulate the market and many haters jumped on top of the situation, criticising the hell out of it. A different rumour was that McAfee would buy bags of coins before the tweet to profit from it himself. Photoshopped "proof" started circulating, fake accounts were opened and things became super confusing. It surely kept McAfee busy replying to all that stuff.

Soon (not soon enough?), McAfee realised that his followers weren't really profiting from his updates because there were bots waiting for his coin of the day that couldn't be beaten in speed.

I am working on fooling the bots. It is an unfair technique which disallows ordinary people from participating in owning sound coins.

— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) December 25, 2017

He has a plan to fool the bots. People started betting that he was going to use pictures and they were right. I guess there must have been soms bots able to OCR these, so I wonder if it really made a huge difference. But let's say: A for effort!

It didn't satisfy the haters... and he also got complaints from more influential people. So he informed his followers he would turn it into a coin of the week.

Due to heavy pressure from crypto adherents, exchanges, developers and every other corner of the earth (and God himself chastised me in my dreams last night), the "Coin of the day" will become "Coin of the week" starting immediately. You can look for it every Monday morning.

— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) December 26, 2017

Only one day later, just when McAfee was on a boat unable to reach AT&T, tweets started showing up that didn't look like they were McAfee's. One by one new coins of the day were called with the inevitable following pump & dumps on the exchanges.

I am just hoping people figured it out that there was something fishy going on and didn't invest after these calls. But looking at the charts, it was mostly those hated bots that started responding and not the human traders. In the chatbox that I was in, people started anticipating the next coin of the day and already bought before the call, to sell at a higher price to the bots. You can imagine that this became a hilarious situation pretty fast. The whole market was in chaos, just watching all this coins going crazy because of a hacker on the John McAfee account.

So there we go... McAfee's "working on fooling the bots" seemed to have worked out pretty nicely. Maybe not the way he intended, but because of a hack. Or was it? All I can say is that I hope that the people behind the bots lost a lot of money and learned their lesson....