Kill switch
The final bizarre part of this saga is a so-called dead man's switch that McAfee warned his would-be murderers contains 31 terabytes of incriminating data (on government officials) that would become publicly available should he disappear.
Moments after his death was reported, a picture of a giant Q was mysteriously posted to McAfee's Instagram page.
Then, a few hours later, the entire account disappeared from Facebook's image-sharing subsidiary platform.
Neither Facebook nor Instagram has provided comment so far.
Further, the smart contract for the above mentioned $WHACKD token started to come alive with transactions.
Some individuals are speculating that some of those transactions may contain McAfee's evidence.
More likely, however, it was just everyday people like me buying some of this momentous coin, which is available on Uniswap with the address 0xfe9b33ec5dcDe28B885a62766cc4d43a1b5A2494
Not one to let a good opportunity to waste, an anonymous coder has now put up a new WHACKD coin on the Binance Smart Chain, which is due to be delivered as an airdrop in the next few hours. Full disclosure: I may have bought that one as well.
The way I understand a dead man's switch is that it would require a check in from the user on a periodic basis, possibly every few days.
The trigger would likely happen automatically should the old man not respond.
So, we still don't know if there will be incoming data. In all likelihood, there won't be though. It's fun to speculate, but we may never find out the truth.
It's not all that unrealistic that McAfee changed his mind about uninstalling himself and decided to use his death to cause a bit of mischief.
It certainly wouldn't be the first time he reneged on previous communications or caused a social media frenzy.
No matter what the truth is, or how painstakingly annoying McAfee may have been, it's still hard to believe that he's gone.
May he will live on in our hearts and minds, as well as our hard drives, forever.
Best regards,
