MGT Capital Investments, a New York-based investment firm whose CEO is John McAfee, announced the company will start mining Ethereum.
MGT already started mining bitcoin in July 2016 with the firm reporting in September 2016 that they are mining approximately 90 bitcoins per month. At the time, the company said that the bitcoin they mined in a month held a value of $55,000, however, since the price of the cryptocurrency surged up, 90 BTC has a value of about $236,000.
The publicly traded company pitched itself to investors mostly as a cybersecurity company, according to Business Insider. This industry is where John McAfee got his name with the antivirus product of McAfee LLC.
McAfee recently started to turn a major focus on cryptocurrencies. Last month, the cybersecurity guru said that the MGT will turn profitable with bitcoin mining in the center of activities of the firm, and have a goal of becoming the biggest in the world.
“We will definitely be profitable before the end of the year,” McAfee said in a phone interview to Bloomberg. “From bitcoin mining, we will get the experience and expertise to apply the blockchain to our security products.”Just after McAfee was named the CEO of the company, MGT’s stocks rose by 63 percent in one day. The cybersecurity expert is confident of his role in MGT:
“I don’t know anyone more capable than me,” said McAfee. “I have never lost in terms of business and I certainly don’t intend to start now.”
Ethereum can also be mined like bitcoin by computers that solve complex computations. On June 23, MGT announced that the company reached an agreement with Bit5ive LLC to purchase 60 graphics-processor-based mining computers, which will be used by the firm to mine for ether.
“We are more convinced each day of the growth and value of digital currencies, and our company is uniquely positioned to be a leading provider of processing power to relevant blockchains,” McAfee said in a statement.
McAfee is among the minority who predicts that cryptocurrencies will rise. In early June, billionaire Marc Cuban called bitcoin’s recent price surge a bubble. In addition, Panos Mourdoukoutas, Professor and Chair of the Department of Economics at LIU Post in New York, also foresaw that the “bitcoin bubble will burst.”
On the contrary, McAfee stated earlier:
No matter how much government and regulators may scream and complain, there will be a world standard alternative currency. Bitcoin appears to be the one… It cannot possibly be a bubble.
Featured image from Gage Skidmore/Flickr.
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