Some Hard Questions for John McAfee About Docademic (MTC)

John McAfee, the cryptocurrency evangelist and insane libertarian billionaire who found a way in the 90s to monetize his paranoia by creating a wildly successful anti-virus software brand (I've always been prone enough to paranoia and conspiratorial ideation myself to wonder whether all the guys making anti-virus software weren't also the ones making all the viruses), has been flogging Docademic tokens (MTC coin) to his Twitter followers all year.

But on closer examination of MTC (Medical Token Currency), I have to wonder whether Docademic, like so many other tokenized services out there isn't just basically a big scam.

If not that, I at least have a really hard time seeing the value of Docademic as a cryptocurrency, or even whether it's actually accurate to characterize it as a cryptocurrency.

I might not know enough about to really understand what it is, and I'm perfectly willing to entertain that possibility, so if you have any answers to these questions to set me straight, feel welcome to fire away in the comments. I'd like to hear from you.

But nothing I've been able to find looking through Docademic's website or on any cryptocurrency news pages that seem excited about it, has been able to answer any of the seemingly obvious questions that come to mind as I investigate Docademic.

For one: A medical token currency? What's the advantage of having a currency that you can exchange for only one kind of service? I mean what's the point of that?

It doesn't make any sense to me at all. It seems like a marketing gimmick riding the wave of excitement over bitcoin and the hopes of unwitting amateur investors hoping to get rich quick off the next hot ICO. I just don't see the advantage of a currency that you can only spend for one kind of good or service through one app.

Why Docademic and not Bitcoin or Dollars?

Why not just buy medical services through Docademic's app with bitcoin? Or with U.S. dollars? Now again, I'm perfectly open to the possibility that I'm missing something here and I just don't know enough to understand. But see this is going to be an obvious question that will occur to others, who are going to be skeptical of this, people who are skeptical of cryptocurrencies in general.

So the answer to this should be clear. If you have a stake in Docademic, I'd be happy to hear from you about this. Because the answer is far from clear looking at MTC's website.

It seems to me unnecessarily complicated for an unclear value add, that to use your service I first have to use my dollars or bitcoins to buy MTC, and then use MTC to buy the services I want. What am I getting out of the extra step you're making me go through to use your medical services?

If you go to the website for Docademic's About page, it is just extremely vague, feel good marketing, not any specific explanation of what MTC is doing that is so special, disruptive, relevant, interesting, or valuable.

Instead it's just the same vague cliches you see on every startup's website. We have a great team. We work hard. We have years of experience. We spent years developing this. Yeah, but what is it that you've been developing? No answer.

What services can you get through Docademic?

Telemedicine can hardly take the place of an in person visit to a doctor. Can a Docademic physician put a stethoscope to my chest and listen to my heart or my lungs? Can they do a blood test? Can they check my blood pressure?

The website says you get medical services, but they must be awfully scant if you're getting them through your smart phone.

Am I missing something here?

Docademic also touts health news every day, but I can get that already for free from a number of sources without buying any specialized tokens that are worthless outside this app.

The website just doesn't offer very much in the way of specifics about what value Docademic is really providing.

Certainly not enough to invest the kind of money that people have put into this. Docademic's market cap is currently over $18,000,000. Which for an app and cryptocurrency that's so vague, with such slim offerings, absolutely boggles my mind.

And John McAfee, who keeps gushing that this is going to revolutionize medicine and make the world a better place because health care prices are so ridiculous around the world– he's been saying this sort of thing all year, but I've never seen him explain exactly how Docademic is going to do that.

He's just hyping it.