My friends, you're about to hear the six weirdest things I've done in crypto since I started out in 2014. I hope this gives you some laughs, so let's jump right into it — because unlike my stand-up comedy, which did not give people laughs.
1. I Did Stand-Up Comedy at a Crypto Conference
I did stand-up comedy at a crypto conference. Now, that might make sense to you if I was a stand-up comedian, but here's the thing: I'm not a stand-up comedian. I had never done stand-up comedy in my life before. I prepared a routine that was clean, and clean is not my specialty. If I'm going to do stand-up comedy, my specialty is dark, crazy, insane stuff — think Anthony Jeselnik and baby jokes like that, and lots of Bill Burr, really crazy, far-out-there stuff. And I tried to do something clean. And it totally bombed. So I did stand-up comedy at a crypto conference. Real weird. But it's about to get even weirder.
2. I Asked a Pendulum for the Price of Ethereum
This is probably the weirdest thing I've ever done in crypto. The second thing I've done is I bought a pendulum at a store. You know I'm into real metaphysical, hippie, spiritual — I'm into all that world. So one day I get a massage, and I'm feeling just super chill, and I go to one of the charm stores downtown and I buy a pendulum. I get the idea because I've seen other people using pendulums to kind of get answers. They ask the pendulum questions, and it tells them things they can't figure out consciously, I guess. So I'm thinking, I'm going to use this pendulum to tell me the price of Ethereum — and I'm going to use it to tell me the price of Ethereum in advance. I'm going to ask the pendulum the price of Ethereum, and it's going to pull it from the ether. Get it? Because it's Ethereum, but it is the ether as well. It's going to pull it from the ether and tell me what the price is. And then I'll be able to do longs or shorts, or buy or sell, at just the right time.
So I get home, and I sit down in my studio, ready to go with the lights out, in the mood. I'm like, all right, pendulum. First I test the pendulum out. You ask it things like, is my name Jerry Banfield? And it goes in a certain direction. Is my name Jerry Seinfeld? And then it says no. You ask it other basic questions to set the direction it goes — it'll go in one direction for yes and the other direction for no. So I get it calibrated properly. Then I whip out my phone, and I've got my phone ready to go with the Coinbase app out and the Ethereum price up. I'm like, all right: in exactly two minutes from now, which will be like 12:41 Eastern time, will the price of Ethereum on my phone in the Coinbase app be higher than it is now, at whatever the price was? I was very exact, because with the pendulum you need to be exact with the questions you ask. So I asked very exact questions. And it gave me one clear answer — it'd spin around in the yes direction. Then I'd wait like a minute, refreshing the app constantly. And the pendulum would say higher, and the price would be lower.
So I'm like, all right, maybe I'm just not doing this right. I tried it a few more times, and my accuracy was almost exactly 50%. You literally could have just taken a coin and flipped it, and it would have been just as accurate. That was really depressing. There goes my plan to snipe the price of Ethereum before everybody else knows about it. I set it up like this to test it as fast as possible, in order to waste as little time as possible — and I still wasted a few hours on seeing if I could use my pendulum to predict the price of Ethereum. I guess if it was that easy, every person that shops at one of those stores would be rich. But usually they're not. So that's how that works.
3. I Made a Steemit Account Creation Service
Number three. This is on Steemit.com, which was huge back six years ago when I was on it. I made a Steemit account creation service. If you're like, what? What do you mean, an account creation service? The Steemit team was so incompetent that you couldn't just sign up on the website and automatically create an account. It would get backed up. I was promoting Steemit really heavily in all these ads, the price of it was pumping, there were all kinds of people trying to sign up — and it crashed the service that the official Steemit team provided to create an account. And nobody else had a very good one. All of them you had to pay for, and none of them you could pay for with PayPal, for example. You literally had to end up paying to create your account on this decentralized social media platform.
Now, my Steemit profile was popping off. Before this, I was making thousands and thousands of dollars just blogging on Steemit.com. I made one little post — $120. I made a post called "My dog slept through cancer" — $120, hundreds of upvotes. And then it all started going in a downward trend when I put a Steemit account creation service up. People's main issue with it was that I charged $50 — $50 to sign up for Steemit.com. But I was giving people like $10 or $20 of Steem to sign up, and I was creating the account for them myself with my own Steemit account. In my mind, I was solving the problem: here's a way people can get in on Steemit when the main account service was down. A bunch of people were contacting me saying they couldn't sign up, so I launched my own service. And the other people on the platform were remarkably nasty about it. That's when my posts started getting downvoted, and there was all this hostility that even today is still directed at me. It all started right there.
And then I made things worse by saying I'm sorry for my last post. The reason that made things worse is because I didn't feel that I had done anything wrong. I made a service that had a unique value proposition that nobody else was offering, and a bunch of whiny little piss ants didn't like it. That's not my problem. Now, it became my problem as they downvoted me tens of thousands of dollars of Steem, and it ended up eventually with me leaving Steem, crashing the price. But I didn't feel I'd done anything wrong. I just said I was sorry to try and get them off my back. And that was a big mistake, because it basically told them: hey, you're right, go ahead and keep pushing me around. Sure, I'll just bow down and do whatever it takes. I was trying to get them off my back, but it actually created the opposite effect. Instead of sticking with what I said and being like, "Look, if you don't like it, too bad — this is something useful," I played right into "Oh yeah, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have done that, I was trying to help everybody out, you guys are right." And things got worse after that.
This was an experience I remembered when I changed my race on Facebook in 2022, and that went viral. I remembered to not say I'm sorry. I remembered to not apologize at all, because I felt what I had done was perfectly fine — perfectly right, done for the right purposes, done out of me being me, me showing people new ways to think. A bunch of people were asking if I was sorry, if I had any regrets, and I remembered this post. Absolutely not. I'm not sorry. I have no regrets. And if you don't like it, that's too bad — that's your own closed mind. This was a powerful learning experience for me. But it was something weird, though. Like, who makes a service to create somebody's account in crypto, and then it goes horribly wrong and apologizes for it? This is so weird. But if you thought that was weird, this is going to get even weirder.
4. I Tried to Channel a Lost Bitcoin Private Key
I debate whether this or the pendulum is the weirdest thing I've done in crypto. This is the fourth weirdest thing I've done in crypto. I was browsing through the forums one day, and I found a guy who said that a certain address used to be his Bitcoin address back when he mined Bitcoin, way, way back when. He mined 103 Bitcoin and he lost it — he lost the computer hard drive where he had the private keys. And he said that anybody who could access this address he had lost was free to have the Bitcoin. And again, I'm into all this esoteric, metaphysical intuition — pull knowledge right out of your butt, or your astral body, all that kind of stuff. So I got the idea in my head, and this has been a tough idea to kick. I even messaged somebody about it. You know that guy in the UK who threw out a hard drive with like 8,000 Bitcoin on it? Which, if you multiply that out, would come to hundreds of millions of dollars. You know, the guy who's trying to get the local government to let him dig in the landfill for his old hard drive? I messaged that guy on Twitter one night, saying that if he could confirm the address he lost, maybe I could help him recover it.
And that forum address is an address where I thought, hmm, since the person who used it gave their permission to access it, maybe I could channel the private key into my mind and access the Bitcoin that had been given away to whoever could access it. There's one little problem, though. Now, I understood cryptography and security and the basics, but I didn't understand how nearly impossible it is to actually get a private key correct. In Bitcoin, there's about 10 to the 83rd power different private keys that are possible. You don't understand — that's so big. It'd be like if I gave you the universe and said, pick one atom in the universe. Based on our current limited scientific knowledge, that's roughly the chance that you could guess or find the private key. So I'm thinking that out of the whole universe, I could find one specific atom. I went through a few different approaches, and again I used the pendulum for this one. I tested it a different way from the price predictions. I thought, maybe since predicting the price is predicting the future, that's a different ball game from finding something that already exists — there is a private key that matches this Bitcoin address, and the person who accesses the Bitcoin has been given permission to find it. But could I actually access that through my pendulum?
Testing the Pendulum Against a Random Number Generator
Now, my thinking was, that private key is out there in the ether. I should be able to connect my mind to it, and this pendulum should be able to help me. So I set up a simple test to see if that was realistically possible. I had a random number generator on my computer. I'd pull up a number on the computer screen, sit down on the floor, and push a button on the keyboard. Then I'd ask the pendulum. I'd say, okay, is the number on the screen less than this number? For example, if the range was 1 to 100, I'd ask, is it less than 50? And again, the pendulum utterly failed me. About 50 percent of the time, it was right. I'd say, is the number less than 50? I'd look up and it'd be 90. I'm like, come on, stupid pendulum. If you can't tell me the number on my computer screen that's right next to my face, but that I hadn't seen yet, is 90, then you definitely can't tell me a Bitcoin private key.
There's still part of me that thinks it's possible for that private key to end up in my mind and for me to access this Bitcoin. But that would be a problem in terms of explaining, well, how exactly, Mr. Banfield, did you get a hold of this $3 million in Bitcoin? Well, I found it on a forum. And then basically anybody could come forward and say, no, he stole that from me. And it would just be a crap show.
The Odds of Guessing a Bitcoin Private Key
If you're wondering what the odds are of guessing a Bitcoin private key correctly, the odds are about the same as you winning the lottery. The Powerball and some of these lotteries have odds of something like 100 million or 200 million to one that you would win. Basically you can play your whole life and it's just a tax on stupidity — you're never going to win. But the odds of you getting a certain private key right are approximately the same as you winning the lottery. Are you ready for this? There are about nine or ten zeros on winning the lottery. The odds of guessing a private key are about the same as you winning the lottery nine times in a row. Back to back. Can you imagine playing the Powerball and winning it nine times in a row? That's just a rough little guesstimation, because the odds each time would be a multiplier. The odds of winning it once are one in several hundred million, but then the odds are in the trillions that you'd win it twice in a row. Can you imagine winning the lottery nine times in a row? Well, that's the same odds as getting this private key.
The $9 Portfolio Review That Nobody Bought
So, on to the last two weirdest things I've done in crypto — and this is the most recent weird thing. A lot of you have asked me about your crypto portfolios. Back then I sold a course where a lot of people were having me do video reviews of their portfolios. And I started publicly reviewing all kinds of different cryptos. Then I tried launching a service on Patreon where I offered to review your crypto portfolio for $9, with a thumbnail that I thought was funny. And to my great disappointment — as you've seen, I've been disappointed many times with the weird stuff I've tried in crypto — not one person signed up to have their portfolio reviewed. Not one. Out of thousands of views and tens of thousands of impressions, not one person signed up for a portfolio review. Well, one person tried to sign up and their credit card was declined. Nobody else successfully signed up. Which, on the bright side, meant that was one less thing I had to do, right? And ideally I could just put it all out there for everyone to see. But maybe someday.
The $300 Bank Withdrawal That Did a 50x
The last weirdest thing I've done in crypto — I've saved this for the end, because I actually made a 50x on what I'm about to share here. On June 1st, 2021, I purchased $300 of crypto via a bank withdrawal. I made a withdrawal from my bank account straight to the founder of a new cryptocurrency. This to me was almost like throwing money out the window. I'm like, this is gone and I'm never going to see it again. I bought $300 of his crypto, and I only bought it so he would stop nagging me. He kept calling me, explaining his crypto. I'm like, yeah, that's a stupid idea. I don't know why anyone would invest in that. At the time, I was making tens of thousands a month gaming on Facebook. I'm like, here's $300 for some shut up money. And he left me alone about it after I bought it.
Then I checked back on it a year later and it had 20xed. I'm like, wow, that's real nice. That's great. And then it ended up getting as high as 100x. I sold some at 20x and some at 100x, and averaged out, I sold more than $15,000 worth — like $15,800. I made more than $15,000 in profit on this one $300 bank withdrawal. And it was fairly effortless. I just gave the money away and didn't worry about it. When I saw it at 20x, I sold some. When I saw it at 100x, I sold the rest. I'm like, huh, that was easy.
Your Turn to Share
So those are the six weirdest things I've done in crypto. I know some of you have done some weird stuff too, and I'd love to hear about it. Today, the best place to share your story and hang out with me is to join the Jerry Banfield Family community — we're building an amazing community there, and if you still want my eyes on your crypto questions, that's where to bring them.
For more stories like these about crypto, earning, and everything I've learned about handling money, check out my Crypto Reviews playlist. I'm going to keep making a bunch more crypto videos. I love you each, and I'll see you in the next one.