I've had hundreds of one on one calls with people in crypto scheduled through my website. And the harsh truth I've seen is that the vast majority of people in crypto have not only lost a lot of money, but have lost a ton of time. And I've been wondering, well, exactly how much money have people lost if you put all of their losses together and then figure in the time loss? So what I did, I've created an incredible research report that's 25 pages from ChatGPT Pro, and I asked it to try and tell me exactly how much money people have lost, as best it can, in crypto, and what we can learn from this.
And I'm putting this full paper, if you want to read all of it, in my Skool community, and it'll be on my website — you can join the Jerry Banfield Family on Skool to read the whole thing. I'm going to put it into one crypto research product that you can buy that'll have like 30 of these papers. Huge amounts of research prepared with my prompts, plus the most advanced AI you can get your hands on in public today.
How Much Money Has Crypto Retail Actually Lost?
So here's the conclusion about how much money people have collectively lost in crypto. And the point of this is to be honest and look at how much money you've lost in crypto, and then to figure out what's the ideal strategy going forward. Now, full disclosure, I've not lost money in crypto. I've made hundreds of thousands of dollars in crypto because I'm the exception. I've made money by being an influencer. I'm one of the insiders that the system benefits. If you're not an insider, you're in the losses. And that's what we're going to see here.
Out of all the research ChatGPT Pro did, based on the long prompt that I put in, it came up with this: retail crypto participation has plausibly produced several hundred billion dollars of cumulative economic harm since 2017. Obviously, no good global data set can prove the exact total. Current on-chain cost basis data suggests the volatile crypto market could be roughly $102 billion ahead at the most optimistic, or $500 billion underwater in aggregate, depending on the unobserved altcoin cost basis. And it gets harder and harder to get data on smaller coins and meme coins and things like that.
So to me, the number that looks most accurate is minus $300 to $350-some billion dollars that I estimate people have cumulatively lost in crypto over the last decade. And to me, that's optimistic. Think about that. $357 billion. And that may not even include how much money insiders have made. Because the hard thing looking at this data in the report is that insiders often make a bunch of money that makes these numbers look better. But crypto retail — most of the hundreds of people I've talked to through my website and one on one calls, most have lost money in crypto.
Some have shown me huge numbers that they've lost. And they ask, what do I do to turn this around? Well, first you need to be honest and look at how this happened, why it happened, what you learn from it, and then figure out, with all that in mind, where do you go forward and how do you not repeat this?
Right now, Bitcoin looks like it hasn't been so bad for investors, because Bitcoin's been around so long and because it has gone up on average — and the same thing with Tron. However, again, it's heavily weighted to insiders who had a lot of the early Bitcoin. So a lot of the money that's actually been made in Bitcoin has not been made by retail. It's been made by people who were very early.
What the Report Supports
Let's look at what this report supports and does not support. It supports that retail participation is badly timed on average. And this is a very important point — this is what's so important to get in your head. If you're honest that you're crypto retail, most of the time your participation is badly timed. You will buy at the wrong time. You will buy high and sell low. And many entrants buy after the price increases. So if you're buying when the price is increasing, you are usually in a losing position. Very well supported: retail participation is badly timed on average, and many entrants buy after price increases.
Also supported: aggregate gains can coexist with the majority of smaller or later entrants losing. This is exactly what I was saying. Even though Bitcoin, for example, looks like people have done well in it, that's because a small number of people made a huge amount of money in Bitcoin. And they've been the ones pushing Bitcoin to everybody. A lot of the smaller people in Bitcoin have actually lost money.
For example, I have a friend. I told her that Bitcoin was an incredible opportunity at $16,000, at $20,000, at $30,000. Do you think she listened to me then? No. She then tells me, when it's $80,000 or $90,000, that she bought Bitcoin. Now the price is $60-some thousand. This is exactly what happens in retail. She doesn't buy when I'm sitting there telling her I'm buying at $16,000 — I was buying Bitcoin every day, and I said, I'm buying Bitcoin every day, now's the time. She said no. But she was following authority. Authority in 2023 was putting Bitcoin down. Then when authority started hyping Bitcoin in 2025, toward the top, she buys it and she loses. Meanwhile, the people who already had the Bitcoin and sold it to her make money.
Also supported: trading, leverage, liquidity provision, and constant attention create structural disadvantages for ordinary participants. And honestly, most of you are ordinary participants. I am not an ordinary participant. Everything is rigged in my favor as a content creator. As an influencer, I've bought coins in the past, sold courses making money off the coins, then the coin pumped when I talked about it publicly, then I sold it. I made hundreds of thousands of dollars while my audience actually lost money. That's why I stopped doing that. I actually quit being a crypto YouTuber for years because I was so disgusted that me, as an extraordinary participant, was in a position to make money with almost anything I was doing. But here's the reality: the ordinary participants get ripped off trading, ripped off with leverage, ripped off with liquidity, and ripped off with the attention. In my experience, the entire system is stacked against retail investors.
Now, yes, not every investor lost money. The decline in market cap doesn't necessarily equal the dollars investors put in, and there's not an exact number. And ChatGPT is a little critical about ICP being an investment exception — it's not, not yet. But to me, ICP is the opportunity — and this is not financial advice — I'm all in on ICP because, to me, ICP is the single best opportunity in crypto. ChatGPT does give it credit for being a credible mechanism-level exception candidate, which keeps coming up when you research ICP.
Where the Money Went — and the Hidden Loss
Overall, it's difficult to calculate these numbers exactly. This was calculated using the best available cost basis method, and the whole-market scenario is tough to actually pin down. The evidence is pretty clear, though, that retail investors get consistently ripped off — it's just difficult to figure out exactly how much. And there's a lot of crypto sitting on exchanges that is very vulnerable. The money crypto retail lost mostly went to exchanges, coins, insiders, venture capital, and influencers — and I'm one of the influencers. These are the entities that, in my experience, have consistently ripped off crypto retail. Then there's the additional complexity of all the fraud, the theft, the custody failures, the lost keys, the amounts exchanges have written down.
But the biggest thing: time is a hidden loss. This, I would argue, is actually the biggest loss in crypto. And the question you should be asking is: is crypto a good use of your time and money? That's why, to me, ICP is the credible exception — the one crypto to set it and forget it and not even worry about it, based on the fundamentals of the technology.
The measurement problem is genuinely difficult when you look at exactly how much people put in, and the report went through and explained how it calculated everything and broke down the numbers it came up with. Overall, Bitcoin profit and loss looks good. But again, how much of that is insiders versus how much is retail that bought high and then sold the Bitcoin low? Almost everything besides Bitcoin and Tron at this point is in losses. Ethereum's in losses. Solana's in losses. XRP's in losses. Dogecoin, Toncoin, and the majority of other altcoins, including ICP, are in losses. Altcoins are one of the absolute worst investments. But Bitcoin — how is that going to hold up in time? Does it make sense to buy Bitcoin from today? In my opinion, it absolutely does not.
If you look at the whole scenario range, this is how the report calculated that the entire market could be up $100 billion or the entire market could be down $500 billion. That's a big range, but the average sits in the middle of huge losses. It's not provable, but it makes sense.
Here's a very key number: 73 to 81% — and this is exactly how I started in Bitcoin. Even in Bitcoin — even Bitcoin — 73 to 81% of retail investors likely lost on an initial Bitcoin investment. And especially with how Bitcoin went up and has been straight down for a year, this is likely very similar today. While most people didn't participate in crypto, the people who did — the median put less than a week of income in, but more than 20% of people put more than a month of income in. Like I have about $20,000 in ICP right now, so that's more than a month of income for me in there.
Aggregate Gains Can Hide Majority Losses
This is a deep report, so I'll give you the key points I found reading through it. Here's a huge one: realized gains, losses, and the distribution problem. Chainalysis estimates realized gains by comparing deposits and withdrawals, assessing gains when users withdraw more than they deposited. This method found approximately $160 billion in gains in 2021, roughly $130 billion in losses in 2022, and a few billion in gains in 2023. Here's the thing, though — those numbers disprove the claim that crypto has only transferred money away from all investors. Real gains were taken. They do not, however, identify how gains were distributed among insiders, early adopters, institutions, and later households. And they don't cover decentralized exchanges, wallets, over-the-counter trades, failed platforms, and so on.
So here's the crazy thing: crypto can create large aggregate gains and still leave most late retail entrants losing. A small group that entered earlier and deployed more capital can realize more dollars than a much larger group loses in smaller amounts. Here's a detailed scenario: imagine 10 early investors earn $10 million apiece while 1 million later investors each lose $50. The market reports $50 million in net gains, even though 99.999% of participants lost. The actual crypto distribution is not that severe, but it shows you it can look like people are making money in crypto while the truth is that almost all retail investors are losing.
I'd say 80 to 90% of retail investors have lost money in crypto — and that's not even including the horrible time cost. And what's even worse is what people often focus on instead.
My $300 Coin Story: How Insiders Win
I had this junk tiny coin I bought that my friend launched in 2021. I put in $300, and in 2022 I sold $15,000 out of that coin. That's $14-plus thousand dollars I made on that coin myself. How did I make that, though? I was an early insider. I was one of the first few hundred people to buy the coin. My scammy friend — who I've since blocked on every platform because his next scam offer always comes along — is actually the one who got me into crypto, but after this final scam I put up with, I was done. How did I make that $14,000 in profit? Because he convinced thousands of people to buy his garbage coin, and I dumped my whole holdings on them, and he dumped his holdings on them, and his friends and other insiders dumped on all the people who bought.
I bought when the price was a few cents, and I sold when the price was a few dollars. Almost every single person that bought over 10 cents lost money. And there were thousands of people who bought over 10 cents. There were like a hundred of us or less who bought it at a cent or two. And this is like almost everybody in crypto.
Then you have these people coming along saying, well, if you'd have bought this garbage coin at one cent and then sold it at a dollar fifty — if you'd have put a hundred dollars into this garbage coin at one cent and sold at a dollar fifty, you'd have turned your hundred dollars into $15,000. But that is a dishonest perspective. It's called paltering, and I talked about it yesterday. It uses data that's real to tell a story that in reality ends up being fake, because nobody would have bought this garbage coin before anybody was talking about it. The only way I bought it is because my friend kept badgering me to be one of the first people to buy it. And then I finally just gave him $300 — that year, I made over a hundred thousand dollars gaming on Facebook, so I gave him $300 so he'd shut up and quit asking me to buy it. Then he takes a year to promote his garbage coin, finally gets the money, gets it to take off. And then I sell it right when it takes off, because I'm like, I'm out.
So almost everybody who participated in his garbage coin lost. And a lot of people would celebrate my position: well, you made $14,000 off of $300. I think that's disgusting. I participated in something that to me was disgusting, and that's why I blocked him after that. I'm like, yeah, thanks for the $14,000, but you ripped everybody off. Everybody that I made money off of got ripped off. And his coin just went to zero after that — as soon as it launched and got on the blockchain, it just went to zero and destroyed everybody. And I saw that coming as I sold. I'm like, this is going to get wrecked. I sold, and it got wrecked. And it's not just the money, it's the time. This is what's unfortunately normal in crypto, so it's even worse than $14,000. And even in bigger coins like Bitcoin, that's still what's happening to retail.
So right now, realistically, retail has lost hundreds of billions of dollars on the low end. This is ChatGPT's best available data supporting a range where, at a minimum, retail's lost hundreds of billions of dollars. The base case — which is where I generated my number — is that retail's lost $370 billion. And a higher case is that retail's lost closer to over a half trillion dollars.
So you've got to realize this is a losing game. And to me, the way to play a losing game is to either find an exception or don't play it. Like I don't go to the casino anymore, because I know going to the casino is a losing game, so I don't go. To me — and this is my belief, not financial advice — the only way to win in crypto is ICP. It's at all-time lows as the best tech in crypto. And I invest an amount I can afford to lose. I can afford to lose $1,000. I can afford to lose $1,000. That's the frame I've found.
Now see, for me as a crypto influencer, if I community-farmed and told you every coin was great, I personally would make lots more money. But I like looking at myself in the mirror and loving myself instead of feeling like a disgusting piece of crap who rips people off. I guess a lot of other people in the crypto space are willing to be a disgusting piece of crap that rips people off in exchange for lots of money and views. I used to be. I'm not willing to do that anymore. I need to be proud of what I'm doing.
Hundreds of Billions Sitting at Risk on Exchanges
On top of all the money retail's lost, there are hundreds of billions of dollars sitting on crypto exchanges that could be lost — that you could easily lose. For example, Andrew Tate said that he got put on the terrorism watch list. From what I heard, it sounds like BS to me, but whether you think it's BS or not, the fact is that as soon as they put him on that watch list, he lost access to his Coinbase account. So if you get hit with anything at a government level, these crypto exchange accounts that are regulated and controlled by the government — they can take those just as easily as a bank account. But you could also lose from the exchange going down, in a different way than you would with a bank account, because they're not insured. And you could lose from the blockchain going down, and from the price going down. So it's way more risky most of the time and, according to the data, with essentially no upside.
There are hundreds of billions of dollars sitting on all these exchanges right now, and these are all risky positions. If something happened with Bitcoin — something could happen with the Bitcoin blockchain, something could happen with a Coinbase Bitcoin wallet — and all the same real-life stuff that could happen to you with a bank account, you have all those risks too. The defensible conclusion in the report is that several hundred billion dollars of crypto is visibly custodied on exchanges. That's not the total wealth, and it doesn't reveal whether the holders are in profit or not.
So you can see that retail just bled to all kinds of different projects, influencers, and paid promotion. Coinbase estimates that they've made billions of dollars just on transactions alone. That's like poker — sitting there playing poker at the casino, the house is guaranteed to win. It doesn't matter about the players themselves; the house is guaranteed to win. And I don't like playing a game where the house is guaranteed to win.
Fraud, Theft, Custody Failures, and Lost Keys
Another layer of this is looking at fraud, theft, custody failures, and lost keys. I've talked to a number of people like this. One woman was telling me, how do I do this with my MetaMask wallet — after she was already in ICP and had tens of thousands of dollars in ICP. Then she's messing around with a MetaMask wallet. And this is a woman who, in her own words, really struggles with technology. I'm like, why the hell are you using MetaMask if you struggle with technology? I helped you set everything up perfectly with ICP, and now you're saying you don't know where your money went in your MetaMask wallet. You screwed up as soon as you downloaded MetaMask and transferred Ethereum off of Coinbase — that was the mistake. And now she's lost her Ethereum in her MetaMask wallet. I don't know what happened; I would guess that she clicked somewhere wrong and got it stolen.
And not just that — people lose their private keys, lose their cold wallets. Custodians have the same problem, just less often, but it's devastating. Exchanges go bankrupt, get hacked, bridges fail. It's nuts how much money has been lost through fraud, theft, custody failures, and lost keys. And this is only going to get worse with AI being able to hack things like bridges and smart contract exploits. People have made accidental transfers — I've talked to some of them — and lost thousands of dollars. I'm grateful that in 12 years in crypto I have never lost money on an accidental transfer, and I've made a hell of a lot of transfers. But these days, I minimize my transfers.
The Biggest Loss of All Is Time
The final thing we'll wrap up with: the biggest loss of all is time. If you get anything truly important out of this, it's that most people are wasting gigantic amounts of time in crypto, and you need to consider the opportunity cost of doing that. This is why, to me, a simple strategy of all in on ICP makes sense — even if ICP goes to zero for some reason, you've still saved so much time that it makes up for it. Whereas most people in crypto are consuming time through price checking, research, social media, portfolio tracking, tax records, wallet maintenance, governance, security, trading, community participation, and recovering from mistakes.
Here are some estimates based on active participants. The base case is 75 million participants in crypto spending two hours a week. That's very conservative — that's a lot of people holding crypto. Because lots of you I've talked to through my website — lots of you told me you're spending 20 to 40 hours a week watching people's crypto videos. I've talked to a number of truckers doing this — and thanks if you're watching my videos, but stop watching other people's videos. Other people's crypto videos are so garbage. It's such an obvious, horrible waste of time. And look at even the base case, the conservative case ChatGPT lays out: 75 million people on average spending two hours a week. Sure, that makes sense if most people just buy crypto and don't pay attention. But you've got to consider there are at least 10 million people in there who probably spend 10 to 20 hours a week watching all this stuff, posting on X getting upset, trading on exchanges, signing into their Coinbase, checking prices.
Look at the opportunity cost. Even if you only have 75 million people spending two hours a week in crypto, which is very conservative, and you value their time at $25 an hour, that's an annual opportunity cost of about $200 billion. If you'd have gotten a little side hustle — made YouTube videos, or had some little freelance gig — you could have made $2,600 that year. And that amount of money — most people don't even have $2,600. Somebody told me the other day that I didn't have money. I'm like, I have like $70,000 to $80,000 in credit.
I have $20,000 in ICP. I have a car that's paid off and reliable. I have tens of thousands of dollars of cash sitting in the bank. The average person doesn't have a couple thousand dollars for an emergency. And yet if you're in crypto, you're putting your emergency money into crypto, and then you're pissing time away that could have made you thousands of dollars a year.
A Trillion Dollars a Year in Lost Time
I think the high scenario is more likely: 150 million participants all over the world, five hours a week on average, at $30 an hour of time. The annual time cost is a trillion dollars. And this is actually the largest loss right here. I'd say that this scenario, from what I've seen, makes much more sense. Maybe the number of active participants is not as high, but the hours per week and/or the value of the time is higher. A lot of people in crypto have more money than usual, so I'd say the time should be valued at $50-plus an hour for a lot of people in crypto — they can make that much working. That looks more accurate to me. A lot of people, if you just worked — if you learned a skill or started a side hustle instead of doing crypto — you'd probably be looking at close to $10,000 a year you could make, instead of watching stupid ass crypto videos where people show meaningless price charts and say the same crap every day. And the only reason you need to watch that is because you're insecure. You don't know if you made the right investment, so you constantly need somebody to reassure you. I'm secure in my investment in ICP. I've done the best research I can.
You can go into more detail on all of this in the report. I'll put it in my Skool community, and I'll put out a product that will have lifetime access to all my reports like this that I do. And I hope I can just help one of you stop burning your time and money in crypto.
The First Step Is Awareness
The first step in this is awareness — realizing that almost everybody doing anything in crypto retail has lost money. The vast majority, probably 80 to 90% of people, have directly lost money. But even more than that, probably 95 to 99% of people have lost money when you look at time as the hidden loss. Probably 99% of people in crypto retail have lost when you count the crypto and the time.
I remember talking to somebody one day who said they were watching 20 to 30 hours of crypto content a week. I'm like, how much money are you making on crypto with that much time into it? How much money would you make putting that time into something else? And it was clear, talking to them, that if they actually worked an extra 20 hours a week, they'd make way more money than they were making with their crypto investments. Their crypto investments were an anchor dragging them down. Almost everybody who's invested in crypto has spent time watching crypto videos. Crypto has dragged you down. So stop letting crypto drag you down.
I'm Here for You
And if you want my support, it's all available through my website. I have a lifetime chat community where you can join the Jerry Banfield Family and you can chat with me all day, every day.
I also have my Officer Banfield book, which is quite an uncensored, incredible story from my time as a police officer. And I have my Skool community where I put these things, and I'll make a new product where I've got all these research reports as well.
I also have calls if you'd like to talk with me. Sometimes I'm online and you can hop on and talk to me for 10 minutes or 30 minutes about exactly where you're at, and I have Zoom calls that can be scheduled in advance.
Helping you save your time and money is why I do my videos. Watching my videos — like the ones in my Crypto Reviews playlist — might help you save hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars losing time and money in crypto, and help you stop watching all these garbage videos. I see who you all watch. These guys don't know shit and are wasting your time. They're just scraping you for time and money and confusing you.
I'm here for you every day, and I hope to see you and get to know you better.