You are about to get a full, honest Jerry Banfield take on crypto, where I explain why I have come to believe that 99% of crypto is theft and only about 1% — the Internet Computer — is providing real value for humanity. Keep in mind, I am not a financial advisor and this is not financial advice. I am holding at least 5,000 ICP right now, as well as coins on ICP like OpenChat, my JBBJ meme coin, and Decide AI, so I am clearly not unbiased. But what you might be interested in is what I have seen in eleven years that makes me this skeptical and, honestly, this hopeless about crypto.
Cut away the charts and the hype, and what's left is mostly empty
When I look at crypto and cut away the price charts, the narratives, and the hype, what is left is mostly useless technology. And I get into even further dystopia when I see that so many of the crypto videos you all watch are pushed by bots. I have seen it firsthand. I have talked to other YouTubers firsthand. There are ways to make a video popular using bots, and it looks to me like a lot of the coins that are at the top — and even some smaller ones that are more serious about marketing — are pushing their videos blatantly with bots. The way I see it, everything you see in crypto is just this matrix of lies and theft, while the real technology is actively hidden from you.
I am on OpenChat instead of Discord or Telegram, which is hosted fully on the blockchain. And yet a major data site recently took ICP off one of its screeners, because in my view they do not want you to find that anything has real value. When you do see that something has real value, it makes it obvious that the rest of crypto is just theft.
People keep missing the real chances
I talked to somebody the other day and reminded them that I had said Bitcoin and Ethereum were great buys at around $16,000 to $20,000 for Bitcoin. They told me, "Yeah, I just bought some Bitcoin and Ethereum." I said, it is $80,000 now. I told you about it when it was a good buy — now you have missed the chance, it already 5x'd. And yet the technology behind Bitcoin and Ethereum is basically useless without centralized third parties like crypto exchanges facilitating trades and interacting with the blockchain for you. It is all so crazy.
This has gotten so crazy that I am giving up on trying my hardest doing crypto content. What I am going to do instead is run my live streams with crypto thumbnails and crypto titles, take clips of those, and put those out as videos. But most of my crypto streams from now on will just be me hanging out, playing games, and chatting. Because almost all people even want to talk about in crypto is the theft part of it. Is Trump doing this? Are the tariffs doing that? Is the market going down today? Is the Fed doing this? All of that stuff, in my experience, is a waste of your time. Almost everybody involved with crypto is purely wasting your time, and then trying to hide the Internet Computer, which has real technology.
There is no guarantee the real technology even wins
There is no guarantee that the real technology is even going to win, because when there is so much profit to be made from stealing from people off of technology that is not good enough to provide a real crypto Web3 experience, then the real deal becomes threatening. So the 99% want to keep the real deal hidden and suppressed as much as possible. I hope we can break out of this insanity, and by communicating this to you, I hope this is part of helping people not get stolen from.
In most of my eleven years in crypto, I quit once because of exactly this. Back then ICP did not exist, and all I could see was lying, cheating, and stealing. I have gotten to the top, I have seen it myself, and I know what it looks like. From the inside, it is people purely thinking about how they can make the most money for themselves, and it does not matter what happens to you. In fact, the insiders laugh that they are ripping you all off with this new blockchain or that new meme coin. And then the average person I talk to on the street is so misinformed it hurts to have the conversation. They will say, "Well, XRP could go to $10,000." And I have to explain that is financially impossible — for something with a $100 billion-plus market cap to 3,000x, it would be worth as much as all the wealth in the entire world combined. And what does the blockchain itself do? Sends transactions. That is how delusional it is. XRP is not special; you could say the same thing about almost any other coin. I try not to mention specific coins, because 99% is theft, and basically anything outside of ICP, I have no confidence that there is any reality to it.
Why almost everything in crypto is paid
And no, I am not getting paid anything from ICP to share this. I am sharing it because it is the best way I can think of to help somebody. But you can see one reason 99% of crypto is theft: because almost everything in crypto is paid. Many of the top YouTubers feel they should not even bother talking about the best technology in crypto when they are getting paid to talk about the theft — when they get more views talking about the theft, when they get more views pushing junk coins with no real value. Why would they talk about the real value? I could get more money stealing from you, lying to you, and cheating you. I could make millions more dollars if I would participate in the theft, pushing these altcoins, putting certain words and certain coins on my thumbnails. If you put certain words and certain coins on your thumbnails, the bots will push those videos, because they want those to go out to the masses. And when you see a coin with certain words and numbers on it enough times, you will subliminally believe that is going to happen, even if you analyze the practical reality and it looks ridiculous. To me, 99% of crypto is just a mind-control scheme designed to steal from you, and I cannot stand it. It is horrible, and I absolutely hate it.
What I'm doing from here
So what I am going to do is just hang out, read the chat, and play video games on my channel. I deleted all my crypto videos before, because I had put up all these videos about ICP and, in the short term, almost all of them in terms of the investment were wrong. Why? Because the whole system is set up for theft. It is set up to steal from you, and in the short term nothing about the technology matters. Hopefully in the long term that changes with Caffeine AI, but we shall see. I am going to take this clip and put it on X by itself, clip some other parts, and essentially give up on trying my hardest to make the best crypto information, because at this point I will just hang out and chat. If you want the fuller picture of how I think about money and crypto, you can watch my Money playlist here. Until the incentives change, my honest take stands: 99% is theft, and I would rather tell you that than sell it to you.