The Quantum Narrative Is Another Distraction
As usual, attention in crypto is diverted to the wrong place, getting people hyped up on BS narratives and celebrating things that don't matter. Right now there's a lot of talk in crypto about quantum computing, and blockchains are trying to virtue signal by saying they're upgrading for quantum computing. But in my view they're missing the real threat and the real opportunity right now, and it's another distraction. I'm not coming up with this off the top of my head, either. I'm drawing from a post by Dominic Williams. To me, Dominic Williams is the number one person worth listening to in crypto. He has been the leader of DFINITY, which has built what I consider the most advanced technology by far in crypto: Internet Computer Protocol. What he's saying about quantum computing matches exactly what I'm seeing.
What I'm seeing is that AI is making the biggest difference right now in crypto. I'm able to use AI to build a website directly on the blockchain, and that's exactly what I've just done. I took my last dating video, dropped it into a folder, used Claude, and Claude cranked out a clip. Then all I need to do is run a Python quicksync script and it uploads that new page to the blockchain. AI has directly changed how I interface with the blockchain, to the point where I can host my website directly on the blockchain with ICP using AI. That is a big advance in what you can do.
What people in crypto are not seeing is how disruptive AI is going to be, both in terms of creating better opportunities, like building everything on ICP with AI, which in my opinion makes almost everything else in crypto irrelevant, and in threatening entire huge technology sectors. I've talked in some of my previous videos about how ICP is a big threat not just within crypto but to the entire tech industry. I made a whole video about ICP taking on the entire tech industry over on my Jerry Banfield ICP channel. AI is huge, and I believe ICP is in the best position for it. So naturally, crypto narratives are pushing people towards quantum, because AI is in a place to destroy the infrastructure that most everything in crypto is built on.
Crypto's Y2K Moment
Dominic Williams goes into this in his post, where he describes how the quantum narrative has become crypto's Y2K narrative. It's scaremongering, getting people to look at things that don't really matter. Then you've got people talking about being "quantum safe," and pointing at things like ISO 222 — an absolutely useless narrative with almost nothing substantial there, yet it gets pushed all over the place as if it's important, and people believe it and make buying decisions based on it when there's nothing to it.
Dominic addresses this as a chief scientist and someone who has created some genuinely interesting applied cryptography — and that's way understated. He's spoken to a lot of senior people in the quantum computing game, and the consensus seems to be that cryptographically relevant quantum computing — the kind that can break established cryptography — could still be decades away. But even if, for the sake of argument, it's coming in five years, which we could theorize might happen with AI's help, should quantum be what crypto is focusing on? No.
A System Built to Distract You
And this is the thing: our entire system of content creation, media, and influencer marketing is set up to constantly distract you from what you really ought to be paying attention to. You're given all these BS narratives, and this is across the board, not just in crypto. You're given fake choices, like two political parties to vote on that seem like they can never reconcile anything. The whole system, as I see it, is put in place to keep you distracted and fighting. The key is that you should never be looking at the things that really matter. Like, should we have a Federal Reserve Bank that controls all the money, that's not even a governmental agency, that the president can't even do anything about? Why is it sitting there deciding huge amounts of monetary policy, loaning money out of nowhere to the government and making interest on it? How does that make any sense? But you'll almost never see any attention put on whether we should get rid of the Federal Reserve or change our currency system. And even when those narratives do get talked about, they end up funneling you into trying to buy Bitcoin or something — and in my opinion, almost everything in Bitcoin is totally centralized.
So this quantum narrative is just another one of these things. Is there some truth to it? Yes. Does Bitcoin have to make some tough decisions to be ready for quantum computing? Yes. But there are more pressing issues. It's just like my personal life. I realized twelve years ago that I had lots of issues, but if I didn't stop drinking, that was my most critical issue, blocking everything else in my life and setting me up so there was no chance of a good life as long as I drank. It didn't matter if I tried to lose weight as long as I kept drinking. In the same way, what we really need to address right now is the infrastructure and AI in crypto, because crypto's infrastructure is set up in a way that's totally junk. Between AI hacking and a future being built on AI, crypto is not at all ready and is extremely vulnerable. So many problems can come as AI advances and more hackers get hold of AI and apply it to the weak infrastructure built around crypto, which can then end up rug pulling the price of the crypto itself.
AI Is the Emerging Threat, Not Quantum
This is where Dominic gets into whether quantum computing should be the focus and whether networks should be switching to the latest quantum-secure cryptography. His answer is no, because it's not as important as getting the infrastructure updated. And this actually makes perfect sense to me, because almost none of these other cryptos are in a position to survive in an environment led by AI, or to have AI build things directly on the blockchain like ICP can without a bunch of other infrastructure. So they always have to use some BS narrative that doesn't matter as much, and signal about it, instead of admitting the truth. It's like saying: our blockchain technology actually sucks and AI is in a position to wreck it, so we really should just start over and quit operations. No — instead it becomes: we need to sell you on some unimportant thing so you keep giving us money, so we can keep surviving while doing nothing useful. That's my read on where we're at right now.
Dominic goes into technical detail about this, and here it is in simple terms as I understand it: AI is getting extremely good at finding holes in open source software. A lot of crypto is open source software, and if you can find holes in that code, you can drain it and exploit it, and the whole thing can end up going to zero. Running open source reduces the need to trust the developer, which is good. But when AI can find holes in it — and can even go after private code by reverse engineering binaries, so doing what Hyperliquid does isn't really a solution either — then when AI can get in there and exploit this stuff, you've got a huge problem.
Copy-Paste Chains With No Engineering Behind Them
On top of this, as I emphasize in my videos consistently, most blockchain projects are just simple copy-pastes of existing blockchain projects. And this point is coming from someone in one of the best positions in all of crypto to give you valid information on the topic. His opinion is much more valid than mine. To some degree I'm an outsider in terms of the tech — I'm an insider in terms of the influencers and all that crap — but Dominic is an insider in terms of the actual tech, and he's saying most blockchains are just copy and paste. They hype up some one tiny unique feature that distracts you from the fact that there isn't really any engineering talent behind them. That creates problems when you have real-time threats. He acknowledges he's an insider, and that most everyone in crypto has departed from an engineering-first approach — all they're doing is chasing quick riches from token sales.
The real situation is that AI is the emerging threat to the industry, not quantum. But if you acknowledge that AI is the emerging threat, you also have to acknowledge the weak infrastructure and lack of engineering that all these projects have. So they can't acknowledge how much of a threat AI is, because then they would have to acknowledge how useless all these projects are. In my view, you're going to continue to see a progression of hacks across the whole industry, as you've already started to see, and the more AI advances, the more these projects are going to get ripped. Instead of focusing on quantum, most chains should be focusing on improving the security of their code and the quality of their engineering. But almost none of these chains can actually afford to spend the money on that, because they've dumped all of it into marketing — and if they don't dump more into marketing, nobody's going to buy their coin.
At this point, I believe there's almost no point in them even trying to improve their engineering, because ICP is so far ahead. Imagine a horse race, first to run one mile, and as soon as the horses come out of the gate, there's ICP running across the finish line. Most of the horses are just going to stop running. The race is over; the jockeys aren't even going to drive them. In my opinion, ICP has already won the game of technology in crypto. So almost none of these other projects have any genuine interest, from what I can see, in improving the quality of their engineering. All they have are narratives and hype and lies and BS and distractions. Because if you find out the truth — and this isn't financial advice — you might do what I did and sell all the other projects for ICP.
Meanwhile, when these chains talk about adopting quantum-safe cryptography, according to Dominic that can make the actual blockchain even more unsafe against AI. The cryptography schemes we use today, which are not quantum safe, have been around for decades. That means they're already strongly tested mathematically, and there's a very good understanding of how hard the existing schemes are to break. Therefore we can have high conviction that today's parameters are safe against classical computers. Here's the thing, though: if you rush to implement these quantum-safe schemes, you might actually make yourself more vulnerable against classical computers. So this is typical crypto marketing, hype, and scare narratives — we shouldn't be rushing to implement quantum-safe schemes that could be broken by AI.
Watch What the Foundations Are Saying
Most of these chains don't care at all about the actual engineering or the tech, because in my opinion they know they've lost against ICP. It's over for them technologically, and they'll say absolutely anything to get your money. As I covered in my last video, if you have coins in your portfolio, you should be watching what their foundations are talking about. You should be reading the things their founders are posting. Then compare them to the things said by the people at DFINITY, and compare their technology to ICP. You might find that some of these foundation leaders come across to you as disgusting, obvious liars — people giving empty promises. You might find that you don't like them at all, and yet you're holding a coin and making them rich off the coin you're holding. All you have to do is click a couple of buttons and you're out of there.
So the truth, as I see it, is that this quantum panic is another PSYOP in crypto, because AI is a much greater threat — and it's ready. We're in the middle of it. At any time, a lot of these cryptos could get wrecked and go to zero, especially because they're all connected. For example, if some liquid staking protocol gets hit with an AI attack on Ethereum, it could spiral into a bunch of other areas. It could take out several layer twos. You could have a whole lot of collapse happen all at once. And when it happens, I'm just going to say I told you so, because it was obvious ahead of time.
Why I Only Hold ICP
To me, the one place to have some safety from that is to be on the Internet Computer. It's a mostly self-contained ecosystem with different buying mechanics and different reasons to use it that are not just related to speculating on crypto. Now, I'm an ICP maxi and I only hold ICP because of the technology — that's my personal position, not financial advice. Every single video I make is designed to show you what a PSYOP the rest of crypto is, and to help you learn about what I believe is the realest technology in crypto, which is ICP. From there, you have a chance to be on the Internet Computer, and I believe you'll have a much better crypto investing experience. If you want to see more of these breakdowns, you'll find them all collected in my Crypto Reviews playlist.
I want to get to know you. I want to know your name and see a picture of you. I would love for you to introduce yourself and help me get to know you — the best place to do that is to join the Jerry Banfield Family on Skool, where I can say thank you personally.
Thank you so much for reading. Bye bye.