You're about to read something that may be hard to digest: the dark, ugly, disgusting side of Bitcoin underneath the doctrine that people are preaching today. I've owned Bitcoin. I bought my first Bitcoin as early as 2014, so I've been in this for 11 years. I've researched thousands of altcoins. I know this information is difficult for some of you who are holding Bitcoin to process, but I believe it's incredibly important that you do.
Before I go any further: I'm not a financial advisor, and this is not financial advice. Here's a fact that should make you stop and think. I hold tens of thousands of Internet Computer Protocol, but I have zero Bitcoin in my wallet. As much as I know about crypto, you should ask why. Why doesn't he have any Bitcoin despite all of this?
The Comment That Inspired This
Let me show you the comment that inspired me to make this. Someone told me I'm crazy to say that Bitcoin sucks and to warn people not to be invested in Bitcoin. First of all, I'm not telling you not to be invested in Bitcoin. I'm telling you there are very important things you need to think about that sit outside of what I call the Bitcoin doctrine.
The Bitcoin doctrine is that it's the only thing in crypto that has stood the test of time. That's not true. There are plenty of other cryptos that have stood the test of time too: Litecoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin. Plenty have been around a while. Yes, Bitcoin has stood the test of time better than most, but the real question is where things are going. Let's get off the past and look at where the future is going.
Apple, Amazon, and Google have withstood the test of time as well. And I actually use the products they create. I don't use the Bitcoin blockchain, but I use Apple, Google, and Amazon every day. They've stood the test of time, but I have no interest in investing in them because I think they're already accurately valued. I don't see why I'd invest in something that's already accurately valued.
Then came this whole rant that ICP sucks in comparison, that tech is light years past it, that ICP is a terrible investment. But in my experience ICP gives you a return. It's valued 500-plus times less than Bitcoin. To me, it's the only thing that delivers the full value of blockchain that nothing else does.
When an Investment Becomes a Religion
Here's the thing. This person said they still hold Bitcoin as a core holding. And this is exactly where I see people turn Bitcoin into a doctrine, into a faith or a religion, rather than dealing with the reality of it. This pattern is typical for most people, and it's so important. If you can personally break past this level of thinking, this level of treating it like a religion, you've done something rare.
Look at my response in that exchange. I said: your reply didn't address any of the issues I pointed out that are critical. The massive amount of Bitcoin held by centralized entities. The fact that almost all transactions occur through centralized entities, not even through the blockchain itself. The fact that Bitcoin mining is nearly totally centralized. You can look this up easily yourself. The fact that there's a small number of people on the Bitcoin Core GitHub, which is not meaningfully decentralized. The fact that there's an anonymous founder, which means there's a huge wallet that we have no idea what could happen with. If the founder has truly passed, which I don't believe the holder of those keys actually has, then somebody has that wallet. And being anonymous, there's no transparency. And the fact that to interact with Bitcoin, almost everyone has to go through a third-party interface like a Ledger wallet.
The response I gave is based on cold hard facts that you can easily look up and that I've shown in a bunch of videos in the past. The way the reply came back to me sounded more like what you'd hear at church if I were speaking against the doctrine than like a discussion of the actual facts of Bitcoin as a reality today.
The Ugly Reality Underneath the Hype
What I think is massively important is that we look at the absolutely ugly, disgusting reality of Bitcoin today: almost nothing that's said about Bitcoin, almost none of the narratives and the hype, actually plays out in reality.
When you hear about how decentralized Bitcoin is and you go look it up, I don't see almost any decentralization at all. You've got five or so miners that control mining. There's literally one that has a third of the hash power, and a second one such that the two of them together hold 50%. That's not decentralized. The holdings, if anything, have been getting more centralized.
If you're holding Bitcoin, there's a good chance you're holding it on a centralized exchange. There's a good chance you don't even actually have real Bitcoin. I estimate there are hundreds of billions of dollars of Bitcoin that people think they have right now. If we all had some way, like on Internet Computer, to take a snapshot of the Bitcoin that crypto exchanges and ETFs are telling us we hold, and we combined that snapshot with all the holdings actually on the blockchain, there'd probably be millions of extra Bitcoin. Paper Bitcoin. Bitcoin that has been sold by a centralized entity but doesn't actually exist on the blockchain.
That's possible because almost everybody holding Bitcoin has some centralized entity holding it for them. Because of that, the centralized entities like crypto exchanges and ETFs are able to sell fake paper Bitcoin and make themselves huge amounts of money doing so. You have no accountability or transparency to stop that from happening, unless you take your Bitcoin off the centralized exchange and put it in a wallet, which then generally will be a third-party wallet like a Ledger or a Tangem. And if you lose access to that third-party wallet, you can lose access to your Bitcoin. That's an ugly reality today, especially when you compare it to Internet Computer, where you can go straight into the blockchain on a web URL.
Why I Sold All of Mine
When you look at the market value of Bitcoin, it's already valued alongside some of the most valuable companies in the world. To me, Bitcoin has just become a Ponzi scheme at this point. I don't see any reason why someone new would buy into it. I sold all my Bitcoin in profits years ago, because I don't want to hold something that today is not fulfilling the value cryptocurrency is meant to deliver.
The goal of Bitcoin when it was created was to cut out the middleman, to cut out the trusted third party moderating the transaction between you and me. The reality today is that for almost everybody doing anything with Bitcoin, the third party has slipped back in. The insanity is that people treat Bitcoin like a religion instead of treating it like an investment. An investment is something that should be researched without emotion and based on fact-finding. To me, investing is about looking at the best opportunities to create value both for the world and for myself. The question today is whether Bitcoin is the best way to create value for myself and the world, and in my view it's absolutely not.
If you're buying Bitcoin today, the reality is that in almost every case you're buying it from some centralized entity that stockpiled huge amounts of it. There's no transparency as to whether you're even getting real Bitcoin unless you can pull it off the exchange. And then in most cases you have to rely on a third party to even hold it. That totally defeats the point of crypto.
Compare the Bitcoin market to ICP. ICP, in my opinion, has massive life-changing potential, whereas Bitcoin is so big already that I don't see how much further up it's likely to be able to go. Now, this is not financial advice or a price prediction. Anything can happen. What I see is that Bitcoin right now has turned into the matrix crypto, a centralized crypto. By the time you see big companies and ETFs pushing Bitcoin, you've missed the opportunity. It's gone. It's not what it looks like. If you believe in banks and centralized stuff, they have stocks you can invest in, and at this point Bitcoin has turned into something like that.
You Don't Even Use the Thing You're Holding
The reality is that almost none of you actually use the Bitcoin blockchain on an everyday basis. It's absolutely insane to me to invest in something you don't use on a daily basis. If your Bitcoin is sitting on an exchange, you are not using the Bitcoin blockchain on a daily basis, and you don't even know whether you have real Bitcoin or not. You've been sold this idea of Bitcoin because it's profitable to sell it to you. People are making huge amounts of money because they're already holding the Bitcoin, many of them selling fake Bitcoin, and they're making massive amounts selling you the idea of it.
Many of you holding Bitcoin and acting like it's a religion you have faith in have never even looked for the reality. The reality is ugly. The reality is disappointing. That's why I don't hold any, after I had been buying Bitcoin as low as $170 and dollar-cost-averaging into it at $16,000. When I found Internet Computer, I thought, Bitcoin sucks by comparison. That's the technological reality. That's not the cult-coin reality, but to me Bitcoin is basically the largest cult coin today. There's almost no value in the technology itself. Yes, the blockchain has run for 15 years, but many other companies and many other things have run successfully for 15 years. This is not special.
I've been creating content for 14 years. I do have a little meme coin I created that most of the community holds, called JBBJ. But just because I've been creating content for 14 years does not mean you should buy a meme coin I created. Do you see the big disconnect between those two things? Just because I've been creating content for 14 years doesn't mean everything I'm saying is right, and it doesn't mean every video I make is going to go viral.
I Know What Delusion Looks Like
The delusion with Bitcoin is shocking to me, and I know about delusion. I'm a sober alcoholic now. I've been sober 11 years, and the delusion I was personally in when I used to drink was total. Everybody around me thought I looked insane, but from my point of view I was being perfectly reasonable. That's what Bitcoin investors look like to me today. You all look insane. You've been drinking some kind of cult Kool-Aid, and you almost never even look at the reality of the situation with Bitcoin. You're seriously delusional and stuck in confirmation bias.
I tell you that with love, because people telling me that is how I snapped out of the delusion that my drinking was reasonable and that I wasn't really hurting anybody. It's because everybody told me, dude, you're insane, you're delusional, you're an alcoholic, you need to get sober.
So I'm telling everybody in Bitcoin today: you need to look up the facts, the technological facts, and you need to put your investment in perspective. If I'm going to hold some big market-cap thing, I'd rather hold a stock of a company like Apple, Google, Microsoft, or Amazon that I actually use every day, and where holding the stock gives me some legal ownership. There are much higher levels of accountability there than with Bitcoin. I would much rather hold the stock of a company I use every day than hold Bitcoin. At this point, that's what Bitcoin should be compared with. And I'd be under no delusion that holding Amazon or Apple is going to give me some huge multiplier. It's unreasonable to expect anything else out of Bitcoin either.
Go Check Your Own Facts
If you've looked all this up, if you've actually examined the hash rate, looked at the chart, looked at the reality of everything I'm saying, and you still think Bitcoin is worth holding, then that's different. But you need to check the facts of your own investment. You need to stop just practicing doctrine and faith and repeating things other people have told you. You need to go look at all the legitimate criticisms of Bitcoin, and not just from me. You need to look at many people saying similar things from different angles, because that's exactly what I've done with Internet Computer. I've looked at all the critics, all the haters. I've looked at every worst-case scenario. I've even come up with them myself. The key to seeing whether you're in a delusion or not is to look at everyone on the other side of your delusion. If you can stomach all of that, then it's worth considering.
This is not financial advice. I'm not telling you to do anything except to research, to think, to digest this information, and to question yourself. If you want to dig deeper into how I think about all of this, you can explore my Money playlist.