Something Big Is Coming, and the FUD Is the Tell
Something big is about to happen in ICP, and the ridiculous FUD campaigns spreading across X are laying the foundation to try and close people's eyes to what's coming. To me, this is one of the most interesting things happening in crypto right now, and it's something very important you must understand if you don't want to get ripped off and manipulated. Blockchain Pill, who is one of the few honest creators in crypto, who has the same information I have, and who's onto ICP, made a video about this called "ICP's Under Attack." I reacted to it at double speed, and thankfully this time I turned the desktop audio on so I could actually hear him while I supplemented what he was saying — all so that you can be empowered and not be tricked by crap like this.
My advice before we even start: never, ever follow — immediately mute and unfollow — anyone who's using these kinds of techniques. What's happening here is a psychological technique called paltering. Go use ChatGPT and research it, because this is what you need to do: look up and understand what paltering is. It's cherry picking, endpoint selection, anchoring, loss framing, the affect heuristic — this is advanced stuff. Ask yourself what kind of people are using techniques like this and then copying it all over the timeline. It's an indication of the environment we're in, and you've got to be smarter than this or you will get manipulated and ripped off by it. So let's get into what Blockchain Pill has to say, because I was excited to share his video. If you haven't already subscribed to Blockchain Pill, make sure you do — I watch all of his videos, along with Bobby O's, two of the few voices in crypto that are honest and have the information you need.
Alex opens the way he always does: "Welcome back to Blockchain Pill, my name is Alex, and welcome back to a new episode." One quick note from me — I always watch at double speed too, everybody, so if you're trying to watch me at double speed and he's effectively at 4x, you're just going to have to slow the thing down.
The Copy-Paste Attack on the Timeline
Alex says that if you open Twitter, you can see ICP is currently under attack — the whole timeline is filled with the same post, copy-pasted, as if it's an intentional attack. And I'll say it plainly: it is an intentional attack. He walks through the posts. One account with over 2 million followers says: "If you invested $10,000 in ICP at its peak five years ago, today it would be worth just $29. WTF happened." Then another one from Our Crypto Talk: ICP is down 99.7% from its peak. Then another: "Remember ICP? Every exchange listed this on the first day and it shot up to $400 billion FDV. If you had invested $10,000 back then, you would have just $9 today." Then yet another: "If you invested $10,000 into ICP at its all-time high of $700, you would have around $31 left today. Over 99.6% of your money is gone." Dozens and dozens of posts like this filled the timeline.
Alex points out that this happens in a loop — he sees posts like this get traction every three or four months. He also notes that this cycle of negative posts isn't really FUD in the strict sense, because if you look at the chart, the chart really has been as high as $700, or $2,800 on some exchanges. The data is real. And this is exactly where I want to sharpen the point: it's not FUD, it's paltering. It's real data taken in an inappropriate context, used to manipulate people's perceptions and designed to position people to ignore the truth about the Internet Computer. People who are vulnerable — who don't understand, who just look at things and don't think — get hit by this. But if you are strong and you are looking for the truth, you will not be affected by weak psychological techniques like this.
Pierre's Response: "The North Remembers"
Alex says we got responses from Dfinity — from Pierre and from Dominic Williams himself — and he wants to go through them and give his thoughts. He also had a few interesting things of his own he wanted to share. First is the post by Pierre, the chief business officer at Dfinity: "Interesting to see several so-called crypto influencers suddenly pushing the same negative message about ICP today. Some didn't even bother changing the wording — literally copy paste. Is it a coincidence? The timing is certainly interesting, given what's coming in the next weeks. The North remembers, and so do we."
Here's my read: these guys are sloppy. If I was going to execute something like this, I'd make it a little less obvious. What they're doing is trying to place a narrative in people's heads, and they're so sloppy that they literally used the exact same data point. The repetition makes it easier to digest — but it also makes it easier to observe. This is something people are just copy-pasting. To me, either there's someone orchestrating all these people and they're all under control, or they're just copying each other. Either way, they were told what to do: "FUD ICP today. Here's your narrative." Once you see that this is the environment, there's no unseeing it. It's the red pill, my friends — and the good news is there's a very real possibility you come out of it with something better at the end of the day.
Alex calls it a very based post and says Pierre is generally a very based person. He zooms in on that last bit — "the timing is certainly interesting, given what's coming in the next weeks." Relatively close to that, the cycle burn rate of ICP has literally shot up two or three times in expectation of what's coming. Something is definitely cooking in the background for the Internet Computer Protocol as we await the mid-August announcement that Pierre said is going to be a big, big deal. Whatever is cooking is something pretty massive, and yes — the timing of the attack is definitely interesting.
Alex also shares his own take on Pierre's tweet and the timeline: the fact that people are posting FUD and trying to scare holders away from their ICP tokens at the bottom is, in his opinion, bullish, because it will shake out the non-believers and make them chase back into ICP higher. His message is patience — and as he says, most of us who are holders have been nothing but patient for the past four or five years. What's another month, another six months, another year, on top of the four or five years we've been in this community?
Dominic Williams Takes the Bait from an Engagement Farmer
Then comes the interesting part: Dominic Williams himself responded to Ash Crypto, the account with 2.1 million followers. Let me tell you how you get to 2 million followers on X: you're an engagement farmer. That's what these accounts do. This guy's ICP post got much more reach than his posts about Bitcoin, and his posts are just generic engagement farming — he offers no genuinely useful information, he sends people over to his Telegram, and all he does is farm engagement. You just say whatever you think people want to hear, you farm all these different communities, you get them following you. And this post is engagement farming too, because he knows all the people in ICP are going to hate it and react to it — he's farming the outrage. He even got Dominic Williams to respond. This is the environment, and you've got to be aware of how this works or you are vulnerable to believing this crap.
I looked over Ash Crypto's recent posts and there was not a single useful thing — straight-up engagement farming. And almost all of the largest voices in crypto are doing exactly the same. People like me and Blockchain Pill are providing genuinely useful information, and because of that we're kind of locked in an ICP silo — I've found some creative ways to get out of it, but generally, if you provide genuinely useful information, you're going to be drowned out by all the engagement farmers who say anything to get their voices as loud as possible. Then they accept deals and sponsorships where they have to say certain things, and perhaps they have to FUD ICP whether they like it or not. They're not going to be honest and tell you that someone's telling them what to do — why would they? They have no incentive to be honest except their own conscience, and they're telling themselves they're doing the right thing. Once you see how much influencers and content creators lie to your face right out in public, there's no going back, baby. You don't believe almost anything, and you treasure the people you can tell are being honest and authentic with you.
So Ash Crypto is engagement farming, but Dominic Williams seems to have taken him seriously. He left a comment saying: "If anyone can tell us what slime crypto project is paying these scammers to post this garbage, with proof, we'll pay them 7,500 ICP. If you posted this garbage, that's an easy opportunity for you — it's more than you got paid by them, and they don't deserve your loyalty." I don't know that it's actually more than they got paid — some of these guys may have been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to push all the crap they push.
Alex has a few things to address with Dominic's post. He can agree that maybe ICP is targeted by some crypto projects, by some shadowy figures, by anyone like that — because if ICP succeeds, everything else is going to look like crap. You can do things on the Internet Computer that you cannot do on any other blockchain. Everything else is just a copy of a copy, slightly cheaper or slightly faster than Ethereum, and the level of innovation since Ethereum, besides the Internet Computer Protocol, has been almost nothing. People even tried to push an on-chain narrative a couple of years ago — the CEO of Coinbase was saying "on-chain is the new online" — but the only place where you can actually have everything on chain is the Internet Computer Protocol. Everywhere else, "on chain" just means the token is on chain and the smart contracts are on chain. That narrative died off because people simply couldn't deliver it — it was not possible outside the Internet Computer Protocol.
Do you see how important that information is? That is more important than anything Ash Crypto has probably ever said in his life. That's what you really need to know, and it's what all these copy-paste accounts will never tell you. Once you know that ICP is the only real, meaningful, big innovation in crypto since Ethereum — that you can't even push "on-chain as the new online" anywhere else because ICP is the only thing that can do it — you understand why I watch Blockchain Pill. This is powerful information.
The $10,000 Copy Pasta Hits Everything, Not Just ICP
Alex first wants to address the claim that ICP is being specifically targeted — which he personally thinks it isn't. In his view, this is just part of the copy-pasta cycle: "if you invested ten thousand dollars into X, then you would have Y today." He opens a few tweets to prove it, and you can verify this for yourself — go on X and search "if you invested ten thousand dollars." At first the results will be full of ICP posts, because that's the most recent and hottest one, but then you'll see the same tweets for all kinds of other projects. As Alex jokes, maybe all of those projects were attacked by the same institution too.
He runs down the list. If you invested $10,000 in DOT in 2021, today you'd have $245 — and that one got quite some engagement. Then, shocking: if you invested $10,000 in Melania last year, you would have only $53 today — so somebody's targeting Melania too, I guess. Listen, that one is a copy pasta that's actually funny. If you invested $10,000 in Melania like a dummy, you'd have $53 right now — the token was manipulated, it went down, and I believe it only went up for about one day. Then there's the Libra one, more recent: if you invested $5,000 in it, you would have had $5.6 million at the all-time high, but investors were only able to claim $3,000 after the unlock — "generational crime." And by the way, that really was a pretty crimey thing that happened: it went from literally nothing all the way up to around $25 and then down to something like eight cents. That was definitely crime — and I called that token out as being absolute garbage and filth before it happened.
The list keeps going: $1,000 in ABTC — the Trump-family-connected mining company, American Bitcoin — would be worth about $600 today. If you invested $10,000 in Disney five years ago, you'd now have $6,000 — which honestly isn't even that bad. If you invested $10,000 in Beyond Meat in 2021, today you'd have $41 — that one's pretty bad, and part of me is fine with it, because Beyond Meat was marketing fake meat that feels like meat and the market has spoken. Actually, as a vegan I like Beyond Meat — I don't eat it very often — but yes, it was overvalued. Someone even posted "$10,000 in a car yesterday, today you have $2,900." If you invested $10,000 in Snapchat in 2017, today you would have $2,800. As Alex says, you could keep doing this for hours with different companies and different coins. This is a copy pasta that has been around for a long time, which is why he doesn't think anyone is targeting ICP specifically — though he admits the timing, with a bunch of them all going after ICP at once, is funny.
Timing Is the Weapon
Here's where I differ a little. I don't know for sure, but I would guess the timing on this is very much on purpose. Once you understand how important timing is, you see it everywhere — the timing on things is often the single most important factor. If you can control the timing of narratives, you can make almost anything happen. You can send people to war. You can dump the market and make huge profits. You can pump the market. This looks intentional to me — at minimum, it's intentional to somebody.
Alex says he can see why people would target the Internet Computer Protocol: if it becomes as successful as we all wish, it challenges the status quo of crypto itself. But if he were designing an attack, he would have come up with another campaign — not the chart. We already know about the chart; no brain went into making those posts. In his opinion, if an organized attack on ICP were real, there are many more viable angles: you'd attack its authority, you'd attack the results they're getting, you'd maybe attack the fact that some of the best minds at ICP have left the company. Those are the angles a sophisticated attacker would use — not the price, which is old news everybody already knows.
Fair point — if you wanted to reach an intelligent person, that's how you'd do it. I've wondered myself, why did Jan leave? That one is not so great. At the same time, though: do you assume most people on X fit into the category where a more sophisticated attack would work on them? Or are these posts aimed at simple people scrolling, not thinking that much, consuming information quickly without considering it? This is aimed at simple people. It is not aimed at someone who is thinking, intelligent, and critically minded. And the first step, if you realize that might be you, is what I've done recently with dating: okay, I need to learn, remember, and study. Once you realize you're weak in a certain area, you can study it and get better at it. If this kind of stuff works on you, then study some human psychology and you'll recognize things like this in advance. The masses don't recognize it — they don't know human psychology, and they're very vulnerable to simple attacks, whereas they would ignore something more complicated, like the more real criticisms that might bother someone like me. So the typical strategy, especially on social media, is to put out the simplest, most easily understandable, most shocking thing to mess with the masses, deliver it with timing, and the masses get led around like sheep. My goal is to help wake people up so that you are not led around like a sheep.
7,500 ICP for a Hater — While Creators Do It for Free
Now to the part Alex dislikes even more than the fact that Dominic took the bait and responded to a recycled copy pasta at all: the offer itself. Dominic said Dfinity would pay 7,500 ICP to whoever divulges, with proof, which project is paying these scammers. Alex thinks that money could be way better spent if it was distributed inside the IC community. There are so many content creators, and some of us are doing daily videos — he names Jerry Banfield and Zero to Hero, Bobby O with weekly videos, Michael Duffy, and Alex himself doing almost daily videos. Sure, not all of Alex's videos are about the Internet Computer Protocol, because part of his plan is to remain an ICP content creator while also looking for opportunities outside the ICP ecosystem — because right now there are literally close to zero opportunities inside it. He loves doing content, but it's his own time and his own money that he has to put in to show up with the ICP news and everything else he does.
And then Alex says something that floored me: this money could definitely help somebody like Jerry Banfield, who's doing seven videos a week — every single day he wakes up, he dreams about ICP, he wakes up, he makes a video — and who has probably onboarded more people than all of the other ICP content creators combined. He's talking about a dozen or two dozen creators that I'm out-competing by myself. "He's just a monster," he says. He knows for a fact that Dfinity watches my videos, so he knows they know I'm currently all-in on ICP with no source of income outside of making ICP videos. He points out the stress I'm under — that I have to make it in something like six to nine months or I'm going to run out of money, and I'll be relying only on the Internet Computer Protocol. His suggestion to Dfinity: reach out to him and say, "Jerry, do you need some help, bro? You've been onboarding people to the Internet Computer Protocol like nobody else here. Let us help you with the rent. You've probably onboarded tens of millions of dollars into the ICP system — let us pay you a monthly fee so you can continue doing what you're doing."
Well, that is definitely my favorite part of the video. And yes — 7,500 ICP? Sure, that would be great. I would love that. I've got a business system set up at jerrybanfield.com for calls, and I just got back to doing this, but I'm reaching millions of people with my videos, and I actually do 14 long-form ICP videos every week — seven on my ICP channel, and then I have a second Crypto Reviews channel where I take a different strategy, reaching people through these other coins and bringing them into ICP. So somebody tell Dominic Williams: hit your boy up with some rent money. I gave my ex like 80% of the stuff in the divorce and didn't fight, because I figured that was the right thing to do.
The Shout-Out Chain: Bobby O, Zero to Hero Fabio, Michael Duffy, Based Giant
Alex continues with Bobby O — the second biggest ICP content creator, hands down. His addition to the ecosystem is just unmatched, maybe matched by Jerry Banfield. Bobby has been fighting these wars, leading everybody into the charge, debating other ecosystems whose claims are fake. He debated developers from the Elrond community live on X, people from Sui — whenever somebody talks down the Internet Computer Protocol, it's Bobby O who shows up and shuts them down, and he has a strong community behind him.
Then there's Zero to Hero Fabio, who is also an incredible ICP content creator. He talks about ICP — it used to be daily, and it very well may still be — with stats and real data. He went to the Dfinity headquarters, he did interviews, and all of that value gets given back to the ICP community for free, like all the other creators. Then there's Michael Duffy, an up-and-coming ICP content creator with some of the best videos Alex has seen — and Alex even mentions that I've taken inspiration from Michael Duffy myself, which is true: just an outstanding guy with incredible content. The final shout-out Alex gives is for Based Giant, who has some of the best written content in the entire ICP ecosystem. Michael's videos are also absolutely incredible, but it takes him a lot of time to make them — turning articles into videos with cool editing, jumping sound effects, everything polished — and the information is just absolutely incredible. And then there's Alex himself, making one video a day for the Internet Computer Protocol. But he says he can't complain in any way, shape, or form — he's one of the fortunate few who has a close relationship with Dfinity, and they have flown him out before.
Champion for the Creators, Not the Haters
Alex explains that Dfinity has flown him and his brother to various events around the world — to meet them, to help with video production, and so on. So he can't complain for himself as much as he can champion for the other gentlemen. And his point stands: this 7,500 ICP that Dfinity is apparently willing to give to an unknown person — we don't even know who Ash Crypto is — just to demask whoever supposedly made him post negatively about the Internet Computer Protocol, when in fact it's recycled copy pasta, would be way better spent inside the IC community, on people who actually care about the Internet Computer Protocol and who actually show up and speak about it.
Then Alex gets into the thing that annoys him most about content creation. He's been talking about the Internet Computer Protocol for the past four or five years, and the price has been generally trending down — those charts are not lying. He opens TradingView to look at the chart, and he's clear this is not him FUDding ICP; his point comes next. Over those four or five years there have been periods when the engagement is great, everybody has made money, everybody's happy, ecstatic, euphoric — and when that happens, when the price is going up, there are so many opportunities. People are throwing money left, right, and center, people are sponsoring videos, and the atmosphere is very pleasant. But over five years, those were only brief moments.
Here's an interesting data point I added while he had the chart up. If you're wondering what exactly happened at that bottom — I went all-in on ICP right down there. I had tens of thousands of subscribers, and I introduced hundreds of thousands of people to ICP who had never heard of it, who had never seen the chart. That's one of the things that happened at the bottom, when almost nothing else was happening: I went all-in on ICP, and I community-farmed and engagement-farmed in 2023 to build a new channel. I had people coming in from all kinds of other ecosystems. I dumped my entire crypto portfolio and went all-in on ICP at exactly that spot, and then some of the SNS projects launched right after, into that momentum, and we got a big pump right there. That's part of the story of what happened on that chart.
All of the Blame, None of the Praise
Alex says those were six great months, and then we've been in a downtrend with only a little upward movement in between. What really annoys him is that we, the ICP content creators, get all of the blame whenever the price goes down — but we don't get the praise when the price goes up. When it pumps, the attitude is "of course it's going up, Dfinity is doing stuff, it's not you with your content, we don't care" — but when it dumps, the creators catch all the anger. There are only downsides to covering ICP in a downtrend: you get the hate, and you don't really get any of the praise or appreciation on the way up.
And because there are not a lot of opportunities inside the ecosystem when the price is going down, Alex believes the videos, articles, and all the content people are making should be subsidized by Dfinity. Nobody else makes money inside the system besides Dfinity. Creators don't want to get rich from making ICP content — they want to at least be able to survive. So many content creators have given up on making ICP content entirely because they were not making any money.
Dexter's Story — and What 20 Cents an Hour Does to Creators
The best example Alex has is a guy called Dexter. Some of you will remember him — he was pushing Caffeine, and he was doing more for Caffeine than the entire Caffeine marketing team. Alex doesn't even know how big the Caffeine marketing team is, but this one guy was doing more than everybody inside the company. Dexter told Alex directly: "I don't make any money from this. I need to make some money. How can I make some money?" Alex told him to reach out to Dfinity to be compensated in some way, since he was making so much content — and Alex believes he did reach out and didn't manage to get paid. Then he just disappeared. He disappeared from X, and people from the community actually reached out to Alex asking, "Do you know anything about Dexter? Do you think he's okay?" The reality was that he wasn't making any money — he was borrowing money, he was asking people to lend him money. Alex didn't want to get into all the details, but Dexter has given up on crypto and given up on X, and he was genuinely a person giving a huge amount to the ecosystem, especially to the Caffeine ecosystem.
It's not just Dexter. Based Giant doesn't make videos anymore, because it takes him eight to ten hours to make one, which is unfeasible — he'd make like two or three dollars from an ICP video that took ten hours. That's 20 cents an hour. Who's going to make videos for 20 cents an hour? Alex points out it's easier for people like me and Bobby O because we're good talkers — it takes Jerry Banfield about 15 minutes to do a 13-minute video. "He's a machine, he does like 20 videos a day," Alex says — it's easy for me. But for people who aren't as fast as Bobby O, Jerry Banfield, Zero to Hero, or Michael Duffy, it's brutal. It takes Alex about an hour per video, so he can't complain that much about his own production time. Still, his conclusion is that all of the videos and all of the work should be subsidized by Dfinity, especially when there are no opportunities inside the ecosystem.
And it goes beyond content creators. Developers are writing to Alex asking, "Alex, do you know anything about Dfinity grants? Do you know how I can monetize, how I can get some money? I've been building on the Internet Computer Protocol, there's no money to be made, I cannot pay my bills, I need to take a job just to survive." To Alex, this is pretty bad — you can build cool stuff, but in the end you need to be able to take care of yourself, your family, your loved ones. That's what's missing inside the ecosystem. And sure, there were grants — something like $200 million worth was available, and hundreds of projects received grants — yet Alex doesn't think any one of them managed to turn successful, which is pretty odd. Something is definitely going on there.
Pay Loyal Creators to Counter the Attacks
Alex adds another reason creators inside the ecosystem should be paid: to be able to counter exactly these types of attacks. When the FUD says "ICP is down from $2,800 since launch," content creators should be making content about why ICP was ever at $700 or $2,800 in the first place — because it was manipulated by FTX. The price was pumped with perps before the actual token launch. It was pumped something like 100 times higher than it should have been, and of course it dumped. But a documentary or a video like that has to be researched — you have to look into it, organize your thoughts, and build a narrative for the video. That takes real time. You cannot expect somebody like Jerry, who takes 15 minutes to make a video, to spend five or ten hours — twenty, thirty, fifty times the work — on a single video unless he's paid for it. Same for Bobby O, Zero to Hero, Michael Duffy, or Alex himself. Alex says he'd happily make all sorts of documentaries about the Internet Computer Protocol, but he needs to be able to cover his time and make some money for it.
This is why Alex doesn't like seeing Dominic Williams offer 7,500 ICP to a nobody — to a guy who's FUDding the project. They're willing to pay somebody who's fighting the project instead of paying the content creators who have been alongside them for the past four or five years, instead of paying the developers who have been building on the Internet Computer Protocol for so long without being able to be profitable. Alex's suggestion: something like the community grants program — maybe not as big as before, when everybody was getting outsized grants — but something smaller, along the lines of 7,500 or 10,000 ICP per month spread across some ten of the best content creators. Make sure they're doing their best, posting about whatever Dfinity wants them to post about, helping shape narratives and share with the world whatever Dfinity wants shared. Even when the old community grants program was active, nobody told anybody what to talk about — to Alex that's an oversight, but it's not too late to fix it.
By the way — I realized at this point that I hadn't talked in a while. I was just listening. Isn't that refreshing, when I don't talk for a minute? Oh, sorry — let me go back to not talking.
Two Posts in Seventeen Days
Alex moves to one more thing, something his community, including Based Giant, has been telling him about for quite some time. He was looking at the Dfinity handle and the Caffeine handle to see what they're posting, because on Mondays — and usually with his brother on Thursdays — he does ICP news, covering what's been happening inside the ICP ecosystem. Lately it's been harder and harder for him to find news. The day he recorded, it was August 17th — seventeen days into August, two and a half weeks — and if you go to the Dfinity Foundation handle, they have exactly two posts in August. Two posts in seventeen days. He's not saying they should engagement farm or post jokes and memes, but two posts, given the amount of things that are happening or are under development at Dfinity? Maybe he's missing something, maybe...
Zero Real Posts, and a Missed Birthday for Caffeine
Alex allows that maybe there's more he can't see — and if so, he apologizes and it's his mistake. But it gets worse: those two Dfinity posts in August are actually retweets. Without retweets, it's zero posts. Then he checks Caffeine for the month of August: one, two, three — a little bit more, three posts, with the next one back on July 31st. Three posts in seventeen days means it takes them around five working days to construct a single post. Somebody, somewhere, is taking five working days per post — and Alex thinks that is unacceptable.
He was talking to Based Giant about this, because as he mentioned, Based Giant is one of the best writers we have in the ecosystem. Alex told him, "Bro, you should reach out to them and let them know you want to do the posts for them." And Based Giant told Alex he already had — he reached out to all the people at Dfinity you could reach out to, and none of them responded. In a recent post he even offered to write the posts for Multidex for free — he didn't ask for money — and he didn't get a response. He reached out to Dfinity: no response. Meanwhile, Dfinity has two to three posts in two and a half weeks of August. The community wants to help Dfinity. The community could help Dfinity. We saw — well, those of you who remember can remember — just how impactful Dexter was for Caffeine, and he disappeared. He could have been the social media marketing manager for Caffeine, and Alex thinks Caffeine would have had more than two posts: you'd have Spaces, you'd have live streams, you'd have building competitions with Caffeine.
The thing that annoyed Alex the most: on July 15th there wasn't even a yearly recap for Caffeine's one-year birthday. The only reason Alex knows Caffeine's birthday is July 15th is that it's his birthday as well. The 15th of July came and went like it was nothing, and nothing happened. So his message to Dfinity, to Pierre, to anyone watching: reach out to him if you want feedback on what you're doing. And that 7,500 ICP? Spread it across the ICP ecosystem — to the developers and content creators who, day in and day out, are here posting about the Internet Computer Protocol. Gone are the days of staying quiet — Alex says he'd held his tongue for a long time about this, offering 7,500 ICP to some random ICP hater. Maybe that's the secret: you have to be an ICP hater to get offered 7,500 ICP. Cool.
Alex wraps up by saying he wanted this to be a news episode, but there wasn't a lot of news — we're still waiting for the mid-August announcement, the huge announcement from Pierre, which he's super excited about even if he doesn't look excited. And we can see the cycle burn rate growing, which is definitely a sign that something serious is happening. He believes we can still make ICP great again, together, as a community, and he gives a final shout-out to the Blockchain Pill community who always tune in, always like, always share, and leave the comments — without them, he says, the channel would not exist. "Let's make ICP great again," and that's his episode.
My Reaction: Take Care of the People Who Already Love You
Wow. That was a fantastic video — one of my favorite videos he's done, and it really turned in an unexpected direction. I totally agree with him. I saw Dominic's post myself, and Dominic understands so much — but I'm like, Dom, all right: do you really think this guy is going to roll over for 17 grand? I love Dom's posts, but if I was Dom's PR person, I'd have him delete that one. It's a bad look. Then again, the people you love are always going to have a bad look sometimes.
It would be nice if Dfinity took care of the people who are already doing fantastic marketing for them instead of trying to get people to stop doing this kind of thing — because people are not going to stop using these little psychological techniques to engagement farm and to FUD projects. This guy probably didn't care about any of these projects; he's just trying to make as much money for himself as possible and grow his business. And maybe no one is even paying him to FUD — lots of times content creators are just copying what they see other creators doing. They see them getting engagement and think, "I'm gonna get engagement too." But make no mistake, it is a well-written post psychologically. The facts are real — the paltering is in the story. Why are you telling that story instead of the story that this is the most advanced technology in crypto? Blockchain Pill's actual criticisms are much sharper than anything this guy said, but you can see how this is the stuff that gets out to the masses and gets them to form an opinion — contempt prior to investigation — where they won't even look any deeper. That's the level most content is operating at.
So if you want to level up the way you think — you know, maybe I should offer a program on my website, instead of just a chat and individual calls. Maybe I'll start offering a program to level up how you think, because you need to think at a more advanced level than the stuff being used to manipulate you psychologically. Once you can rise above all of that, you'll find life becomes very easy, and you'll find you're one of the people who's really alive — awake, powerful, wondering what everybody else is doing, able to see beyond things like this.
Would I love for Dominic Williams and Dfinity to start taking care of, say, the ten creators Alex named — me, Blockchain Pill, Bobby O, Michael Duffy, Zero to Hero, Based Giant? Yes. It's better to take care of the people who already love you than to try and go find somebody new. I know this as a guy who got divorced last year: it's much easier to take care of the wife you've already got than it is to go find a new one. Now, finding a new one is a fun little adventure, and I talk about it a lot on my dating channel and my Jerry Banfield channel — but the next time a woman and I decide to be together, I'm going to focus on making sure I take care of her and ignore other women as much as possible, focusing everything on my woman. It would be nice if Dfinity took the same approach and took care of the people like me, like Alex, like Bobby, like Zero to Hero, who are showing up every day for ICP.
So thank you for the awesome video, Blockchain Pill — I hope this was a good read for you. If you want to support me, you can drop tips and join the chat over at jerrybanfield.com — I've got an audiobook on there too, I'm about to start putting courses up, and there's a lot of stuff for you on jerrybanfield.com.
And if you want to talk with me one on one, you can have a call with me.
And yeah — Alex is right. I'm going to need some money in the next three to six months, or things are going to get interesting. But I am powerful and I am grateful, and I have all the help I need. For more reactions and everything I'm covering on the Internet Computer, come watch the rest of my ICP Crypto playlist — and hey, if your boy Dom slipped me 17 grand, I'd sure take it.