Jerry Banfield Crypto is back! After six days having the channel suspended from YouTube, we are here with some major changes, and I intend to make sure you get the very best quality and most useful crypto information out of this channel going forward. I'll tell you why I think the channel got suspended and explain what happened between six days ago and today. I'll even tell you about another crypto YouTube channel I have that I think you'll love and enjoy.
I want to thank everybody in my crypto coaching community. They were really helpful during the six days my channel was taken down, when I was obviously frustrated and lost. I questioned everything and even considered quitting YouTube completely. And I want to thank Joe Paris, too. I had a call scheduled with him on Monday, and he explained to me: Jerry, all the big crypto YouTubers have gotten their channels taken down at some point. Congratulations, this means you've made it.
Why I think the channel got taken down
That takes me into my theory for why my channel got taken down. There's a ton of spam bots, as on my channel and many other crypto channels, that are constantly in the comments trying to rip you off. In my experience, you should stay away from those bots. Don't chat with them. Don't WhatsApp them. You can imagine I don't have time to be in the comments on my YouTube channel, except to occasionally reply or heart directly from my actual channel. If you want to talk to me, the only place people are really consistently talking to me is in my community. The best way to reach me and work with me on this is to join the Jerry Banfield Family.
But there are tons of bots using my profile picture, and they have WhatsApps, and the entire channel just gets swarmed with bots. There's nothing I can even do about it. I've tried hiding bots, banning the bots, and it doesn't matter. Whoever controls these bots, perhaps it's some human that controls an AI apparatus that creates these bots, they have infinite bots. You hide them, ban them, and they just come back with more. I imagine what led to the channel being taken down was a result of actions by the bots. I don't know exactly how it happened, but that's what Joe said: it's all these bots, they trigger some automatic thing in YouTube, and it just takes the channel down automatically. What Joe said, though, is that once you get your channel put back up, you don't have to worry about that happening again. So I feel more confident and secure in my channel than ever. I think you'll really enjoy the video I did when I was so rudely interrupted live. That was really good.
The email from YouTube and my record
I got this email from YouTube today, and it was just really fantastic news. Joe encouraged me to make sure I kept reaching out on Twitter, kept contacting their support, kept emailing them. It says when you get your channel taken down, it should only take one or two business days. I chose to take it as a good sign that it was taking so long, because it's very easy, if your channel was rightfully taken down, for them to look at it and say: no appeal for you, we obviously took your channel because you were clearly violating the rules. I imagine it's harder if you get a case where you look at it and you don't see any rules being violated. Then you have to figure out, okay, what happened here? How do we put this channel back up?
Consistently on Twitter, I was out there doing what Joe said to do. I was consistently out there on Twitter reaching out to TeamYouTube, which is a great account that's very responsive. I was posting, hey, this is what happened to my channel, hope you guys can help. Now, in 12 years, I have zero upheld violations on YouTube out of 4,000 videos, which you have to know means I'm committed to obeying the policies. If I've uploaded 4,000 videos over a period of 12 years and never once has a policy violation been upheld ever. I've had two copyright strikes. I did counter notifications on both of them, and they were both fraudulent copyright strikes, so obviously they didn't respond. I had one community guidelines violation on my main channel as a result of, in 2017, some crypto algorithm going crazy and flagging a whole bunch of stuff. I appealed that and they upheld it. And now this, my second community guidelines appeal, was upheld. Undefeated on YouTube, baby. I really appreciate them, and I'm really happy to have them making this right.
Cleaning up my portfolio and my content
I did kind of go crazy when I was offline. I took the time to reconsider my entire crypto portfolio: every single thing I'd bought, every decision I'd made. And I realized it's time to take some action. I need to clean my portfolio up, I need to commit to making better quality crypto videos than ever, and I need to respect my audience and consider where you're coming from.
So I created, well, this is actually the first new crypto channel I made. I made it last year. I thought I deleted it, but I actually just made the videos private and hid the channel. So what I did while the channel was offline, after a couple of days of reflection, is I updated it, because you're not allowed to make new channels after you've had one suspended, but I already had this one. I found it and rebranded it. So this new channel is new to you, new in that I'm using it again, but I actually made it more than a year ago. This Jerry Banfield Crypto Reviews channel is where all the cryptos that I review will now exclusively live. This is a channel pretty much dedicated to talking about cryptocurrencies that suck and bashing them. This is a channel where I try to expose the truth, or the ugly side, of all these different cryptos that are merely trying to rip you off. And I'll be 99% right on this channel. I can basically just pick a crypto at random, explain why it sucks, and 99% of the time over the next five to ten years I'll be right as it goes to zero. That's just simple statistics. So from now on, that channel is where I'm going to put all the videos where I do honest, negative crypto reviews.
This channel will now be more general crypto education. So something like this livestream, "Are altcoins for poor people while the richer people buy Bitcoin and Ethereum," or "Weird reasons Bitcoin will hit a million," and so on. The videos I've been making lately, I'll do more of that on this channel, and I won't go into reviewing specific cryptos here. I'll talk about the cryptos I like as well.
My Jerry Banfield approved cryptos list
Here's another huge change I made while I was offline. I reconsidered my entire crypto portfolio and I made a Jerry Banfield approved cryptos list. These are the only cryptos, on a watch list on CoinMarketCap, that I have high confidence in as an investor, that in my view are a good place to put my money going forward. Now, these could be removed at any time if something happens. For example, if XRP loses a case and goes down the drain, I may remove it and not buy anymore. There are only about 10 or 12 cryptos on here. These are the only cryptos I will be buying right now.
All of the cryptos that are absolute trash, I actually went through my portfolio, and this took hours, and sold them. I did a one-time reorganization of my portfolio to get rid of all those crappy cryptos, and you're going to see them pop up on the Crypto Reviews channel. I eliminated all those crappy cryptos. I am keeping some of the ones that are not definitely terrible, but I'm not buying any more of them. For example, Hedera, I'm going to keep that one. I'm going to keep the Hedera I bought and hold on to it until it 20Xs. But Hedera is not right now on my list of approved cryptos that I definitely think, for me, is a well-researched quality crypto investment. The ones on the list, I've researched a lot. I know them really well. I have very high confidence that I want to keep buying these, and every day I will buy one of these cryptos.
I've sold thousands of dollars of the crappy cryptos I bought, and what I've done is put almost all of that into Bitcoin and Ethereum. So I bought 0.04 Bitcoin the other day. I also sold my Gods Unchained cards, and I'm done doing live streams as well, so I sold a lot of them into Ethereum. I've actually got more than two Ethereum right now. My new portfolio will be shared with my community once I get that ready. None of this is financial advice, it's simply what I decided to do with my own money.
Putting my videos everywhere
I'm trying to keep these videos short, so I can upload them directly to other platforms like Twitter and Facebook. I've learned the necessity of putting video natively on as many places as I can possibly put it. So I started uploading my videos directly to Twitter. If you want to get all my videos on every topic, I'm now uploading them all straight to Twitter. Sometimes it didn't work, like yesterday, but I'm uploading everything directly to Twitter now.
Elon Musk recently stated that the algorithm is now fair on Twitter. If people spend more time on your post, for example if you go and watch a video on Twitter and you spend eight minutes on it, that's going to really pump it up in the algorithm and give me the chance to get organically discovered. Basically the algorithm on Twitter comes down to how much time people are spending and how much time people are putting into your post. Twitter wants to show you things that it thinks you'll put time into, just like YouTube. YouTube wants to show you videos it thinks you will put watch time into. So I've learned I can't just put up my videos and rely totally on YouTube. Even though I am abiding by all the terms and conditions, anything can happen with any platform.
So now I've got two different YouTube channels. I'm uploading on Twitter. I've gone back to uploading again on my Facebook page. I've even started uploading again on TikTok, and yes, I'm just straight up putting the horizontal videos over there on TikTok, not even bothering to crop them or anything. Uploading them on TikTok, appealing the community guidelines violations when they come along. And I'm also putting these up on my Spotify account. I've got a podcast, if you search the Jerry Banfield Show podcast, and I'm putting these up there too. I'm just dropping everything on there, so you can get access to what I create in whatever your favorite format is. If you'd prefer to just listen to these as podcast episodes on your phone instead of on YouTube, you can do that. This has been a very helpful experience overall.
Why I'm cutting back on what I do
All of this has led to a lot of questioning and reconsidering how I do what I do and whether there's any better way I can serve you. The biggest change I'm making is no more live streams. Live streams are the most inefficient use of my time, and the gaming live streams have been the worst offenders of all, just spending hours and hours playing games. I've been taking that time away from my family. I've been taking it away from things like AA meetings and cleaning up around the house.
It was actually really nice to stop. On the day after my channel was taken down, I took the first full day off I've taken in quite a while. I didn't do anything, and it felt so good that I realized I need to cut back on how much I'm doing. There's no urgent financial necessity for me to create anymore. I've got tens of thousands of dollars in crypto now. My wife has tens of thousands in the bank. I've got thousands in the bank after I sold my Gods Unchained card and sold off some of those crappy cryptos. I'm good.
So many times we're conditioned to work as if our survival depends on it, stripping away other parts of our life just to make more money. At some point you have to stop that when you don't need to anymore. In my experience, there's no urgent need to survive here. I have plenty, and even if the worst case struck, I'd still have plenty. It's time for me to create from the most pure place I can.
The dump strategy
In order to create from that place, I'm now limiting my creativity and everything I do online to about three hours a day, seven days a week, instead of the five or six hours a day I've been doing. I'm generally only going to be creating while the kids are at school now. And instead of trying to optimize and time everything perfectly, scheduling uploads down to the minute, I'm just dumping everything online as soon as I create it.
I made a whole separate video about this in more detail, but I'll call it the dump strategy for short. So if you follow me somewhere like Twitter, you may see that in a span of three hours I dump four or five videos on completely different subjects. One or two crypto videos, a short video, and several others all at once. Then I don't do anything for the next 24 hours.
Reflection and gratitude
This last stretch of six days has definitely been uncomfortable, and yet it's been a time of reflection. I hope this makes this a better crypto channel forever, and it has already spawned another crypto channel as well, one that can give you and everyone else looking for honest reviews a chance to hear more than "oh my God, this is going to 100x." Sometimes the honest answer is: nah, this might go to zero. If you want that kind of straight talk on projects, that's exactly the spirit behind my Crypto Reviews playlist.
Thank you to everyone who really held me up and held me accountable during this period. One person even joined while the channel was completely offline, which is awesome. If you want to be part of that same kind of honest, supportive group and work with me on this directly, the best way today is to join the Jerry Banfield Family.
And thank you again to Joe Paris. I was ready to quit YouTube entirely and just be a life coach in St. Pete, working in person, until I talked to Joe. He said, "Man, you're so good at what you do. This is just another thing. You're going to get past this." And I realized he was right. There's no way I'm going to make this much money and help this many people in such a short amount of time doing almost anything else. I'm not sticking to a schedule now. I'll just upload whenever I have something to say, to one of my six YouTube channels and everywhere else. I really appreciate your love and support, and I'll be back.