Short answer: no, not in the way the marketing says. I think the idea that crypto is decentralized is mostly a myth, and I say that as someone who holds ICP and talks about Internet Computer Protocol almost every week. Bitcoin, Ethereum and most other coins are sold as peer-to-peer systems with no middleman. When you look at who actually controls mining, staking, supply and voting, a surprising amount of it comes back to a few companies, a few wallets or a few foundations. That is the conclusion I have reached over the years, and it is why my view of this topic has changed as much as it has.
What I believe now is more specific than just saying crypto is centralized. I think decentralization is the wrong first test for whether a coin will matter. The test I care about is whether the technology does real work that people need, and whether it can survive when the bubble pops. That is the argument I make in my July 2026 post on the 'tech doesn't matter' claim, The Dumbest Argument in Crypto. I argue that only useful infrastructure lasts, the way railroads, electricity and the internet did, and that most coins will not survive. I also say plainly that this is not guaranteed, that I only hold ICP, and that it is my opinion, not financial advice.
My thinking started with freedom. In The 'Crypto Is Freedom' Lie from July 2024, I argued that the original promise of crypto had been pulled back into the same institutions it was meant to escape. Exchanges, ETFs run by firms like BlackRock, and hardware wallets and other third-party providers sit between most people and the blockchain. I have quit crypto more than once, and one reason was seeing the same backroom politics I had hoped to escape. True freedom, as I put it then, is something you have to find inside yourself, not in a coin.
Then, in The Biggest Crypto Lie 99% of Bitcoin, ETH, and ICP Holders Believe from November 2024, I put numbers on it. Four mining pools controlled over 75 percent of Bitcoin mining. Roughly 17 people were on the Bitcoin Core GitHub. About 2,000 addresses held almost 40 percent of all the bitcoin. On Ethereum, one staking provider held close to a third of the staked ETH. Whatever you think of any one of those numbers, they all point the same direction, and that is why I called the public story about Bitcoin and its peers a myth.
In that same video I did not spare ICP. DFINITY still held about 20 percent of the voting power, down from about 40 percent, and I said that roughly half the supply ends up voting along with it. Around 786 addresses holding more than 100,000 ICP held about half the supply. Node operators had to be approved by DFINITY. I also described DAO proposals that the community voted for overwhelmingly and that still failed because the founding team did not vote. I called that decentralization theater. If you are thinking about ICP, that section deserves a careful read before you take anything I say about its technology at face value.
So where has this left me? I still think most of crypto is centralized, and I still think ICP has real centralization problems. What I have changed is the question I ask first. Instead of asking whether something is decentralized, I now ask whether the technology is doing work nothing else in the market can do, and whether the people behind it can be checked against documentation. I am not saying the centralization problems go away. I am saying they are not the only thing that decides whether a project survives.
If you want to test these claims yourself, do it the way I would. Start with on-chain data, mining pool and staking dashboards, and governance records, then check the claims against each project's own documentation. How to Research a Crypto Before You Buy walks through that process step by step. AI tools can help, but check anything they tell you against the source.
Below this opening you will find every post on this subject in full, newest first: the 2026 'tech doesn't matter' post, the November 2024 decentralization breakdown, and the July 2024 freedom post. Read them from the top to see how my view moved. If you are holding a coin you bought because it was supposed to be decentralized and you want a second set of eyes on your reasoning, you can get a personal video review from me at https://jerrybanfield.com/review/.
On this page
Every post I have written on this subject is below in full, newest first, each under its own heading.
- The Dumbest Argument in Crypto: “Tech Doesn’t Matter” (July 13, 2026)
- The Biggest Crypto Lie 99% of Bitcoin, ETH, and ICP Holders Believe (November 27, 2024)
- The 'Crypto Is Freedom' Lie (July 15, 2024)
The Dumbest Argument in Crypto: “Tech Doesn’t Matter”
From my video published July 13, 2026.
Only the Tech Survives
Today, I'm going to take on the dumbest argument in crypto: that tech doesn't matter. People say crypto is all speculation and hype and none of it's real. That's not true. We're seeing the same things play out in crypto that have played out in history in numerous other areas, and the core lesson continues to be that only tech survives. In my experience, Internet Computer Protocol (ICP) has the utterly dominant technology in crypto. Now, just because its price isn't blowing up today doesn't mean it's not in the absolute best position we've ever seen.
If you want to see the technology in full detail, go to CryptoTechCap.com, which I created. There you can look at how Internet Computer answers yes to 97 out of 100 questions that I created based on what a cryptocurrency blockchain that's truly going to change the world should be able to do. Like: can I put a custom domain website directly on the chain without a centralized web server? Only ICP is able to do that — CryptoTechCap.com itself is fully on chain with ICP. The site also encourages you to join the family and have a call with me every week. We can talk crypto or anything else you want to talk about, and we can have a two-way relationship instead of just me talking to you.
The Railroad Bubble and the Key Lesson About Infrastructure
Now, let's look at how technology has played out in the past. There have been all these bubbles throughout history where money was just thrown around. You can go all the way back to the railroad era in the UK. There was a huge speculative bubble, which seems silly now that railroad tracks have been pulled up everywhere. But in the 1800s, railroads were like the crypto of today. There were huge amounts of money involved, and people were throwing their money into all kinds of railroad stocks. And yet that bubble burst. But the fact is that railroad tracks got built all over the United Kingdom and all over the world, and railroads were the dominant form of transportation for nearly a hundred years.
The infrastructure — this is the key lesson about why ICP is so important in crypto. It's the only crypto that has built dominant infrastructure that solves huge problems, just like railroads. Railroads built dominant infrastructure that solved a huge real-world problem: how do I go from one side of the United States to the other without having to Oregon Trail it across the country, like that game we used to play? It seemed like a miracle when you could just hop on a railroad train and go from DC across the country to California. Do you know how hard that used to be before railroads? But here's what happened: investors threw their money all over the railroad market. Most all of the railroad companies failed, but a few became utterly dominant and insanely rich. And in time we got cars, and cars ended up replacing railroads.
How Every Bubble Repeats the Same Pattern
Here's how history tends to consistently repeat the same thing we're seeing in crypto. When you see that this has happened over and over again throughout history, you won't be fooled by it. The first thing that happens is a real technological breakthrough appears — and yes, that was Bitcoin in crypto. Then what happens next is investors wildly overestimate how quickly it will transform the economy. That's what people consistently get wrong. It took a long time to get railroads actually built out all over the world. From the time you started seeing a tiny railroad from one city like London to another city in the UK, it's like, oh, great — but from that point where you've tested the railroad and built one railroad, it is a huge effort to build up the entire rest of the infrastructure. What you can see is that it takes longer than you would think. And that's just what's happening in crypto: the technology is taking much longer than most of us would like to get adopted.
After investors start overestimating how quickly it's going to change the world, capital just floods in. And it floods into legitimate companies and garbage alike. There were lots of garbage railroad companies, and the same basic thing that happened with railroads also happened with electricity. At the end of the 1800s, there was a big electricity boom, and all kinds of companies got all kinds of money to research electricity. Very few of them are still around today. There are huge companies that still exist a hundred years later from that initial electricity boom, but almost everyone else went out of business. That means most investors actually invested in companies that went out of business. It's the same basic thing in crypto today: most investors are investing in chains that are going to go out of business and are not going to last the test of time.
While that euphoria is happening — and I would say 2021 was probably the peak of it, and I don't think we're ever going to see bull markets for altcoins like that again, at least I hope not — the next step arrives: prices become totally detached from realistic cash flows. That's what has happened to everything except ICP. The prices have been totally detached from what's realistic to expect from a business point of view, from money coming in, or from the chain having a profitable business model. And the further prices get disconnected from realistic cash flows and realistic valuations, the more you've made a bubble, just like the dot-com bubble at the end of the 90s and early 2000s. All these companies got huge valuations as the internet — massive infrastructure, a big deal — was coming in and changing all aspects of our lives. But it really took a couple of decades for the internet to go from "hey, this is something new" to "the internet is something I use constantly every day for everything." And it's the same kind of issue with AI. People are so excited about AI, but AI has been out for years. Even things like Facebook and YouTube had AI, as you'd think of it, doing the algorithm for a while. With ChatGPT, though, you could finally see what AI could do that's so valuable. Now AI companies are getting bubbled huge valuations — but how sustainable are they?
The Crypto Bubble Still Has Room to Collapse
So here's what has happened in crypto: crypto has been a massive bubble that still has a lot of room to collapse. This is not financial advice — I only hold ICP, this is just my opinion on everything, and this is what I'm doing with my actual money. What I see is that there's a lot of money in crypto, and what I see happening is that the crypto bubble is going to continue to collapse further. We've not even seen most of the stuff collapse in crypto. If you actually looked at the technology for most of these coins — which I do — you'd see it. I hardly ever go to CoinGecko or CoinMarketCap anymore. CryptoTechCap.com is what I look at, because it shows crypto ranked by technology. And we're not talking about a tiny difference in technology. ICP is a major technological breakthrough compared to the rest of crypto. In my view, this is why it's so suppressed: because it is so far advanced past the rest of crypto that it is a threat to putting everything else out of business.
I would analogize that ICP is so dominant technologically in crypto, it's similar to when cars got invented and what happened to the railroad system. It took a while — with cars, it took a good 50-plus years from when you first started having cars to when the railroad system just utterly broke down and collapsed. Now hardly anybody even rides trains anymore. My ex and I took the kids about a year ago, when we were still married, on a nice train ride. We took the Auto Train from Lorton, Virginia down to outside Orlando. That was fun, but at the same time, I see why people drive places — the train took much longer, although it was a cool experience. You can see why cars won out. The Internet Computer Protocol is that much more advanced than the rest of crypto, and I believe it puts the rest of crypto out of business because of that.
In one of my last videos I talked about how $10,000 for ICP could ruin my life. To me, ICP should be at a thousand times what the price is today. Based on the tech, I believe ICP should be a $1.28 trillion market cap. But it's going to take time, because hardly anybody sees this right now. The more the rest of crypto collapses — the more the bubble pops for crypto — the more ICP will continue to stand out. Most all of these other coins have no substance to them. Their technology is utterly useless compared to ICP, and it's utterly useless in mass adoption scenarios in most cases.
Take Near Protocol, which is going around talking about AI. Look at what the tech can actually do. Can you access LLM inference provided by the network itself? No. Can AI-generated actions be auditable through on-chain state and execution records? No. Can the chain host a model-serving API endpoint from on-chain compute? No. Does the chain provide verifiable randomness to smart contracts? Well, no — not according to the analysis I did, anyway. Maybe I need to dig deeper into that one. Can a dapp call an AI inference without using a centralized API key? No matter how you want to cut the analysis on something like this, the fact is Near Protocol can't hardly do anything with AI. When you dig into the technology and see how the infrastructure ICP has set up is so superior, it's the difference between cars and trains. Then again, cars took a while to proliferate because trains had their infrastructure built before them. It took a while to build enough roads to merit driving cars. And now that we have interstate expressways and huge semi trucks all over the place, trains have become totally irrelevant. That's what I believe is happening with ICP.
Why Hasn't the Market Caught Up Yet? AI Is Changing That
If you wonder, okay, well, ICP has this utterly dominant level of technology — why hasn't the market cap 1000x'd yet? Most people just haven't hit this level of information. But with the proliferation of AI, you're going to get people accessing this information faster, because AI cuts through BS a lot faster than a lot of humans do. AI is able to take in a whole lot more data and look with much more depth than an individual human, and humans using AI can gain the benefit. You could pull this kind of research yourself with the ChatGPT Pro model — that's exactly how I created CryptoTechCap. I created it with the ChatGPT Pro model that I pay $200 a month for, combined with all the knowledge I have in crypto. I used something like a 20-minute-long spoken prompt, then went back and forth to get it all put together, and then I used another AI to build the whole site. If you'd like, you can talk to me every week and I'll get you on this level with AI too, now that we have tools like ChatGPT Pro and Claude out there.
AI Cuts Through the BS in Crypto
Picture someone who pays $200 a month for AI and tells it to cut through the BS on crypto: tell me what coin out of the top 100 is an outlier, tell me what coin has something real that's drastically undervalued. Boom. We didn't have AI in 2021, so people had no ability to cut through all the crap. The more people have AI, the more AI cuts through all the BS that all these cryptos are putting out. Now, some of the AIs are less advanced than the others — Grok especially really sucks at this, in my experience — but the capability is there. And that means people are going to find this, because AI can dig this up for you easily. AI can dig all this information up from actual documentation, from a huge amount of data and research, especially if you ask it to do deep research. That means the tech matters more than ever. It's just that the market hasn't accounted for it.
And the crypto market is doing everything it can to keep you from finding out about this tech. Crypto exchanges and many of the crypto influencers are surviving based on this crypto bubble, and ICP is set up to pop the rest of the crypto bubble. Now, I think the next big crypto bubble could actually be on ICP — where everybody tries to move onto ICP, launch coins on ICP, put all their memes on ICP, build everything on ICP. To me, ICP is in the position to host the next crypto bubble, because then all the narratives get stronger and you have the technology behind them, which gives it legitimacy.
But for now, almost everybody who's in a position of power — crypto exchanges, influencers, politicians, crypto media, foundations — is completely dependent on you not knowing this stuff. And once they realize you know it, they're going to exit as fast as they can. Some of them are already making discrete exits. In my view, that's why there's no big boom and no big bull market.
What Happened When AI Compared Sui to ICP
You can see it when they start talking. Take Sui: when you see Sui's co-founder talk like their tech is like Internet Computer, the AI can tell you that's BS. I guess we're not swearing today — the AI can call that bluff immediately. When the co-founder goes on another YouTuber's channel and talks about what their tech can do, the AI can immediately call BS on it. The founder's saying one thing, and people don't know well enough to use AI to fact-check this stuff when it's sitting right there. If you're holding more than $10,000 in crypto, a $200 ChatGPT subscription to do better crypto research seems like a no-brainer to me — especially if you have over $100,000. The people who have a lot of money in crypto can likely afford a $200-a-month ChatGPT subscription and take five minutes to ask it to call BS on these claims.
So Sui's co-founder is sitting there acting like it can do what ICP can do. But here's what the AI says when it goes through all of Sui's documentation — just rips through all of it at once — then rips through all of ICP's documentation at once, and compares both technologies to each other. The AI cranks out that ICP can do 97 things that are important, and Sui can do 19.
So we're getting to a point in the cycle where the crypto bubble is popping, because AI is able to instantly cut through all this BS. And I'm trying to save all of you — can't you see that? I'm trying to help people cut through all this BS in crypto and see that only the tech survives.
When the Bubble Pops, Only Useful Infrastructure Lasts
When the bubble pops, most companies disappear. We're already seeing projects where maybe not all of the team has left, but the teams have gone silent and the roadmaps have given up. You might still have the founder go on and on trying to promote it, because they have more to gain than anyone. But when the bubble collapses, almost all the companies, coins, and foundations are going to just go away. What will last is the useful infrastructure. ICP is the useful infrastructure in crypto — and I'm talking useful to the planet, like railroads, roads, the internet, light bulbs, electricity. These are useful for average people who aren't invested in any of that stuff.
For context, I don't own any stocks. I don't believe in investing in companies that already have huge valuations — they don't need my money. And I want 100x, at least. I'm not trying to get 10 or 20 percent. I'm in ICP because I see it can last through everything else dying in crypto, and whenever all of that happens, I believe it's in a position to 100x or maybe even 1000x. That's why I'm here. Only the tech will survive the crypto bubble collapsing.
And it looks like we are seeing signs that the crypto bubble is collapsing. It looks like people outside of crypto have no interest in getting into crypto. Ironically, the masses see the truth about crypto while people in crypto are stuck in delusion — but they're getting woken up from their delusion, because the prices just keep sucking. Only the useful infrastructure is going to last after the bubble collapses and, essentially, everybody in crypto disappears. Meanwhile, the adoption will not only continue but will accelerate. That, to me, is the exact future we're going to see with ICP.
The only way I see that changing is if some superior technology to ICP comes out, or some equal technology comes out — like if, say, Google released the same thing and then put a massive marketing push behind it. That's unlikely now, because DFINITY has such a lead on everyone else. Almost no one else figured out how important this was 10 years ago and started working on it. Even at this point, just catching up with DFINITY would be very difficult. Meanwhile, the crypto fakers are starting to act like this is the truth about their own projects — but that depends on you being ignorant, naive, and uninformed. And if you watch my videos, that's gone.
The Masses Only Care About Tech That Works
So when the bubble collapses and the useful infrastructure is all that's left, the adoption for ICP is set up to be rapid, because the masses only care about tech that works. You don't care about the brand on a company's railroad. And you've been tricked into thinking that a brand on a car matters — it doesn't. That's why I drive a car that's 20 years old. It's cheap to repair, it's reliable, and I have an emotional attachment to it — I love it. I'm not tricked into spending money or taking on more debt to drive some car that is more complicated. It's practical.
So what happens at the end of this cycle, when the whole bubble collapses, when all the BS is found out, and when AI is able to easily communicate to regular people that ICP is the only thing that truly is useful infrastructure that can last and serve the masses? Then everything else collapses. In time, a small group survives — there may be another coin or two, a handful of things, and memes may try to move over successfully to ICP. I just reviewed the top 100 meme coins on Jerry Banfield Crypto Reviews, and I recently reviewed the top 100 blockchains there too. Almost none of them are going to survive. Maybe Bitcoin as a collector's item. Maybe Ethereum as a collector's item. Almost everything else is going to bite the dust, and almost all the value that's in crypto today is going to pour into the survivors — just like it did with the railroad system, just like it did with electricity, just like it did with the internet.
I'm a prophet sent from God. Oh, that sounded good, didn't it? Really, I'm just here showing you what I believe the probable outcome of this is. That's why I say on the tech cap multiple that ICP has a 1000x tech-adjusted upside. The question is how long this will take, and whether anything else will come out that can compete with it and grab market share. This is not guaranteed. But this is what will happen if all the money — or 90-some percent of the money — tied up in the rest of these pours into the top technology. If you're operating in a world of logic, reason, and research — which AI does really well — then in that world, the more we move toward AI, the more I believe you should bet on ICP. And if you just want to operate in irrationality and emotions and the "tech doesn't matter" dumb argument, you're operating in the dark, and that's going to be a rude awakening.
Now, I'll concede some things. What we've been through in this bubble is tons of fraudulent investments and ridiculous valuations, but yes, there are other things being tested, and there are other blockchains that have usage — I know all that. Still, the best infrastructure in tech tends to dominate and take over eventually. I will also concede that distribution can beat engineering — that's what's happening in crypto right now, where a lot of technically inferior projects have more adoption, at least today. But on the ICP blockchain, real utility is being created by burning ICP for cycles. I'm paying my web hosting bill by buying ICP and burning it for cycles. This is something no other crypto has, and it's a very important use case. That's why I talk about it every day.
And if you appreciate that I talk about it every day, imagine if you had the chance to talk to me every week. I'm building my community from the ground up, and I want the people who are most devoted — who would most care that we have a two-way relationship — to join the Jerry Banfield Family, where you can have a one-on-one call with me every week. You could talk with me about crypto — any crypto — or about dating, YouTube, or AI. I do amazing things with AI; you should see the stuff I do with it. You can hop into a Zoom call, screen share, and show me what you're working on. You can talk with me about life coaching too. I'm sober, and you can read the sheer depth of things in my books about dating, relationships, business, sobriety, health, weight, AI, YouTube and content, and money. That's 52 one-on-one calls with me a year.
I'm Very Interested in Talking to You
I'm very interested in talking to you. And here's the honest truth: even if it's just you and one other person on a call with me every week, I can make everything else in my life work absolutely perfectly, financially, by fully monetizing everything I do. As the community grows, I may need to work 25 to 50 hours a week just on the calls — and I'm glad to do it.
I hope you're one of the people I can get to know so much better. If a weekly one-on-one call sounds good to you, join the Jerry Banfield Family, and I look forward to seeing you again soon.
Written Versions of Everything, Hosted on ICP
And if you want written versions — a whole history of posts and videos all in the same place, including things that aren't even on YouTube — my website has a blog with 949 posts on it. I don't know any other way in the world I could host all of that with the security, the speed, and the affordability — damn near free — that I get hosting it on ICP. For more videos like this one on making, saving, and investing money, you can also watch my Crypto Reviews playlist. Alright — wow, that was a nice five-minute pitch.
The Biggest Crypto Lie 99% of Bitcoin, ETH, and ICP Holders Believe
From my video published November 27, 2024.
You're about to experience a heartbreaking video that will ruin crypto for you forever. I mean, you're going to hear the biggest lie in crypto today, the one that 99% of people in Bitcoin, Internet Computer Protocol, and almost every other altcoin actually believe. It's decentralization.
What is decentralization? That means everything's not all controlled by a tiny amount of people. Almost everybody in crypto thinks that things are so decentralized. And this is why we got into crypto in the first place, because the world is very centralized. A tiny amount of people control huge amounts of things on the planet right now. I got excited about crypto because, for the first time, there's the potential to have peer-to-peer currency, where we don't have a centralized third party moderating transactions, like a bank or a government, sitting in between us. But the unfortunate reality today is that almost everything in crypto is centralized in almost every single way.
Bitcoin is not decentralized, and the evidence takes one minute
Let's start with Bitcoin, because a big claim like this requires very clear and obvious evidence. So here's the clear and obvious evidence that the most important part of Bitcoin is not at all decentralized. If you look at the Bitcoin mining pool comparison today, Foundry USA and Antpool control half of the Bitcoin mining power by themselves. And then if you throw in F2Pool and ViaBTC, just four single mining pools control over 75% of Bitcoin mining. You can imagine those mining pools each have a single person you could talk to if you wanted to get something done. That's more than likely four people in the world who effectively control Bitcoin mining.
Now, does that sound decentralized to you? Does that sound any different from our existing system? No. Bitcoin mining didn't used to be this centralized, but with Bitcoin mining companies having stocks you can pour money into, this is what's happened. Bitcoin mining is not at all decentralized. So all the claims people are making about how decentralized Bitcoin is are absolutely, provably false in one minute. It's not decentralized. It is very centralized.
And if you want to look at this from another angle, look at how many people are on the official Bitcoin Core GitHub repository. This is the official Bitcoin GitHub for the Bitcoin Core wallet, which is the official developer wallet and where you set up a node. There are about 17 people on it. Now, that's more decentralized than Bitcoin mining. But if you combine that with the mining pools, that's like 20 people who control almost everything important in Bitcoin. Is that decentralized, given it's a two-trillion-dollar-plus market? No. That sounds like more of the same.
And then if you want to look at the supply, it's the same as the rest of finance. About a quarter of 1% of Bitcoin addresses hold around 80% of all the Bitcoin. A hundred addresses hold roughly 15% of all the Bitcoin, and about 2,000 addresses hold almost 40% of all the Bitcoin. Even though it's been out 15 years, this is not decentralization. The supply of Bitcoin is centralized, the Bitcoin Core GitHub is centralized, and the Bitcoin mining pools are centralized. And this is the most celebrated, quote, decentralized cryptocurrency.
The public view versus the inside view
What I have been learning after 10 years in crypto is that the further and further you get into it, the more almost everything in life applies. There's this matrix of how people think things look from the outside, the public view, and then when you get on the inside, there's the inside view. The public view of crypto is: we're so decentralized, come join us, it's a much better world, it's totally different from this centralized, controlled world you're a part of. But then when you get on the inside, like I am, it's like, oh, it's the same crap. It's just that people don't think it is. It's the same stuff.
Now, what's even worse than this is how most people are actually interacting with the Bitcoin blockchain. Do you think most people have a Bitcoin Core wallet and are just on their computer? I mean, that's a hot wallet, so I wouldn't even recommend it, but do you think most people have an official Bitcoin Core wallet and that's how they're interacting with the blockchain? Nope. One reason Bitcoin is so centralized is that most people are buying Bitcoin through a centralized exchange. That removes any thought of decentralization. You've got one or two people who control massive amounts of Bitcoin on exchanges. There's something like $200 billion of Bitcoin sitting on centralized exchanges, and that's how most people are buying it. And Bitcoin ETFs? Centralized, controlled.
Ethereum tells the same story, maybe worse
So then you say, well, what about Ethereum? Same story. On Ethereum right now there are about 30-something million ETH staked. One single staking provider has almost 10 million ETH staked. So one single staking provider has a little less than a third of all the Ethereum staked. They call themselves Lido DAO, but if you dig into the details of how the DAO works, is it actually DAO-controlled where everything's fully on chain, or do you have to go off chain? Do developers have to make changes? Is it actually controlled by one or two people? Well, if you dig into the details, it's controlled by one or two people.
The Ethereum blockchain itself doesn't have the capacity to do every single thing you'd need to do with Lido DAO completely on chain. So there's a website you go to that's off chain, controlled by the Lido DAO team, and anything that can't be done on chain is controlled off chain, and therefore it comes back to being totally centralized. And the other huge amounts of staked Ethereum are in more staking pools that, again, come back to centralized control. Ethereum staking is by no means decentralized. Even Vitalik Buterin doesn't stake his Ethereum, because he doesn't think that's a good idea. Your Ethereum can get slashed. For example, if you aggravated Lido DAO, it's possible they could slash your stake.
Ethereum is not decentralized by any means. This is why they've been able to censor transactions on Ethereum, where certain transactions won't be allowed through and the nodes will ignore them. Many of the nodes are all hosted in the exact same place. Most would argue Ethereum is more centralized than Bitcoin. And clearly, if Ethereum is more centralized than Bitcoin, and given what I've just shown you about Bitcoin, then that's pretty bad. If you want to keep going down this rabbit hole with me, I keep this conversation going in my Crypto Reviews playlist, and I've made the argument before that Bitcoin is essentially a trillion-dollar spreadsheet rather than the revolution people sell it as.
Yes, ICP is centralized too, and I'm the one telling you
Now, I'm big on ICP. I talk about Internet Computer Protocol every single day. And the argument a lot of the critics make is, well, Jerry, that's totally centralized. If DFINITY isn't constantly working on Internet Computer Protocol, then what's it going to do? And unfortunately, this is a valid criticism. But keep in mind, it's valid for Bitcoin too. Those Bitcoin mining pools can do whatever they want with Bitcoin, as can the people on the Bitcoin GitHub.
On ICP, you've got DFINITY instead of a couple of Bitcoin mining pools. DFINITY still has a huge amount of the voting power, but it's even worse than it looks on the dashboard. On the dashboard, DFINITY has about 20% of the total voting power, but you've also got a whole bunch of people who follow DFINITY. So when DFINITY votes, like half the whole supply votes with it. DFINITY still has Internet Computer Protocol completely locked down.
Now, for people out there who believe the lie that Bitcoin and Ethereum are so decentralized and then point at ICP as if it's the horribly centralized one, here's the fact: I don't see anything really useful in crypto that's meaningfully decentralized. Sure, there are a couple of little projects and DAOs with some meaningful decentralization, but almost everything that people have money in is totally centralized, and ICP has the most promising technology. And yes, ICP is right there with everything else. All the critics saying how centralized ICP is? You're absolutely right.
Now, at least ICP does have the potential to decentralize further. The voting power has gone down from DFINITY having 40% to 20%. That said, if DFINITY votes on something, it doesn't matter what the rest of the community wants to do. That's just plain facts. If you look at the voting at the Network Nervous System, all these DAOs and all these proposals, when DFINITY votes for something, it happens. In some areas, when DFINITY votes, it's immediately executed. There's literally no discussion. You can go see these kinds of proposals yourself in the Network Nervous System. Some things DFINITY votes on are just immediately executed, no discussion, and like 80% of the voting power just plows in immediately. So many people are following DFINITY that there's no thought of decentralization at all.
If you look at the ICP supply, same story. Half the ICP supply is sitting in addresses with a balance greater than 100,000 ICP. They hold half the entire supply. And how many addresses is that? Right now there are about 786 addresses holding more than 100K ICP, and they hold half the entire supply of ICP. That's in line with Bitcoin, where 0.28% of addresses hold around 82% of the supply. ICP is right in line with that, 786 addresses holding about half the entire supply.
Decentralization theater in the DAOs
And then there's OpenChat, which I'm very excited about. I use it every day. I'm excited about all these DAOs on ICP. I did a little experiment where I submitted proposals to do a single video about all these different DAOs. If you look at the most active DAOs in crypto right now, in the top 10 there are nine of them on ICP. The top nine DAOs are all on ICP, and most of the top 20 are on ICP as well.
But if you actually submit a proposal to these DAOs, which most people haven't done but I have, you'll notice most of them are completely centralized. If the founding team does not vote on your proposal with their massive voting power and massive following, then nothing happens. I've had proposals where the community voted overwhelmingly in favor, but the founding team didn't vote on it, and therefore the proposal didn't execute. I won't call any one project out in particular here, because there are a bunch of them like that. I've put out proposals where the community voted like 20 times as many yes votes as no votes, and the proposal was rejected because the founding team sat there and did nothing. That's not decentralized. That's decentralization theater. And that's the big lie in crypto. Everything in crypto in a meaningful way, as far as I can see today, is decentralization theater.
Even Internet Computer Protocol, the nodes come back to DFINITY
It's all decentralization theater, even Internet Computer Protocol. Now, I think Internet Computer Protocol is in one of the best positions to provide real decentralization, but the fact is it's centralized today too. I've seen people complaining that in order to get listed as a node on Internet Computer Protocol, you have to get DFINITY to approve you. So all the nodes on ICP have been approved by DFINITY, and they often aren't even accepting new nodes. So the nodes on ICP are totally centralized, even though technically they're different companies. They've all been approved by DFINITY, and there are a few people that it all comes back to. It all comes back to DFINITY again. Total centralization.
Yeah, there are more people who work at DFINITY than are on the Bitcoin Core GitHub, but at this point it seems like we're just splitting hairs. Is there any real decentralization in crypto? As far as I can see right now, almost everybody interacting with crypto is doing so through an exchange, and if you're doing anything on an exchange, all decentralization has been removed completely. Anything you're trading on an exchange, you are in a centralized environment. You're effectively at a bank, where it doesn't matter how decentralized the blockchain is. If you're trading crypto on an exchange, if you're trading meme coins on an exchange, unless it's one that's fully on chain like ICPSwap, and even then the founding team has so much voting power that it's not even really meaningfully decentralized either. And that applies to everything, not just one exchange or one project in particular. If you've felt this same disillusionment, I went even further in why I believe 99% of crypto is theft.
Why I keep facing the dark side anyway
So yeah, this is pretty depressing. I have days where I wake up and think, why? This is why I quit crypto before. I quit crypto in 2018 when I got to be enough of an insider to see how fraudulent it is, when I realized almost everything the public believed was wrong, and that the very reason I got into crypto was a lie. That said, you've got to do your best with what you've got today. I mean, ICP is some of the best tech we've got in the world right now for preventing cybercrime. It has some of the greatest potential to be decentralized, if DFINITY didn't have to approve everything themselves and if the DAOs weren't all centralized.
So I think it's important to face the dark sides, the lies, and the things that are not how you'd like them to be in anything, whether that's a relationship you're in or a job. This is part of the reason I quit doing crypto again earlier this year. I'm like, this is gross. I know that most people are being lied to and deceived. All these people throwing money into the Bitcoin thing, betting on the future, you're all being lied to. But that's pretty much all of this, isn't it? The whole matrix of reality we're in is pretty much like that. So at least we're in this together. I've laid out the more hopeful side of my thinking in why I think the market caps are a distraction and only ICP is real, even with everything I've just admitted about its centralization.
If you want to come talk about this with me and give me feedback, you can find me at jerrybanfield.com, which runs on Internet Computer Protocol, which arguably has some decentralization, though whether it's meaningful is debatable. You can hop into my OpenChat and chat with me there.
The 'Crypto Is Freedom' Lie
From my video published July 15, 2024.
Crypto is freedom is a huge lie. People, including me, were really excited when Bitcoin first came out, and we started imagining that we could be free of government tyranny and centralized control. But the centralized powers have discreetly snuck back in and taken control of crypto almost completely, to the point where, in my view, crypto is more of the same lies. And in fact, crypto has extracted billions and billions of dollars and huge amounts of hours of people's time. If anything, for most people, crypto is more bondage. It's putting in a bunch of time and energy only to lose money. It's buying a meme coin and then selling it and taking profits and then buying some other coin that tanks and goes to zero, all while you put hundreds of hours of time into it and thought you were getting richer, but it turns out now your bank account's drained.
How the centralized powers snuck back in
It is having people now put money into institutions like BlackRock for ETFs, where now BlackRock holds the Bitcoin and not the people themselves. And BlackRock, if they're honest, will only sell one Bitcoin for each Bitcoin they have to their investors. But if any centralized organization who has a bunch of Bitcoin chooses to double, triple, 10x sell their Bitcoin — say they only have a thousand Bitcoin, but they sell 10,000 worth to investors — now crypto is exactly the same thing that we're already used to everywhere else.
And I would like to see a future where crypto does equal true freedom. So what exactly do we need to have happen in order for that to actually manifest? This is the kind of question I keep coming back to across my Crypto Reviews playlist, and I think it's worth working through carefully.
What crypto would need to actually equal freedom
Well, first, we need to be able to directly interact with the blockchain ourselves. Right now, the main way that crypto has been compromised from offering any true freedom is that most people keep their crypto in a way that you have a third party between you and the actual blockchain — even if it's in your own wallet. If you have a Ledger or Tangem or Trezor or MetaMask, in these cases there's a third party between you and the blockchain that can be compromised, and that can cause you to lose some or all of your crypto: whether it's hacked and stolen, whether the exchange goes down like FTX, or rather a government decides to seize your crypto, which can happen on any exchange, or whether the third-party provider gets hacked and you get tricked into making a fraudulent transaction, or you end up losing your Ledger or your hardware wallet and then can't get another one. This is what has happened to so many people in crypto.
And the first thing we need to do to take some real freedom back for crypto is we need people in crypto to be more open, more educated. Because the existing state of finance in the world is that people get tricked into all kinds of bad investments, putting money into things that end up working against them. For example, when people throw money into mutual funds carelessly, just hoping to get a better return and keep up with inflation, then they're funding all kinds of these companies to have centralized power and control right back over them. People throwing money into mutual funds — some of it ends up in Facebook, then they end up getting their posts taken down by Facebook, and then they complain when really they just contributed to funding the company that then censored them. Our whole system is set up like this right now.
Why a third party always stands between you and the blockchain
And while crypto initially had some hope of giving us a better deal, with most people holding their money directly on an exchange or in some third-party wallet and not even interacting with the blockchain, most of the people in crypto are extremely vulnerable to losing money. In my experience, Internet Computer Protocol is the only blockchain out there where anyone can easily directly interact with the blockchain, and you do not need any more third-party wallets — you can have your entire wallet on the Network Nervous System or in any of these other apps. Because Internet Computer is the only full-stack crypto where you can build your whole website, an order book exchange, AI on chain, full Web3 social media apps like Taggr and OpenChat directly on chain. Internet Computer is the only crypto that I've found that is practical and easy to use, with low transaction fees, that does not practically require a third-party wallet.
Now, yes, I'm aware that technically there are official wallets. You can download the Bitcoin Core wallet and download the whole Bitcoin blockchain — like a half terabyte of data — and wait while your computer does that. But for most people that's too difficult. And that ends up being a hot wallet also, where even one of the Bitcoin Core developers got their roughly 100 Bitcoin stolen out of their hot official Bitcoin wallet. So Internet Computer is the first crypto that I see that really gives us a chance to take back true freedom in crypto.
Why I think Internet Computer is the one real shot at freedom
And this is one of the reasons that, in my opinion, Internet Computer appears to be getting censored. Because on Internet Computer it's very easy to do your own staking, which cuts out third parties — unlike Ethereum staking, which has become huge, centralized entities. They say they're a DAO, but technically they're not a DAO; the token doesn't give you any real control, and you have to rely on the developers, who then get to have all the real power.
So both Bitcoin and Ethereum have been totally compromised at this point by centralization, the way I see it. With Bitcoin mining, there are only two or three big mining pools that have control of almost all the hashing rate. When I started in Bitcoin, you could — well, technically it wasn't easy, but if you had the technical expertise, you could just plug a computer in and start mining some Bitcoin. But today the network is so huge, and then it's been centrally funded by things like Bitcoin mining company stocks, so now Bitcoin mining is centralized. And transactions could easily be censored if these mining pools decided to do so. Ethereum already has been censoring transactions, and you've got three or four Ethereum stakers who hold the vast majority of Ethereum. So that's not freedom. That's the same old thing that we've got in the rest of the world. In fact, with all these hundreds of governments in the world, you might argue our current geopolitical system offers more freedom of choice than crypto does. This is the same pattern I dug into in the biggest crypto lie that 99% of Bitcoin, ETH, and ICP holders believe.
Internet Computer Protocol definitely has some centralization as well, with heavy reliance on DFINITY at this point. But at least the technology looks, in my opinion, to be our best chance to have any freedom in crypto. Because right now, the way Bitcoin and Ethereum and all these other cryptos except for ICP are operating is taking away people's freedom. You can see how I think about ICP specifically across my ICP Crypto playlist.
The freedom that's been stripped away over ten years
Having a few thousand dollars in the bank that you can use to travel somewhere — at least there is constant inflation, so the value of your dollars is going down, but having some money in the bank is at least a bit of freedom. But for the billions of dollars that people have got ripped off on all these garbage coins in crypto, that's people's freedom being taken away by lies, by market manipulation. In crypto, market prices are horribly manipulated. There appear to be blatant insider trading, and exchanges collaborating with coins to intentionally pump and dump coins at certain times. And that's not freedom.
Now, the one way I'll say it is freedom: you can buy into any crypto you want to. But many of these exchanges are blocking users from certain countries, and many of these ICOs are not even allowing people in the US to participate. Ironically, crypto felt much more free 10 years ago when I first got into it. Now crypto feels, by comparison, much more heavily regulated, and a lot of the freedom that was there 10 years ago has been stripped away.
So I hope to dispel those of you going around feeling like you're really being free with crypto — you might question that. I don't totally believe any thought that I have, and it's good to question some of these thoughts, because some people get lined up politically on things: if you believe all these other things, then you're into crypto because you believe in freedom. That's probably how I got into crypto myself. But today I know that you've got to be very careful with freedom. Because even if there's some truth to crypto as freedom, freedom is challenging. And what you can see with all these meme coins is that people use their freedom in crypto to often make bad financial decisions.
Crypto creators have almost no freedom
And then when it comes to content creators in crypto, content creators in crypto have almost no freedom if you want views and money. And why do you think most people create content about crypto? Views and money. So if you want views and money, you want to be a crypto creator, and most content creators hype up altcoins relentlessly — either picking a small coin, loading their bags, and just hyping those up.
Even me — what do I do? I talk up Internet Computer in almost every single video, and now I'm talking about Taggr and OpenChat in most of my videos too, which are social apps on ICP. So I'm at least leading by example and telling you what I'm doing with my own money and my own research, in what I believe is your best interest — giving you the best of what I would want to be given if I was in your position. But most of the crypto creators are signing non-disclosure agreements, taking money from other coins, and then some of them have taken money and appear to also then be silent about anything that might threaten them, like ICP. So crypto is nasty. If you'd rather just talk this through with me directly instead of through a screen, you're always welcome to join Jerry Banfield Family and bring it to one of our weekly live calls.
Why I quit crypto for a while — it was the same dirty politics
I quit doing crypto a few years ago because I felt the opposite of freedom. I got to the top of one of the crypto coins I was invested in, and I found it was more of the same. I was going around telling everybody about freedom until I got to be one of the top holders and top witnesses — which was like being a miner — and I found out: this is just the same old nasty, dirty politics, and underhanded deals. You ask for help and somebody's like, sure, I want a cut of this, and I want a cut of that, and I want a cut of that, and I'll help you out, and if you do this then I'll promote you here. This is the same nasty stuff that goes on everywhere else in politics and corporations, isn't it? I told that fuller story in why I believe Bitcoin is a lie, crypto is fraud, and ICP is real.
True freedom is something we can only have inside
So therefore true freedom is something that we can only have inside. And my big life purpose here is to encourage you not to find freedom in external things — like crypto, for example, or whatever country you're in. True freedom is knowing yourself as the creator of the universe, as a sovereign being who has power over what you think about, what you intend, and what you attract into your life. You have more power over your life than anyone else does, and that is true freedom. And that's something that crypto — no matter how good ICP is, or how good the tech is — cannot give you. Crypto cannot give you the level of freedom you already have.
And for most people, crypto actually appears to have distracted them from doing more important things, like going within and taking care of your addictions. I've run into a lot of people in crypto who are in addiction — because, how do you think I got in here? It's law of attraction. People who are addicted to gambling are often addicted to crypto and drawn to crypto. People who are self-centered, obsessed with themselves, drinkers, drug addicts, often get drawn into crypto, and some of the content creators we've seen have very much matched that description. I'm grateful I haven't placed a bet in a long time, but look at my history — how did I end up here? Well, I found crypto right at the end of my drinking and gambling.
Be careful where you think your freedom is
So you've got to be really careful in crypto, and question where you have real freedom versus where you're being manipulated and tricked into certain altcoins, into certain narratives, into taking what US dollars has been used to make — pretty tangible, clear value, although we could question how well that's going to last in the future — and trading away things that can buy you food and pay your rent, dumping them into sketchy altcoins and meme coins. Crypto is not freedom for most people, but I hope it can be in the future.
If this resonated and you no longer believe the old story, here's a related one worth reading: why I believe Bitcoin is the biggest lie in crypto. This whole conversation actually started live on stream, after somebody got me thinking and talking about the "crypto is freedom" lie — and I'd genuinely love to keep that conversation going with you.