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 Money playlist. Alright — wow, that was a nice five-minute pitch.