Where I See Crypto Today
This is the state of crypto as I see it today. I want to tell you my history with crypto and where I see it going in the future. We've just had the Ethereum merge. On Bitcoin, the latest move I made is I sold 0.98 Bitcoin at just a little bit above this a week ago, after holding it for months. I got really excited about Bitcoin, but then I watched a documentary on Amazon called Above Top Secret. The people in it say there's free energy technology that's being kept secret, along with anti-gravity technology and things like that. So I was getting hyped up on Bitcoin and crypto generally as this awesome technology that's going to change the world. And while it does have that potential, as long as you've got people with so much money that they can just do anything they want, they're not going to let Bitcoin change the world. They're not going to just let it take over.
So the way I see crypto today is that I think Ethereum is on the way to push Bitcoin out. After the merge, a bunch of people were buying the merge because they wanted to get the free Ethereum proof of work fork. And now a bunch of people are unloading Ethereum who have wanted to sell for a while. In my view, Ethereum goes well below a thousand. I was thinking today that Bitcoin could even go to six or seven thousand, because the whole time, if you look at the history of Bitcoin, we've never seen a real down financial market while Bitcoin's been around. If you look at 2008, Bitcoin got started back when we had a huge financial crisis, and we've not had another one of those since Bitcoin has been around.
Why I Think the Big Money Wants Ethereum on Top
Tesla and Elon Musk sold huge amounts of Bitcoin. I think the global elites are focused in on killing Bitcoin, because Bitcoin truly could take on the US dollar as a global reserve currency. And they're using this fake narrative of, "Oh, it uses so much energy." If all you've seen about Ethereum is how much energy it's saving, consider this: people drying clothes uses more energy than Bitcoin mining. Should we just stop using dryers and hang dry our clothes? We could save a ton of energy by doing that. Nobody's talking about that, because there's no benefit there, there's no agenda. But to me it seems that every effort is being made to knock Bitcoin out of number one, and that the global elites want Ethereum to knock Bitcoin out of number one.
I don't know if the proof of stake change is controllable. We're talking amounts of money that are nothing compared to global elites holding trillions of dollars of assets. If they don't already, they could just buy the Ethereum network. Right after the Ethereum merge, you started seeing articles pop up about people worried about censorship on Ethereum. That was not popular to talk about before the merge, was it? But now it's obvious: all you need to do is buy a bunch of Ethereum and you could set the rules for the whole network. That's not something the average person is going to be able to do, but the people who have trillions and trillions of dollars at their disposal can. Ethereum, to me, if you're a huge money person, is the crypto you want, because you want to take Bitcoin down. Bitcoin, if you're a big money person, is purely annoying, because holding Bitcoin doesn't pay you any interest unless you stake it on some marketplace, which is sketchy.
So I think Bitcoin's on the way out. And I'm saying this after I was a Bitcoin maximalist for three months. I tried that on for a little while. I sold almost all of my other crypto except lovely Kronos. Did any of you get hyped up about Kronos and get that debit card? I unloaded four grand on Kronos at 42 cents to get the debit card, and I'll be offsetting some losses with that.
That's my overall market thoughts on crypto. I think Ethereum is going to number one, but one reason it's going to go to number one is that I think Bitcoin is going to plummet. I think that's going to happen because the global elites are going to grab more of it, intentionally. Once you get Bitcoin out of number one, Bitcoin is not attractive anymore, because basically the only thing Bitcoin's got going for it is that it's number one. It's crappy in terms of investors wanting to buy it. Sorry, El Salvador, but this might not work out for you. So I think Ethereum is going to tank a bit, and Bitcoin is going to tank, but I think Ethereum is going to overtake Bitcoin. And that's not any surprise. If you look at the Ethereum price relative to Bitcoin, it's on the way to being at the highest it's ever been compared to Bitcoin. It was up there in 2017, it got over 0.1, and I think we're on the way over there again.
My Take on NFT Gaming
Someone asked how I feel about the NFT movement in gaming. I actually just got an email from Gods Unchained. I think NFT gaming has a lot of potential, but there are a lot of problems with it. A friend was telling me a year ago that he was really excited about NFT gaming, but wasn't sure he'd be able to get into it. Gods Unchained just pumped again, and I'm thinking, man, I wish I'd bought a bunch of Gods Unchained.
Let me talk about crypto gaming, because this is a good example. Gods Unchained is one of the best NFT games out there, in my opinion. It's the only crypto game I've actually played. I looked at the other crypto games, and I think Gods Unchained, in terms of the quality of the game, is one of the very best games on the market. It's a card game similar to Magic the Gathering or Hearthstone, and it uses NFTs where you actually own the cards and can trade them and sell them.
NFT gaming has a lot of potential, but it's also kind of a waste in a lot of ways. Let me tell you what I've done with Gods Unchained. I bought $1,200 of Gods Unchained at over a dollar. I wish I'd bought it at 42 cents. Then I sold it to take the loss and rebuy it in the 30 cent area. Then I became a Bitcoin maximalist and unloaded it right before it pumped to a dollar. So I bought it high, it tanked, I sold it, then it pumped up, and I thought, "I need to just become a Bitcoin maximalist, this is annoying." And then it tanks again and comes back up.
What is the point with this? Well, I found out about Gods Unchained because they actually sponsored one of my live streams a few months ago, and they might sponsor another one. At this rate, if they sponsor several more streams, I'll break even, because I've put over $1,000 into Gods Unchained right now. I'm rank 8 out of 12. So if I keep playing, I may get to one of the very top ranks in it.
But here's the thing. I've bought over $100 in Gods Unchained NFTs. I literally just Googled "Gods Unchained decks" and found a deck with about a 60% win rate at one of the highest tiers, bought the exact deck, and then upgraded some of my cards. But I'm not making that much money actually playing and earning on Gods Unchained. I played Gods Unchained for three hours and I made 30 cents. That's with a deck that cost more than $100. That's with me winning 8 out of 10 games. And that's with me only being rank 8 out of 12. You get more as you climb toward rank 12, the highest rank. It is possible, if you're at the very top of Gods Unchained, to make five or ten bucks a day in Gods tokens, and then occasionally open packs or get something out of that. But it's expensive, unless you live in a country where the dollar is very strong and your currency is weak.
Someone in the chat said that's crap, and it is. I played Gods Unchained for three hours and got about 30 cents, with a $100 deck, winning 80% of my games. I don't see the play to earn model as being sustainable. I think NFT gaming, most of the time, is going to be a crap shoot, most of the time a waste of time, and it's not sustainable, because the more Gods Unchained gives out Gods tokens, the more sell pressure there is. Ultimately, if you're wanting to make a profit off of Gods Unchained, you don't want them to give out a whole bunch of Gods tokens to pay people to play the game. And I'm a gamer. I've played hundreds of games in the last couple of years. The gaming space is competitive. There are a lot of games out there. If you enjoy games like this, you can also check out the games and comedy I've put together over at jerrybanfield.net.
I like being able to just hang out and talk to my people, and it's an honor. I'm brutally honest with them, and I'll be brutally honest here too: I think a lot of cryptos are nothing more than rug pulls, idealistic startups, and in some cases outright scams. That's what makes this whole space difficult. When you look at a site like DappRadar and try to sort by games, the data is genuinely hard to make sense of. Take something like Splinterlands. At first glance it's up near the top of the rankings, but it's not really a top-tier game. It's a good quality crypto game, but the user numbers are grossly inflated because it's on the Hive blockchain. If you look at the volume, the volume is pretty low. So even sorting through the numbers to figure out what is really the fastest-growing crypto community is a challenge, because the data itself is deceiving.
The movie that changed my view on crypto
I got a question about the film Above Top Secret and why it changed my view on crypto. I've got a video on YouTube where I went into this in more depth, but I'll talk about it here too, because it has a huge impact on my thinking about crypto. And it's not single-handed. I'm big into conspiracy theories, and I've come to believe in them because I've seen things firsthand.
I talked to my brother about this, and his take was that human beings want to believe in conspiracy theories just so they can point at someone and say they're evil and that's why everything is the way it is. But here's how I see it. The only reason we have conspiracy theories, and the only difference between truth and a conspiracy theory, is that someone in power decides the truth is inconvenient and therefore puts out lies as the official position. From there you get conspiracy theories that then circle back toward the truth. What's tricky is you don't know exactly which ones are true and which are false. And if you're the one in power, that's the exact design of it: keep people confused, keep people guessing. In fact, it seems the same people responsible for handing us all these lies also intentionally plant people inside the conspiracy communities to spin up false conspiracies and get everybody chasing their tails.
The only difference between misinformation and disinformation and what's actually true is power. If you are powerful enough, whatever you say and whatever you think should be true becomes true, or else. Or else you can make people hurt and suffer, because if they're not following what you've decided should be true, you can take them down. But at a certain level of power, there's nothing above you at all.
What I've seen firsthand
As this relates to crypto, I've watched a bunch of what you'd call conspiracy movies, and I've firsthand been impacted in several ways that leave me certain a lot of these conspiracy theories are true. There are definitely some false ones too. For example, a lot of alien abductions may actually be carried out by human beings who are part of a secret organization trying to prepare people for a fake alien invasion. So maybe the abductions themselves are staged, or you're not getting the proper narrative behind them.
But I've seen some kind of a UFO myself, firsthand. Dr. Steven Greer, who made the documentary Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind, is the same person behind this material. I followed his protocol to contact extraterrestrials myself, and it worked for me, and I didn't even do it with anybody else. I just did it on my own. I saw a craft above my house one night, in exactly the spot where I had asked it to appear. It took over a month from when I first made the request, and I had to be persistent with it.
The way I understand it, human beings have advanced enormously materially over the last hundred years, but we're just getting started on our spiritual development. Once you develop spiritually, you start to understand telepathy, you understand that every being everywhere is connected through thought to every other being instantaneously. So if I reach out to an extraterrestrial species and ask them to come say hi, and I give a clear reason, it can actually happen. My reason was simple: I'm into all of this, and I wanted to see for myself whether it was true or not. And I told them I'm sober. I don't do any drugs. I've been sober for eight and a half years, I go to Alcoholics Anonymous every day, and I was one hundred percent sober at the time this happened.
Here's what I saw. I was walking my dog when I noticed a light. At first I didn't think anything of it. It looked like a helicopter overhead, except there was no sound, with a kind of spotlight aimed a bit over in my direction. It was a decent distance above my house, roughly helicopter height. I looked up at it, and all of a sudden it just ripped across the entire sky. One moment it was stationary, and the next it streaked from one side of the sky to the other. I was on the phone with my mom, and I said, "I saw it, mom, I just saw a UFO." I thought it was awesome. And then my own skepticism kicked in. My mind came in with the dumbest stuff: did you really see a UFO, or was that just a streetlight you got confused about? But I had asked to see one, and I saw one. So I know there is a lot of truth to some conspiracies. I can't tell you exactly which ones are yes and which are no, but I know there's truth in there.
How this ties back to Bitcoin and crypto
Here's what he says in the movie, and it's something I have very high confidence in. Our governments and the companies working alongside them have essentially merged into one thing now, what you could call the military-industrial complex. And from what he says, from what I've seen, and from what feels true to me, that complex has extremely high technology that is kept secret. One example is what you'd think of as free energy, zero-point energy devices, like a Tesla device. Something that could power an entire neighborhood with a small device that isn't even that hard to make, drawing on planetary zero-point energy. And it's been kept secret because releasing it would annihilate so many industries that people sitting on massive amounts of money would lose everything.
Think about it. Some people say the US dollar is really a petrodollar, that its value is tied to oil. If you let this technology loose, it annihilates oil almost entirely, except in manufacturing. It annihilates nuclear power, coal, and natural gas. It annihilates all the old cars out there. Even things like Tesla's battery-powered cars aren't necessary anymore. So if you're sitting on a trillion dollars in assets and you have access to technology that would wipe out the majority of your portfolio, the logical, self-centered move is to keep it secret, use it yourself, and release it later only if and when you feel like it. I've seen a bunch of people saying similar things, and that's what got me thinking about it in terms of cryptocurrency.
Because I used to get idealistic about crypto, the same way a lot of people do. When I was a Bitcoin maximalist, I thought we could change the world. All we needed to do was buy Bitcoin, and it would screw the US dollar over and replace it as the global reserve currency. I was all-in on that idea. But then look at it this way. If there are people powerful enough to decide that free energy should stay secret, I don't think they're going to get caught off guard by Bitcoin. I think they don't like Bitcoin, but it's not a threat to them, because they have so much money and power. From their point of view, a market cap of a few hundred billion dollars, which is significantly overinflated anyway because so much Bitcoin has been lost and can't actually be transacted, is not a threat. It's an annoyance at most.
And it's something that could easily be handled. You get a currency like Ethereum into proof of stake, or you simply buy up the network and control exactly what happens to it. The intelligent move, as I see it, is to make Ethereum number one. That gets rid of Bitcoin, and then you no longer have any concern about some cryptocurrency potentially replacing your precious US dollar, which is the primary tool you use to control the world.
Aliens are no longer a surprise
Somebody pointed out that Joe Rogan discusses aliens as well, and yes, I've listened to Rogan do a couple of different podcasts on it, one with Bob Lazar and another with a guy who said he'd been abducted. Think about how far this has come. Eighty years ago people were terrified when the War of the Worlds broadcast came on the radio. Today the average person already believes in aliens, or at least would not be surprised by their existence. When we expect something, we're prepared to hear it, and today we're prepared to hear that aliens are reality. That, in my view, is exactly why our governments are finally disclosing that, hey, there are some UFOs flying around out here. In reality we've known that pretty much throughout human history.
Some honesty on UFOs, and why I think our elections are a distraction
I am glad that in the 2020s we have finally got some honesty from the government when it comes to UFOs and all these incredible military tools. When I look at how much has been admitted, I think it is amazing. Someone in the chat joked that if you do not watch Jerry, it means you are not committed to self improvement, and I have to laugh, because I am huge on self improvement. I am big into it. That is a big part of why I do what I do.
So let me tell you where I see the current state of crypto today. In my experience, crypto is a very powerful technology, but it is not something that is going to change the world single handedly. You can listen to these Bitcoin maximalist podcasts, and I understand the appeal, but here is how I have come to see it. If there were no conspiracy theories, if everything were just as it seems, if the government were really the people we have elected and our corporate leaders were operating in a way that is honest and transparent, then there would not be documentaries with so much good evidence and so many good points showing that things are not operating like that.
In my belief, our governments and our elections have become a distraction at this point. I do not think it matters whether Biden or Trump wins. I do not think it mattered whether Hillary or Trump won. To me it is a distraction, because whoever gets into that office is going to do what they are told, or they are going to face severe JFK style consequences. My honest view is that we have collectively, as the people, lost control of our democracy. It does not feel like a democracy to me anymore. It feels more like a military dictatorship run at a level that only some of us are starting to comprehend. Our entire election cycle can look like a show, pretending we are really electing somebody, when it does not seem to matter who gets elected.
I heard a story that Barack Obama came into the Oval Office all idealistic, and they sat him down and gave him the talk that new presidents get if they do not already know about all of this beforehand. From what I understand, Barack was not in on it beforehand. They gave Barack the talk, and he was left crying, asking how it could be like this and what he had gotten into. Here he had been talking about change that we can believe in, and the talk was basically: Barack, you are going to do exactly what we tell you to do, or there will be the most severe consequences you can imagine. You can see how that would be distressing. And you can see, looking at Barack Obama, that things did not change much through Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden. To me it feels like the same military dictator has run the government my entire life.
What crypto really needs is a change of consciousness
So this is the state I see us in. We are clearly in a world where a small group of people have so much money and so much power that, in my opinion, the idealism around crypto is not going to make the difference people hope it will. In other words, I do not believe Bitcoin is going to change the world, and I do not believe Ethereum is going to change the world. It is cool. It is providing some new technology. But what I have come to believe we really need is a change of consciousness.
We need more of us to move into a collective consciousness state where we stop thinking only about ourselves, only about making money for ourselves and our families and our friends and our countries, and we start looking at everybody on the planet as an equal instead of an obstacle. Imagine if we divided our attention up equally. Right now some tragedy hits the news and you get hundreds of millions of people around the world praying for a very small group of people that does not need that many prayers, while tens of thousands of people starve to death every day and hardly anybody thinks about them. With just a tiny bit of attention, we already have enough food to feed everybody.
I was really into crypto, and I am very skeptical now. Especially when you look at crypto and you do not care that much about making money for yourself, the question I find interesting is: where would it actually help the collective for me to participate in crypto? If I am not just thinking about how I make a profit, but about where it would really help, then I start seeing possibilities differently. One place I am seeing a bit of that is in crypto gaming. If you want to see where this thinking has taken me across different projects, you can dig through my Crypto Reviews playlist.
So I will wrap this recording up here, and from this point I want to go deeper into crypto and Web3 next, with all of this as the backdrop for how I look at it now.