My friends, you're about to see how you become stupid investing in crypto on X. The tweet I'm showing you gives a perfect example of it, except I changed it to be more accurate instead of the other tweets I keep seeing that are very manipulative, poorly researched, and will rip you off. I know it's a little harsh to say stupid, but to me the first rule of investing is don't lose money. And if you lose money investing in crypto, and especially if you combine that with putting a bunch of time into it, that's just dumb. Yes, I lost thousands of dollars in 2014 just buying Bitcoin, but I've made money every year since then in crypto, because after being naive and getting wrecked I realized I never, ever want to do that again.
Reading a bunch of tweets written the way these are, where the author is simply trying to get themselves clicks and impressions without any consideration of the impact on you, will lead to you getting programmed to research and like altcoins that have no real value. What's happening on X right now is that tweets like this do very well in the algorithm, except mine's not going off nearly as hard. Here's why. I took ChatGPT and rewrote a BS tweet I saw that was formulated mostly the same way with mostly the same cryptos. The ones I saw would say things like diversify to become the next millionaire during the bull run, and then they'd list all of these altcoins. I've done reviews on almost all of them, and they're junk after trash after junk, after crap, after suck, after whatever you wouldn't want to do. Tau, Fetch AI, these are just Quant ripoffs, straight-up ripoffs. No fundamentals, no clear angle as to how you're even going to beat Bitcoin as an investor, let alone make good profits.
For the layer ones, I included the same cryptos in the same categories as one of the tweets I saw, because these are just junk. They put Injective, Casper, and Tron in there. I've said overhyped for all of these. And privacy coins, what a joke.
Why my negative post reached more people
My post got way more views than the average on my own X account. I made a new X account in February 2023 to get rid of all the old followers that were killing my algorithm on the last one. If you look, this one went out there and reached a lot of people not following me. This internet computer post also went off pretty hard, but most of my other tweets reach a few hundred people. This one, where I took a negative angle, reached ten times or so as many views as my tweets normally do. And that's only a fraction of what I'd get if I had just written it in the positive.
So what's happening on X is that a bunch of these accounts have figured out the tokens you can tag with those dollar signs, which represent altcoin ticker symbols. They've figured out that if you tag a bunch of these junk coins all in one post and write reasons why they're great, then a bunch of the communities and the token accounts themselves will like and re-share your post. Those posts go off in the algorithm and reach a lot of people. But everyone involved is missing something really important: almost all altcoins are junk and go to zero. And almost everybody involved is in some way seriously delusional, or outright manipulating and exploiting other people.
So the creator of something like this, written to the positive, in the nicest case, for most of the tweets I've seen, we could say they're naive and don't know any better, and they're just trying to say what they think people want to hear. That's the nicest case. In the nastiest case, they're very aware that the tweets they're writing are blatantly crap, that people have gotten wrecked and are going to keep getting wrecked in all the coins they tag, and they're simply putting them out there to make money for themselves so they can get a bunch of organic reach, get monetized on X, sell their membership programs, and so on. And all of the tokens, obviously, are desperate for anybody else to talk about why they're good. So the tokens, understandably, are self-interested and likely to like and retweet any content they come across.
You put out what you take in
Now you might think, well Jerry, so what if I see some posts like this? That doesn't make me stupid. What I've noticed is that if I take in junk, then I tend to put out junk. So I'm very careful about what I take in mentally and physically. Sure, I just had maybe a half of a snack bag of Cheetos before this, like 80 calories. In my experience you can take in a little bit of junk and not totally throw your body away in most cases. But for the majority of my diet I eat mostly whole plant foods and drink almost just water and green matcha tea. And guess what? It's easy for me to maintain a healthy weight and my body feels great almost all the time. What I've come to believe is that if you eat a bunch of junk, like a lot of processed foods and animal products, and drink a bunch of things like sodas, you take all that junk into your body and you're generally going to be overweight and have health problems. It's that simple.
If you do the same thing with your mind, the difference between mental illness and a healthy mind is often the stuff you take in. If you watch a bunch of crappy, violent, crazy TV shows, and you listen to a bunch of the same kind of music, and then you work in an environment with people like that, it's not surprising that you have all these problems. I used to live that way. Now I live around people who are loving and cooperative. I listen to mostly instrumental music. And about the only TV show I watch is Star Trek, a maximum of one episode a day, and I focus on learning.
So what I'm saying is, if you keep reading all this hype, and then you start researching and all you find are more people putting out hype who are not mature in the crypto market and are not looking at the big picture, that almost all altcoins get destroyed over time, that almost no altcoin beats its initial pump against Bitcoin. The vast majority of altcoins, once they have their first pump in the price of Bitcoin, all they do after that is lose value indefinitely. Most of these have already had their first pump against Bitcoin. It's almost all down from here. In almost every case you'd be better off holding Bitcoin.
How "doing your own research" still gets you wrecked
If you read a bunch of stuff and watch a bunch of stuff, you can end up with a portfolio where you think you've done your own research and made great decisions. And then, if you don't sell at the absolute perfect time, which almost none of you do, you get wrecked and you wonder what happened. Because from your point of view, you did your research, you were on Crypto X, you were watching Crypto YouTube, you took a look at CoinMarketCap and clicked a couple of explorers. How did this go so wrong?
It went wrong because when you've got people writing things in that same exact format with the intention to make money off of you, and with no concern for what impact it has on you, and you keep taking that in, when all the content you take in is from self-interested people who don't care if you get ripped off or not, then give me the logical outcome in that scenario. Most of you are going to lose money. And even those of you who do make money will often not appreciate it, get wrecked in taxes, and piss it all away anyway, like I did in 2017, 2018, and 2019, when I made huge profits in crypto, to be fair, doing crap just like this except on YouTube. This is why today, perhaps some of my atonement for that is to turn it around.
So this is why you'll find me on X now. If I see one of those tweets, I just stick it in ChatGPT, tell it to rewrite it the way I think it ought to be written, and the funny part is it's actually working well for me. It's sending people to my crypto reviews channel. So I hope you can understand that it's very important to consider the mindset of the person creating whatever it is you're consuming. If you don't know the mindset and don't know the person, you need to be careful, because there are a lot of people who are not out there to help you. You're just a dollar sign of a view to them. That's why I'm very careful about who I listen to and who I trust. That's one of the biggest things you can do to make a difference in your life: be careful who you listen to.
Take honest inventory and get a diverse set of views
Yes, it's good to take in a diverse set of viewpoints and to hear different opinions. But things like this are how it works, and it's also how echo chambers get built. That's where you really get screwed. You get tricked into buying some of these, and then you help sucker other people in with your own likes and your own shares, and then all of you get wrecked at once. The way out of that is to take in a diverse set of views, and to take honest inventory of the cryptos you've got today.
My angle is that I love mentoring. I love hearing about your portfolio, and I will tell you exactly what I think even if it hurts your feelings, when I'm looking at it going, oh my God, how did you get this much crap? These are all bad. To be clear, I am big into Bitcoin, the next global reserve currency. Solana, to me, has some of the most adoption potential for an Ethereum competitor. Internet computer, to me, has the most potential for an everything-internet alternative. And DeSo has the most potential for decentralized social media. Those are the ones I've researched and that I think will do really well, but that doesn't mean I'm right, unfortunately.
If you'd like to talk with me and get my honest feedback on your portfolio, the best way to work with me on this today is to join the Jerry Banfield Family community. To be fair, I'm here making my main living as a creator on this same stuff too. But I genuinely want a world full of wealthy people, and I want you to become wealthy in crypto. I don't want you to get ripped off or tricked out of your money, because unlike a lot of these other creators, I've run into you all in person. It's heartbreaking to meet some of you who've lost a ton of money in crypto. And it's really heartbreaking to meet someone who got wrecked following my advice.
That was a big turning point for me in crypto, when one of my followers ran into me in person and was pissed that I'd told them to get into these altcoins that got crushed relative to the price of Bitcoin. They said, you gave me bad information, I wish I wouldn't have followed anything you said. I went, wow. So that's what it's like to be on the receiving end of that. If you want to go deeper on the way I think about all of this, you can watch my Crypto Reviews playlist, where I lay out the mindset behind it in a lot more detail.
We can have a little battle on X between the critical versions of these posts and the pump versions of these posts. That way, at least people have a choice in which one to believe. You get stupid when you only ever see the hype. But either way, even if it's just my version and you never see the other side, the magic in life is having a choice.