Every cryptocurrency except Internet Computer Protocol is a meme coin. If you're wondering what a meme coin exactly is, I asked ChatGPT. A meme coin is the type of currency that's typically inspired by internet jokes or popular culture, created more for entertainment or community engagement rather than for serious technical innovation or utility. When you see the technical innovation and utility that Internet Computer has, everything else looks like a meme coin by comparison. Meme coins are often highly speculative and driven by social media hype, community support, and online trends rather than fundamentals or use cases. That's exactly why ICP is different, and I want to give you a quick look at why.
Dominic Williams at ICP put out a video yesterday showing how AI on ICP is bringing out the self-writing internet. You can find him at @dominic_w. This is a massive deal, because you'll be able to just talk to AI and it'll crank out a working URL for you. If you want to understand exactly how that works, his video walks through and explains the entire paradigm. AI is so much bigger than all of crypto combined. I've shown this before: AI on Google Trends has four or five times as much traffic as Bitcoin and crypto all combined. And ICP, through the DFINITY Foundation that launched it and remains the main contributor, has made something that is dropping jaws in the AI community. Next to that, everything else in crypto is just highly speculative, and the average person who isn't in crypto already knows that.
Even Bitcoin Is a Meme Coin in My View
To me, even Bitcoin falls into the meme coin category. Ethereum, Solana, they're all basically meme coins where the value has nothing to do with what the technology can actually do. It's completely speculative, community-driven, and volatile. Let me dig into that definition a bit more, because I know some of you will push back. I don't even read my YouTube comments anymore, because there are so many people who are just toxic and nasty, along with the bots and scams. So instead, you can talk to me directly on the blockchain. That's something no other crypto can do. If you go to my VIP chat, I read it every day. That's real utility. It's a Discord or Telegram style application that runs directly on the blockchain. It has a crypto wallet built right into it where you can swap cryptos and even make your own meme coins. This tech is genuinely useful, and I use it every single day.
Here's a question worth sitting with: do you use the tech of the blockchain you're invested in every day? If your coins are sitting on a crypto exchange, you're not even using the tech itself. You're operating through a third party that in many cases is selling you crypto they don't even have. And even when they do have it, they're often not moving it on the blockchain at all. If you've never taken your crypto off an exchange, you've never actually used the technology you're investing in. With ICP, I use it every single day. So when more awareness comes around for what ICP is versus what everything else is, I believe it'll become obvious to everyone. Everything besides ICP is a meme coin: community driven, with all kinds of people promoting it on social media and forums.
Take XRP especially. That's just people talking on forums. Do you use the XRP blockchain every day? I don't. Does anybody else? According to the data I've shown in previous videos, hardly anybody is using it. Go look at the Explorer. Go look at the growth. And look at the volatility. These cryptos are extremely volatile, and here's why: every crypto besides ICP lacks real-world applications or use cases. Even the layer-one blockchains lack real-world use cases that don't depend on centralized tech to finish the job.
The Third-Party Problem
A lot of you would argue, "Ethereum's not a meme coin, Jerry. I can build DeFi and swap coins on Ethereum." No, you can't do that yourself. You need a third party, often Amazon, and often several third parties. You need MetaMask, then you need another third party, then you need an oracle, all of these middlemen just to interact with the blockchain. You yourself can't do anything with the Ethereum blockchain unless you're using an official Ethereum wallet you've downloaded onto your own computer. If you're using the Bitcoin blockchain, I hope you've downloaded a Bitcoin Core wallet and indexed the whole blockchain, because then you'd be using the blockchain directly without a third party. All these other cryptos rely completely on third parties.
Things like games and NFTs? You can't put those on a blockchain on any other crypto. It's just a meme coin. These coins also have abundant supplies, and it's often not even clear who holds them. Some examples are obvious: we already know Dogecoin and Shiba Inu are meme coins. But all of these coins besides ICP lack fundamentals. There's no real utility, especially compared to ICP. All these apps that are supposedly "on Ethereum" or "on Solana" are actually running through third parties. The blockchain itself can't do almost anything without Amazon hosting the website, without oracles feeding in the prices, without some centralized entity doing everything to maintain the whole system.
The Argument That Bitcoin Is a Meme Coin
So I asked ChatGPT to give me the argument that Bitcoin is really just a meme coin. Many people consider Bitcoin a revolutionary financial asset, but there's a compelling case that it's just a meme coin. Keep in mind that technologically, Dogecoin is a copy of Litecoin, which is a copy of Bitcoin. So if Dogecoin is a meme coin and it copied Bitcoin's technology, then it's logical that Bitcoin is also a meme coin.
Here's the key point: Bitcoin's value is driven by hype and speculation. I've talked to people who have huge amounts of money in Bitcoin, and I'll ask, "Have you ever used the Bitcoin blockchain?" Well, no, it's sitting on an exchange. Do you even know if you have real Bitcoin? You don't know if you have real Bitcoin until you sell it and put the money in the bank, or until you take it off the blockchain yourself. Bitcoin's price is heavily influenced by public perception, media coverage, and social momentum. It is not influenced by what the tech can do for humanity. In my view, ICP is the only thing in crypto with technology that can be genuinely useful for humanity.
Bitcoin gained a lot of its traction purely through hype. And all the things you're hearing about Bitcoin, like the ETFs, only reinforce that. BlackRock is making all kinds of money while taking almost no risk, off of other people buying Bitcoin and letting BlackRock hold it. That completely ruins the value of the blockchain itself. The Bitcoin blockchain is slow and not practical at all for day-to-day transactions. Paying taxes in Bitcoin is ridiculous, because it'd be more complicated than just using the systems you already have. The "digital gold" narrative is largely speculative. It's not tied to concrete fundamentals.
What are concrete fundamentals? Technology with a real use case, where you can use AI to create running web apps. Where you can put your own version of Discord or Telegram fully on chain, without some centralized entity controlling and censoring it. Where you can actually give crypto away. I've done several of these giveaways. In one, I gave 320 people $1.50 worth of BOB. In another, I gave a thousand people a collective 20 ICP, which is about 20 cents each. Do you know of any other way you could easily send a thousand people you don't know 20 cents, with built-in protections against bots? That's real utility.
Why ICP Tech Actually Matters to Me
My website is hosted on ICP, and I can tell you firsthand that this tech matters. When I found ICP, I dropped my old website host after years and years of researching for the absolute fastest and best solution, which was Kinsta. I'm actually still getting paid through their affiliate program even though I haven't used it in a year. Their solution is to run WordPress on the Google Cloud Platform, and then you have to pull in all these other third parties just to host a website. Not on ICP. There, you stick the code right on the blockchain and it's practically infinitely scalable. I can have 100,000 people go through my website and it won't crash, because it doesn't use much computation, and I can stock up a huge amount of computation for dirt cheap on ICP.
This is the only thing in crypto that isn't absurdly and completely based on speculation. All these other altcoins, their values today are not based on how good the tech is. They're based on narratives. They're based on manipulated prices. They're based on people talking who have no idea what the tech does. And they're based on people's ignorance of real tech, which is Internet Computer. The more popular this gets, and the more people build on it because it's the best tech in crypto, the more they'll see that Bitcoin and Ethereum are meme coins.
With Bitcoin, there's no intrinsic utility beyond speculation. The store-of-value claim is ridiculous to me. I could make up a Jerry Banfield coin and call that a store of value too. That's what Bitcoin is at this point. It's not inherently tied to any physical asset or productive system. And Bitcoin mining is a joke, though not a funny one, because people have paid to buy billions of dollars of computer equipment, which inflates the price of all the computer equipment in the world. That equipment gets thrown away every few years because it's useless outside of its one specific case: mining Bitcoin. And the power grid all over the place is getting drained massively. Internet Computer Protocol is millions of times more power efficient than Bitcoin, and the technology can do everything you could possibly imagine with Bitcoin and more. It can do things that even Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and X can't. That's a real technological use case. We're not just talking about fundamentals, hype, and speculation.
People don't use Bitcoin for day-to-day transactions, just like meme coins. Bitcoin is just a meme coin. It's community-driven hype. It's people talking, not really using the tech to do anything meaningful. And the more centralized entities like ETFs and crypto exchanges hold Bitcoin, the less value anything on the Bitcoin blockchain actually has, because third parties are able to manipulate and handle all the transactions and the value never ends up on the blockchain at all.
Bitcoin's scarcity narrative is a joke to me too. The market cap is cited as a reason for its value, but how does that create utility? I created a meme coin, and there are a bunch of other meme coins I shared in a video yesterday. They all have scarcity too. In fact, no more of those coins are even being created. Meanwhile Bitcoin, depending on the price, has tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars of new Bitcoin that can be mined every single day. That's inflation. Last I checked, Bitcoin's scarcity is theoretical, not practical. There are tens of millions of dollars of Bitcoin being mined every day and dumped on exchanges, and in all practical terms, that's inflation. Even Bitcoin's origin is just as murky as a meme coin's. Did the CIA make Bitcoin? Probably.
Why Bitcoin's Decentralization Story Falls Apart
Would the people behind Bitcoin love for it to be adopted by governments? Yes, because if they hold Satoshi Nakamoto's wallet, which translates roughly to central intelligence in Japanese, then they would have a trillion-plus-dollar war chest. If Bitcoin gets to something like a million dollars, they would have trillions of dollars sitting in the wallet they originally created. And you could make the counter argument that, well, Bitcoin created the blockchain industry. So what? Do you care that America Online had an instant messenger 25 years ago? No, you don't, because you don't use it. It's not as useful as all the other things we have today.
In my view, decentralization on Bitcoin is a joke. I've talked about this before. Bitcoin mining is completely compromised. Two single miners, Ant Pool and F2 Pool, or Foundry USA off the top of my head, control the hash rate. If they decided they wanted to cut everybody else out, they could take Bitcoin over completely. That's a US pool and, I believe, a Chinese pool. The two of them control Bitcoin mining. Any thought of real decentralization is a joke at this point. All you need to do is have those top two pools collaborate, and maybe a third one, and you've got total control of the Bitcoin blockchain.
Then the argument you would make against this is, well, institutions, Bitcoin's recognized by governments. That's great. I thought we needed Bitcoin so we could cut out banks and governments. So now we're pointing to Bitcoin being recognized by governments and financial institutions that are hoping to profit off of Bitcoin as the thing that gives it validity. But when I started in Bitcoin, we got into it because we could transact. If you actually downloaded the Bitcoin Core wallet and transacted directly with somebody else using a Bitcoin Core wallet, you could transact without a middleman third party. And Bitcoin mining had some kind of decentralization back then.
Everything After Bitcoin Still Needs Middlemen
To me, everything beyond Bitcoin has basically been created the same way, from copies of Bitcoin straight through to Ethereum. Ethereum added a little bit of functionality, but you can't do almost anything meaningful directly with the Ethereum blockchain. Same thing with Solana. You have to have these third-party wallets. You have to have third-party websites. You have to have all these middlemen interacting. When I staked my Solana a couple of years ago, how did I do it? I bought a Ledger hardware wallet, so that's one third party. Then I delegated it to some other third party. Wow, that's amazing technology, that I have to buy one third-party thing and then delegate to another third party.
Once people see that ICP is the only full-stack platform and start building on it, and you've got projects where you can see the proof, things change. The cycle burn rate on ICP has blown up. We're at all-time highs over the last few months. It keeps going up and up. And this is the equivalent of people paying their web hosting bill. In my opinion, ICP has the best tech in the world for meme coins and for real-world assets. It's the only thing you could even try to call a decentralized physical infrastructure. It's a real-world computer. It has the best technology in the world right now for AI. I watched a demonstration of this twice yesterday, and it's incredible. You're talking about doing things with AI that are blowing people away in the AI space.
Why Almost Nobody in Crypto Is Talking About ICP
Now, you all might wonder, when is this going to happen? Why isn't it happening? Why isn't everybody talking about it? Because the whole system's rigged against you. Because almost everybody in crypto is just paid. And, for better or worse, my own video is a perfect example of this. I made a video called something like Top 24 ICP Altcoins. I was very transparent in that video. I made a proposal to their DAO, and their DAO funded the proposal. And I started the video saying, to be fair, and as a signal that these coins care more about their marketing, that they probably have this in common. I said, all these coins paid me, but none of them paid me to make that particular video.
After I made that video, I was playing tennis, and I thought, holy crap. It's one thing to see it deeper and deeper, but what I just did in my video is exactly what everybody else in crypto does, except they don't put that disclaimer in. They don't tell you at the beginning of the video that the only reason they're saying these are the top 10 altcoins for the next bull run is because they all paid them. The only reason you're not seeing ICP talked about all over the place is because almost everyone who has an audience has been paid to talk about certain projects. And almost everyone who isn't at a high enough level to get paid to talk about projects, what are they doing? They're just view chasing, hoping to get to a high enough level to get paid. So they're just copying the top creators and parroting the same stuff, hoping to get a piece of the action from the communities. That's crypto.
ICP's Trump Card Is the Technology Itself
However, ICP's marketing has a trump card in it. ICP has made technology that's so revolutionary that it will break out of the ICP ecosystem. It'll break out of crypto completely. Because when people see that this is possible and they ask how it's possible, then they find out, well, it's possible because of Internet Computer. It's possible because ICP is a world computer. Then all this money and attention and interest organically flow into ICP from outside the crypto world, from people in AI, from people who are just trying to build websites cheaper and faster and more secure. All of this will flow into ICP from the outside world because the tech is genuinely valuable.
And the tech is valuable because this team at DFINITY has put in more effort, more time, more research into building the blockchain technology itself than any other crypto has. They put in so much effort that they're years and years ahead of everyone else. Why? Because almost everyone else wants to get the money as quickly as possible, and they think short term. As far as I can see in crypto, DFINITY is the only organization, and ICP is the only crypto project, that's set up to be long term. And in my belief that's going to work out over the long term. All these other cryptos, the truth is going to come out about them, that they're nothing more than a meme coin. They're a copy of a copy. Their technology is useless without Amazon, without oracles, without Internet Computer Protocol. One of the main ways some of these cryptos might survive in the future is if they start building the rest of the stuff the blockchain needs to even run on Internet Computer, like Chainkey Bitcoin, like Chainkey Ethereum. The only way some of these DAOs would be able to truly decentralize is to move everybody onto Internet Computer.
Seeing It Before Everyone Else Does
So I realize that in the short term, people like posting charts and talking about how I've been wrong so far on ICP. That's okay. That's happened a lot of times in my life before. I can see so far ahead what's coming that I feel like a crazy person for a while, and a lot of times, by the time it finally comes, it's like it's already passed for me. I think it's going to be a great year for ICP, and I'm trying to help as many people as possible figure this out before it's too late. By the time everybody realizes the truth, that every crypto except ICP is basically a meme coin, most of those are going to lose a lot of value, and that value is going to pour into ICP, and the price will be in the hundreds, thousands. You'll have missed it at $10. If you want to dig deeper into the reasoning behind all of this, I've put it together in my ICP Crypto playlist, and I'm sharing it because I want to help you see this before it's too late.