Here is my answer, plainly: if you are holding a coin you hate, sell it, and hold only coins you actually love. For me that is one coin, Internet Computer (ICP). I have sold nearly everything else I owned, and the only exceptions are a few tiny ICP-ecosystem altcoins I am still working to get out of. ICP is the one coin I am holding for the long term. I am not giving financial advice. This is my opinion after ten years in crypto.
The question behind this page is one I hear a lot: why would anyone keep a coin they dislike and wait for it to come back? In my experience the answer is mostly psychology. We hold a losing coin because selling would mean admitting we were wrong, and because we hope to get back to even. The posts below come at that from several angles, and the thread running through all of them is that the cost of a bad holding is bigger than the loss on the chart.
My view changed over time, so it helps to read these in order. In my February 2024 tough-love take, I told regular investors to stop chasing altcoins and charts, and argued that most coins are copies of Bitcoin and Ethereum with a marketing layer on top. In that post I also said I had built a portfolio from $0 to about $50,000 by buying $50 a day and dollar-cost averaging into ICP. Then, in You Secretly Want Your Crypto to Go to Zero that May, I admitted something less flattering: over ten years my portfolios had gone to zero several times, and I had caused it myself.
Get Honest About Your Crypto Investing Skill from August 2024 came at the same problem from the other side. Most retail investors overrate their skill, and the way out is an honest inventory of where you are. I laid out four levels of competence, from unconscious incompetence up to unconscious competence, and said that for me the clearest sign of real skill is spotting the one outlier among the top 100 coins. For me, that outlier is ICP.
The 2026 posts push the idea further. In The True Cost of Holding the Wrong Crypto, from June 2026, I argued that opportunity cost is the real loss. Every dollar in a coin you do not believe in is a dollar not funding something else. I used Bitcoin as the example, pointing to its roughly $2 trillion market cap and to how much of its supply sits with a small share of holders, and I compared that with ICP, which I put at under $4 billion. Those are my numbers and my reading of them, so check them yourself before you act on any of it. My longer case for Bitcoin is on my Bitcoin page.
Then 20 Sloppy Side Cryptos Don't Equal One Great Coin, from July 2026, made the portfolio version of the point. Many small positions split your attention and make you easier to mislead, and one coin you are willing to stay with for years is worth more than twenty you only half believe in. I said I had sold nearly everything besides ICP, and that I do not even hold my own JBBJ meme coin, because I did not want to keep thinking about its price.
The newest post, Why Are You Still Holding Crypto You Hate?, from August 2026, is the practical end of this line of thinking. It asks you to look through your exchange accounts for any coin you hate or feel apathetic about, forgive yourself for buying it without research, and sell it to free up room for something you love. I also said that a lot of the bad feeling I had about a coin turned out to be about my own decisions, which is a pattern I have seen in my dating life too. The test I keep returning to is simple: which coin would you be proud to hold no matter how the price moves? For me that is ICP, and I say that without any promise about where its price goes. If you want the ICP side of this in one place, see my ICP hub.
Below this opening you will find every member post in full, newest first, with a contents list above them. Read the older posts to see how the reasoning started, and the newer ones to see where it ended up. If you have a coin you are unsure about and want a second look, you can get a personal video review from me at 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.
- Why Are You Still Holding Crypto You Hate? (August 5, 2026)
- 20 Sloppy Side Cryptos Don’t Equal One Great Coin (July 15, 2026)
- The True Cost of Holding the Wrong Crypto (June 17, 2026)
- Get Honest About Your Crypto Investing Skill (August 7, 2024)
- You Secretly Want Your Crypto to Go to Zero (May 24, 2024)
- A Tough-Love Take on Why Your Crypto Investing Sucks (and How to Improve) (February 11, 2024)
Why Are You Still Holding Crypto You Hate?
From my video published August 5, 2026.
Why Do You Have Coins You Hate in Your Portfolio?
The person was telling me, as they were showing me their portfolio on Coinbase, and I asked, "Which of these coins do you think is the worst?" They said, "Well, I hate these two coins." I'm like, "Well, why do you have coins you hate in your portfolio?" And they said, "Well, I bought them, I've lost money on them, and I'm just hoping they'll go up." That I don't understand. Why would you keep them and wait for them to go up? If you hate coins in your portfolio, the thing to do would be to get rid of them, right? Not financial advice.
I'm all in on ICP because ICP is the one coin I love in crypto. I will sacrifice. I will hurt. I will go down to zero — zero — for the coin I love. But I'm not holding a coin I hate in my portfolio. And I imagine some of you are in the same position today. If you go on your Coinbase or your Binance account, or KuCoin, or MEXC, or Poloniex if it still exists — maybe it does — wherever y'all are trading today, Hyperliquid, Dexy — nobody's trading on Dexy — I invite you to go look in your account and see if there's a coin you hate.
Because this is something psychologically that we do to ourselves. Lots of us will bring people, investments, and things into our lives that we hate. Then we'll complain about them. Then we'll feel bad about them. But from my point of view, you have very limited space in your life, in your crypto portfolio, in your relationships. It's absolutely essential to clear out anything you hate, because that's taking up space that could be filled by something — or someone — you love.
The Couch You Hate Is Easier to Get Rid of Than You Think
In crypto, this is so obvious. Sometimes in your house, maybe you have a couch that you hate. It's probably pretty obvious you should just get rid of that couch and buy another one. But in crypto, you have these coins sitting in your portfolio and you hate them — yet you're hoping you'll love them one day. You're hoping they'll go up in price and then you'll love them. But here's the thing: if you hate them now, just because of the price or because of something else, you don't have to keep holding on to them. It's not like a couch, where it might take some work to get the couch out of your house and some significant money to buy a new one. Literally, you can just push a button and get rid of something you hate out of your portfolio. It's so easy.
But I understand, because of human psychology, we often don't want to close the doors on things. It can actually be difficult to look at this coin in your portfolio that you purely feel bad about. You bought it, you lost money on it, and the feeling you have now is that you hate it. Yet there's this sense that it's part of an identity — that this coin is part of me now, it's part of my portfolio. Just like that couch you might hate: well, that's my couch. And the miracle is when you can let go of it and say, that's not my couch anymore. That's not my coin anymore. To honor it: look, I made a mistake buying that coin. I didn't research it. I didn't think that through. I forgive myself for buying that coin, and I'm going to let it go — let it go so I can make space, whether it's cash in a bank or a coin I love like ICP. The miracle is when you can just let go of that.
Opportunity Cost: The 2x You're Hoping For vs. the 50x You'd Miss
It can be hard sometimes. The person on the call yesterday said they were kind of feeling aggravated by having me sit there and witness this and point these things out. But at the same time, just witnessing the honesty of "I hate this coin" matters. I asked, "Why do you hate it?" "Well, I hate the team, the marketing — they're jerks." "So you're still holding money in it?" "Well, I'm hoping the price will go up later." So let's look at opportunity cost. How would you feel if this coin did go up 2x, but ICP went up 50x? Now you'd hate the coin even more, wouldn't you? Because not only did you hate it to begin with, but then you missed out on a 50x because you were hoping this coin would do a 2x.
To me, what a lot of us need to do in crypto is look at which coin we would go to zero with. Which is my ride-or-die coin? I love holding ICP, and that makes it easy. If you have coins you hate in your portfolio, crypto is hard, because it's like you have poison in your crypto portfolio. And with that poison sitting there, you feel bad. When you look at your portfolio, you feel bad. You feel stupid. Ironically, it can be hard to stop feeling bad or stupid until you face honestly in the mirror that feeling bad or stupid is a temporary thing you can do something about.
What Dating Taught Me About Letting Go
When I shared my experience with this person, I said that usually what I feel bad about most is my own decisions. And sometimes people will bring out what I feel bad about and I won't realize it. Like this woman I dated. In a vlog on the Jerry Banfield channel, I talked about it — "the queen goes cold" was one of the most miserable days I've had in a long time. Realizing she's pulled away. It's gone. It's over. It was just agonizing to open my heart and really love someone and go all in, and then watch it go to zero — and then to not play the game that I knew how to play. I'm talking more about that in the vlogs and on my Jerry Banfield dating channel, where we go into all these dynamics as well.
The comparison, though, is that if you clear out space — there were many women I went out with that I was not interested in, and I'm so glad I didn't keep seeing them. And some of the ones that weren't interested in me didn't keep seeing me, and because of that I had space. What was really hard for me in dating and letting go of this woman — the queen, as I call her — was facing that I feel bad about my own behavior. I feel bad that I told her I'd be patient when I'm not going to date one person at a time and be patient. I feel bad that I acted so needy. I feel bad that I took her literally when she said she didn't want to play games — I took that to mean I could just honestly express my feelings and my emotions and what I was experiencing with her, without filtering it and considering my audience. I felt bad about my own behavior.
At first, the first thing I observed was looking at her and being frustrated and aggravated with her and her behavior. But underneath all that was feeling bad about my own behavior, and realizing that the path forward was to forgive myself — because I have to live with myself every day. I don't have to live with her. I might not see her again, but I have to live with myself every day. That's why I make this analogy: crypto can get a bit esoteric and hard to relate to, but you can definitely relate to dating somebody and focusing all your attention on them and what they did wrong, and that they should and they shouldn't. If you can forgive yourself for your own actions, that's the secret to moving forward.
Forgive Yourself First, Then Say Thank You
So ironically, if you really want to have a crypto portfolio you love and you've got all these garbage coins — and to me, almost everything besides ICP is a garbage coin — it starts with forgiveness. Looking through this person's portfolio yesterday, there were coins that were absolutely horrible. One project had literally shut down. They had announced a month or so ago that the project was shutting down — the team themselves said they were shutting down — and still the coin was sitting in this person's portfolio. I'm like, this project literally said they're shutting down; that's an extreme risk on that coin. And a couple of other coins were just "I hate these coins" or "I don't even know what this coin is or what it does." There's an obvious solution. But it starts with saying to yourself: I forgive you. I forgive myself for buying these coins without researching them. I forgive myself for buying something and then losing money on something I now hate. From forgiving yourself, then you can move forward.
That's been my main exercise, and it has been the biggest pain point with dating this woman over the last month. Every time I start thinking about her now — wishing she was different, wishing all this stuff — it's like: I forgive you, buddy. I love you, buddy. I forgive you. I forgive you for how you acted. From other people's point of view, I probably didn't act that bad. But I feel bad that I was so excited, and the way I acted, I didn't give her space when she asked for it. Now I haven't talked to her in a week. It's like: I forgive you. And once I forgive myself, then I can accept the world as it is, and then I can start saying thank you. Thank you that I had an amazing week with this woman. Thank you that I learned so much.
You can do that with your crypto portfolio. You can say: thank you that I learned a valuable lesson. Thank you that I've learned never again will I hold a coin that I hate — never again will I even hold a coin I'm apathetic about. I just bought a thousand more ICP today, which I talked about in a recent video on my ICP crypto channel called I Bought $2,100 More ICP Today. What I will never do in crypto is hold a coin that I hate, or that I'm apathetic about, or that I'm just getting to try and promote it. All the coins I hold going forward will be coins I absolutely love.
Same thing with dating: I will only date and commit to a woman I absolutely love and am really excited to have in my life — and I just have to pace myself on communicating that with her, and encourage her not to watch my vlogs. Same thing with my kids: I absolutely love my kids. Same thing with my work: I absolutely love my work. And if I'm not loving my work as a YouTuber, I need to change how I'm doing it, because there's every opportunity for me to love it. I even hated my work as a YouTuber in 2025. I deleted all my channels.
Deleting My Channels Showed Me What I Love
That helped me return to how much I love my work, because after deleting YouTube and trying to make a business locally, I realized I'm very good at YouTube — and it turns out I'm a dummy and suck at almost anything else I try to do locally. So even if you have to dump your entire portfolio and get rid of every single crypto you have, that kind of reset could help you figure out: which coin could I buy and love? Which coin would I be proud to be in, no matter how the price moves — price up, price down, I don't care, because I love the coin, I love the team, I love the project, I love what it's adding to the world?
To Me, the Only Coin Worth Loving Is ICP
To me, that answer is obvious, which is why I have a whole channel just for ICP. In my view, the only coin worth loving is ICP. I mean, Bitcoin is unlovable to me. I was going to make a crude joke about how bloated and big Bitcoin is — Bitcoin is too big and bloated for me to find any love with it. Same thing with Ethereum: in my opinion it's way overbought, way overhyped, and the technology sucks. The Bitcoin tech sucks too, as I see it — it's all marketing. I can't stand Bitcoin or Ethereum, and I can't stand almost any coin in crypto right now besides ICP, because in my experience the tech itself doesn't do anything fundamentally useful for the world. And all these predators have come in to leech on things like Bitcoin and Ethereum, to extract value out of people in the name of the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains. That's my opinion, and I clearly wasn't giving financial advice here.
Fill Your Life With Things You Love
What I am encouraging you to do is have a life filled with things, investments, people, hobbies, and a place to live that you love. Fill your life with things you love, and let go of things you hate. Let go even of things you feel apathy about. And yeah — lightning literally struck right when I said that, so that must have been really powerful.
If you enjoyed this, I want to get to know you. Join the family, so this can stop being me just talking to you, and I can start listening to you and getting to know you — and you can ask me questions.
You can even show me the portfolio you have on Coinbase, and I'll just look at it, listen to you talk about it, and ask you questions. It can be extremely therapeutic. It's not therapy — not mental health therapy or anything like that — but just being witnessed sometimes can move miracles and move mountains.
If you'd like that, you can schedule a call with me and we'll go through it together.
And if you enjoyed this, I have six more YouTube channels. The Jerry Banfield Show vlogs seem to be some of the things you all feel the most about. I even have music. If you're single, definitely watch my dating videos. If you're into games, you will love my gaming videos. If you're a content creator, I've got a YouTube coach channel and a bunch of collaborations. And of course, for more of my honest takes on coins and projects, there's my Crypto Reviews playlist. I appreciate you watching — so I can know your name.
20 Sloppy Side Cryptos Don’t Equal One Great Coin
From my video published July 15, 2026.
Internet Computer Protocol is the one coin that is worth marrying. What a lot of you have for crypto portfolios is essentially 20 sloppy side cryptos, and none of those 20 sloppy side coins that you're all over the place on are going to equal having one great coin. I'm going to make the analogy that having one crypto you love and are in for the long haul is very much like dating. What the research shows, at least for dating — and we talk more about that on my Jerry Banfield dating channel — is that people who tend to have fewer partners and build really happy relationships that last, deep spiritual partnerships for the long term, tend to be the happiest. Whereas the people who are in and out of the most relationships and have the highest body counts tend to be the most miserable and unsatisfied.
Same thing with crypto. The more coins you trade, the more you mess with your portfolio, and the more you get into all these other projects, the more you're going to be unhappy, confused, and distracted. The entire point of crypto seems to be to do that to you. The whole point of all these different coins is to get you so distracted that you can't make any sense of things and think clearly. And then you are vulnerable to getting ripped off. You're vulnerable to buying coins that are basically useless. You're vulnerable to having all these exchanges you trade on all the time. You know what I don't do? I don't trade crypto. And that's because I get the benefits of being married to ICP — just like when I'm in a relationship, I don't have to date anymore.
What Being Married Taught Me About Holding One Coin
Now, I'm so excited about my dating life right now. I have a woman I just met a couple of days ago that, oh my God, this is just the best, and I'm going to see her again tomorrow. Really excited about that. But what I can tell you from being with my ex for 15 years is that it made my life so much easier not trying to date. It took an entire part of my brain out. Now that I'm single, there are two main parts of my brain: one thinks about YouTube and business and making money and helping people, and the other thinks about dating. And speaking of helping people — if you are tired of being stuck on ICP, you don't have to figure it out alone. Join the Family. Someone just joined yesterday. You can have a one-on-one call with me every week, plus you'll have a group you can share with — everybody else who's in the same community. You can post your question, share your ICP project, and if you want to film videos together, this is the place to do it.
What I can say is that my brain is split right now between a big focus on dating and a big focus on YouTube. As soon as I'm not dating anymore, that attention goes all to one woman who gets to really enjoy all of me instead of my fragmented attention, and the rest of my focus goes to YouTube. Crypto is so much better when you stop playing with all these other coins. Just like dating, you have this idea that you have all these options and there are all these gains you're missing out on. But the truth is, most people are losing money in crypto. Most people are wasting time in crypto. And the truth in crypto, as Bobby O said in his recent video — which I absolutely loved, as usual — is that the truth is utterly simple.
Crypto Tech Cap: The Coin Worth Marrying by the Numbers
When you look at crypto by technology, I made a site called CryptoTechCap.com to help simplify everything for you and show you why, in my view, ICP is the crypto worth marrying. It is hosted on ICP. And it shows you why this is the coin worth marrying: it has a 97 out of 100 capability score for things a cryptocurrency blockchain ought to be able to do. The next closest, according to their own documentation, can't do hardly a third of that. ICP to me has a thousand-X upside potential because of this. It should be the number one coin in crypto — crypto is logical and rational, if people were thinking clearly. But right now, people are not thinking clearly. And the most vulnerable you are is when you're not thinking clearly.
Now, I'm not giving financial advice, obviously. What I'm saying is that marrying ICP, to me, means making ICP the only coin in my portfolio. Technically, I have some tiny alts on ICP that I will sell as soon as I can, but ICP is the only coin in my portfolio that means anything, that I'm holding on to for the long term. I'm literally selling everything else as soon as I possibly can — tiny little positions in ICP alts that I got locked up in. Even back when I was all in on ICP but spread across all these different ICP projects, I felt this fragmentation of attention, checking ICP explorer prices to see what these other altcoins were doing. That's why I don't even hold any of the meme coin I created, the JBBJ meme coin. I don't want to have to think about what the price of that is. It's got a few thousand holders and a $52,000 market cap, and I don't want to have to think about it. Because I don't have any of it, I don't think about it — very often. I think about it occasionally, just like being married you might think about another woman occasionally, but not most of the time, right?
Sanity, the Suppressed Price, and a Crypto Judgment Day
Being all in on ICP, to me, is the number one way to be sane in the world of crypto, where the truth is on your side and the technology is set up for the long term. Once I've married ICP, I don't need to get involved emotionally — or physically, by buying any of these other coins. I don't need to get involved with anything else. Now, I know some people are so toxic about the ICP price, and I've come to believe that's been intentionally engineered that way. Because if the ICP price was up at a hundred-plus dollars where I believe it belongs, everything else in crypto would immediately be found out to be a total fraud, and that would destroy billions if not trillions of dollars of other people's wealth. However, the technology is in a position that is inevitable at this point. Either it's ICP, or the alternative is that something else comes along instead of ICP — which is unlikely. Otherwise, crypto is absolutely doomed. And if you don't see that, you're going to see it someday.
The question is how many people are going to see this coming in advance versus how many people are suddenly going to get caught by surprise when there's a crypto judgment day, or the equivalent of the 1929 stock crash. There were a lot of people who saw that crash coming at the time, were out, were prepared for it, and made huge amounts of wealth. But the masses were caught unaware. The masses were fooling around with all these stocks, and then there was a Great Depression. The people who saw things coming ahead of time pulled everything out early, made huge amounts of money, lived large for a long time, and some created generational wealth. That, to me, is the opportunity with ICP.
Locked In: Why Nothing Else in Crypto Matters to Me
Being married to ICP allows me to withdraw from the rest of crypto. I don't care what the Bitcoin price is — or Ethereum, XRP, Solana, Cardano, and all these other coins. The prices, the stories, the founders, the narratives: none of it matters. I'm locked in with ICP. The only way I'd divorce ICP is if another coin came along that was vastly technically superior and had massive marketing behind it. The longer no other coin like that comes out, the less likely it looks that it will happen. It's the same as looking at Bitcoin: even though Bitcoin has some of the worst technology in crypto today, it's still dominant because it was the first. And even though Ethereum — which is practically a layer two today — is one of the worst smart contract platforms out there in terms of simplicity, speed, and cost, because all these other ones have come along and made incremental improvements, it's still number two today. Ethereum is one of the worst blockchains, and it holds that spot anyway.
So ICP, at a minimum, is coming for that number three spot, and these other cryptos are just hanging on and doing anything to stay where they're at. ICP is coming for third at a minimum, if not second or first, because it's the first big breakthrough in crypto since Bitcoin and Ethereum. I would argue ICP is the full realization of crypto. Bitcoin and Ethereum are basically dial-up internet; ICP is fiber optic. It can finally do everything you need. And once you have fiber optic internet, you don't need anything else until there's a massive breakthrough — and we haven't seen a massive breakthrough over fiber optic internet in 20 years. So to me, ICP is the dominant future of crypto. It is far enough ahead of everything else that even if something else comes out, it'll be difficult to catch up, because ICP is already so vastly superior.
Side Pieces, 12 Wives, and Voldemort's Soul
I hope every day that my videos help somebody save time and energy in crypto, so you can stop wasting your time. I see a lot of you have ICP, but then you're fooling around with all these other coins too. To me, that's like being married and then trying to have a bunch of side pieces. It doesn't make sense. It's distracting. Now, you do your thing and live how you want to. This is my world, this is my channel, and this is my opinion. I'm not saying other approaches are wrong — I'm saying they're distracting and produce anxiety, chaos, and drama. If you like that, then go for it. The King of Jordan, who has 12 wives last I heard, said that having 12 wives was worse than politics. You'd imagine the King of Jordan would think politics was pretty bad, and yet with 12 wives, he's like: I buy one $100,000 necklace and then the other 11 all want something. That's what having all these coins is doing to your portfolio.
Every coin is an emotional attachment, like Voldemort splitting his soul up into all these places. It fragments your energy. In the short term, you might feel like you're stronger because you can't just be taken out. And marriage — loving one woman — feels extremely vulnerable, because if something happens, like getting divorced the way I did last year, that's a devastating loss. At the same time, though, it keeps things simple, because my space is totally cleared out for one amazing woman. And maybe that space is getting filled now.
Imagine Never Having to Look for Another Crypto
In the meantime, though, I had 15 years where I didn't have to look for another woman, which is really nice. Imagine what your life would be like if you didn't have to look for another crypto. How many hours would you put into watching crypto videos if all you cared about was ICP, and you didn't have to watch all these other people with Bitcoin price charts and Ethereum data and narratives coming around? None of that stuff matters to me. I'm in position with ICP. The rest of crypto can burn, and I hope it does, because it's almost all fraud and lies and junk. And when it burns, it's going to burn down, and ICP is absolutely in the position to take over after that. The only questions are: how long can the charade continue to go on? How much will ICP accumulate from the rest of crypto burning down? Will ICP burn down a bit with it — though it's hard to go down much more than it is now? And how long will all this take before ICP rises?
The nice thing with the marriage is that you can relax and be in it for the long term. You don't have to worry about anything else. So I hope I've helped you relax a little bit today — I feel that's one of the best things I could do, if you can see how easy your world would be without all of it. I used to spend hours watching garbage crypto content every day. The same useless narratives, hype, and speculation: Solana's coming out with a phone, Charles Hoskinson just said this, here's what the Bitcoin on-chain data shows, here's this price chart, here's this meme coin. God, that sucked. I've got better stuff to do with my time than to listen to all that.
Let's Turn This One-Way Relationship Into a Real One
And if you want to have the life of your dreams today, imagine talking with me every week. I'm here to be your coach. I am in a position to listen to you and get to know you. You spend all this time listening to me, which I'm very grateful for, but I don't know you at all. I want to know you, because right now I'm just talking to a screen. This is a one-way relationship, which is not a relationship — this is just me talking to you.
I'm so grateful that somebody I recognize just joined yesterday, and I've got two calls with people from the Family today — two different people. You can have a call with me every week when you join the Family. I should charge thousands of dollars a month for that: four calls a month, 25 to 30 minutes each, four times. You can also DM me — I'm available every day, and I get the messages straight on my phone. If you DM me there, I'd love to get to know you.
I'm married — I'm married to ICP. But to me, family is something you want as big as possible: family, friends, relatives, cousins, nieces and nephews. Have one wife, one coin, and then have the family as big as possible. So we're making the Family as big as possible, and I invite you to be one of the first members. I would love to get to know you.
And when you talk to me, I will have your viewpoint to consider when I make my future videos, so you'll be able to have a direct impact. Instead of me watching other people's content, I'll be taking in what you have to say and considering it in my future videos — and you can see the results of that kind of input in every review I publish on my Crypto Reviews playlist. That's how you get to see your influence show up in my videos in the future.
The True Cost of Holding the Wrong Crypto
From my video published June 17, 2026.
I believe a lot of people are being robbed and stolen from in crypto, over and over again, and I hope I can help you avoid that by talking about a very important idea: opportunity cost. In my experience, this is making things so much worse than most people realize. Opportunity cost basically means that if you put your money into one crypto, that's money you can't put into another. So I'm not just talking about the obvious losses, because plenty of people have lost money investing in bad coins, getting rugged, and getting ripped off. But to me that's not even the worst part. The worst part is all the things you're not funding because of that choice.
Let me put this in terms of a marriage. If you marry a person and you have a really awful relationship with them, the cost isn't just the awful relationship itself. It's the fact that you could have married someone and had a great relationship instead. When you think about it that way, a lot of people stop at, "Well, I'd rather be single than be in a bad relationship." To me that's only halfway there. Imagine the amazing life you could create being in a great relationship with the right person. The thing to do, in my view, is to immediately clear out whatever is in the way. So you're not just being robbed in crypto of your own personal gains. Because of opportunity cost, you're also helping create a world you don't want to live in by funding all these coins.
What you're really funding when you hold Bitcoin
Let me give you a perfect example of opportunity cost in action. If we look at the crypto charts, right now the market cap for Bitcoin is around $2 trillion. So many people, when they invest in something like Bitcoin, are only thinking of their own personal gains. This happens in the stock market too. To me, that's selfish, self-centered thinking, because you're not considering at all what you're creating by your investing.
I've shown the Bitcoin rich list so many times, and I'll point to it again, because this is the number one thing I think you need to consider. In my view, if you're sitting there holding Bitcoin today, you are making the rich richer. At this point I don't believe you're contributing to decentralization at all. The fact is that about 82% of the Bitcoin is held by 0.28% of holders, and 60% is held by 0.03%. To me that's a shocking level of centralization. So even if you're holding Bitcoin, the opportunity cost is that you're contributing to this huge market cap, and from where I sit that's creating essentially nothing but pumping the whales' bags.
I'm talking about Tether, and Michael Saylor with MicroStrategy. The way I see it, you're pumping the bags of ETFs, centralized funds, and Wall Street by holding Bitcoin. You're helping create a world where the people holding huge amounts of Bitcoin get richer off you. And in my opinion the tech itself is nearly useless at this point. It's just narratives, hype, and speculation. On top of that, I believe you're contributing to a world of massive, wasteful energy and computing usage for mining Bitcoin. But again, that's not even the worst part. The worst part is the opportunity cost: instead, you could be holding something like Internet Computer, and to me there's nothing else like Internet Computer.
The opportunity cost: what Internet Computer offers instead
Look at the market cap on Internet Computer Protocol. The market cap on ICP is only a few billion dollars, less than four billion. That means the market cap for Bitcoin is roughly 500 times larger. So by holding the same amount of money in Internet Computer Protocol, your money would be valued about 500 times more in ICP compared to Bitcoin. But it's not just about that. The real question I ask is: what is the technology you're investing in, and what utility does it have?
In my experience, if you're holding ICP, you're contributing to what I consider the best technology in crypto. Your ICP helps fund coins that are launching on the launchpad. When you hold ICP, you're getting voting rewards, which I believe supports the best governance anywhere in crypto. The most active DAOs in crypto are all on ICP, and you're getting around 13%. So while someone is sitting there hoping the price of Bitcoin will go up, in my view they're just pumping.
People can make the argument, "Well, aren't there some centralized entities holding ICP?" Yes, but the entire market cap is 500 times smaller than Bitcoin. So whoever is centralized in ICP holds 500 times less of the overall wealth. To me, whatever centralization there is becomes nearly irrelevant compared to Bitcoin.
And look at the tech you're investing in. When you buy ICP, you're supporting all these SNS DAOs. OpenChat, for example, has about 23,000 ICP in their treasury, and they hold a bunch of NICP as well. So you're supporting all these Service Nervous System DAOs, which I consider the most advanced DAO technology in crypto, with applications that run fully on-chain like OpenChat. When you're buying ICP, I believe you're supporting real Web3, technology that can allow the true decentralization of applications. OpenChat is like an on-chain version of Discord or Telegram, but the OpenChat token lets you actually vote on proposals and have a real say. Holding Bitcoin, by contrast, gives you no utility in my opinion.
Every coin you hold is a vote for the world you want
So consider the opportunity cost, all the things you could be investing in instead. To me, if we invest in Internet Computer Protocol, we're contributing to a world where we value technology. ICP has, in my view, the largest research and development team in blockchain. Bitcoin is 15 years old and has just a few people on the GitHub who control things, and I think the tech is garbage at this point. So when you invest in ICP, I believe you're saying, "I care about real technology." When you invest in the rest of these coins, I think you're saying, "I don't care about technology. All I care about is narratives, hype, and which government might buy my coin."
When you invest in something like XRP, watch the XRP videos and judge for yourself. To me it's just hype and speculation. The blockchain itself is doing almost nothing, it's a decade old, and I think the tech is garbage. When you invest in XRP, I believe you're saying, "I don't really care about the tech. All I care about are my own gains." But how many gains are you really going to get in something with this big a market cap and technology I consider so weak?
When you invest in meme coins, I think you're saying, "I don't care at all about the tech. I'll just throw my money into anything. Anybody clicking a few buttons to launch a coin can just take my money." Take Dogecoin. People ask me, "Jerry, what do you think about Dogecoin now that Elon Musk has DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency?" In my view, that means nothing for Dogecoin. Dogecoin is a copy of Litecoin, which is a copy of Bitcoin. When you buy Dogecoin, I think you're saying, "I'd like to invest in someone who copied something from somebody who copied something, and it has no real utility."
When you invest in Ethereum at this point, I believe you're saying, "I'd like to invest in a failed world-computer vision that has high gas fees, that's slow, that can hardly keep anything on the blockchain, and that already has a lot of people invested in it." Opportunity cost is showing you, I think, how important it is to make conscious choices about where your money is going. And in my view you're being robbed if you're not taking the time to think about what kind of world you want to create, and investing in things that support the kind of world you want to live in.
Do you want to live in a world where you're making people ultra-rich because they bought Bitcoin before you, or who use things like ETFs to line their pockets with transaction fees on their own customers? Do you want to invest in things like XRP, which to me look like they pay bots, pay people to talk about it, pay for what looks like market manipulation, and donate to everybody's campaign to make sure they get a seat at the table? Or do you want to support people and technology that I believe is genuinely the most advanced in the world and solves real problems we have? I think you're being robbed if you're not thinking about what your money is doing, and from where I sit most of humanity is getting robbed right now.
Most of humanity is investing completely selfishly, thinking only about their own gains and not about what they're doing to the rest of the world. This is how I think the world got so centralized: people just threw their money in without thinking, poured it into Facebook, and then Facebook censors everybody. They poured it into all these companies the same way. So my encouragement is to stop getting robbed and start thinking about the opportunity cost of where your money is. If you want to go deeper on how I think about money and where I put mine, you can explore my Crypto Reviews playlist. For me, I pulled my money out of everything like Bitcoin, because to me that is not the best opportunity, either for me or for the world.
Get Honest About Your Crypto Investing Skill
From my video published August 7, 2024.
Getting honest about your skill investing in crypto is an essential starting point that will make everything else so much easier. The truth, from my point of view, is that most people in retail who are investing in crypto are shockingly bad at not just crypto investing, but investing generally. There is great news in that, though. Once you look at it and realize, wow, my crypto investing skills are close to zero, then you can get motivated to learn and do better.
The trap is that if you are not honest about your crypto investing skill — and let's be honest, most of us when we started, and even me, I would say nine years ago, possibly even today — most of us think we are better than we actually are. This is very dangerous, because God forbid something actually goes well for you and you just kind of get lucky buying a meme coin before it pumps, or buying some crypto coin right before a narrative hits. Then you think you are really good, and that sets you up to get destroyed.
This is the second lesson in my free Learn Cryptocurrency course. If you haven't watched the intro lesson, I'd suggest going back and watching that first so you understand why we're here. The number one lesson I see that needs to be communicated is that you need to take an honest inventory of your current skill at crypto investing. Because if you already think you are an expert, if you already think you are really good at crypto investing, then you will generally not want to learn anything new.
Take an honest inventory of where you are
The more you know, the more you keep learning. I'm a YouTube creator. I've uploaded 5,000-plus videos on YouTube, something like 10,000 videos online, and I am still watching how-to-do-YouTube videos. I am always looking for an extra tip, always looking to improve my craft. So if you want to be better at crypto investing, you really need to be honest about where you are at, not overstate your position, and get clear about where you want to go. If you want to be really good at crypto investing, you can't get there from saying, oh, I'm an expert already.
The more you identify your level of crypto investing, the more you can be drawn to a mentor who has what you want. If you want me to talk with you and do more direct mentoring, you can join Jerry Banfield Family and ask me your questions directly on a weekly call.
So let's get honest. If you have been in crypto less than a year and you have no, or almost no, experience investing outside of throwing money into mutual funds or things like that in a retirement account, then more than likely — there's probably a 90-plus percent chance, if you're watching this — the truth is you are a beginner. You are a beginner at crypto investing. I don't care if you got lucky or even made a good call here or there; most of you are still, generally, a beginner.
Now, if you have been in crypto at least five years and you have researched hundreds of cryptos, then it's possible you might have a little bit of skill. That said, if you still find yourself making bad decisions like buying meme coins that you lose money in, or if you're watching the price all the time, there's an opportunity to learn a lot more.
What I think an expert crypto investor actually looks like
I would classify an expert crypto investor as two different basic profiles.
If you're an expert, you are able to make really smart crypto investments with a very small amount of time. That, I would say, is the retail — not professional — level of expert in crypto. For example, if you spent very little time researching crypto, found my videos, loaded up on ICP, locked it up for eight years, and are just taking the rewards, you probably have expert potential, at least. Because what most people do is get sucked into all these altcoins and put a whole bunch of time and energy in, only to lose money. That said, if you did that, you still might have lots to learn about the basics and other areas of crypto.
The second way I would say you are truly an expert at crypto is if this is what you do professionally. And I would hesitate to even say I am an expert at crypto. I've done this for 10 years. I've researched thousands of altcoins. To me, true expertise is to be able to take a huge amount of complex ideas and simplify them. The best indication of my own skill at crypto investing, in my experience, is being able to find a low-risk, high-reward crypto that's drastically undervalued and has very little speculation to it — which, to me, is Internet Computer Protocol — and then to find a couple of projects I like under that.
Expert-level investing is spotting the outlier
To me, that's expert-level crypto investing: I've looked at thousands of these altcoins, I've looked at and used all kinds of different technology, and I've found out of all of that what is truly an outlier. Expert-level crypto investing, to me, is being able to identify outliers. Outliers are things that are not like everything else. So if you look at the top 100 cryptos, I would say that if you're an expert, you should be able to point out the one outlier — the one that's not like anything else on the rest of those charts, the one that is the least well understood and that has the most potential. And generally, if you've researched all 100 cryptos, or most of them, to a meaningful level, the conclusion I've come to is that Internet Computer Protocol is that outlier. It's not like the other stuff in the top 100. After researching thousands of coins myself, ICP is the one altcoin I love.
My hope is that you can rapidly level up your experience at crypto investing by watching this course. But you can't do that without getting honest about where you're at. And if you're a beginner, that's okay.
Why asking questions is the real skill
A lot of us in life try to put on a front, and we're encouraged to always act smarter than we are, to act like we know more. But that prevents us from asking those dumb questions. It's really asking all of those questions that will make you smarter at anything in life. It's asking for advice. To me, someone who has a high level of crypto experience is very willing to ask for help and ask for advice when they don't know what to do.
I'm really proud of all of you in the YouTube community. A few days ago I posted saying, I don't know what to do — should I sell my Tagger? I posted asking, because my integrity and my value as a creator were coming into conflict with what my crypto research suggested. My expertise as a crypto investor was telling me I was over-invested in this coin called Tagger, a micro cap on ICP. A few days ago I had over $10,000 or so of it, and meanwhile I only had about $30,000 or $40,000 of ICP. To me, ICP should be 90-plus percent of my portfolio, so I had gone in a little heavy on Tagger. I bought a lot of it under $3.
And yet my integrity as a content creator was saying I shouldn't sell my Tagger, because I had just told everybody how this could 100x — it's not ethical to sell my Tagger right after that. So what did I do? I asked for your advice. I explained that I had put so much money in and that I needed some more money in the bank just to pay my bills. I wrote a long post explaining it, and I'm really grateful for the comments you all gave. If you want to get better at something, asking for advice and asking questions is how you learn. That's the whole reason I'm doing a complete crypto course — because if you realize you are a crypto beginner, you don't even know what questions to ask yet. If conversations like that are your thing, I keep them going in my Crypto Reviews playlist.
The four levels of skill
There's a scale of skill at anything. It's a four-level set of skill indicators, and the first level is unconscious incompetence, where you are so incompetent you don't even see how bad at something you are.
Unconscious incompetence
Like when I started making music, I was so bad at it that I couldn't even figure out what to learn or where I could get better. In crypto investing, unconscious incompetence means that everything just looks confusing. You watch one video and you automatically think that's how it is. You watch another video and now you think that's how it is. It's really confusing. And unconscious incompetence often comes with arrogance — actually thinking you're way smarter than you are. When I first started buying Bitcoin, my unconscious incompetence led me into trading Bitcoin. When you're unconscious of how incompetent you are, you are really vulnerable. That's the majority of crypto: retail investors who are so bad at crypto investing that they don't even see the questions they should be asking to learn and get better.
So I'm hoping that going forward, you can be free from the delusion that you are a crypto expert — that there's lots of room for you, and for me, to learn and to get better at crypto investing. Get honest. Honesty is often where you get set free.
Conscious incompetence
The level above unconscious incompetence is conscious incompetence, and that's what I'd like you to get to with crypto as soon as possible. Conscious incompetence is where you start to see the things you don't know that you should find out about.
For example, unconscious incompetence in crypto is watching videos and just buying — my mind's going, don't say Hex, don't say Hex. Unconscious incompetence in crypto is buying Hex because you see a bunch of people flexing and posting pictures of cars. You don't even realize how bad you are at crypto investing. Then you think Hex is awesome because of confirmation bias, and then you think the price is so low because of anchoring bias, since you saw it at a higher rate before.
Conscious incompetence is starting to realize, okay, I'm starting to figure out what I don't know that I don't know. For example, you're watching one of my videos and you realize I keep saying anchoring bias, and you realize you have no idea what anchoring bias is. I'm going to cover that soon in a new lecture, because you need to understand what anchoring bias is if you're investing in crypto. The short version: anchoring bias is that the first time you see a price, that tends to become your anchor, where that just feels like the right price, because that's the first time you saw it. Then every impression you have after that gets connected with your anchoring bias.
For example, the first time I really paid attention to the price of Internet Computer Protocol, it was around six or seven dollars. So for me, it being around that same price still looks like a great value, because I think it's going to go up and it's still around where I first saw it. When I saw the price drop to three dollars after first finding it at six or seven, it was a very easy buy for me based on my research. But other people who had an anchoring bias where Internet Computer was at, say, a hundred dollars, and who were stuck in confirmation bias thinking about how great it was — for them, watching it drop to three dollars was horrifying. Where you first saw it determines everything; for them it was like, oh my God, this is a total rug pull, I'm totally wrong about this, and I have to sell everything. It was the same for me with Bitcoin. This is why it's so hard to buy low and sell high: because of both anchoring bias and confirmation bias and several other things I'll bring in.
But you see, when you're in conscious incompetence, at least you start to realize, oh, I don't know anything about emotions and investing. I don't even understand why I buy things high and sell them low. I don't understand what anchoring bias is. I don't know what confirmation bias is. There are so many things like that, and you start to realize, okay, I want to learn this, I want to learn that. When I'm doing music production and I started to reach a level of conscious incompetence, I started to realize, oh, I need to learn how to use this synthesizer, or I need to learn why this note sounds good next to that note. I know how to hear, okay, why do drums sound this way, how do I put a drum rack together in Ableton — I don't know how to do that. That's where you start to feel a little bit better.
Conscious competence
The more you start to ask questions and figure out what you don't know, the more you can get into the next level, which is conscious competence, where you start to know what you're doing but you have to think about it. You've got to essentially write it all down or plan it all out, really make sense of it and lay it out. For example, with music production, I'd say I'm at a conscious competence level. I know how to make a song pretty quickly, I know how to throw a drum rack together, I know how to do all these things on synthesizers — I've made over 200 songs now. I have conscious competence in certain areas, and there are many other areas I don't know about, but I still have to really think a lot. It's not something I can do effortlessly yet.
Unconscious competence
The final level is unconscious competence, where you are so good at whatever it is you're doing — generally because you've put so many hours into it — that you can do it without even thinking anymore. My friend who's just fantastic at music production can touch the keyboard and make a beautiful sound without hardly thinking about it. I still have to think about what I should hit and why I should hit it.
With crypto investing, unconscious competence is where you get so good that you don't hardly have to think anymore. You can look at something and just get a feeling almost immediately. When I go to CoinMarketCap and look at a project I've never seen before, I've looked at so many coins that I'll just click on it and start to get a feeling. I'll look at a price chart, see how long it's been out, scroll down and look at it, and I just start to get a feeling for it based on immediately looking at it. My feeling looking at most coins right away is, ill — this is kind of nasty. That's unconscious competence: I've looked at thousands and thousands and thousands of altcoins, and my first impression looking at one is, yuck, gross. That's my first feeling for almost every crypto I look at. Except when I go to Internet Computer — then I get really turned on. I'm like, yeah, look at this price chart, and hardly anybody's figured this out yet.
That's what I want you to be able to get to: a level of unconscious competence with your crypto investing, where you can just look at something really quickly. You can scroll through and watch somebody's video, search through crypto videos, see whatever is out there, and immediately start to detect what matters. I'll just randomly search crypto, and immediately I start looking: don't buy crypto now — that's terrible advice. Major Bitcoin signal detected — waste of my time. US Treasury steps — useless. Something diabolical happening with Bitcoin — extremely unlikely. Danger lurks in the market. You're going to get completely annihilated. Unnecessary traders talking — unnecessary. Market update — unnecessary. The best crypto bet you can make right now, paid promotion — unlikely there's any useful information in there. You can go through and get so effective that you rip through video after video, and then, okay, this one probably has some useful information, this one is probably really good, there are probably some nice gems in there.
Getting to a place where crypto feels easy
So that's what I've hoped to communicate here: you can get honest about where you're at and see where you could possibly go. At the highest level of crypto investing, you can start to sift through huge amounts of content and automatically be drawn to the stuff that's actually interesting. The better you get at crypto investing, the more you'll see that almost everybody is just wasting your time. It's shocking how little a lot of people know about what really matters. There are lots of people whose technical analysis and Bitcoin trading signals you simply don't need to know — for 99 percent of you, that's a waste of time. I'm not going to teach that, because I don't think it's the most effective way to use your time. If you want to go deeper on how I separate the signal from the noise, that's also why I fired myself and quit crypto hype for real education.
If you can get honest about where you're at today, most likely you are a beginner. Most likely, if you're at unconscious incompetence where you don't even know how bad you are at crypto investing, this course will very quickly help you level up to: okay, I know what questions I need to ask, I know what I need to learn about. Then I want to get you at least to conscious competence, where you feel confident in what you're doing, you know what to look for, and you know what to avoid. You could get to a place where, if you stepped into my shoes, you'd think crypto was shockingly easy. Lots of days I just rip through this whole feed and go, okay, nothing useful today on any of the big channels. That's my vision.
If you're brand new to all of this, it also helps to use the tech before you buy so the names stop being abstract.
Where to go from here
I really love filming this course for you. If you did not watch the first part, definitely watch it to give you a big-picture overview. This entire course is available for free, and I'll put out a video every day at the same time.
If you want to speed up and learn as fast as possible, getting a mentor is the best way to do that. Maybe I'll have a mastermind at some point in the future as well. Thanks for being here — I hope to see you on the third lesson.
You Secretly Want Your Crypto to Go to Zero
From my video published May 24, 2024.
You secretly want your crypto to go to zero. I know that's a crazy idea, and your mind is probably already violently resisting that any part of you would like anything except to be a crypto millionaire. I just got a message today on Patreon saying, "Jerry, someone stole my ICP. They had a lot of ICP too, much more than me. Can you help?" At first I'm like, well, I don't know anything I can do to get it back. But I can help in the learning, because I've had a lot of experiences that can be useful if you're in crypto.
The way I see it, there's some part of you that wants all of your crypto to be gone, that loves being poor, that loves being broke, that loves scarcity, that loves struggling, that loves being a victim, that loves being afraid. There's some part of you that would love to lose all your crypto. And this is true for almost all of us. Now, how big this part is — whether it's a vocal minority, or a tiny thought in the corner of our brain, or nearly the majority of our thinking — this is important to acknowledge and observe in yourself. Because I know there's some part of me that would be thrilled if I lost all my crypto. Why? Because it'd be an adventure to build it all up again.
I've taken my own crypto to zero before
How do I know? Because I've gone through this. In 10 years in crypto, I've lost all my crypto in one way or another, always through my own doing. My crypto portfolios went to zero several times. Now, usually I sold and took profits, but then years later I missed out on huge earnings because of selling and taking profits. Or I sold junk altcoins, and if I'd had them in something better, I'd have had huge earnings.
At first, I felt horrible that my crypto portfolio was at zero. I felt like such an idiot. But then there's an adventure. And right now I'm on the way to having a million dollar crypto portfolio. I literally don't have to do anything except wait, since I've got about 4,000 ICP. And I imagine within a year or a few years, that'll be worth millions of dollars. I literally don't have to do anything. In the past, though, I've been doing a lot of things. I didn't like having things too easy. Anytime I would get these good opportunities, I would do something, or put myself in a position, to lose them.
I'll give you some examples, because this will be really helpful for you to dig into and understand. If you can look at this in yourself now, in my experience this can prevent you from making bad crypto investments in many areas, and it can keep you out of situations where somebody steals your crypto — because to me, these are generally situations which you've attracted into your life. Now, I know there'll be people who whine that I'm victim blaming, and that you don't have control over life, and none of us chose to be here, and we're just all doing our best. I don't believe that. At the deepest level, I've come to believe that I'm creating this universe and everything that happens in it, and that everything that happens is some kind of a desire I have on the deepest level as the creator. Sometimes it doesn't make sense in the short term, and sometimes it's painful in the short term, but in the long term, it often makes sense. So let me explain how this has happened in my own life.
Why I really left the police department
From 2004, when I switched to criminal justice in college, I really wanted to be a police officer. So I worked for years to get there, including working in dangerous environments like a corrections facility, in order to get some experience to then get hired at a local police department. And then I ended up getting a job at what some people thought was the best police department in town. It had great pay. It wasn't as dangerous or difficult of a job. On the surface, you would think Jerry's totally made it. He's got the exact job he wanted. He's got the exact life he wanted. He should be happy, right?
But no. There was some part of me that was extremely dissatisfied with having everything perfectly in position. As soon as the adventure and the struggle of becoming a police officer and learning how to do it was mostly figured out — once I was comfortable being on the road, making arrests, the danger, the action — there was a part of me that got miserably bored and was desperate to exit that situation. But my conscious mind was stuck in: I'm in law enforcement, this is my career, this is what I've decided to do. And when you decide to do this, you have to have a career in law enforcement and retire, like my mother had a career in the military and retired. I remember sometimes sitting at work being so bored, thinking I should just go in the Air Force or something. My life was so easy. There was no struggle in it. I was making enough money. I was doing good at my job. It was too easy.
I remember one day making the decision. There was a coworker there that was really hot, and I'm like, you know what, I would love to date her. That would be so much fun. And I remember thinking: the consequence of doing that, it'll cost you this job and possibly this whole career. And I remember thinking, I don't care. What I had worked for for years, I don't care about it anymore. I just want fun and adventure and action, and if it costs everything else, even my life, I don't care. And that's exactly what happened. I went for the coworker, and I then ended up losing my job over that situation and my drinking a few months later.
At the time, my mind was all revved up about how it was the police department, and they treated me unfairly, and I didn't want this to happen, and I felt bad and guilty about it. But some part of me was thrilled. The day after they encouraged me to quit and I accepted their offer to quit, I was so relieved and happy to be taken out of that situation, because that opened up my life to all these possibilities that were previously closed. What initially was a very painful, struggle of an experience became an awesome thing that, looking back, I'm so happy I made that exact choice.
Now, I would prefer in the future to not have things be such a rough ride. I simply could have resigned from the police department without causing trouble, moved home with my parents, and gone to graduate school without all the drama. But at the time, my mind was so rigid that I just couldn't see quitting my job and moving home with my parents as something that was okay to do. So I manifested a situation where that would happen, but it would seem to happen to me. This is the kind of pattern I keep coming back to when I think about self-sabotage and the mountain being you.
Getting banned from Udemy was something I secretly wanted
Now, if you're wondering how this has to do with losing your crypto, I'm going to give you another story that will make it even clearer when it comes to money specifically. Because there's some part of many of us that hates to be financially secure, that hates financial independence, because it's too easy. We're conditioned and we're used to having that struggle. And if we don't have that struggle, then we have to face the rest of our life and our choices — taking a struggle away often reveals many others that were obscured, like when I got sober.
I was a Udemy instructor in 2014, right when I got sober, and I poured my heart and soul into filming thousands of videos for Udemy. I set my mind on becoming the number one instructor on the platform, and I got into the top 10. After I sold millions of dollars of courses, some months I made like a quarter million in sales, and the top month they paid me $90,000. Overall, I made $600-and-some thousand dollars on Udemy, most of it in 2015 and 2016.
Then one day they sent me an email, out of nowhere, banning my entire account. I was meticulously following all the policies, although I was in gray areas that didn't have policies written about them. I had no strikes or anything. They just took my entire account down all at once. That cost me thousands of dollars a day in income, which certainly by now would have been millions of dollars.
At the time I was ferociously mad — the same as I imagine you'd be if you suddenly had your ICP wallet stolen and it had tens of thousands of ICP in it. I imagine you'd be as mad as me having had my account taken down, and that you would feel like it was not your fault at all, that you did nothing to deserve it. Some part of you would feel guilty and acknowledge, yeah, I did participate in this somehow, but you would certainly think on the surface that under no circumstances did I want to be a part of this. I would certainly have thought: this was purely bad, I don't deserve this at all, this is not what I wanted.
But now when I look back, I see it differently. I just told my friend earlier — he's secretly had me coach him on Udemy for a long time, and he's been very successful. He dominates his niche, I showed him exactly how to do it, and he's been very stable and just continues to take the money in. Yet he's stifled from doing anything else in his life, because he's getting so much money that he doesn't want it to stop. He just keeps grinding out these courses and putting in all this work, and he won't do anything else with his life because this Udemy money is so good. I told him: I'm glad I got banned from Udemy, because I've had a lot of adventures in the last eight years since. I can see that there was some part of me that was desperate to get banned. Some part of me really wanted to stop all that income, because as long as I had all that income coming in, I was tied to it. I had to think about it and obsess about it, and therefore it blocked all these other things I could do.
I hated how easy success was
There was some part of me that hated being a big winner and making huge amounts of money. It hated the person I turned into — this egomaniac that everybody's got to talk to and is so successful and wants to be like, and then some people hate and get jealous of. Some part of me really hated how easy it was to just show up and teach and make a few videos, send a couple of emails out, and just have money pour into the bank. I'm glad that over the last eight years, one of the things I've finally leaned into is: I love financial security. And yet some part of me still hates financial security. Today, over the last week, I stopped accepting paid calls for $300 an hour, and the part of me that hates financial security loves that. It's like, good, we don't need those calls anymore. What I really want is my time. I want my time to be free. If learning to sit with being disliked for a choice like that interests you, it's a lot of what I get into with the courage to be disliked in crypto.
What I can see is that many times when it looks like we've been a victim of something, or it looks like we totally didn't have a part in it, because of the law of attraction we always have a part in everything that happens in our lives. We always have a part in everything we're creating, because — the way I believe it — we are the divine creator. And what can help make things easier is to look for that unacknowledged, hidden side. There's a part of me today, even though my life is fantastic. I have a happier marriage than I've ever seen anyone have before. My kids are healthy. Everything's going great. They're enjoying school, they're home right now, everyone is safe. I mean, obviously I've got the regular old stuff too. I have family members that are sick and in addiction that I choose not to be around, because they're so sick that I'm just not going to see it. I have yoga friends and AA friends. My body is as healthy as it's ever been. I have not been sick one day in over a year and a half.
And yet there's some part of me that would just love for everything to be annihilated. Because my life is so good right now that I don't want to hardly change anything. The majority just wants everything to stay the same. The downside of that is it kills off adventure. You might think my life was so miserably boring you couldn't stand to live in it for a single day. I'm like a robot at this point. I get up at 7am every day, get the kids ready for whatever they're going to do — school, or whatever adventures they're having on a weekend or in summer. I go to yoga at 9am most days with many of the same people that I'm very friendly with. I come home and I eat like a robot too, which is why I'm in good shape and not fat anymore. I've stripped junk food out of my eating. Then I go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting at noon or 5:30 or 7, and I show up and make whatever videos I want to.
There's a part of me that feels really uncomfortable not struggling, that loves the struggle and can't stand the ease. The part of you that thinks of money and views and success as the goal — that part can't stand making a bunch of money and getting a whole bunch of views and then having everybody want stuff out of me, everybody asking for my opinion about everything. There's a big part of me that feels stifled by that. And having tens of thousands of ICP is a level of financial security that can pull up some of those deep unconscious things and then make things happen to lose it.
Why I think most people in crypto are losing on purpose
This is why so many people buy all these junk crypto coins. What I see is that crypto is mostly people losing money and wasting time, which is why I choose not to make crypto videos most days. I've seen so many people that have had lots of money in the bank and then lost it in crypto. And what I see from the outside is that you don't like financial security. That's going to come as a blow to some of you. Some of you are going to be like, that's ridiculous, I didn't want this to happen. Well, why did it happen? "I don't know, Jerry, I don't control everybody and everything that happens in life." Maybe you do, maybe you don't, but you definitely set your attraction point. You definitely set your expectations on what happens. And your beliefs, even if they're unconscious, often drive the situations you get into. If you want to see how I think through all of this, I keep these conversations going in my Crypto Reviews playlist.
If you manage to lose a bunch of money in crypto, like I did in 2014 — I lost thousands of dollars I'd borrowed — or like when I made myself broke in 2019, it all started inside, on my thinking and my feelings and my identification. Then I blew all the money on bad business ideas, or poorly executed business ideas. But you know what? At the bottom of it, when I was borrowing money on cash advances at like 20% interest just to make the minimum payments, part of me loved it. It loved the adventure. It loved the suspense. It loved the tension. It loved the pressure. Because the downside of not having tension and pressure and stress is that there's not much motivation to really change and learn and grow. You really have to learn how to be comfortable and to proactively seek growth opportunities out. Otherwise your conscious mind will think, I'm building wealth, I'm getting rich, and unconsciously your mind will be saying, I'm destroying you financially.
The year 2019 for me was: if you asked me what I'm doing, I'd say I'm making a business that will sell for billions of dollars one day, I'm going to get investors, I'm going to make a platform better than Udemy. But my unconscious mind was like, we're going to destroy him. And my unconscious mind got exactly what it wanted. At the bottom of my financial situation in 2019, there was part of me that loved it. That loved being at the bankruptcy lawyer, that loved being an utter failure — when the year before I was this big guy in crypto, making hundreds of thousands of dollars, unloading my wallet on people who didn't know any better, and who also wanted to be broke and lose their money. Part of me was really satisfied for the adventure, the opportunity, the difficulty of the situation. Because it's like playing a video game that's really easy.
Sure, it's fun to win at first. I played this addictive game called Marvel Snap, and I quit it — I'm a week or so off of playing Marvel Snap now for the third time, which is great. When you first play it, it lets you win almost all the time, because you play against bots. The first few bots you beat, it's cool, but it quickly gets to be this empty feeling. And ironically, the way the game sets you up — where you win a bunch at first, and then you start losing — the losing ends up being more painful. I'd feel stupid for losing the game, but I'd feel almost nothing for winning it.
Most of us have never seen real poverty
Many of us that have enough money to put tens of thousands of dollars into crypto have so much financial and material abundance that we've been winning our entire lifetime relative to real poverty. Many of you have never seen real poverty. I've never seen real poverty firsthand. I've lived in the ghetto — I lived in a place that was under $400 a month in rent when I was a corrections officer. I've been relatively poor compared to my neighbors in the USA. But most of us have never even seen real poverty: people who can't get clean water, who have no electricity, whose children are starving to death. Most of us are so materially wealthy that the only reason we feel like we're broke is because we enjoy the struggle, because we choose to see broke and poverty instead of abundance.
At least in the USA, there are so many places to live. There's so much food. There are so many people that need companionship. There are pretty much infinite opportunities here to work with other people, to love other people, to have several people live in a house together and share the rent and work together. I've seen all kinds of innovative communities come together — five or six single people will all rent a house out together and live in it, and even if they have low-paying jobs, they can easily afford to pay their bills and everything. There's so much abundance in the world that often it's only losing something that can really even get us to feel.
Many of us are desperate to feel something, even if it's to feel something bad. We're desperate for an interesting story to tell people, even if it's a bad thing. The person who messaged me on Patreon that they lost tens of thousands of ICP — that's a noteworthy story. If you'd held onto your tens of thousands of ICP, that wouldn't have got my attention enough to make a video about it. Winning and doing well is ironically something we take so much for granted that it's not even interesting.
I've shared these ideas with you because once you get conscious of the bigger picture — the depth of your desires — it can help you more consciously manifest and navigate things more smoothly. Because obviously the majority of me loves having 4,000 ICP. I love it. I love financial security, because now I have real freedom. I can make music, like I'm doing on my Spotify and my Jerry Banfield and Jerry Banfield music channels. I've got time because of the ICP I've got, and because my wife works, I have financial security indefinitely. The majority of me is really happy with it. But there's some minority part of my spirit or brain or whatever that doesn't want that, that loves the struggle. And what I've found is that the more you clear out your bigger and bigger struggles — and a lot of times your financial struggles will blot out all the other struggles — the more you clear out the other struggles in your life. This is part of why I've come to believe that being bored in crypto is a sign of success.
Financial abundance forces you to face everything else
If you truly get financial abundance in your life, you'll be forced to deal with all the other struggles in your life — your relationships with your friends and your family, your history, your traumas, your addictions. Sometimes financial security and stability will bring out the worst of those qualities in you. Like if you have an inferiority complex, which I certainly did in 2015 and 2016: when I got to be a big deal online and I was making all this money, my inferiority complex manifested as a superiority complex, and I went nuts making videos about how great I am. Part of me wanted all that to stop, to get some humility — to recognize that other people are giving you all this money, and other people can stop giving you all this money whenever they want to. It's not that you're some superior being because you've got people to buy your online courses. Other people are doing it for you, and they can stop doing it for you whenever they want. Some part of me really wanted the humility of earning an ordinary income.
If you can tap into this stuff, you can face some of these things that will manifest unconsciously, seemingly without you having to do anything. For example, almost none of us would consciously volunteer to have our ICP stolen. But some of us clearly put ourselves in a position for it. If you were to ask me what you're doing, I would say you don't really care about your crypto portfolio or your wealth. If you're buying meme coins, if you're investing in most cryptos outside of ICP, I would say you don't really care about wealth and financial security — because if you did, to me, the wealth and financial security coin is ICP, based on 10 years in crypto, thousands of hours of research, and thousands of cryptos and altcoins that I've looked at: the technology, the team, and so on. That's my opinion, not financial advice.
Most of crypto is filled with people who are in this never-enough mindset, including many crypto creators. I was very much manifesting this myself too, up until very recently, when I realized: okay, you're going to be an ICP millionaire. Are you going to make videos every day trying to sell people on ICP when you're an ICP millionaire and everybody knows about it? No. Well, then why are you doing those now? Act as if. Always act as if. You can see, based on your actions, the totality of what you really want.
You can see what someone really wants by their actions
For example, there was this amazing girl who spoke at a speaker meeting in AA one night. She talked about how she would go out and get drunk, and stay out late, and go out by herself. And then one night she was victimized because of that. She consciously wouldn't have said, I want this to happen to me, going out. But by her behavior, you could see that she wasn't totally opposed to it either. And it was amazing to see that she took responsibility. She's like, I knew the decisions I was making were bad, and I knew the consequences could be bad, and I just kept making them anyway.
That's what a lot of us do in crypto. We keep buying these coins that are bad. On some level we know it, but consciously we're telling ourselves we're going to get rich. And sometimes in the short term, some of you showed me a meme coin that pumped above ICP, and I'm like, that's a short-term thing, it's not reflective of the bigger picture. It's a reality where, yes, you may not ever directly think, I want this bad thing to happen to me — but do you put yourself in a position for bad things to happen to you?
Does some part of you? I remember, as a police officer, I used to fantasize that I would be the one — that I'd pull a car over and I'd be the officer down, and then everybody would remember me so fondly, and they'd have their little black tape on their badges. I often used to fantasize about that. I thought, that'd be such a great way for me to go out, because I was afraid of having a really disappointing life. If nothing bad happened to me, I was afraid of causing bad things and hurting people myself. So when I was a police officer, I used to hope that if anything bad was going to happen, I was on duty for it. I wanted a chance to be the hero, even if it cost me my life. And I realize how insane that looks now.
Take responsibility, and let it become empathy
What I want you to do is really to take responsibility for the things you can change, and to look at yourself at a deeper level, and to ask other people what things look like to them. Because sometimes the ideas that look really good to me — like all these business ideas I had in 2019 — looked really stupid to a lot of people outside me. My friends, for the most part, refused to loan me money and made it clear they didn't think I was making good decisions. It's like that girl in her speaker meeting: everybody told her she shouldn't be going out alone downtown in the city, and she didn't listen to anybody. And it's still sad. It's still tragic when things happen to people — when you lose your ICP wallet, or you get hurt, or whatever it is. The bright side is that it gives us a chance to help each other and to work together. This is exactly the kind of thing I love going deeper on directly with people, and you can join me in Jerry Banfield Family to do exactly that.
I find that sometimes my life's going so well that it can be difficult for me to have empathy for anyone else. When I saw this message about the ICP wallet, at first it was hard for me to have empathy, because of how I understand reality to work — like, well, I guess you wanted somebody to steal your wallet. That's honestly my first thought on the deepest level. But then I go deeper. It's like, well, did you want to lose your job as a police officer? Did you want to get banned from Udemy? Did you want to be in the worst financial situation in your life in 2019? If bad things happen to people I love in the future, did they want those to happen? Sometimes bad stuff does just happen in life. And the only silver lining is that it gives us a chance to help each other and to have empathy for other people. When I thought of all the stuff that seemed like it was bad, that seemed like it happened to me, I needed a lot of other people's help to get through that stuff. And the benefit is that now I'm in a place where I can do that for someone else.
I'm really happy with what I do have. And I do have enough, even though there were times in 2018 where I had much more crypto than I do today. Back then, the nearly a million dollars at one point of crypto I had was not enough. Today, 4,000 ICP is plenty. Sometimes having something bad happen — like losing your crypto, or buying a meme coin that goes to zero — yes, it can be a painful experience. But you can turn that pain into learning and into empathy for other people. You can understand other people more than they even understand themselves. Because I'm imagining this guy that had his wallet stolen, with tens of thousands of ICP — he's financially set for life. And on some level, I imagine he'd never considered that some part of himself might not want to be set for life, might want to have to struggle financially. Because if you don't have to struggle financially, then you might have to get into all these other issues in your life. And sometimes financial success means all your other issues actually get worse.
The world I'd really like to see
So this is my experience, and I hope this has helped. I would prefer a world where we don't even use money at all, where we just focus on giving to the collective, and make our needs and our desires clear to the collective, and we all operate telepathically on energy exchange. I know that sounds real hippie-dippy and dreamy. But to me, that's the future I'd like to see — where we don't even use money. That way, no one can steal your money. You just give in a spirit of joy, you receive in a spirit of joy, and you make sure you're giving in proportion to what you're receiving. So maybe, in the future, we won't even have money to steal.
A Tough-Love Take on Why Your Crypto Investing Sucks (and How to Improve)
From my video published February 11, 2024.
Your crypto investing sucks, and I want to help you make it better, because I'm tired of seeing you all get ripped off in every way you could imagine in crypto. I know that for many of you, this is the truth you don't want to hear. And I find that when I listen to the truth I don't want to hear, that's when things can actually get better.
First, let me tell you about my own crypto investing
My crypto investing is killing it. I took a portfolio from $0 to $50,000 in just a year doing $50 a day dollar-cost averaging, and I've made it ultra simple so anyone can follow along. It's not complicated. Anyone literally can do exactly what I'm doing. I've made profits in crypto ten years in a row, so I've seen what really works. I got wrecked my first year in crypto, and I learned from it, and that has never happened again. Now I want you to have similar results, and I'm in a position to judge what else is going on in crypto pretty well.
Here's what I see. I go into YouTube and I look at the videos you all are watching, because my YouTube Studio shows me the videos my audience watches. And I'm like, oh my God, y'all are watching such garbage. You're watching blatant clickbait. You're watching stuff from paid liars, from people who don't know what they're talking about, and from people who are doing anything to get you to click. They don't care about you at all. It disgusts me, because you watch this, then you lose money, and not just the money but your time. Every single video I saw my audience watching this week was either from creators I know to be paid liars, or from people who don't know what they're talking about, or it was a blatant waste of your time.
What regular people should stop doing in crypto
In my opinion, regular people investing in crypto should never be looking at charts, should not be hunting airdrops, and should not be trying to figure out what the price is going to be next week or even next month. Most of all, I believe most of the coins in crypto are absolute garbage. They are basically copies of Bitcoin and Ethereum. They didn't innovate anything fundamentally on a technological scale.
Most of you don't realize that, the way I see it, almost all of crypto and decentralization is a big fat lie. Almost everything is built on centralized services and has a single developer or entity who has true control over everything. Admins with backdoor keys that can do anything they want to the blockchain. Nodes that are centralizing transactions on Ethereum. A small handful of developers on Bitcoin who control the official GitHub. Big mining companies and pools that control even Bitcoin, so it's not that decentralized either. And most of the attention is in the wrong places. Even when people are giving you good information, which is infrequent, they're usually pointing you in the wrong direction, toward information that's not relevant for where I think the future of crypto is going. In other words, you're consistently wasting your time, missing the best opportunities, stressing yourself out, and then losing money.
And I want to help you. I have a little bit of a savior complex, that's definitely a thing. I want to help you all do better because some of you I talk with in Jerry Banfield Family, and you're telling me, "Jerry, I don't know how much longer I have to live, I'd like to do well with my crypto investing." I've had calls with some of you who say, "I have tens of thousands of dollars in crypto I can't access." Thankfully, in some cases, I've been able to help get that back. So that's what most of you are doing, and here's what I think you need to do instead.
You're playing a game that's rigged against you
One more thing. Y'all are always looking for these little altcoin gems, especially meme coins, or these degen plays, or these narrative plays. You're playing a game that's rigged against you. I've been to some of the highest levels in crypto, and I've seen how much lying there is, how much cheating there is, how much pay-to-play there is. The one rule is you never tell the people how much they're getting ripped off and what they really need to know. And I violate that one rule, because I just can't stand it. I don't care how much money I make if it means other people are getting screwed, because I think of you all as my neighbors.
I don't want my neighbors getting ripped off and losing all their money in crypto, because then when I'm sitting here wealthy, my neighbors are going to be looking to steal stuff from me, or they're going to need me to give them money, or they're not going to be able to pay to maintain their house. That's why I don't want my neighbors getting ripped off. I want a world full of wealthy people, because wealthy people can't be tricked into going to war. Occasionally they can, but for the most part, people who are wealthy are not going to be tricked into going off to war, doing crazy stuff, or hurting other people. Wealthy people, for the most part, are going to be more cooperative and peaceful and ask deep questions about life.
Most of crypto, to me, is a scheme, a plot to rip you off. However, there is some real value in crypto. There is some real opportunity. That little bit of truth is just obscured by a whole bunch of garbage. So that's what you all are doing: constantly hunting for altcoin gems. Most of you have way too many cryptos. You've got 5, 10, 20 of them in your portfolio, and you try to believe in them all, and in many cases they all suck. You haven't even researched them. You're letting your crypto sit on exchanges where it's not even really your money. You're doing crypto so wrong, and I'm going to break down how I'd do it right.
The two or three things that actually matter
This is what I'm doing for myself, which is the most honest thing I can possibly present. I imagine you are a grownup, and I trust you to take this as educational material you can use to learn. That's what you really need to do in crypto, is learn, because a lot of the stuff out there is just garbage.
When you strip off all the other crap, to me there are about two or three things that really matter in crypto. One is the technology. Is the technology worth using by itself? If you strip away all the marketing hype and all the speculation, is the technology by itself worth using? I only see one single crypto where that's the case, and maybe there are some small niche use cases beyond it. What you really should look for in crypto is blockchain singularity: out of all these coins, which one is best positioned to consume all the rest and to be number one based on technology? That's what you really need to find, and everything else you don't need at all.
Two: which crypto is onboarding people for the lowest cost? And that goes back to number one, because if the technology is so far advanced beyond anything else, if it's so genuinely useful to humanity, then people will build on it because it's the best option and not because of marketing hype or lies or because everybody else is doing it. Once people find it, they'll build on it because there's truly nothing else better.
One of the keys to those two things, and arguably the third thing, is the team. Not just one face or marketing, but who has the largest and best research and development team behind their project. If I want to invest my money where the most talent is innovating, researching, and making breakthroughs in cryptography, doing what nobody else is doing, that's where I want to be. I don't care if you copy a blockchain or fork it and make a couple of changes. Getting honest with yourself about what you actually own is the whole game, which is why I keep coming back to the idea that you have to get honest about your crypto investing before anything else.
Crypto is like the Super Bowl, except the winner takes everything
Think about crypto like football. It's the Super Bowl today, so think about crypto like football, except if you pick the wrong team, you lose everything. It's not like, well, maybe your team will win and you double down your bet on every game. If you pick the wrong crypto, the winner takes everything. For example, eight years ago all you had to do was buy Ethereum and it thousand-X'd. You literally didn't need to buy anything else. You could sit there, buy Ethereum, watch it thousand-X, and you're done. Smart crypto investing, to me, is to identify what I can buy today that in eight years is the blockchain singularity. To figure that out, all you need to do is look at the technology, the actual technology, the team, and the organic marketing setup behind it.
If you've seen my videos before, you know where this is going, because I'm talking about Internet Computer Protocol, for all the reasons I just said. The technology in Internet Computer Protocol is so good. They've made all kinds of breakthroughs in cryptography, and I've done a ton of videos about it. Before you take anyone's word, including mine, the right move is to do your own research on the actual technology and team rather than the price chart.
"If it's that good, why isn't everybody talking about it?"
The first thing you're going to say is, well, Jerry, if it's actually that good, why isn't everybody talking about it constantly? Remember, I said crypto is full of paid liars, full of people who don't know what they're talking about, and people who are wasting your time. Now go back to the idea that there's one crypto on the path for blockchain singularity, with the largest research and development team in blockchain and by far the best technology. Think about that yourself. Why wouldn't everybody talk about that?
Think about many of the other people doing videos like this. They have accepted huge amounts of money. They have accepted huge payments in order to talk about specific coins. Many of those coins are houses of cards. They're built on continuously paying all kinds of people to talk about their coin and hype it up, and paying developers to build on it, when really they're not even building hardly at all on the chain. They build a tiny little thing to connect to the chain, then build almost all the rest of it on centralized web hosting. There's only one platform that, to me, is truly worth building on organically, and that's Internet Computer. When developers find Internet Computer, and I'm watching their videos and talking to them, they're saying ICP is the future. It is the most lucrative opportunity they see as a developer right now, because this is where the internet is going and this is where developers are needed. Think for yourself.
Why wouldn't everybody just tell you?
Why wouldn't everybody just tell you Internet Computer has the best technology, the biggest research and development team in crypto, and that they're onboarding users for free? They onboarded me completely for free, and I've put out videos to millions of people talking about it. Why wouldn't everybody tell you about that? Because all these other altcoins, which are mostly scams and ripoffs with no real value, would all get destroyed. Who do you think is holding all those other altcoins? Not only that, but you wouldn't need their videos anymore.
If everyone simply took the same approach as me: I've got 3,333 Internet Computer locked indefinitely, a minimum of eight years, and I have over 500 liquid. That's $50,000 in Internet Computer, which is 97 or 98 percent of my portfolio, and all my other coins are on Internet Computer as well. If everybody just told you that, you wouldn't need to watch their videos anymore. Remember, I built that from zero, just putting in $50 a day starting a year ago. I've basically 3 or 4x'd my money, because I was dollar-cost averaging and put all my crypto into Internet Computer at $3, and it's gone up a bit since then. That's because I identified, based on my research, that this is the only real thing in crypto. If everybody else told you that, all these other altcoins would get destroyed and be dead forever, and all the people holding big bags of those would get wrecked, and Internet Computer would go up, and then you wouldn't need anything else except maybe a couple of my tutorials on how to use it.
You see, crypto as it is right now is a whole game out there to distract you from the real value. All these other videos are meant to steal your time, energy, and money, when successful crypto investing with ICP, in my experience, is insanely simple. You can put all your crypto in one wallet. You can have it on all your different devices. You actually get 16 percent APR if you lock it up as long as I have. To me, it looks like the only crypto that, eight years from now, you're going to wish you had bought and held on to, and it's that simple. The way I see it, almost every crypto except ICP is a meme coin dressed up in a different story.
Of course, everybody can't tell you that, because it would cost so much money across the board. All the regular people watching crypto would get rich off it, but all the influencers and all these crypto companies would get annihilated. It's just normal. People want to survive and make as much money for themselves, and unfortunately many people will do that even if it means you pay the price. I'm here to point you in the right direction, because to me, crypto is simple once you research Internet Computer and see what it can do. All other crypto looks horrible by comparison, which is why I sold everything and went all in on Internet Computer.
"Never go all in, don't marry a crypto" — here's why I did anyway
Some of you are like, well, you should never go all in, don't marry a crypto. That makes sense if you think all crypto is crap, that it doesn't have any real value and it's just gambling. But if you see there is some real technology, what's special about Internet Computer is that it's the only platform that's an everything platform. You can build your website, your database, your videos, your NFTs, your code, your games, all of it totally on chain. The CEO of Coinbase said that on-chain is the new online, and Internet Computer is the only place you can do fully on-chain. So to me it's clear: Internet Computer is the future, and everything else is a distraction.
How I actually use Internet Computer
If you want to learn more about how to use Internet Computer, here's how I do it. The first thing you need is an Internet Identity. That is your wallet. That's where I keep all my ICP. So you get an Internet Identity and set one up, and if you're new to ICP, follow a step-by-step beginner guide to get started. Then you set up the Network Nervous System to stake your tokens, earn 16 percent APR, and use the tokens.
I'm locking mine up indefinitely, because at 16 percent APR, if I ever want to sell, I can just sell my entire account. It might cost me 10 or 20 percent, but I'll earn so much in voting rewards that even if I have to sell my ICP account for less than the ICP I have in it, I'll still make way more money in ICP than I actually put in. So to me, the only logical thing to do is go all in on Internet Computer and lock it up indefinitely. If you ever want to keep some liquid for the short term, I've got about 500 liquid for that, and I lock everything else up. If you ever need to sell, you can sell the whole thing.
My website is hosted on Internet Computer too. I've been in marketing since 2011, and this is the best place I see anywhere to host a website, and believe me, I've looked a lot of places. It's almost free to host a website on Internet Computer, and if 100,000 people come through my website in a single day, it won't crash. That's how good this technology is. Developers who are actually in there using it, and I'm not a developer, but I watch and listen to them and developers schedule calls with me, are saying the same thing: "How did nobody tell me about this?" Well, now you know.
My goal is to save you from the ugly world out there and to help you make a real difference in your life. If you enjoyed this and want to keep going, you can watch more of my honest takes in my Crypto Reviews playlist.