I don't want to be stupid anymore in crypto. I've been in crypto 10 years now, and there's nothing I've ever done in my life that's made me consistently feel so dumb. From your point of view, I got into Bitcoin when it was as low as $170. I've made hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits in crypto. I've made a profit every year, 10 years in a row. But inside, most of the time I've been in crypto, I just constantly feel stupid. I feel stupid whether I bought something too high and sold it low, or whether I bought it low and sold it not high enough, or whether I missed out on something else that ended up doing really well.
The main times I've felt stupid in crypto have been going all in on projects that turned out to be absolute garbage, which I've done at least twice now. That's exactly why I was very scared to go all in on another project. Is this something you can relate to?
The decisions that made me feel dumb
Even last year I was buying meme coins myself. Even though I was very critical of most projects, I bought this one meme coin and put out a five-star review of it, and it tanked right after that. I lost more than 60 percent of my money in it. I remember sitting there looking at myself and my own video online, thinking: how can you do this? How can you be this dumb after you've been in crypto so long? Why should you be putting videos out here that people are watching when you're as bad or worse than a total newbie?
Ironically, the point where I've started to become smarter in crypto is where I realized exactly how dumb everything I was doing looked if you looked at it from the outside. For example, just a year and a half ago I bought a crypto I'd never heard of before off of one single 30-second video on TikTok. I immediately put a few hundred dollars into it, which triggered my confirmation bias, and then I bought more, and I ended up having thousands of dollars in that crypto before finally dumping it when I found something better.
Someone watching live said I was being too hard on myself, and I agree. At the same time, how many of you are thinking about buying a crypto right now? How many of you are in the same spot, where even if you're doing really well in crypto and you've made a bunch of money, you're on edge about the next dumb decision you're going to make? You're almost afraid to even do anything, because do I want to sell now? Am I going to feel stupid if the price pumps afterward? Should I follow what Jerry's doing and go in on ICP? What if I miss out on this other stuff?
A lot of times in crypto, I've noticed I was making decisions more on what I was afraid of, like FOMOing into something because I didn't want to miss out on it. I was constantly setting myself up to feel dumb, but at the time I was doing it, I thought I was being so smart. I filmed a video one time where I was trying to show people how to make a hundred dollars a day trading on Bittrex, and I managed to lose over a hundred dollars while I was filming, in a single hour, just buying a crypto high and selling it low several times on relatively small trades with about a thousand dollars. If any of this sounds familiar, I'd gently encourage you to get honest about your crypto investing skill the way I finally had to with mine.
The good news is, I know almost everybody in crypto feels like this. I talk to some other crypto YouTubers, and I have one-on-one calls with you all scheduled every week, and I know this is a very common feeling in crypto. The best part is that it pushed me to ask myself: how do I actually feel smart in crypto? What can I do in cryptocurrency so that on a daily basis I feel like I'm applying all the intelligence I have? And how do I even know if I'm being smart or if I'm being dumb?
Clarity is how I tell smart from stupid
From 10 years of experience in crypto, I can say that usually when I'm confused, that indicates I'm not operating in smart mode. Where there's confusion, there's no clarity. Smart, to me, comes with a sense of clarity. Clarity means I know exactly what I'm doing today and why I'm doing it. The experience and the research I've done in the past have put me in a position to be successful today.
Confusion is waking up and having an altcoin portfolio of 50 different altcoins and wondering: should I buy any today? Should I sell any today? Which one should I hold? Should I research some new ones? That feels like I'm just blowing my brainpower all over the place trying to figure out what to buy and what not to buy. What I want to do instead is focus it.
So what I've learned is that if I want to feel smart and make good decisions in crypto, it comes down to lots more research, much less trading, very well researched and thought-out positions, and exiting any position immediately that is not well researched and thought out. For me, I can simplify it so much, because to me stupidity is exemplified in making something simple complicated. Crypto really is pretty simple if you cut through all of the marketing and get into the technology. And I'll be honest: I contributed to a lot of the confusion in crypto myself. To me, genius is taking something very complex and making it extremely simple, so that anyone can understand it. I'm going to do that right now.
The only two cryptos I see real value in
Internet Computer Protocol and Bitcoin are the only two cryptocurrencies that I see having true value beyond marketing, hype, and speculation, and true potential to go into the future. I don't want to hold Bitcoin myself, though, because I think it has about the same level of risk that Internet Computer does, but it doesn't have nearly the upside and the staking rewards that I see for Internet Computer.
Out of the thousands of altcoins I've looked at, and the more than 200 I've reviewed on video over the years, Internet Computer Protocol is the only project I see with real internet-transforming technology, the largest research and development team in blockchain, and something that's so good that I just want to talk about it in every single video. After researching for a decade, it's the one I keep coming back to, and it's the reason it's the one altcoin I love after researching thousands of them.
To me, intelligence is being able to figure something out in your life and simplify it so it's easy for everybody to understand, and then move on with my life. I felt real stupid in crypto when I was watching hours and hours of videos every day, doing all this research, and then still making bad decisions like buying a meme coin I hadn't researched, only to watch my money go down as I checked the price chart all day. What I love now is this: a smart investor, to me, is a well-researched investor who has found something that is truly an outlier, that is massively undervalued, where there's something real there. I feel very smart today being all in on Internet Computer. If you want to go deeper on the project itself, I keep that conversation going in my ICP Crypto playlist.
Going all in without repeating my old mistakes
I was very afraid to go all in on Internet Computer, because I'd gone all in on cryptos before and felt massively dumb when they fell apart. However, I learned from that. I realized what I didn't do before was look more into the technology. The cryptos I went all in on before did not have any game-changing technology.
Internet Computer Protocol is the first crypto where you can build everything fully on chain. It's the only crypto that currently runs small basic AI models on chain and that, in the future, could run bigger, scalable AI models directly on chain, to have AI on chain even writing its own contracts. I've done a lot of videos about Internet Computer, so I'm not going to go too deep into all of that here, but if you want the long version of why I committed, that's exactly what I covered when I explained why I invested my life savings into ICP.
Going all in on Internet Computer, I feel smart, because I'm not betting on marketing. I'm not betting on hype and speculation. I'm not betting on people just building somewhere and hoping everybody else FOMOs into it. I'm betting on technology that does so many things nothing else can do. There's no other crypto where you can build a website on chain. There's no other crypto out there that runs as a real-world computer, where you can just build your application and have the database, the NFTs, and the pictures all on chain. There's nothing else even building something comparable. I feel very smart, because it looks to me like the future is going toward Internet Computer.
And unlike my previous all-in investments, I haven't made the mistake of just jumping into it without looking at the downsides. On the cryptos I went all in on before, I did not try to find every bit of criticism before I invested. On Internet Computer, I looked and looked and still keep up with all the criticism, every reason everyone says something's wrong with it. It's like my marriage. We've been together 13 years, married for 11 or 12. I know all of my wife's downsides, and she knows all of mine. Where I've consistently felt stupid in crypto was where I got surprised by the downsides of what I had invested in, and those downsides were consistently technology that wasn't worth using by itself, technology that, if it didn't have a crypto coin attached to it, nobody would use.
Internet Computer Protocol is the only technology in crypto that I see people will actually use and build on even if it didn't have a crypto coin attached, because of what it can do. Now, time will tell. And yes, I realize that if Internet Computer goes to zero, I'm going to feel real stupid again. But at least this time, I did my full due diligence. I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours researching it. I tried to find every reason it could possibly not work out ahead of time.
Why I refuse to diversify
Instead of throwing out new cryptos every day for you, and having a low percentage of actually being correct, I just put one thing out, and then I'm either going to get a 100 or a zero on it. I like to be an all-or-nothing, 100 kind of student. Personally, I would rather take a very high-confidence shot at being 100 percent correct, instead of the model most crypto YouTubers pursue, where they throw out 50, 100, 200 coins, and they're wrong on 90-plus percent of them, at least in the long term, and in the longer term they're wrong on 99 percent of them.
And yet they'll focus on the one or two they were right on. If you add all of it up, I'm unwilling to diversify. Being wrong about something leaves me feeling dumb. Even if I was right nine times, the one I'm wrong on leaves me feeling more dumb than all nine I was right on. So with being all in on one single crypto, I'm either getting a 100 or a zero, and because I just have one, it doesn't matter what the price is every day, because I'm not leaving and the research hasn't changed. It makes things super simple.
When things in life are simple, it's easier to focus your genius. I have a simple relationship with my wife, a simple crypto channel here, and a simple investment strategy. Because my whole life is simple, it gives me the space to feel smart. I think almost all of us have a lot of intelligence we're not really tapping into. When you've confused yourself, put in a bunch of junk data, and spread yourself all over the place, it's easy to make a bunch of mistakes, and even if you do a lot of other things right, the mistakes leave you feeling dumb. That's why simplifying my crypto down to one position has done more for my peace of mind than any trade ever did, and it's the same reason I share these conversations openly in our community, where I do weekly group calls and one-on-one calls inside the Jerry Banfield Family.
I'm not afraid anymore
So this is my approach: take a safe, sane, and simple investing strategy by being all in on ICP. I'm excited to see how this works out. I'm not afraid. I've done my research. I'm feeling very smart today, and I hope you are as well. For more of how I think about all of this beyond ICP specifically, I keep those broader crypto and money conversations going in my Money playlist.
One last thing that sums it all up for me: this entire website is hosted on ICP. That, more than any price chart, is why I feel smart holding it. I'm not just betting on a coin. I'm building on the technology I believe in.