Here is my answer, plainly. Before you buy any crypto, use the technology it is built on. Do not put money into a coin you have never used yourself. I have been in crypto since 2014, and I left plenty of coins sitting on exchanges without ever taking one off, so this is not theory. Most of what people call research, the charts, the narratives and the hype videos, I now think is mostly a waste of your time.
I should be upfront about where I stand. I hold Internet Computer (ICP), and by my own count in June 2026 I had about $50,000 in crypto, nearly all of it on that one network. So read everything here knowing I am not neutral. I have also been wrong in public. In February 2024 I made a video called "Last call for Internet Computer," saying that when the May 2024 token unlocks hit, that would be it. By June 2026 ICP was down about 41% over the year, and I wrote that I was blatantly wrong.
The earliest post on this subject is How to Do Your Own Research (DYOR) in Cryptocurrency, from 2024-02-12. It argues that you should start with the technology, not the metrics. I said price charts and exchange volumes are manipulated, so technical analysis is a poor use of your time. I pointed to cycle burn as a real measure of usage, and I told people to check where an app is actually hosted, because many apps that call themselves on chain keep their real code and files on a developer's AWS account. I also warned that the 100-hour version of research, watching deep dives on every coin, is wasted time if you do not understand the underlying technology.
The 2026 posts are harsher and more personal. In Crypto for Absolute Beginners: Use the Tech Before You Buy, I make one rule: never buy a crypto you have not used on its blockchain. The comparison I lean on is Warren Buffett's idea that if you use a product, you might consider buying the company's stock. The amount you invest does not change the mistake, and in my view a coin held on an exchange like Coinbase is not really yours. Bitcoin, in my view, is not worth a beginner's money right now. My honest advice in that post is to stop buying, do more research, and, if you have to, sell everything and start over.
The same day I published that guide, I also wrote I Fired Myself: Quitting Crypto Hype for Real Education. In it I admit that most of my videos were wrong, and I say I am done making price predictions, reviewing other coins and covering crypto news. I want to teach real material instead, plus some comedy. I also say, fairly, that things could turn around, and that a year from now my videos could look like good calls.
The top-ten post is the one I would read most carefully. In Why I Reject the Top 10 Cryptocurrencies and Demand Better, I go through the largest coins one by one and explain why I think each is a poor place to put money. This is my opinion, and the argument is one-sided, so check every claim against its source before you act on it. It also sits awkwardly next to the quitting post published the same day. I am keeping it here because it shows the reasoning I used, not because it settles anything.
If I had to reduce all of this to a process, it would be this. Learn what a network is built to do before you care about its price. Find out where its apps and files actually live. Use the network yourself, starting small. Judge usage by what people and apps actually do, not by transaction counts. Discount price charts and hype, and cut the noise.
For the coin-by-coin detail, the Internet Computer hub gathers my ICP posts, and the Bitcoin hub has everything I have written on Bitcoin. Below this opening you will find the four posts in full, newest first. If you are holding a coin right now and want a second opinion on what you actually own, you can get a personal video review from me at https://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.
- Crypto for Absolute Beginners: Use the Tech Before You Buy (June 17, 2026)
- I Fired Myself: Quitting Crypto Hype for Real Education (June 17, 2026)
- Why I Reject the Top 10 Cryptocurrencies and Demand Better (June 17, 2026)
- How to Do Your Own Research (DYOR) in Cryptocurrency (February 12, 2024)
Crypto for Absolute Beginners: Use the Tech Before You Buy
From my video published June 17, 2026.
If you're an absolute crypto beginner, or if you're pretty advanced and you feel you've lost your way, this is for you, and it's something you can send to someone brand new. I'm writing this after I talked to a guy in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting today who told me he'd started buying a little bit of crypto. I realized, holy crap, I need to put together something specifically for him.
The number one thing you need to know if you're an absolute beginner in crypto is a simple Warren Buffett idea that Kyle Langham from DFINITY shared with me the other day on a call. Buffett's advice is that if you use a product, you might then consider buying that company's stock. In blockchain, this means if you actually use a blockchain, if you use the technology behind a crypto, then you could consider buying the coin.
The number one thing I see people doing wrong in crypto, and I've done this probably more than most since I started in 2014, is buying crypto coins where I've never used the technology itself. There's no reason to invest in something just because you think it might go up. You need to actually use the product first. Imagine buying stock in a company you don't believe in. In my experience I wouldn't buy stock in a company unless I love the company and use whatever they offer all the time.
Use the technology before you buy the coin
Let me give you an example of how you can do this easily, and for free. To me this is the number one crypto worth owning, even though it sits far below Bitcoin, all the way down around number 30 by market cap. It has the most advanced technology in crypto, and you can use it totally for free when you're on my website. My website is hosted on the blockchain. No other crypto can do that. There are also community channels, like the OpenChat channels, where I gave away $1,000 worth of Bitcoin today in my open chat. OpenChat is an application like Discord or Telegram, a social media and community-building application that is hosted fully on the blockchain and has incredible capabilities.
So let me show you what my top two crypto investments are. My number one investment is Internet Computer Protocol, because I use the blockchain every day hosting my website, I use the blockchain every day on OpenChat, and I use the wallet every day, which lives in the Network Nervous System. I have about $38,000 of Internet Computer and OpenChat locked up in there. Then I have a few thousand dollars liquid. Then I just sold an account with another thousand dollars, another thousand ICP in it, which puts me at close to around $50,000 or so in crypto. All of it is on Internet Computer Protocol. And that's because I actually use the blockchain.
Now, to be clear, when I first bought this I had never used the blockchain before. I had a wallet full of coins sitting on exchanges that I had never used. The biggest, smartest thing I've ever done in 11 years in crypto is that I took all my coins off exchanges and started using them. And where there was no reason to take a coin off an exchange, where there was too much of a gas fee, some of these coins you can't even withdraw without paying a huge fee, I sold those immediately, because I could see how worthless they are.
When I started using the Internet Computer Protocol blockchain, which you can research at internetcomputer.org, I discovered that this is a real-world computer. The tech is incredibly advanced. So I started asking why. Why is this crypto down at number 30? What's with all these other coins? What's going on? And then I realized a horrible fact about crypto that I knew getting into it: almost all of crypto is lying, cheating, and stealing.
Why this matters even with $100
This is exactly why it is extremely important that, under no circumstances, you buy a crypto without actually using the blockchain, without actually using the technology, without having at least some basic level of understanding. It doesn't matter how little money you're putting into it. The guy today told me, well, I'm only going to put in $100 or less. That's how I started with Bitcoin too. And soon enough I had my entire bank account in Bitcoin, and when the price dumped I lost thousands of dollars just trading Bitcoin alone in 2014.
Especially if you have an addictive personality, or if you're looking to get rich quick and you're struggling with your money, in my experience you should never buy a crypto without using the blockchain and without understanding what value the technology has to offer the world. These cryptos, especially the big ones, but also many of the smaller ones, are lying, cheating, and stealing in order to get you to invest in them. Some of them are not, but in that case you should know exactly what you're investing in.
And if you're holding your crypto on an exchange like Coinbase, you don't even own the crypto. You don't own it. On ICP, I have direct control. My holdings are directly on the ICP blockchain. My devices have control over this crypto. There's no third-party exchange sitting there controlling it. If you had this same portfolio on a crypto exchange, you wouldn't actually have any of that crypto unless you went to withdraw it.
How exchanges manipulate the market
Some exchanges are making themselves all kinds of money and then collapsing, like FTX. Others have survived doing the same things. When people deposit crypto on exchanges, the exchanges are double, triple, ten times over, selling way more crypto than they actually have, and then buying it back cheaper. The prices are manipulated. People making videos about crypto are very often lying and uninformed. When you're a beginner, you need to realize what a dirty, nasty environment this is. This is an environment where whoever pays the most money, hires the most influencers, and fakes and lies the most about their blockchain can often get a huge valuation.
So if you ask why Internet Computer is down here when it has some of the best technology, it's because they're not cheating. They're just building the best technology and doing their marketing by making products like my website, like the Network Nervous System, like OpenChat where I ran that giveaway, which you couldn't have done any other way. Their marketing strategy is to make technology so amazing that people share it for free. That takes a while. Almost all of these other projects have done anything it takes to grow their market cap and get listed on exchanges, and they have no real fundamental value. There are very, very limited exceptions.
The way I look at it is that the only thing worth investing in is that which you've actually used yourself. Would you buy stock in a car company when you drive a different brand of car? That seems insane. Why not buy stock in a company whose car you've driven and liked? Why would you buy stock in Walmart if you shop at Target? It's insane, and that's exactly what people are doing in crypto.
Timing, Bitcoin, and third-party wallets
Internet Computer Protocol is, to me, the example of an ideal investment, because it appears to be drastically undervalued precisely because it's not lying and cheating and stealing like so many of these other cryptos are. That's not going to last forever, though. It will get accurately valued by the market eventually. So timing is everything in crypto. Finding Internet Computer Protocol before most other people figure it out could be very good, while many of these other cryptos are going to go to zero, or they'll have much smaller gains than ICP.
Bitcoin, to me, is not worth investing in at this point either, because the market is so big that you're just not going to get many gains out of it. And you can't take Bitcoin off a crypto exchange in small amounts. With ICP you can withdraw five or ten bucks, no problem. With Bitcoin you have to pay a $5 or $10 fee just to take it off an exchange. You have to use a third-party wallet, unless you're going to download the whole 600, 700, 800 gigabyte Bitcoin blockchain onto your computer, like I've done multiple times. If you're not going to do that, you're left using a third-party wallet.
The guy I talked to this morning asked, well, what about things like Coinbase Wallet? That's a third-party wallet. The only wallet I trust to hold all my crypto in is one that doesn't require a middleman. ICP is hosted directly on the blockchain, and because the blockchain can serve web, I can go straight to the wallet with no third party in the middle. If you want to go deeper on how I think about money, holdings, and the mistakes I've made, I've put a lot of it into my Crypto Reviews playlist.
So if you're an absolute crypto beginner, my honest belief is to stop buying crypto, start doing more research, and maybe sell everything you've got and start over again. The worst thing in crypto comes in when confirmation bias hits. When you buy something, you become a holder, then you start showing it to your friends, then you want the price to go up. All of that can be cleared up by correcting the initial mistake. It's an absolute mistake to buy something you've never used yourself, and buying a crypto on an exchange does not count at all as using the product. Use Internet Computer Protocol yourself, and join us in OpenChat where you can ask more questions.
I Fired Myself: Quitting Crypto Hype for Real Education
From my video published June 17, 2026.
I Fired Myself From Crypto Hype Videos
My friends, I've been fired. With ICP hitting $7, I'm officially out of a job. Now you might say, "You didn't have a job to start with, Jerry. How can you be fired?" Well, basically every video I've made has been wrong. I'll show you some of the biggest losers. I made one titled "Last chance for ICP price in 2024" back in May. If I were a boss looking at that, I would fire myself. And you know what I'm going to do instead? I'm going to make videos I'm proud of, screw around, and have fun. A crypto course, and some comedy. I'm going to try making some jokes, because I looked at the ICP price and thought, really? After all these videos you've made, you're going to zero, Jerry.
After all the videos I made about ICP, and then that May video saying "last chance, ICP price can blow up after this," followed by all these "going to zero" videos. I'm fired. I don't get to make any more hype videos for ICP. I can still be right from here, for sure. I can still be right. But take a video like "40 reasons I sold my Bitcoin and Ethereum for Internet Computer." Horrible video. So far it has just gone terribly. I'd have been much better off otherwise. I would have had close to a whole Bitcoin by now if I had just continued stacking Bitcoin, like I said to do a couple of years ago. I literally could have just stacked Bitcoin and talked Bitcoin the whole time. Now, do I think I've done some good? Sure. But I'm going to make a video with some ICP price jokes after this, because this is crazy. And yes, I know the rest of the crypto market is down. But I want to have more fun, and I want to laugh at this stuff. I want to stop taking crypto so seriously.
I've fired myself from all these videos hyping up how great ICP is. And then you have so many people in crypto who just want you to play nice. "Play nice, Jerry. Don't talk dirty about my coin. I just want you to say everything's going up, and then I'm right." Ugh. My ICP price is so bad I can't pay to have your mom come over later. See, I'm going to do a whole comedy routine on ICP price jokes. And sure, when it goes to $100 one day, this will be a great ride.
Going Back Over the Bad Calls
I was going over these videos yesterday. All these videos I've done about how these other cryptos suck. And sure, some of them have done badly. But here it is: "Last call for Internet Computer." I did a video in February 2024, almost a year ago, saying that in May 2024, when the token unlocks hit, guys, that's it. And the price? It sucks. And I suck. I'm fired. Look at the price. It's down what, 30, 31% in a year? No, excuse me, that 30% number was Aptos. ICP is down 41% from a year ago. Blatantly wrong.
To be fair, I'm not the only one. There are a lot of other crypto creators, almost every crypto creator, who made horrible price predictions. But if I performed this poorly at any other job, I'd get fired. Or you'd hope I'd get fired. How many people do you know with nice corporate jobs where all they do is watch Jerry Banfield on Twitch all day? Nobody does that. All right, they watch other people all day at work and do almost nothing and still make six figures. So this is what my videos are going to be like now: I'm just going to not talk. And that'll be better. I literally could have said nothing and made no effort and gotten the same result. It feels like everything I've done has been an absolute waste of time. I know you don't want to judge based on the price. And I know all the other metrics are great. But it sucks. I'm tired of having all the data on my side. I'm tired of taking this stuff so seriously.
All of crypto is serious people trying to scare you, and then trying to get you into euphoria. I looked at Odin.fun today, and what a degenerate environment that is. Just more of the same. I'm even struggling to make jokes and have fun about it. The way I look at it, I'm fired. There's no going back to hyping ICP up every day. I've hyped it enough. I've said enough. I've been bullish enough.
What I Actually Want to Make Now
From here, I'm really proud of this crypto course. I want to make stuff I'm proud of. In this new crypto course I'll teach some real things. We'll go through an outline and cover real material: how I found Bitcoin, all the things you should know in crypto, just basic tutorials. What's wrong with YouTube is that it's all dopamine hits. It's all "make something, say something to make me feel something." Well, what happens when I say something to make you feel something day after day, but it doesn't work and it just wastes your time? What about that?
And this is what's horrible: everybody wants to explain everything away. "Well, it's this, it's that." That stuff doesn't matter. The fact is, my videos have been absolutely useless as far as an investment has gone over the last year. That's it. That said, things could certainly turn around at any time. A few months or a year from now, my videos could look like the best thing ever. But I quit crypto before because I was tired of hyping up ICP every day back then too. I've got to do something better with my life. I love teaching something valuable.
I know a lot of people on YouTube don't want a real education. They're like, "Just give me the effing coin. Tell me the coin to buy so I can make money today. I don't want to learn about the basics of crypto. I don't want to try and do anything. Just give me the coin. Give me my profits. Or scare me, make me afraid, make me sell my coin." As Superman says, people don't want a real education on YouTube; just give me the coin. Well, how many times do I need to give you the coin before my job's done? I gave you the coin.
So here's what I'm thinking today: no more price predictions. No more reviewing other cryptos. Real education, and no more sensational news. I don't want to be a crypto news person. Anyone can come in and do that, and the bigger ICP gets, the more people are going to come in and cover what's going on. Zero to Hero has been cranking out all kinds of news videos. Blockchain Pill covers the news. Bobby O is in there too. We have enough creators doing that. So where's my unique space? I think my unique space can be making light of all this, making fun of all this. There's nobody doing stand-up with crypto. There have been some crypto comedy videos from comedians, but what we need is real education, plus lightheartedness, play, and fun.
So I'm going to try to record a video after this with ICP price jokes. I'm happy to interview people if you want to come on and talk about ICP. I'm just insanely burnt out on hyping ICP up. I said in my crypto course that you just need to get in position and stay there. But what gets you out of a position? If you're me, the way I've gotten myself out of a position in the past is by hyping it up and then watching everything not happen fast enough. So I'm fired. No more ICP hype. I'll do interviews, education, and tutorials, and I'm going to make comedy. If you want more of how I think about money, building, and not taking it all so seriously, I put a lot of it into my Crypto Reviews playlist. As soon as I'm hired, I'm fired.
Why I Reject the Top 10 Cryptocurrencies and Demand Better
From my video published June 17, 2026.
It's time to reject the top 10 cryptocurrencies and demand better. In my opinion, which I imagine is what you're here for, all of these currencies are terrible. They're so bad, and I'll walk you through everything I don't like about every one of them right now. This excludes stablecoins, because we deserve better than what is being offered, and in my experience, if you settle for less, you end up getting what you settle for.
To me, Internet Computer Protocol is the first currency that actually blows me away. To even find it, you have to scroll all the way down to number 29. Everything above it, in my view, is overhyped, over-speculated, and oversold. If you're holding any of these, this will be important for you to hear, because before I went all in on Internet Computer, I looked. I tried to find everybody who didn't like ICP so I could hear why they didn't like it.
Where I've been most wrong in my own crypto research comes down to two things. First, finding something like Bitcoin early and being impatient and exiting, which is what happens when you look at the price all the time. Second, getting into things too easily. How many of you have bought a coin after watching just one video about it? Then you're stuck in confirmation bias. Many of these coins, I'd bet you didn't research enough before you bought them. That's the unfortunate truth, and sometimes you need to hear some criticism so you can question your position and maybe reposition.
Why I think Bitcoin has lost its way
Let's start with Bitcoin. In my opinion, Bitcoin has fallen apart. When it was at $170, it was cool. But at $105,000, the hype right now feels insane. Two years ago we were talking about all the problems funding Bitcoin, like its energy usage, and that hasn't changed. To me, Bitcoin is massively wasteful and not worth it when there are better things available like ICP today.
Most of the Bitcoin is held by third parties now, by exchanges, ETFs, and large entities holding it on behalf of other people. Look at MicroStrategy. They're using a whole pile of public money to buy themselves Bitcoin, and they're holding huge quantities of it. But what can you actually do with it? In my experience, the real utility of Bitcoin is poor. You can't practically pay with it at the grocery store. It has become, to me, the biggest meme coin at this point.
People say the mining is decentralized. I don't believe the mining is decentralized at all. Foundry USA could collaborate with anybody else and do whatever they wanted to the mining. That's a technical fact. Look at how much of the mining is controlled by Foundry USA, and then throw in an AntPool or F2Pool or some of the other largest pools. The fact is, in my view, Bitcoin mining has no meaningful decentralization today. And the whole process is massively wasteful, millions and millions of times less efficient compared to Internet Computer Protocol.
Ethereum, gas fees, and centralized staking
Ethereum was cool in 2016 when it was under $10. But have you actually used Ethereum? In my experience it's painful. You have to pop out and sign all these transactions, and the gas fees are disgusting, worse than using a credit card unless you're sending a lot of money. All these coins on Ethereum, to me, are junk. They don't have much of anything on the blockchain itself; all the real stuff is hosted back on centralized tech. The staking is, in my opinion, disgustingly centralized with Ethereum. Come on, there's better stuff than this. Ethereum has also lost so much to its competitors recently, and it hasn't even been keeping up with Bitcoin very well.
XRP and investing in centralization
XRP. I just made a video called "Critical XRP Information You Need to Know." XRP finally hit a new all-time high, and it's only been eight years since the last one. This, to me, is probably the worst dumpster fire of the bunch. Ripple still has a hundred billion dollars they can dump on all your heads, so in my view the price will never consistently appreciate long term. Everybody hyped up on this is talking about investing in basically centralization. All the hype is that the banks are going to use it. If you want to invest in banks, buy bank stocks. Buying XRP to invest in what the banking system might do in the future, which it hasn't done in the last several years, makes little sense to me. The XRP hypers years ago were saying the same things they say today, and it still hasn't happened.
People aren't even using the ledger. The amount of growth on XRP is abysmal, and in my opinion the blockchain tech is garbage. When you've got something like ICP, where you can actually do all these transactions and host all these apps on chain, XRP feels irrelevant to me. ETH and Bitcoin feel irrelevant too.
Solana, middlemen, and off-chain hosting
Then there's Solana. To me, Solana feels like, "let's get a bunch of criminals together to take everybody's money, then pay everybody to build on our blockchain, and we'll retain full control over it." They host the infrastructure on centralized cloud. Doesn't that sound exactly opposite to why I got into cryptocurrency? I got into Bitcoin because I thought, cool, we can have a coin where we take out the middleman. In my view, Solana has middlemen on top of middlemen, riding middlemen underneath middlemen. You go to the websites, and they're not hosted on Solana. The apps trading Solana meme coins are all hosted off-chain, which means they can censor your meme coins if they want to. The tech, in my opinion, is garbage. The blockchain is massive, and yet it still holds so little information. How sustainable is that? Is the FTX bankruptcy estate going to dump on all your heads? Probably. To me, it's absolute trash. I bought it under $10 and I sold as soon as I saw how superior ICP's tech is.
BNB and Dogecoin
BNB. This one is something. Your CEO has been doing time in prison, Binance has been fined billions of dollars, and CZ holds roughly half of the entire market cap of this coin. The only positive thing I can say is that it's performed pretty well against Bitcoin compared to the others. But again, this is investing in centralization, and unlike a stock, your token doesn't give you any shares of Binance. It gives you some coins on the Binance Smart Chain. The more these coins, like Solana, ETH, and AVAX, compete with each other, the worse it is for all of them, because if somebody's building on Solana, they're probably not building on Binance. To me, Binance is trending downwards.
Dogecoin is a copy of Litecoin, which is a copy of Bitcoin. If you copy someone else's paper in school, and then I copy yours, do I deserve an A on my paper when all I did was change the name at the top? In my opinion, Dogecoin is junk and has been junk the whole time. I've hated it ever since it came out. I bought it a couple of years ago just so you all would like me, and then I realized what a disgusting decision that was. This is a meme coin from way back when, and I hate meme coins. All the money in Dogecoin could be going into building something useful, building people houses, or giving people running water. To me, investing in meme coins is just throwing your money away to centralized insiders who are taking from you because they're more dishonest, and in some cases smarter or more well-informed, than most of you. Elon Musk has even contributed to getting people ripped off in Dogecoin, and he's the richest person in the world. That's not surprising. How do you think someone gets to be the richest person in the world? I do like some of the things Elon Musk is doing, but pushing Dogecoin is, to me, one of the lower ends of what he's done. That said, it's a free world. Anybody should be able to create their own junk coin and be president of the United States, right?
I know some of you are thinking, "God, Jerry, why are you being so negative?" A lot of times, the most loving thing somebody can do is give you some constructive criticism and question the way you're living your life.
Cardano, Tron, Chainlink, and AVAX
Cardano was hyped to be the big Ethereum competitor years ago. It has clearly lost at this point to Solana and BNB. Have you used Cardano? In my experience it's awful, and to me it's not even worth talking about anymore.
Tron. Justin Sun, in my opinion, comes in and ruins projects like Steem when he buys them. People are just using this to gamble on things that aren't even on chain. There's no way I would buy any Tron. You have to hold a bunch of it just to transact.
Chainlink, to me, is irrelevant technology going forward now that you can build oracles directly on ICP. Even worse, if it were a stock that would be one thing, but in my view this is basically a meme coin where the Chainlink Foundation tries to get people to think it has value. It has no ownership by code, no ownership by stock or law. It's purely, in my opinion, a meme coin, an ERC-20 token that's been bridged over to other platforms.
AVAX is just another basic Ethereum copy, and there are so many Ethereum copies at this point. In my view, Avalanche is clearly losing, its DeFi system is dying, and the insiders are dumping on your heads as much as they can get away with while retail FOMOs in.
We deserve better
We deserve better than all of this. If you want better, go to internetcomputerprotocol.org. They've made what I believe is the most impressive thing I've ever seen in crypto, and I've shared a lot more of my thinking on it across my Crypto Reviews playlist.
How to Do Your Own Research (DYOR) in Cryptocurrency
From my video published February 12, 2024.
You're about to learn how to do your own research in crypto for real, based on my 10 years of experience in it. I want to build a world full of wealthy people. I'm tired of you all getting ripped off by crappy, useless, paid liars and people who don't know what they're talking about in crypto. So you really need to do your own research and learn how to do it. So many of you have asked me, Jerry, how do I do my own research? This is my honest answer.
Start with the technology, not the metrics
The first thing you really need to do, in my opinion, is come back to the technology. What makes doing your own research hard in crypto is when you don't understand the technology, and that's where almost everybody in crypto is wasting their time. You're wasting your time trying to look at all these metrics and narratives, because a lot of that stuff doesn't matter. What you need to start with is: which cryptocurrency has the best technology? Which has the largest research and development team? Which is doing something that nothing else is doing?
If you've read Malcolm Gladwell's book, what you need to start with is thinking about outliers. You need to think about what is fantastically different in crypto. For me, the biggest thing in doing my own research was before and after I found the Internet Computer Protocol. So I'll take a look at the internetcomputer.org website, because the biggest thing that changed for me in doing my own research in crypto was before and after I discovered it, which you all told me about when I was doing my live streams.
Why I start my research with the Internet Computer
So the first thing I really look at in crypto is the Internet Computer, because to me it answers all of those questions I just set up. The Internet Computer Protocol is the only real-world computer where you can build everything fully on chain. You can build something like my website entirely on chain on the Internet Computer: the website, the storage for the files, the code, and it all runs in smart contracts. In my experience there is no other technology like this in crypto. The reason it could be created is that the DFINITY Foundation, which is a major contributor and which launched the Internet Computer blockchain, has the largest research and development team in blockchain.
This is what I think you really need to know before you even research anything else. Because before I found the Internet Computer, crypto was very confusing to me. I couldn't figure it out. I would go through CoinMarketCap, click all the market caps and the explorers, and try to figure out, well, why is this one worth this much and that one that much? Why does this one have that narrative and that one another narrative? It all felt very confusing, because most of the rest of these are, technologically, basically copies, and some of them are actual copies of Bitcoin and/or Ethereum, sometimes with small innovations, but really they're built the same way. If crypto still feels that confusing to you and you want help cutting through it for your own holdings, you can join Jerry Banfield Family and we'll make sense of what you actually own.
So the starting point for your research is to understand what's different about ICP. Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency, and it has accumulated the most value in large part because it was first, which was a massive breakthrough. Ethereum was a massive breakthrough technologically too. It was trying to be a world computer, but they went a different direction and it became the first platform with smart contracts. And if you had simply bought Ethereum eight years ago and done nothing else, you would have got a thousand X. I found Ethereum when it was at like $9 or $10 when I started buying it, and I didn't pay enough attention to the underlying technology, because there's a lot of hype and talk in crypto. But eventually it's going to come down to business fundamentals. Which crypto has technology that is truly worth building on, and which don't? Which cryptos do something that nothing else does?
How most crypto actually works under the hood
The way every crypto except the Internet Computer works, in my view, is this: they have a blockchain similar to Bitcoin and/or Ethereum, where the blockchain is a collection of nodes that send transactions and have very tiny amounts of data actually on the chain. Then the majority of everything else you use is built right back on centralized hosting. There's even a guide on Amazon Web Services on how to launch an IPFS node. Those are often hosted on AWS or other centralized hosting sites.
The other key thing is that they have a centralized infrastructure, which means there's a centralized point of failure in almost every single crypto application you use. So even if you're using something like Bitcoin and Ethereum, ask: is the website you're using it on, or the wallet, subject to a centralized point of failure? Yes. Can that centralized point of failure be hacked and have your crypto stolen, even if you're on the official website using the official wallet? Yes. And that's exactly how this has happened.
Then, when you try to actually make these different chains work together, you run into more problems. Bitcoin and Ethereum can't talk to each other, because they're blockchains where all they do is talk with themselves. So you get centralized bridges and wrapped tokens, and those are subject to being hacked and to centralized parties. And then projects say they're built on chain. Many of these other cryptos will do anything, even some stuff you'd really be bothered by. They'll pay huge amounts of money to get a partnership with a company, and then silently terminate that partnership because there was no real substance to it to begin with, except publicity. When all this other stuff says it's "on chain," in my opinion it's not really. There's almost nothing on chain. Almost everything of importance is off chain. And once you know that, it changes how you research everything.
The DAOs that aren't really decentralized
All of the DAOs in crypto that aren't on the Internet Computer rely, to actually execute anything that gets voted on, on a centralized developer, somebody with the AWS account or the admin key to the blockchain, to go in and make the changes. So all the other DAOs besides the Internet Computer have, in my view, no actual decentralization executing the real code or the changes the DAO votes on. And in many cases we've seen DAOs where the development team blatantly goes against what the DAO voted on. So once you understand how crypto really works technologically, then you can be prepared to do real research.
For better or worse, once you find the Internet Computer, and it took me months to really understand this (I hope to speed that process up for you), it changes everything. Some of the smartest minds in the world, like Elon Musk, quickly dismissed NFTs that are hosted off chain, because he sees that as inherently worthless. So what happens when Elon Musk finds out there's one single platform, only the Internet Computer, where you can easily build your entire NFT fully on chain? Maybe he thinks that does have value. Some of the other people around the world who are as smart as Elon do think building on the Internet Computer is the only logical place to build going forward.
So to do my own research, I have to start with the Internet Computer. It eliminates the need for oracles. As soon as you know about it, in my honest experience it kind of ruins everything else in crypto. It's like dating. I have a wonderful wife. It doesn't hurt to look at the other women I see in yoga class who are beautiful and be friendly, but I certainly wouldn't want to trade her for anyone else, because my wife provides everything I need: a fantastic mother, very mature, she's everything. Until I met my wife, dating was very hard, because nobody ever provided everything I wanted, nobody was really a grown-up who could deal with my personality. And that's like crypto. Before I found the Internet Computer, it was like trying to compare one turd to another. Well, this one's a little different, there's more of that one. But the way I found the Internet Computer was different is that I actually used it.
The most basic research: actually use it
So if you're not sold on the Internet Computer, that's fine, research it and start there. But here are some other tips that I think will be very helpful. What you need to stop doing, which so many of you are doing, is this: you buy stuff on exchanges, you've never taken it off an exchange, and then you go around thinking you know something about the crypto and promoting it, but you've never even used it. The very first thing I'd do with any crypto you have is actually use it. That's the most basic way to do your own research. Use the tech before you buy it.
Try sending a Bitcoin transaction and tell me that's the future of money, waiting five hours for 12 confirmations so you can feel confident your transaction actually went through. Try paying a $20 gas fee on Ethereum on a slow day, and tell me that's the future of buying NFTs. Or during a bull market, try paying a hundred-plus dollars just to swap two tokens, and tell me that's the future of the internet. Try using some of these other coins, and realize the moment you feel like you've been lied to. Like, I thought this app was on this chain, but it's not, it's on an AWS account, and all it does is connect with and do little transactions on this other network, while all the real value, all the code, all the pictures, lives on some developer's AWS account.
If you want to research a crypto game, play the game, and then think about the technology. Where's that game hosted? Is it on some developer's AWS account? What happens if they stop paying the bill? How much does it cost them to pay developers to interact with the blockchain, and then put all this other stuff on Web2 infrastructure, and then keep it all secured, and then promote the game? Try playing one of these games and watch the community consistently dwindle over time, and think about how the technology actually works. You realize, oh, basically all of crypto gaming is Web2 games that have tried to bring in tiny little crypto features, but it functions the same as a Web2 game at the end of the day. It's not true ownership over an NFT when the game developer has images of your NFT on their servers and can change those images however they want without you having any say in it. That's not real ownership.
How I discovered the Internet Computer was the real deal
What made me discover the Internet Computer was real was when I started using it. I'd played these crypto games on Ethereum layer twos. I'd used these literally trash decentralized social media applications where the founder will show you how decentralized it is when they sell their AWS account that has the bulk of the value on their website, and they sell that website and the code, and then the people in the community create forks of it. They put their own centralized hosting up, and then somebody else creates a fork and backdoors a blockchain and locks tokens. You'll see how decentralized all this stuff is not. And the user experience on these other applications is poor, too. Having to download all these browser extensions is not something the average person is going to do.
But then you go use the Internet Computer with the Internet Identity login, and this is what caught my attention. I actually transferred my ICP off an exchange. I know I'm using a mocking tone, but the foundation of doing your own research is taking your crypto off an exchange, and I'm shocked at how many of you have not done that, who then pay to talk to me and ask, can you help me get it off an exchange? Yes, but you can learn to take it off an exchange yourself. If you're holding $20,000 of a crypto on an exchange and you've never transferred it before, that's a good place to start your research.
What you'll notice is that with the Internet Computer, it is harder to set up an Internet Identity than setting up some of these other wallets, for sure. But once you get it set up, it is so easy to use, so much easier than any other crypto wallet I've ever used. I've used a lot of different wallets on a lot of different blockchains, and nothing is as easy and as fast as the Internet Computer's Internet Identity, and nothing else is set up so you can both protect your crypto and also be safe from losing it.
Look at real usage, not inflated transaction counts
If you want to talk about breakthrough performance, I've seen YouTubers present blatant lies to their audience about the Internet Computer's performance. If you go look at the dashboard, in my view it absolutely shreds anything else in crypto. It's doing over 5,000 transactions a second consistently. But you need to think: what is the value being done in these transactions? What exactly is going on in them? Are these meaningless transactions designed to inflate the transaction number, which some cryptos absolutely do, just like exchanges inflate their volumes? On the Internet Computer, these transactions are serving the web. My website, when I go to jerrybanfield.com, pulls a transaction on the network, which burns cycles. The only way you get cycles, which are pegged against a basket of fiat currencies, is by burning ICP.
Right now we're seeing the cycle burn rate do something. It's up like six times as much as it usually is. One of the best ways to research a crypto, in my opinion, is to look at how much real use and adoption it's getting. The actual amount of cycles burned on the Internet Computer is equivalent to somebody with an AWS account paying Amazon their hosting bill, so there's real value and real technology being used here. Depending on how you count it, since the network launched two and a half years ago, its use is up anywhere from 10 to 20-plus times on average. And these transactions are smart contracts moving gigabytes of data around on the chain and serving pictures, video, and much more directly on chain. Canisters are kind of like containers for the smart contracts, and thousands of canisters were created today alone. To me, this is the real deal in crypto.
I wish there were several other things I could compare with the Internet Computer and say, well, this one's really good and that one's really good too. But there's not. I've done hundreds of altcoin reviews. If you want a specific review on an altcoin, just search "Jerry Banfield" and then the coin, I've reviewed hundreds of them, and you can find more of my coin reviews in my Crypto Reviews playlist. And in my honest opinion, ICP is so far better than anything else that there's no comparison. It even has the first Bitcoin and Ethereum layer two on the same infrastructure.
Be careful with your time
Here are some more tips. Be careful with your time when you do your own research, because you could go down the list of every coin and spend an hour watching videos about each one. You could spend 100 hours watching deep dives and basic videos about all of them. But that 100 hours would end up being a total waste of time if you didn't understand the underlying technology behind it. Ultimately, if a crypto is going to be valuable, it needs a strong team of people behind it who are innovating the technology and doing the work. Who's making your blockchain better? Right now, in my view, the Internet Computer is so far in the lead, and it has the largest research and development team in blockchain. There's nothing else even close to catching it.
You might expect me, when I talk about doing your own research, to ask, well, why aren't you talking about diluted versus fully diluted market caps and tokenomics? I've covered those in other videos, but you really just need to understand the technology. Almost everything else is a waste of your time, because it doesn't matter. Many of these other cryptos have done anything they can, paying huge amounts of money, paying people. That's a whole other video. I made one called "Insane Crypto Creator Conspiracy," where the point is that most crypto creators are either paid to talk a certain way or they're just copying other creators. Long story short, some of these cryptos pay huge amounts to get people to relentlessly promote them and to not talk about ICP, because once you find ICP, in my experience it kind of ruins the rest of crypto in terms of any kind of serious potential.
You can't trust price charts or narratives
Another thing you need to understand when doing your own research is that you can't trust things like price charts. Price charts and exchange volumes are, in my opinion, blatantly manipulated. Prices are manipulated, narratives are controlled and manipulated. So paying attention to narratives and technical analysis is, to me, a complete waste of your time, because you're looking at what's happened in the past. You don't know about the manipulations and the lies coming up, the diversions. If you're not researching the actual technology, you're missing the only thing that matters.
You need to pay attention to people who would actually know about the technology and can compare it. There's a channel I want to shout out specifically: you need to pay attention to what developers who've seen ICP and who've seen other cryptos are saying. One example is Cityscape. He's a developer, and he understands from a technological point of view how amazing the Internet Computer is. From what he sees as a developer, actually building stuff and getting in there and really using it (and how many people in crypto do that?), he says this is where the future is going. This is where the hottest opportunities are coming, because the technology is vastly superior and way easier to use, and this is where people are going to be hiring in the future. So you need to listen to what actual developers are saying. For better or worse, I'm mostly a marketing and content creation guy. I'm a full-time creator. It's taken me a long time in crypto to finally cut through the crap and stop wasting my time with all these other cryptos that are, to me, games. They're gambling, they're speculative hype, they're houses of cards. Most people have lost money in crypto because, in my opinion, many of the projects are nothing more than copies, lies, and marketing hype.
So if you want to hear from a real developer who's actually building stuff, who's in the programming language for the Internet Computer and who's also into crypto, watch Cityscape on YouTube. He's done videos on other cryptos as well, and things on topics like ICP tokenomics. And if you want to compare how I think about who's worth listening to, I went through every top 100 crypto YouTuber with one question.
Who do you actually listen to?
So when you're doing your own research, be very careful about who you listen to. One thing to consider is: does this person honestly care about my results, or do they care more about buying themselves big houses, fancy cars, and trying to take over the world? Unfortunately, crypto is a space that tends to attract people who are mostly selfish and self-centered. How do you think I got into this? Let's be real. I am sober almost 10 years now, but I was in the middle of my alcoholism when I found crypto. Selfish, self-centered, only thinking about how to bring myself up no matter what happened to other people on my way up. That's how I got into crypto.
I very recently have had a change of heart. What I care about now is building a world full of wealthy people. Because if I consider each of you as a neighbor, I don't want you to get ripped off by somebody's crypto scam. If you lived next door to me and lost your life savings in somebody's crypto scam, I don't want a broke, desperate neighbor living next door who might steal my stuff or be jealous of my stuff. And I don't have much: I just have a regular thousand-square-foot, three-bedroom, two-bath house, no garage or anything. It'd be like $100,000 if I wanted to build a garage, so I'm not building a garage. I'm not even going to spend like $20,000 to get a new studio. I could get one built, but I'll just move into a closet in the house or a little shed.
Because what I care about is providing a meaningful education. I care about a world full of wealthy people, people who have enough, who are comfortable. I'm not talking about the ultra-wealthy, who are often mentally sick and care too much about wealth, power, and domination. I'm talking about people who are comfortable, who have enough money, who often have time for fun, for family, for friends, for volunteering, for charity. We tend to be some of the happiest people in the world. The biggest difference in the world is having enough versus not having enough.
So when you're doing your own research, be very careful about who you listen to, because most people in crypto care about themselves, their own earnings, and their own pocketbooks, and you are a secondary consideration. There are various degrees. There are people who are just a little selfish but do care, and there are people who are absolutely paid liars who perhaps can't stand you, and all they care about is ripping you off, or buying a new house, a new car, a private island. They'll lie straight to your face like Sam Bankman-Fried. Crypto is full of people like that. So pay attention to the energy of the people you listen to. The more you cultivate your own energy, the more you become an honest, transparent, loving, and caring person, the more you'll be drawn to people who are the same, and you'll just stop watching the others.
Cut out the noise
I don't even read stuff on X anymore unless it's shared in my open chat group, because there's so much noise. So if you want to do your own research, you need to learn to cut the noise out. The main place most of you are going wrong in crypto is that you're listening to too much noise. You're clicking on these hype videos and these 100X videos, and I don't watch those, because 99% of the time they have no substance, and the 1% of substance is either copied from somebody else who was paid to say it in the first place, or it's not long-term meaningful substance.
I hope this has helped you do your own research better, because learning how to really do your own research in crypto is, to me, the difference between wealth and poverty. So I invite you to join me in wealth. Stop getting ripped off, stop holding your crypto on exchanges, and make sure you learn about ICP, because once you really understand it, you're in a better position to understand everything else. If you want to go even deeper, this is the same one altcoin I keep coming back to after researching thousands of them.
These conversations have really helped me to care about you. I've talked to so many of you who lost so much in crypto and were desperate for help. I realized not everybody can afford or wants to pay to talk to me one-on-one, so I want to give the same information I share on those calls to everybody for free, and lead by example. Most people who make content like this do not do face-to-face video calls with their followers, because if they did, they'd have to stop doing what they do.