Crypto YouTubers Exposed: Which Channels Mislead You and Why

I no longer trust most crypto YouTubers, and after the research I did this year I think you shouldn't either until they prove otherwise. I know this from the inside. I was one of the first big crypto YouTubers. I sold $300 courses that picked out "best" coins that were not much different from the rest, and I made money from ad revenue and course sales while hyping coins I did not believe in. I eventually quit because I could not live with what I was doing to my viewers.

So which crypto channels can you trust? My honest answer is very few, and my test is simple, if admittedly biased: does the channel cover the Internet Computer (ICP), the project I hold and have been writing about since I found it? In my June 2026 review of more than 100 top crypto YouTubers, most channels with thousands of videos never mentioned ICP once. Only three, No BS Crypto, Sin City Crypto and Steph Is Crypto, had regular, substantive coverage I would call decent, and a few more, including BitBoy and Joe Parys, had at least some fair reviews. I would rather you learn to test a channel yourself than just take my scorecard, so the rest of this page shows my reasoning in full.

My view has moved over time, and the changes are part of the story. In The Huge Lies Crypto YouTubers Are Telling You, from February 2024, I listed seven lies, including that crypto is decentralized, that most things are built on crypto, and that you need to trade and own a pile of altcoins. I still hold most of those points, and I still think ICP is the strongest technology I have found. But I now say more plainly that you can lose money on it too, even if I am right about the tech, through exchange hacks, wrong addresses and lost wallets.

Why I Walked Away From Crypto YouTube Lies, from October 2025, is an excerpt from my memoir and tells the other half. After I was demonetized on Facebook, I relaunched as a crypto creator in December 2022, and I describe how I started to see my own dishonesty. In May 2023 I switched to calling most altcoins garbage. A bot-driven mass report got that channel terminated, and YouTube restored it about a week later. The same excerpt covers how I found ICP after that and why I think it was unfairly dismissed at launch.

The newest posts show how I now judge creators who cover crypto every day. In Investigating All In Crypto: Why I'd Warn You Before Watching I argue that a channel whose thumbnails push XRP, Hedera, Cardano and Chainlink, with an XRP-to-$11 call and a Cardano ETF video, has stopped doing research and is just reporting news with clickbait. I also say it is not the worst I have seen, and that the host shows his face, which I respect.

In Why I Stopped Trusting InvestAnswers: An ICP Reality Check I explain why I stopped watching a channel I used to follow every day. When I checked his ICP claims on the official explorer, the inflation he called horrible came to about 3 percent, which I calculated as less than Solana's. His comparison put a dash where ICP's transaction count belonged. When ICP had a breakout week and outperformed the other top 50 altcoins, his chart dropped it, and he called it a junk coin rug pull. I read that as deliberate. His record also includes Terra Luna, Celsius and FTX, which I think his viewers should weigh.

The lesson I take from all of this is the one I end on in the original post: verify the data yourself, because even creators with secret compendiums can be wrong or deliberately misleading. Below this opening you will find the contents list, then each post in full, newest first, starting with my top 100 channel test. Nothing here is financial advice.

If you want the same question asked of one project, the ICP hub gathers everything I have written about the Internet Computer, and how to research a crypto before you buy is the practical version of the checklist I use here.

If you are holding a coin and want a second opinion on what its YouTube coverage is telling you, you can get a personal video review from me at https://jerrybanfield.com/review/.

I Tested Every Top 100 Crypto YouTuber With One Question (June 17, 2026)
Investigating All In Crypto: Why I'd Warn You Before Watching (June 17, 2026)
Why I Stopped Trusting InvestAnswers: An ICP Reality Check (June 17, 2026)
Why I Walked Away From Crypto YouTube Lies (October 30, 2025)
Crypto YouTubers Exposed: Which Channels Mislead You and Why (February 27, 2024)

I Tested Every Top 100 Crypto YouTuber With One Question

From my video published June 17, 2026.

How I Define a Fraudulent Crypto Channel

I define a fraud in one of four ways. The first is incompetence, where you don't know what you're doing and you're giving your viewers crappy information. The second is being a paid shill, where all you do is show the coins you've been secretly paid to promote and you don't even cover what's most relevant. The third is that you simply waste your viewers' time. The fourth is that you blatantly hide some of the best information out there and screw your viewers over. Any channel whose primary purpose is to extract value out of you, I would call a fraudulent crypto channel.

So I'm going to go through at least 100 of the top crypto channels and count how many of them I would consider not a fraud. And I'll be honest with you: I personally would never watch any channel again that I put in the fraud category here. I've tried to make this as simple, transparent, and objective as possible. To me, genius is being able to simplify something. So I asked myself: what is one simple test I could apply to all of these crypto YouTubers to keep it fair? I didn't want to just point at somebody's thumbnail or title or channel name and say, oh, this one sucks and this one doesn't. So I thought of a single test that I'll apply to every single crypto YouTuber to determine whether they're legit, thumbs up, or whether they're a fraud.

Now, when I say a channel is legit, that doesn't mean they're perfect. It just means they're not as bad as the rest, and maybe they provide some real value.

The Test: How Do You Cover Internet Computer Protocol?

Here's the test I've come up with. Internet Computer Protocol, at internetcomputer.org, is in my view the number one technology in crypto. The capabilities are absolutely mind-blowing. When you look at what it can do, you can serve web directly from smart contracts, which you're not able to do with other blockchains. You can connect Web 2 and Web 3 without oracles, where everything else needs oracles. It has the most computation out of any blockchain, the most transactions per second, and the most advanced Bitcoin layer 1. Most important, it is 100% on-chain, with no cloud. All other cryptos rely on centralized tech clouds to actually interface with the blockchain. For example, a MetaMask wallet is a website that's hosted on centralized tech.

ICP has a reverse gas model. In my opinion it is the best DePIN network in the world. It is the only thing that can do native Bitcoin smart contracts, and it offers the best Ethereum Layer 2 signed transactions on other chains. Whether you like it or not, whether you think it's a good investment or not, this is incredible, because it's the only tech in the world where you can run AI directly on chain. That's very important for the security and transparency of AI.

This project has broken all kinds of records in crypto. It has the largest research and development team in crypto and, to me, the most transparent team in crypto. They're the people I absolutely love listening to the most. My own website is on ICP, and it has the most transactions per second out of any blockchain. Yes, more than Solana. My community is directly on ICP too.

So my criteria for this whole exercise is simple: do you cover Internet Computer Protocol, and when I search for your videos, how do you cover it? To me, that's the one thing you should be getting good coverage on. If you don't know the things I just told you, if you don't know that the largest research and development team in crypto is DFINITY and that they're the main contributor to Internet Computer, if you don't know that the rest of your cryptos have no hope of running AI on-chain, and if you don't know that the rest of your cryptos mostly run on centralized tech, then it's because your crypto YouTubers haven't been giving it to you.

Going Through the Top 100 Channels

So let's go through the top crypto YouTubers. I went through all 100 and searched each of them for ICP to see what videos they do. Let's begin with Coin Bureau. Out of all the videos Coin Bureau has done, they hardly ever mention ICP, except for one of the most well-done, brutal FUD videos out there. It briefly mentions the tech and then totally spins it into some dystopian conspiracy theory, which a lot of the Coin Bureau channel is about. This was some of the most well-done FUD on Internet Computer Protocol that didn't just shout that the price sucks. And to me that's evidence the Coin Bureau channel is a fraud. They're there to shill the coins they've been paid to shill, and to share the narratives they've been paid to show. You'll notice they put the same coins on the channel all the time. So to me this is an absolute fraud channel, a waste of your time that does not give you valuable information.

Now we're going to have to speed up the rest of these. BitBoy actually has a decent number of videos talking about ICP. My standard is this: if you've at some point covered ICP positively, whether it's the tech or the market cap relative to the tech, you've at least offered something. But if you can't have even one video where you're positive about ICP or highlight some of the tech, then you have nothing of real value to offer and you're wasting your audience's time. BitBoy clears that bar. I know BitBoy has had his issues with addiction. I'm sober 10 years myself, and I would love for him to join me in sobriety. But BitBoy has some great videos about ICP, and he was actually one of the people I watched when I discovered ICP. So BitBoy gets a check.

Now Altcoin Daily. If you look at Altcoin Daily, there's not one video, not one, about ICP, and I would put Altcoin Daily in the paid shills category. All Altcoin Daily does is show coins and narratives they've been paid to show.

Discover Crypto has a lot of BitBoy videos on it as well; it looks like BitBoy's old channel. They've got some positive videos about ICP. Now, many of these channels, even the ones that do put up positive ICP videos, are still mostly noise. If you're covering $15 ADA right now and every video is about ADA and other junk like Chainlink, the vast majority of those videos are a waste of time. But at least you've covered ICP, so I'm not going to write your whole channel off. So far that's two channels on the moon.

Carl. Not one video, not one, that I can see about ICP. You've literally got 600-and-some thousand subscribers and you haven't done one video about ICP, not even to FUD it. I'd put that into the incompetence category. You should know the top 50 cryptos at least if you make daily crypto content. Data Dash, not one video about ICP. Ivan on Tech, nothing about ICP. I would never watch one of Ivan's videos again; an absolute time waster. Crypto's R Us actively suppresses discussion about ICP in his live streams. That's how bad it is. Every video I've ever watched of Crypto's R Us has been an absolute waste of time, and I'd never watch again.

Crypto Casey, same category. All these videos she's done, and she's a local who lives near me, and not one is about ICP. She's talking about AI crypto coins and she doesn't include ICP, which is the only thing you can actually run AI on-chain. Crypto Casey, I would love to see an ICP video from you. Then there's Andreas, not even one match for ICP. Lark Davis did a video where he talks about Forbes trashing the 20 zombie altcoins. What's so interesting is that he actually speaks a bit positively about ICP in this one video, in the middle of a video that doesn't mention ICP directly. But to me 99.9% of his videos are a waste of time, just clickbait stuff to get views, sell his products, and build his influence. At least he did one video in the middle of it, but then he just moves on quickly. So out of 4,000 videos, you get a couple-minute clip in there, and probably a third of it is about the price.

Anthony Pompliano. I watched a lot of his crypto videos before, and he hasn't talked about ICP once. Box Mining, not one video. So far I'd only call two crypto channels as having any semblance of legitimacy. Can you see how this is rigged? It's like a crypto matrix where everybody's out here to rip you off.

Crypto Banter is talking about top AI altcoins, and House of Crypto tries to speak up a little bit about ICP on there before getting shut down as fast as possible. What? This is ridiculous. These are the channels you all are watching, the channels you're dumping your time into. House of Crypto only got to try to speak up for ICP while everyone was talking about AI coins, when ICP is the only thing that can actually run AI on the blockchain. Everything else runs AI on centralized tech and creates a token, which is basically useless. I would never watch Crypto Banter again.

I didn't know any better back then either. I'm doing this so that I hope you don't waste as much time as I did watching these channels. 99Bitcoins has all kinds of crypto videos, 2,000 of them, and not one about ICP. Michael has 2,000 videos, all kinds of Cardano videos, with ICP slipped into the title just to try and get clicks, but not one real video. Benjamin Cowen has a whole bunch of useless Bitcoin analysis and not one video about ICP.

Now, Joe Parys. I'm giving Joe Parys the check mark here because Joe Parys and I are partners and did some videos together, and he introduced his audience to Internet Computer in several different videos with me. So Joe Parys has one of the most positive ICP series of videos on any of these big channels so far. Joe Parys and BitBoy are the first two large channels I see that actually accurately cover Internet Computer Protocol. And how many channels have we gone through? Twenty? Out of 20 channels, if you count Discover Crypto and BitBoy as one, that's about three channels out of 20 giving accurate coverage or even a semblance of it. Joe Parys mostly posts about non-ICP stuff, but at least he has a bunch of videos that we did together. I must have mentioned ICP in every single one of them; if I didn't mention ICP on his channel when I do videos with him, you might not even realize he holds thousands of ICP himself. So Joe Parys gets a check mark.

So that's three so far out of a hundred. Satoshi Stacker, with 1,800 videos, has nothing about ICP. Elio Trades, a thousand videos, nothing about ICP, all kinds of other stuff. Crypto Jeb. To me it's pure incompetence if you've done thousands of videos and haven't even talked about ICP once. Crypto Jeb has 3,000 videos, and not one covering ICP. That Martini guy has one video with ICP even in the title, but it's not at all about ICP; hundreds of videos and nothing about ICP. Brian Young, 469 videos, top 10 altcoins to 10x, this one in the 100x. Deeso is so far inferior to ICP it's ridiculous, and there's not one video in here about ICP. Not one. He hasn't told you. Crypto Tips.

Going Channel by Channel Through the Biggest Crypto YouTubers

Crypto Tips actually did a review on ICP that, unfortunately, I forgot to watch before sitting down to do this. I watched so many other videos that this one slipped my mind. At least they do have one single video, an ICP coin review asking whether it lives up to the hype. I really want to go watch that later to decide. So this channel has at least one ICP coin review. Think about how many times people have asked these other channels, like Cryptos R Us, to review ICP. His viewers have asked him so many times to cover a top 50 crypto, and he has refused. So at least Crypto Tips has provided one video on ICP. Based on whether that video is good or not, you could judge the rest of the channel. But still, one video about ICP out of 1,700 videos of what I see as constant clickbait junk that wasted my time in the past, I wouldn't watch it again.

Digital Asset News, not one video about ICP. Not one out of 2,000 videos. MoneyZG, a thousand videos, all kinds of tutorials, all kinds of content, and not one about ICP. Alex Becker did something interesting in one of his last videos. He actually hovered over ICP and looked like he was trying to subliminally signal it, while putting what I consider absolute garbage on his thumbnail, like ChangeEPT, which filed what I believe was a fraudulent copyright strike to try and take down my critical review. That strike was reversed because I said, take that stuff to trial. Top nine AI coins, and that one is not even the ICP one, but it covers AI coins without covering ICP. Hundreds of videos, millions of subscribers, and as far as I can tell, not one bit of good done.

Doug Polk Crypto, not one single ICP video. Blockchain Backer, thousands of videos, not one ICP video. Isn't this insane? Even if I include Crypto Tips, that is four out of roughly 30 channels. Chico Crypto, not one video about ICP. MM Crypto, not one video about ICP. Crypto Zombie, not one video about ICP.

The Few Who Actually Cover It

House of Crypto, on the other hand, along with Joe Parys and the two BitBoy videos, is one of the few that actually covers ICP. This video of his is pretty bullish on the internet computer. He covered Dominic's AI on chain. I would put House of Crypto, along with Joe Parys and the two BitBoy ones, and maybe Crypto Tips, as the channels that are not totally wasting your time. Let's call it five generously. Five out of 30-plus. But again, most of his videos just hype up junk coins repeatedly. At least he tried to talk about ICP before Crypto Banter tried to divert him and shut him up about it.

Nothing on Crypto Kirby Trading. Crypto Love, a bunch of useless junk on this channel, nothing there. Crypto Crow, we do at least have an internet computer price prediction. That video was not quite a total waste of time, and at least it is covered. So we could call Crypto Crow number six, because he at least has a couple of videos on ICP.

What I'm seeing is that almost all the very top YouTubers seem to have some agreement in place to be paid not to talk about ICP, as part of secret crypto payments they have arranged, or they're completely incompetent. As you start getting to the smaller ones, though, they are covering the internet computer more. Channels that blew up more recently, like House of Crypto, covered it.

InvestAnswers and the Active FUD

InvestAnswers, in my view, is a paid Solana shiller and one of the most active FUD channels on ICP. I used to watch him every day until I realized he was blatantly lying about ICP. I could prove what he was saying was false in five minutes of my own research. He actually tries to capture the ICP traffic for himself. He tries to get people searching for ICP to come to his channel, and then he lies to them about ICP. He was even kind enough to feature me in one of his videos, so thanks for the shout out, InvestAnswers. This is right on par with Coin Bureau's FUD, except not as well done.

The Chart Guys, nothing on ICP. Crypto Crew University, nothing on ICP. All those videos, a thousand of them, nothing on ICP. CoinGecko, do we have anything on ICP? Look, this is CoinGecko, one of the blockchain price listing platforms. Nothing on ICP, and this is the same CoinGecko that removed ICP from the AI category. You can see there's something going on behind the scenes to actively suppress ICP, because in my belief ICP is the truth in crypto, and almost everyone covering crypto is either a liar or incompetent. I don't think CoinGecko is incompetent. I believe they're intentionally trying to keep you from finding some of this stuff out.

Here's another one, Crypto Stash, nothing about ICP.

Paul Barron, Superman, and the Higher-Quality Coverage

Paul Barron Network I'll put in at number seven out of all of these. Paul Barron did an interview with Dominic Williams. So out of the highest quality ICP content so far, I'd point to Paul Barron Network, BitBoy, and Joe Parys. Let's go with the higher quality ones that did it more than once. Paul Barron Network has done a few videos covering ICP, although he doesn't talk about ICP every day or anything. There are lots of these other cryptos on his channel that I see as an absolute waste of time, going to zero, and fraud, but at least Paul Barron does have some high quality ICP content. So the high quality ones are Joe Parys, Paul Barron Network, and BitBoy. We've almost gone through 40 to 50 crypto YouTubers at this point.

Tyler S., nothing. Bankless, nothing about ICP. Node Investor, nothing. Unchained, nothing. Hashoshi, nothing. Voskcoin, nothing. Isn't it amazing how much content wastes your time and doesn't tell you what you really need to know?

Superman is an interesting one. Superman has spoken positively about ICP in a few of his live streams and actually put it on his thumbnails, especially when I was talking about it and he was watching my live streams. So I believe Superman also bought some ICP. You'll notice several of his thumbnails, and he's defended ICP against his degen audience. Superman has had some good ICP talks. He's into getting the biggest gains he can, very much on the degen end of it. If we're counting some level of legitimacy, I would put Superman in there as channel eight, with some level of legitimacy, not an absolute fraud and waste of time. I wouldn't say Superman has high quality ICP content, though, because he hasn't dedicated a single video to talking about ICP. He did all these AI coin videos and talked about a bunch of AI coins recently, but I didn't even hear him mention ICP, when that's the only coin you can actually run, the only thing with real technology in AI. I've known Superman for quite a while. We've talked a number of times, and I would love to get him on to do a dedicated video about ICP.

Modern Investor, nothing about ICP. Virtual Bacon I would throw in at number nine on creators that have some level of legitimacy at all. He's done some shorts about ICP, which is interesting, four shorts about ICP, all of which have gotten decent views for him. Virtual Bacon also did a video on the top web three cryptos with ICP in about half his chart. Now, Virtual Bacon again often just puts up a bunch of useless videos that waste his audience's time, which makes you wonder, do you really understand ICP? If you do, why do you cover all these other junk matrix garbage coins all the time? But at least Virtual Bacon does have some high quality ICP content, like talking about Web3 cryptos and some shorts on ICP. That said, he's got 1,600 videos, and these ICP videos are a very small minority. In his 2024 crypto portfolio it looks like he did stick some ICP in there, but in his 2025 crypto portfolio we don't have any ICP. Then he's got Kaspa and Pepe, which I consider absolute garbage coins, Bittensor TAO, which I see as a fraudulent AI ripoff coin, and most of his portfolio in Bitcoin and Ethereum, which I think is pretty useless for his viewers. So at least he does have some ICP content, but again, mostly time-wasting, useless content that I believe will make his viewers broke.

Cheeky Crypto and the Volume Problem

Crypto Daily, one video called "No One Cares," and that's the only thing that was even tagged in. Cheeky Crypto has a video about why he's selling internet computer for profits. He does at least have several videos on ICP, so that's solid. But again, most of the videos are all this other crap. 6,800 videos. That's impressive. I've done about 10,000 videos myself and I deleted most of them, so I'm impressed Cheeky Crypto has that many up. And at the same time, at least there are some ICP videos on there.

So out of all these creators so far, maybe Joe Parys, BitBoy, and Paul Barron Network are the three that have actually highlighted the value of ICP. Then maybe you have eight, nine, or ten that have even talked about it out of 50. Not one that has repeatedly emphasized the value and compared it to the rest of crypto. And that's mostly me doing that. But I'm way ahead of my time, as usual.

Crypto Face, not one video about ICP. Crypto Jack, not one video about ICP. Coin Mastery, not one video. Crypto Advance, not one video. Crypto Mob, not one video. Crypto VO, not one video. And Crypto, not one video. Cointelegraph, which I see as one of these paid matrix crypto pushers, not one video. Thinking Crypto, not one video. The Crypto Dad, not one video.

The Crypto Coin Show has one thing about airdrops with Lugh Mesh, so there are actually a couple of decent videos here, including Bitcoin Ordinals with Bob Bodily where it looks like they talk a bit about ICP. Another one two years ago featured Dominic Williams in interviews. That's actually a lot better quality than I see almost anywhere else. You do have a few good videos on the Crypto Coin Show, out of a thousand, about ICP. A low percentage, but higher than almost everybody else. Their most recent relevant video, though, was a year ago, and there's been so much happening since. This one should have covered the internet computer, but it doesn't look like it did. So not one new video in the last year about ICP, even with everything going on. Still better than others. Maybe we're up to ten that have even mentioned ICP at this point, and maybe three with real quality.

James Crypto Guru, nothing. Crypto Wendy, this video is a blatant waste of time talking about "huge XRP and ICP news." Does she have any real ICP content? She's obviously aware of it. The only video is "Huge XRP and ICP," and it wasn't huge XRP and ICP news at all. I watched it. It wasn't. An absolute waste of time. Sad. Huge channel, lots of potential, not covering ICP at all. Crypto News Alerts, nothing. Scott Melker.

Scrolling through the giants and finding nothing

I kept going through the big crypto channels, and the pattern was relentless. One channel with 2,000 videos: nothing on ICP. Crypto Savvy, 1,500 videos: nothing. Then I hit Crypto Gains. Now this was a sloppy video, the kind where someone is clearly riffing off the top of their head, titled something like "Mega Urgent: Watch This Right Before You Buy." At least he has a video about it. But Crypto Gains pushes some absolute dumpsters on his viewers, and honestly it's never a channel I would watch except to do this kind of research. So there's one ICP video on there, and as sad as it sounds, that's an improvement over most channels. It's amazing how low the bar is.

Advanced Crypto Trader: not one video on ICP. Crypto Revolution: not much of a revolution, not one video on ICP either. Then there's Connor Kenny, who actually does have a few videos about ICP. He throws it in there next to Caspo, which in my view is a dumpster fire, as I've said repeatedly, but at least a couple of his 2,000 videos touch ICP. That's a big improvement over most of crypto. Still, it's another one of these "crypto matrix" channels, video after video that's irrelevant and never really talking about the tech. Just wasted time.

I looked at one channel calling itself "My Financial Friend." Any videos about ICP? Nope, just one time-waster after another, nothing even new in the mix. Then No BS Crypto, and this one surprised me. He actually has some very positive posts about ICP and a good number of ICP videos on his channel. This is one of the higher-quality channels in terms of ICP coverage, probably the best ICP channel I had seen up to that point. And I'd had to go through about 70 of the top crypto YouTubers to get to one. He certainly stuffs a lot of other garbage coins in there too, but ICP is the best tech in crypto in my opinion, so you should at least include it. Out of everybody I'd covered, No BS Crypto had the most ICP videos, talking about why ICP will set you free, internet computer price predictions, and more. This is solid.

The handful of channels actually doing the work

Even with the good ones, the time-wasting issue never fully goes away. He still props up things like Ondo Finance and Render, which in my experience are nowhere near the same category as ICP. That said, this was the best coverage ICP had gotten out of the top 100 crypto YouTubers I'd seen. Holy crap. Then CoinDesk: their one video is "Why is it down 95%?" plus a five-minute clip with Dominic and another short one with Dominic. At least they have videos featuring Dominic, even if they're old and not much watched. That's still better than a lot of the others.

Then Steph Is Crypto. A few videos about ICP, with the usual "ICP will hit this price" framing. Steph actually had more ICP videos than I remembered, some of the most ICP coverage out of any of these bigger YouTubers. There's a bunch of other junk in there to distract you, but Steph is one of the smaller channels, about the same level of subscribers I'm at, and I was very happy to see it. I've come to believe the creators who actually cover ICP should be in a very good position. So that's two channels, No BS Crypto and Steph Is Crypto, that are really committed to providing regular ICP coverage.

I kept scrolling. Savvy Finance: nothing on ICP. Crypto Capital Venture: nothing. Crypto World: nothing. JRNY Crypto: nothing. Then Sin City Crypto, and I'll throw him in as number three. He's actually covered a lot of ICP, had interviews with Kyle from DFINITY, talks Hedera, and talks about Caffeine AI. There's a video where he sold his Polygon for ICP, and it's a great one. He and No BS Crypto have some of the most depth on ICP videos. A lot of his other content isn't worth watching, but these ICP ones are really good, real reviews from one of the more competent creators actually covering the project. I hope the channels doing this kind of work grow faster than all the others.

The final tally

From there it was the same story. Thinking Crypto: nothing. Crypto Coffee: nothing. Bitcoin Magazine: nothing. NAS Crypto: nothing. Crypto Coin Show I'd actually already covered twice. I got through over 100 channels, and a couple of them I hit twice because it was genuinely difficult to even pull this list together. I spent the whole day on it. Matt's Crypto at least has ICP listed as decent among AI coins, which is a lot better than nothing, though it's one video out of 400. Cowboys of Crypto had "new parabolic potential for ICP" three years ago and nothing since, better than nothing but not that good. Crypto King ran "ICP unlisted from Binance," which was fake news, on top of a bunch of other time-wasters. James Crypto Guru: nothing. Mellos Crypto: nothing. Lab of Crypto: nothing. Crypto Emperor: nothing. Crypto Gorilla: nothing. Crypto Jargon had one ICP update, but out of 1,500 videos, one, and the last one was three years ago. Today Crypto: one video, nine months ago. Crypto Archie: nothing. Whiteboard Crypto: nothing. Jolan Crypto: nothing. Noobs and Cash: another nothing.

So out of all these channels, here's the count: No BS Crypto, Sin City Crypto, and Steph Is Crypto. Three channels out of more than 100 with decent coverage. Add BitBoy, Joe Parys, and a couple of others who at some point provided a fair review or a bullish outlook, and that's about it. When you're hyping crypto up all day and you don't have ICP hype, something is off. It's genuinely shocking to me, reviewing the top 100 crypto YouTubers, how few of them cover what I see as the best tech in crypto.

This is the kind of deep, no-shortcuts review I'm experimenting with for my crypto reviews work, and if you want more of my thinking on building wealth, investing, and the tech I'm betting on, you can dig into my Crypto Reviews playlist for the full picture.

Investigating All In Crypto: Why I'd Warn You Before Watching

From my video published June 17, 2026.

If you watch All In Crypto, which is one of the main channels a lot of you tell me you follow, I want to warn you about a number of problems I see on that channel. I'm investigating All In Crypto here, and you should know these things before you ever watch another one of his videos. From what I see, the information he's putting out will cause you to lose money and to invest in things that don't make sense once you actually stop and think about them. To be clear, this is a criticism of the content he's putting out and not him as a person or as a content creator. I'm a content creator myself, and I love my fellow content creators. If All In Crypto watches this, what I'd say to you is this: put out videos that are more helpful for your audience instead of just chasing as many clicks and as many views as you can. Think through the videos you're putting out more.

I'm not going to show any of his videos, so that this stays absolutely untouchable, but I'm going to talk about what I'm seeing as I scroll through his channel.

The Cardano, Chainlink, and ETF problem

He's talking about a Cardano ETF. In my experience, Cardano is garbage technology. Try using the blockchain if you don't believe me and see how slow and expensive the transactions are. And an ETF, the way I see it, just means people who aren't paying attention to their investments get suckered into dumping money into something they haven't researched. You keep scrolling and you see a video saying Chainlink is a must-have in your portfolio. Seriously, it's an ERC-20 token, which gives you no ownership over anything Chainlink actually creates. And in an environment where the Internet Computer Protocol exists, you don't even need oracles anymore. The thumbnail is so obvious. You've got to do more research. Your viewers deserve better than this.

Why I think XRP is one of the worst investments in crypto

His thumbnails consistently push Hedera, Cardano, and XRP. I absolutely believe XRP is one of the worst investments in all of crypto, for all the reasons I've laid out before. The short version: it's already a massive market cap. How much more is it going to go up? And what are you even investing in? If you like banks, why are you in crypto to start with? If you're hyped up about what Bank of America is doing, then they have Bank of America stock for you, and that stock gives you legal ownership, a small portion, but real legal ownership and control over the company. Buying the XRP token does not. It's laughable in terms of decentralization. The technology is a decade old and, in my view, garbage. We've got things like ICP out now that are doing so much more than XRP is.

If you're going to build a payments platform, and if you're covering XRP as one of the foundations of your content, you're greatly benefiting off of bots pushing your videos. I know this because I've seen it firsthand when I hyped up XRP. I know it can be hard as a content creator: you do a video about XRP, you put Trump and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink on your thumbnail, and you get more views than average. I know it's lucrative, but you've got to think more about your viewers. XRP is a horrible crypto investment in my opinion, especially after it just went up. It's all hype and speculation, and I don't see a reason to invest in something where the narrative is that banks are going to use it when those same banks have bank stocks. It's insane to me.

HBAR, centralization, and missing the point

Then there are videos about how HBAR is the future, which I also find ridiculous. They're having to partner with ICP just to keep themselves relevant and build things that aren't totally centralized. But if you look into HBAR, it's governed by centralized companies. It does not have open governance. Again, if you love centralized companies, why wouldn't you just buy their stocks? Why would you buy a crypto that's governed by centralized companies, where the tech is nothing compared to ICP? It makes no sense to me.

So my number one criticism of All In Crypto is this: you're wasting your viewers' time. You're just talking about the same stuff almost every other crypto YouTuber is saying. It's HBAR hype. It's XRP hype. And you're not giving your viewers anything useful. They're spending time watching people talk about news and not much else.

Now, All In Crypto has actually posted some bullish videos about ICP, which I really like. But that's exactly what leads me to ask: why are you hyping XRP to $11? That would put XRP close to a trillion-dollar market cap, which is laughable to me. This is basic math. You're talking XRP to $11? That's so ridiculous. I'm not saying it can't happen, but stop hyping up the exact same crap that everybody else is. And what do you even hold in your own portfolio?

News channel or crypto channel?

Then there's an XDC network hype video, which is ridiculous, and then content about China and an AI bull market. Are you a news channel or are you a crypto channel? To me, you could give your viewers some valuable information by looking in more detail at what they're really investing in and what kind of world they're creating. When you're investing in all these centralized cryptos that have no real use case and are all hype and speculation, I believe you're going to get your viewers wrecked in the long term. Constantly doing videos hyping up Hedera and XRP, there are so many other people doing exactly that. It's just a waste of your viewers' time. There are a hundred other people they could watch saying the same kind of hype.

Over and over: XRP, the United States is about to adopt XRP. Ridiculous. Another video: US government to start a strategic XRP reserve. Even if that shouldn't happen, and even if it does happen, it's ridiculous. XRP is a ledger that isn't even growing. Look up the data. I've shown it in my previous videos. The real usage of XRP is laughable.

Then there's a $100 trillion Bitcoin video, so you're saying Bitcoin is going to 50x sitting next to an HBAR video, an XRP video, and an Algorand video. In my opinion Algorand sucks; the guy who founded it just exited because he can see how much it sucks. And you've got Quant on here. I think Quant is worse than the rest. And then Jasmy coin. Anyone talking about Jasmy, unless you're footing it hard like me, anyone hyping Jasmy at 71 cents like this, leaves me believing it's a pretty obvious, blatant scam coin. ICP is actually doing everything Jasmy holders are excited about. Hyping ICP and Jasmy next to each other leaves me believing All In Crypto has not done genuine research on crypto. It's just looking at news and reporting on it with clickbait thumbnails. What good are you doing?

What I'd actually encourage him to do

Now, at least I see fewer Solana videos out of him, and I do appreciate that, because there are so many Solana shillers. I'm glad you're not constantly shilling Solana, although it does get in there. But look at the XRP ledger and the crappy lack of adoption on the actual ledger before you make another video. There's talk of a 15x on Jasmy, and I don't think you've ever even looked up the basics of Jasmy. You can find what a scam it is in five minutes.

And then it's XRP, Hedera, Chainlink, Hedera, XRP, Hedera, Stellar Lumens. Oh boy, Stellar Lumens. If you're bullish on XRP, you should really just pick Stellar Lumens or XRP or XDC, because all of them are extremely similar. It's ridiculous to think they're all going to get adopted. There's a video from two months ago talking about XRP to $20, which would make it close to as big as Bitcoin. That's insane. I don't see one recent video in here that I'd actually want to watch. So many of them say things like "The Cardano project is changing computing forever." At least that video bombed, because it's ridiculous, and I'm sad to see that.

Here's the thing. When All In Crypto does videos that look like they might have real value, like interviewing a Bitcoin mining company, no one watches. But that's because you've made a channel that's just clickbait over and over again that doesn't really offer any value, so you don't have a real connection with your viewers. They're just viewers. If you're watching this stuff, you may not know much about crypto, and you're probably not thinking about how your investments are impacting the rest of the world. The more you dump money into XRP, the more you're not putting that money into something that could build a better world. To me, throwing money into XRP is just throwing it away. If you want to think through that side of investing more, that's a lot of what I cover in my Crypto Reviews playlist.

I will say I like that All In Crypto shows his face, believe it or not. There are a decent number of crypto YouTubers who don't even show their face. All In Crypto is not the worst of the worst. There are YouTubers I think are harming their viewers much more. But All In Crypto, I encourage you to step up your crypto content. When you're putting out a video saying the Internet Computer has insane potential, a hundred dollars, a trillion dollars, sitting right next to XRP and Hedera, it tells me you don't really understand any of this stuff. They're not all going to make it. Jasmy too? At least pick some of these cryptos and stop talking about all of them.

Why I Stopped Trusting InvestAnswers: An ICP Reality Check

From my video published June 17, 2026.

I used to love watching InvestAnswers crypto videos until I discovered what I'm about to share here with you. I was a member of his Patreon. I spent hours and hours watching his live streams and the recordings of them. I had bought into Solana under $10. I had Bitcoin. I had Ethereum. I was doing pretty much what he was doing in his videos. I kept wanting to see his comparisons to all these other cryptos, because he talked about having this crypto compendium with all this secret data that he didn't share with anyone. I got into watching him compare his favorite cryptos, like Solana, to these other coins.

Where the comparison stopped adding up

That was going along just fine until I noticed him compare to Internet Computer Protocol. When he compared to Internet Computer Protocol, something appeared to be strange. He appeared to be talking pretty straightforward and honestly in most of his videos, but I detected some deception and something weird going on when he was talking about Internet Computer. I also knew by this point that anytime he had mentioned Internet Computer Protocol, he was incredibly toxic. To him it was a rug pull, a nasty coin, a sham project not worth looking at.

I'm not the kind of person who just generally takes somebody else's word for something. I go look things up myself, just like I looked up the Solana data and the Bitcoin data and the Ethereum data that he presented, just to double check and see where he was getting it from. So I went to look up the data myself for Internet Computer Protocol. What I found is that he was saying things that were instantly provably false, like in five minutes of looking at the official explorer. I could see that what he was saying versus what I could see on the official explorer was not true.

For example, he talked about how horrible the tokenomics were with the Internet Computer. Meanwhile, I was very familiar with the Solana tokenomics and the inflation. When I looked at the data myself, I calculated it. He said the inflation on ICP was horrible, and I calculated it. A year ago there were 513 million ICP. Now there were 529 million. So if you do some division, that's 3% inflation. I started to see that the things he was presenting were not accurate. I'm thinking, wait a minute, this guy has all this data and he makes himself out to be this expert trader who wakes up to check prices in the middle of the night. And yet, why is he saying the inflation is so horrible on ICP when the fact is, in five minutes, I can see there's 3% myself, which was less than Solana? How does that make sense?

Asking questions and getting no real answers

Then I started asking questions in his Discord about ICP, and nobody would give me real answers. Everybody would just say it sucks, it's a rug pull, the team betrayed everybody. And I'm like, okay, well, I looked into this. The tokenomics aren't that bad. Why does he say they are? And there'd be some short answer.

Then came the one that put me over the edge. He did another ICP comparison video, because I wasn't the only one asking about it. He literally compared the transactions on ICP to the transactions on Solana, which we're all very familiar with. But for some reason, he literally put a dash in ICP's transactions. He just excluded it. Now, I knew from doing my own research at this point that ICP had many more transactions than Solana. To see in his videos that he clearly did this left one of two basic assumptions. Either one, he's never been to the dashboard. This is a guy who says he has a crypto compendium with hundreds of the top cryptos, massive amounts of data that he uses to drive his decisions, and you're telling me he's unaware of the transactions on Internet Computer to the point where he puts a dash? He didn't minimize the numbers, he literally just dropped the transactions, then did a comparison of Solana versus Internet Computer and said Solana won the transactions category.

If you look at Chainspec, for example, they do their best to try to drop the transactions to compare them accurately, because Solana does a bunch of vote transactions, which essentially artificially inflate the amount of transactions greatly. And ICP has a lot of query transactions. Chainspec, for example, has a real-time dashboard, and ICP is almost always above Solana in transactions. There are other applications which include all the transactions for every network, and ICP blows Solana away by those, by like 10 times. When I realized this, I thought, InvestAnswers is not telling the truth here, because it destroys everything else he's said. It literally makes Solana look like crap in terms of all the metrics he's comparing. Now, obviously there are still some where you could say Solana was superior. But if he honestly presented the data about Internet Computer Protocol, it would destroy what he was saying in all of his videos. The moment I realized that, I thought, holy crap, this guy is deceiving his viewers severely. Either perhaps he hasn't done his own research, or perhaps he does know this stuff and he's intentionally deceiving his viewers.

Looking into his track record

So I looked into his history. If you search InvestAnswers on Google, and if you search things like "InvestAnswers Terra Luna," you will see some things. InvestAnswers explained why he's very bullish on Terra Luna. InvestAnswers had a meltdown after he said Terra Luna could go to 80,000. He was bullish on two coins. Now, it's one thing. There are a lot of these pumper crypto guys that just say everything's going to go up. It's one thing if you're just going to be bullish on a different coin every day. But you pick two coins. One of them was Terra Luna. The other one was Solana. Both. Terra Luna went to absolute zero. Solana rug pulled and went down under $10. That's not a good track record.

I searched for some other things that he had got his viewers into before I started watching. Turns out he was also pushing Celsius and FTX. So I'm like, this guy is constantly pushing his viewers into these crypto matrix things that destroy them. He got his viewers into Terra Luna, Celsius, FTX, and Solana. Now the manipulation has pushed Solana way back up, but at the time when I first started watching him, Solana had just rug pulled from hundreds of dollars to under $10 before Vitalik stepped in to try and save it. I felt pretty stupid as a crypto YouTuber myself that I got sucked into watching his videos, and it took me months to see through his deception.

The breakout week he hid

Once I saw through his deception, I saw through the last video that finally pushed me over the edge. ICP had a breakout week, where, for maybe the first time ever, it went up higher in price than all the other top 50 altcoins. It outperformed every other top 50 altcoin in price. And James from InvestAnswers chose to drop it from his chart. There were several other crypto YouTubers, like Crypto Banter and Ivan on Tech, that also participated in this. He simply said that the one of these he dropped was a junk coin rug pull. I looked at it, and I'm thinking, the one time ICP would have been forced to shine, as he's showing the top 50 cryptos' price action, he literally dropped ICP from the chart. That is not a little bit of ignorance and maybe I don't know what I'm doing. That is very careful deception.

Then he made a video recently talking about ICP. I didn't watch it, but my followers told me about it. He said that I'm goofy, and he shows a picture of me that I posted in my underwear that you've got to scroll down to find quite a bit. He must have paid an assistant to go that deep. Instead of talking about the tech, he talks about me, which I'm always happy for the free promotion. I've gone viral a bunch of times because other people just can't help but talk about me. So thanks, James, for the free promotion. I hope your viewers discover me and see that I genuinely care about giving everyone the best information I have in crypto, whether it makes me look bad or not. If you want to see how I think through these decisions for myself, that's the spirit behind my Crypto Reviews playlist.

I didn't want to do this. But this experience I've had is valuable, and I hope I can help one of you from falling into the InvestAnswers trap that I did. In my experience, the lesson is simple: verify the data yourself, because even the experts with all the secret compendiums can be wrong, or worse, deliberately misleading.

Why I Walked Away From Crypto YouTube Lies

Originally published October 30, 2025.

This is an excerpt from my memoir, I Was Famous on the Internet — my honest story of 14 years of internet fame and what it really cost, and why I deleted it all to choose real life.

The Unstable Internet

My race change was another lesson in just how unstable the internet is and how easy it is to ignore problems that are not happening to you. While I was popular on Facebook, I’d heard countless stories from other Facebook gaming creators about their pages getting automatically flagged for “unoriginal content” which destroyed everything. I’d had the same problem myself multiple times, but because I was a partner, Facebook always fixed the issues manually for me within 24 hours. The masses, though, were left to suffer with no support. Facebook demonetized thousands of creators automatically, without any viral story or any clear communication about why it had happened. When I was a partner, I had little compassion or concern for their problems.

Then, when I was demonetized, I got hit with the same automated “unoriginal content” flag on my page when I posted a short that had been clipped from one of my live streams. Over the next year and a half, they never removed it despite my many attempts to get the same help I got as a partner. When I approached Facebook support as just a regular creator with no monetization, I found nothing but bots and automated responses. Not one person was willing to help. I realized how unsympathetic I had been when I had my elite partner status and how I had overlooked the awful environment I was encouraging people to spend time in.

The worst irony came when I wanted to bring people from Facebook to platforms where I was still monetized like Twitch and YouTube. 98% of people who followed me on Facebook refused to switch to Twitch or YouTube because they were so addicted to Facebook they did not have any interest in using other apps. I was so annoyed, thinking I had done all this work to build a Facebook page, and yet 98% of it was not transferable to another platform. People kept saying they loved watching me on Facebook, but they weren’t willing to install a free app called Twitch on their phone, where they could have had a dedicated streaming experience that still monetized my work.

The level of addiction and unwillingness to change in the viewers was horrifying. I thought they were there for me but clearly, the vast majority cared more about the app than me and would simply watch someone else rather than install a new app on their phone to keep watching me. This insanity in the viewers today makes me angrier than being canceled on Udemy or Facebook.

Crypto Still Sucks

After being demonetized on Facebook, I went back into full on experimentation mode like I had after Udemy. I tried just about everything including creating a new YouTube gaming channel, streaming on my original YouTube channel, going all in on Twitch, multistreaming, and repeatedly switching strategies. In October 2022, I went all in on live streaming Gods Unchained, a “crypto” play to earn game. I bought tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of the GODS coin connected to that game, only to quit playing a couple months later. I even tried doing $100 giveaways during every Twitch stream. Those worked great until the giveaway ended, at which point everybody left.

Six months after losing my Facebook monetization, I was desperate to make money and to have a comeback. That’s when some of my old crypto YouTuber buddies reached out. Years earlier, I had shown them how to be successful crypto YouTubers. Some of them had even paid me to coach them while they built their channels. Now their channels were massive, and they promised to promote me and help me restart if I got back into crypto YouTube.

In December 2022, I launched a brand-new crypto YouTube channel because that seemed like the best opportunity I could find to make money online. I told myself I wouldn’t repeat the old mistakes I’d made with my first channel. I wouldn’t just say anything to get paid or watched. I would lead by example. My plan was simple: build a brand-new crypto portfolio from zero via buying $50 a day in crypto. I figured nothing could be more honest than that especially if I just bought whatever coin I felt like each day and shared a video explaining why.

I started off buying a mix of the top cryptos along with some niche altcoins. That’s when I discovered how bots and a generally silent hidden hand mafia controlled crypto YouTube. I noticed when I bought $50 a day of certain cryptos and hyped them in a video, I would get that money back and much more through ad revenue, new subscribers, and course sales. As I repeated this process over a few months, viewers became desperate to know which of the coins I actually thought were good. For those desperate viewers, I would sell them a $300 course, where I picked out a handful of cryptos as my “best picks.” Those picks weren’t much different from the others, but I presented them as the standouts, based on some arbitrary characteristics. Most people were satisfied with that, and it worked for me to make tens of thousands of dollars in March 2023 off of my then four-month-old crypto channel. Cutting through that noise and learning to research crypto for yourself, instead of paying someone for their “best picks,” is exactly what we can work on together when you book a private call with me.

A small part of me still wishes I could have been happy doing that, because if I’d kept going, I would have made millions of dollars since then. My new crypto channel was growing rapidly, and the people running bots absolutely loved me. All I had to do was put my face on a thumbnail, smiling and pointing to a crypto symbol with a massive price increase, and the views poured in. The audience believed me because I actually believed what I was saying too.

The easiest way to get views and money online is to be very conscious that you are draining and exploiting people with the belief that they deserve it. If you can do that, then you can really play the game at the highest level. My limitation was that I could not consciously accept that I was draining and exploiting people with my content. I had to feel like I was doing something good, that my intentions were pure, or that my videos were helping people. Unfortunately, that was a major limitation that always led to my downfall.

I saw it clearly with other instructors on Udemy and with the top gamers on Facebook. The ones at the top consistently were the ones who could consciously admit privately that they were draining their audiences and cheating. They would rationalize this because it was just the nature of the game be it online course sales, crypto, or video games. If you weren’t willing to go that far, then you weren’t willing to be at the top. If you didn’t realize being an influencer was a game where you were just a hoe and the content platforms and the elites were the pimps while all of your viewers were tricks, then you were blind to how it all worked and deserved your place with the unwashed masses.

I couldn’t consciously stomach that. I played a game of hide and seek with myself, pretending like I was helping people. Then one day, I looked in the mirror and realized I was doing the same crap with my crypto channel I had years before. This inward feeling was sharp contrast to what looked like more rapid success in growing a brand new crypto channel to tens of thousands of subscribers and dollars per month in less than 6 months. I was proud that a year after being canceled on Facebook, I had reinvented myself. My fame on crypto YouTube was bringing me back toward where I had been with Facebook Gaming, only this time with even more money.

The problem was that I couldn’t stomach what I was doing. I saw clearly after a few months that I was lying to people and buying cryptos based purely on what got me results rather than what was actually a good investment. Even if I rationalized it as just playing the game, I was still a liar giving out junk crypto information. Once I had this realization, I started telling the truth. My honesty was the same problem I ran into on Facebook and Udemy. Once you start telling the truth, you piss off the people who are thriving on lies, cheating, and deception which appears to be the majority of those in the top positions.

In May 2023, I suddenly switched from videos that were community farming, praising cryptos, and saying how great they were, to putting out videos saying I was wrong, that I had been giving shallow information, and that most of these cryptos were garbage backed by liars and bots. That was when the bots turned on me and took my channel down. My best idea at the time was to talk about Bitcoin and to say that most altcoins were crap, while at least Bitcoin had history and stability.

When the people controlling the bots saw me suddenly shift to trashing the altcoins I had been promoting, they must have felt betrayed. I never spoke with them outside of my live stream chat where they told me “You’re going to regret what you said about [that shitcoin].” The liars and criminals controlling the bots were true to their word immediately. They mass reported my new crypto channel with thousands of bots within a few minutes of the comment on my live stream. My live feed was cut off suddenly and I received an email immediately from YouTube saying my channel was permanently terminated for “illegal activity.” I appealed within an hour and explained that my channel had been hit with a bot attack. It took a week for YouTube to give me my channel back, even though there was no illegal activity on it.

The only reason I even got that channel back was because I started posting on X. I reminded Team YouTube that I had another channel that had been active since 2011 without a single violation. A week later, I got an email saying my appeal was successful and my channel was restored but my viewership and algorithm was destroyed for the foreseeable future.

For the next few months, I was more cautious, but eventually, having already been taken down once, I got even bolder than before. Over the next two years, I would publish around a thousand videos with extremely critical reviews of altcoins. Some days I put out five or six videos each ten minutes long with a thumbnail saying things like “Dumpster Fire” next to the logo of the coin. I realized that one way I could genuinely add value to crypto was by calling out which coins sucked—which was nearly all of them. I hoped to inspire others to do the same and crush the liars and criminals behind many of the coins with the truth.

The problem was that I still needed a coin I could invest in myself. I was extremely hesitant to go all in on anything because I was highly critical of everything, which left me with very few options. Eventually, after enough research, I discovered there was one crypto with the best technology, the biggest research team, and the clearest delivery on the real promise of Web3 and the future of the internet.

Discovering the Internet Computer Protocol

In the early days of my new crypto channel, one of the cryptos I hyped up casually was called Internet Computer Protocol or ICP. I gave it the same generic kind of hype I had given plenty of other cryptos, basing my pitch on just a tiny bit of research. After my channel was taken down by bots for speaking out against what I saw as the crypto mafia, I started searching hard for something real in crypto buried beneath all the fraud.

A few of my live viewers told me I should look into Internet Computer Protocol. The more I researched, the more everything about it looked perfect. The founding team was the largest research and development team in all of crypto. The founder, Dominic Williams of Dfinity, gave me Steve Jobs vibes. He had an incredible vision for the future of the internet; one I had never heard anyone else in crypto talk about before.

Naturally, with a mission this big, Internet Computer Protocol had been sabotaged at its launch by the same criminals behind the fall of FTX, who artificially pumped the ICP price sky high using futures markets and then crashed it so everyone would dismiss it as just another rug pull. For years afterward, ICP suffered from almost no marketing, even though they had the best technology in crypto. For example, ICP still has the only system I know of where you could put an entire website, database, photo, video, or even a full game completely on-chain. That realization struck me as the most important piece of information in crypto. If you want to think through what actually matters to you in crypto and ask me your own questions directly, you can set up a call with me to get clear on your own thinking.

Nearly everything else in crypto was basically just a glorified Google spreadsheet with a private key that let you access and edit data. All blockchains besides ICP depend almost completely on centralized entities, especially crypto exchanges, because you cannot do much directly on the blockchain. Take Bitcoin as an example. You must download a wallet on your computer to truly use the blockchain yourself without having some third party in the middle. To even fund your Bitcoin wallet, you generally must buy Bitcoin on a centralized exchange and then send it to your wallet. If you lose your computer, your private keys, and/or get hacked, you lose all your Bitcoin and no one can help you get it back.

Other cryptos had made small tweaks to Bitcoin’s open source (publicly available) design or to the relatively small innovations of Ethereum. Ethereum, at its core, is basically a Bitcoin copy with a few small modifications including the ability to run very simple bits of code called contracts. The fact remains that the Ethereum blockchain itself can only process tiny amounts of data that are not even enough to have a phone photo directly on the blockchain itself.

For something like a so-called crypto game, the truth was that you’d have a token on a blockchain—often on a “layer two,” which was just another blockchain plugged into a different one—but 99% of the actual computation and resource usage happened off-chain. The marketing around this was deliberately murky and misleading. Most materials made it seem like crypto games or NFT marketplaces were hosted directly on the blockchain, but that wasn’t the case.

To me, most altcoins and Bitcoin are like someone advertising a house for sale “on the water” where there’s just a puddle in the backyard alley, like at my house. If you complained, “Hey, I thought you said this house was on the water,” and I replied, “Well, it is on the water—I never said how much water,” you’d feel misled and would never buy the house. That’s exactly how crypto marketing operates but investors instead plow huge amounts of money into metaphorical houses they never see in person. Founders, team members, paid influencers, and even crypto journalists claim projects are “on the blockchain” when the truth is that less than 1% of what matters is on chain while 99% is hosted on centralized tech. In most industries, we would refer to this as fraud.

If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Crypto Reviews playlist.