I think ICP is the one crypto that can stop moving with Bitcoin, and I am all in on it. That is my conviction, not financial advice for you. The question behind a search like this one is whether ICP can trade on its own usage instead of riding Bitcoin's price. My answer is yes, because I argue ICP's demand comes from people and organizations buying tokens to pay for computation and to vote, not only from exchange trading.
The shortest version of the argument is in the post where I made the decoupling case. Hosting and computation on ICP are paid in ICP, so a buyer who needs compute has to buy and burn tokens, and I argue that puts a floor under demand as the price falls. Governance adds a second source of demand, since holders lock tokens to vote on proposals. In my view Bitcoin offers neither.
The posts are not a straight line, so reading them in order helps. The earliest, Bitcoin Is a $1.6 Trillion Spreadsheet. ICP Is the World Computer., went up June 15, 2026. It sets up the core contrast: Bitcoin is a ledger secured by cryptography, while ICP can run websites, apps and AI tools directly on chain. That day, my 21 Bitcoin in 2014 post compared my early Bitcoin position with a similar share of the ICP supply.
Two posts on June 17 widened the argument. Every Crypto Except ICP Is a Meme Coin, Even Bitcoin calls Bitcoin a meme coin because its value rests on hype rather than on what the technology does. Why Bitcoin's Future Is Being Built on ICP was more practical: Bitcoin developers are starting to build on ICP because it is the most realistic place to make decentralized Bitcoin apps. There I still expected Bitcoin to benefit in the short term.
By June 23, in Every Bitcoin Narrative Makes More Sense for ICP, I went through the stories Bitcoin tells about itself, including peer-to-peer cash, digital gold and censorship resistance, and argued that each one works better on ICP. That post is long and blunt. Read it as my case, not a neutral comparison.
The June 27 post, Bitcoin Is NOT the King of Crypto, argues that market cap and brand are the wrong test. I think the right test is what a network can host, compute and govern, and by that standard I say ICP is the king. I still credit Bitcoin as the first major crypto, and I say chain-key Bitcoin is the most useful part of its story.
The most recent post, from August 6, 2026, makes the decoupling claim directly: ICP could break its link to Bitcoin because its demand could come from real usage. The test is simple. Does ICP's price start to move on its own network activity, governance and burns rather than with Bitcoin? I think it will, but that is a conviction, not something I can prove yet.
The numbers I use are my own calculations, and they move. In the June posts I put Bitcoin mining issuance at roughly three BTC every ten minutes, and I compared that with ICP inflation of a few million dollars a month. I also described about 8.6 percent APR on a neuron I was staking. Check current figures on the public dashboards before you rely on any of them.
The strongest objection is correlation. I say so myself in the August post: while ICP trades on exchanges next to Bitcoin, the two stay statistically linked. My claim is about where the demand comes from, not that the charts separate next month. Read it next to the bear case for ICP and why I still hold, which covers the outcomes where this thesis fails.
If you are deciding how much to hold, that is a separate question, covered in ICP accumulation: how much to stack and why. Nothing in these posts is advice for your own money.
If you hold ICP and want a second opinion on your own read of Bitcoin versus ICP, you can get a personal video review from me at https://jerrybanfield.com/review/.
Right after this opening comes a contents list, and below it every one of the seven posts in full, newest first.
On this page
Every post I have written on this subject is below in full, newest first, each under its own heading.
- ICP will be the first and only project to decouple from BTC. (August 6, 2026)
- Bitcoin Is NOT the King of Crypto (June 27, 2026)
- Every Bitcoin Narrative Makes More Sense for ICP (June 23, 2026)
- Why Bitcoin's Future Is Being Built on ICP (June 17, 2026)
- Every Crypto Except ICP Is a Meme Coin, Even Bitcoin (June 17, 2026)
- Bitcoin Is a $1.6 Trillion Spreadsheet. ICP Is the World Computer. (June 15, 2026)
- 21 Bitcoin in 2014 Is 550 ICP Today (June 15, 2026)
ICP will be the first and only project to decouple from BTC.
From my video published August 6, 2026.
Internet Computer Protocol is the first crypto that is in a position to truly decouple from Bitcoin. Almost everything else in crypto is really just shackled to Bitcoin. When Bitcoin goes up, the altcoins tend to go up with it. When Bitcoin goes down, the altcoins tend to go down with it. But ICP has several unique dynamics that will allow it to be the first to truly break free and operate independently of the Bitcoin price, based on real demand for actually using the network.
The Only Crypto You Buy to Pay Your Hosting Bill
The number one thing ICP has that nothing else in crypto has is the ability to buy the ICP token and then use it to pay, effectively, your web hosting bill — to run all kinds of computation, to host all kinds of data, to pay to use the blockchain like a world computer. Everything else in crypto is mostly driven by hype and speculation, with very little real utility or computation happening on the blockchain. Thus, the prices are all extremely speculative too. This is why, when things go down, there is no floor for many of these projects — they are not actually doing hardly anything useful that continues to get paid for over time outside of crypto speculation, hype, and occasional fee burning from things like meme coin trading, DeFi narratives, or whatever the next narrative is, like quantum computing. ICP is different. I buy ICP to host my website, and I love that.
I also love getting to know you all. I see some very familiar names from the comments and from the open chat over the years, and I am really happy to see them. We have 25 people in the Family now, and I would love to see you in there too — we talk about ICP. In fact, the conversation we had in there yesterday is exactly what motivated me to drop another $2,100 to buy another thousand or so ICP yesterday, which I shared at the time. And I will admit I was not happy about the sound while I was working on this, because something just fell on the house and it looked like it was trying to rain — and I was trying to have a tennis date. I had a date in two hours and I was out here saying, stop that. All right, stop it.
So ICP has this unique property where the network is so useful that people, enterprises, and governments are set up to want to buy the token just to pay to use it. And this introduces a dynamic that nothing else in crypto has, where there could be huge customers paying to essentially buy and burn ICP — and they may not even buy or see the ICP themselves. Think of enterprises that are working with a consulting company or an implementation company, or even paying someone like DFINITY themselves for cloud engines. They may be paying in US dollars, and behind the scenes that money is buying and burning the ICP coin in the process to pay the node providers and use the network. Thus, ICP is in the best position of anything in crypto to have a floor for the price, because as the price gets cheaper, you need to buy more ICP and burn it just to pay for the same computation. Nothing else in crypto has that dynamic going for it.
Buy It Cheap, Burn It When It Pumps
Then there are a couple of other angles. If you understand this dynamic, you see what is coming, and you plan on using ICP, then a smart enterprise, government, organization, or even a solopreneur with a lot of compute ahead of them may buy a bunch of ICP when it is cheaper. Then, when the price pumps, they can burn all that ICP and stockpile cycles. Imagine if, instead of paying Amazon for your web hosting bill as a fixed amount every month, there were an Amazon token that you would buy. If the price of the Amazon token went up, you could burn it while the price was up and use that burned amount to pay your entire web hosting bill for a year or two in advance, instead of sitting there paying the same thing every month. That dynamic exists with ICP.
It would only take one institution with one serious implementation, and one person sitting around the boardroom table who says: we know we are going to use this, and we know how the computation and the pricing works — why don't we buy, say, $10 million, which is small money in a lot of enterprises, or $10 to $20 million of the coin right now? Then, when the price goes up, we will burn it to pay for the cycles to actually run our implementation. Someone in a boardroom may run the calculations and say: look, I think if we buy $10 or $20 million of ICP right now while the price is low, we are going to be able to burn $50 or $100 million worth of it for computation. It will only take a few people who are in the know and planning to use this technology for what it can do — and there are incredible things it can do.
I am living proof of this on a small scale. I have seen how well the network hosts my own website, which I have shown plenty of times before, so I know how good this tech is — and I have got ICP stockpiled. Basically, I never have to pay to host my website again. Whenever the ICP price pumps, I can just burn a couple of ICP and get a lot of traffic — I am not going to say unlimited, but a lot of traffic — to my website and the other websites I am hosting. I also get ICP locked up producing maturity, and whenever the price pumps, I can just burn that. I never have to pay again to host my website. That is a dynamic I figured out as a solopreneur. Other people are going to figure this out too. It is sitting there in plain sight.
Governance Bitcoin Simply Doesn't Have
On top of that, there is another dynamic that Bitcoin does not have: holding the token for governance. Holding Bitcoin does not give you any say over the governance of Bitcoin. Maybe if you are a centralized exchange holding a huge amount of it, or you are Michael Saylor, you could try to pressure the Bitcoin core team to take certain actions and threaten to dump the token if they don't. But holding the token directly does not give you any real governance. On ICP, the more the network grows, the more people will want to hold the token and use it to vote on the Network Nervous System on each different proposal.
For example, let's say you are a Fortune 100 company and you have decided you are going to move over to ICP because it can save you huge amounts of money. It can allow you to use AI to build everything on chain, which can secure all your infrastructure and bring all of it under one single platform — instead of having 50 or 100 different platforms that you all pay for separately and that all have access to your data. It would only take one Fortune 100 company to look at this and say: we are moving to it. Let's buy some ICP to hold for when the price goes up, which we can then burn for more cycles to save huge amounts of money on our hosting. And let's buy some more ICP to lock up. In fact, some might even decide: why don't we just put something like $50 million into ICP right now while it is cheap, lock all of that up for governance, and use the APR on it to help offset our web hosting costs? Whenever the price pumps, we can burn the ICP we are earning from voting. We will have a strong say in the future of the network, and we will have the ability to take the edge off all of our hosting costs indefinitely.
What Happens When a Government Puts the Pieces Together?
Now take that governance angle and apply it to governments that are looking at ICP. Remember how El Salvador put millions and millions of dollars into Bitcoin, and how hyped that was? What happens when a country like Pakistan or Switzerland comes along, the word finally gets around to the right people, and they put all the pieces together? Because right now, lots of the right people have some of the pieces, but they have not put all of them together in their heads. Maybe one or two of them are reading and watching my content. Bobby O of Blockchain Pills — do you hear? What a hero. Michael Duffy. Maybe they are following some of this and thinking about all of it. What happens when they put it together and say: here is what we need to do — we need to get maybe $50 million of this into the government treasury? Then this is going to pay for our infrastructure, and we will be able to guarantee that we have a significant vote in this ecosystem going forward, which will make it much harder for anyone to take any kind of negative action against us, and it will make us prominent in the entire community of ICP — a network that has the ability to grow worldwide.
Why I'm All In
To me, this gives ICP fantastic potential to completely separate from Bitcoin. Now, yes, there is always going to be some level of statistical correlation as long as a lot of cryptos are traded on exchanges. But the setup we have now is that huge amounts of ICP could be bought and burned without ever touching a crypto exchange. You could have companies, even countries, paying DFINITY — for all we know, tens of millions of dollars — to get set up on ICP. DFINITY could literally just be burning their own ICP to pay the costs instead of having to sell it. And then DFINITY could be in the position where they are buying a whole bunch more ICP off exchanges because they have to burn it for their clients. This is a fantastic setup. This is why, personally, I am all in on ICP, and this is why I bought a thousand more ICP yesterday, August 5th, 2026. That is my own conviction and my own experience — not advice for anyone else.
I try to film my videos ahead of time so I can take some days off while constantly putting out content — you can see the whole ongoing series in my ICP Crypto playlist. Thank you for reading.
If you have just spent this long with me, I would like to get to know at least your name.
Even if you simply join the Jerry Banfield Family, I will see your name and have you top of mind. And when you join the Family, I will send you the link whenever you ask for it, or you can get it with the next-level membership in there.
I am really grateful for the three new members who joined yesterday — we have had ten or so members join in the last week. I hope to see you in the Jerry Banfield Family soon.
Bitcoin Is NOT the King of Crypto
From my video published June 27, 2026.
Bitcoin is not the king of crypto. The Internet Computer Protocol is. This is the most important idea you could possibly have in crypto today, and I'm going to lay it all out very clearly with a nice organized outline that communicates one idea. I was inspired to create this after I saw Michael Duffy 2.0 just in passing saying that, well, Bitcoin's the king of crypto. And I'm like, no, it's not. Bitcoin is not my king. ICP is. Those of us in the ICP community for the Internet Computer Protocol need to, first and foremost, stop even thinking of Bitcoin as the king. I'm going to show you exactly why here. And I'm always here for you at jerrybanfield.com in the community. I just had an awesome Zoom call with Scott, who joined for a year a couple of days ago.
Bitcoin's crown is based on the wrong metrics
Let's look at this idea that Bitcoin is the king of crypto. People are saying Bitcoin's the king because it was the first crypto, has the biggest brand, and the largest market cap. But that's no way to define a king to me. That's a king that's set up to be slain. The real king should be judged by technology, real-world use cases, global scalability, decentralization, governance, AI readiness, developer power, and the ability to build the future of the internet. By that standard, Bitcoin is not the king. It's up to each of us to stop thinking of Bitcoin like it's the king, because Bitcoin's crown is based on the most ridiculous, wrong metrics.
Would you consider this time in crypto equivalent to the internet in the 90s? Yes. The future of crypto is going to look nothing like it looks right now, just like the future of the internet looked like nothing like the very beginning of it. It's a whole new thing. There are all new companies. Companies have taken over that didn't even exist in the beginning of it.
Bitcoin is respected, and people just offhandedly say it's the king because it was first. But is AOL first? Or whoever offered the first broadband — Netscape, Navigator — are those still a thing? No. You don't get to be king forever just because you were first. Bitcoin created this idea of digital scarcity. It launched the crypto movement. It currently has the largest market cap, which to me is one of the most ridiculous ways to define being first in a crypto coin, because there are so many manipulative things you can do with a crypto coin market cap. For example, you could launch the largest market cap coin in crypto today. All you'd have to do is make 10 trillion coins and then sell one of them for $1 billion. Technically you would have the largest market cap crypto, because there are 10 trillion of them and you sold one coin for a billion. That's how ridiculous the market cap thinking is.
So Bitcoin currently has the strongest brand and this ridiculous digital gold narrative, but those aren't going to last. Being first does not mean being best. The first major player in a technology category is consistently replaced by better technology. So this does not make Bitcoin the king of crypto technology.
What should the king of crypto actually mean?
The king of crypto should be the blockchain that can answer these questions the best. And by all these definitions, the Internet Computer Protocol is very clearly the winner. The question is: what real-world problems does Bitcoin solve? What real-world problems does ICP solve? What can developers actually build on it?
For Bitcoin, the real-world problems it solves by itself: almost nothing. What can developers actually build on Bitcoin? Almost nothing. Can Bitcoin scale to global use? Absolutely not, by itself. Can it host apps and websites? Absolutely not. Can it support AI? Absolutely not. Can it reduce dependence on centralized companies? Almost not at all, barely. Can users protect themselves and participate in governance? Absolutely not. Does it create real value beyond speculation? No.
This is how I would define the king of crypto. And I encourage you to be the one who defines reality on your terms, instead of being the one who goes around taking other people's definitions without thinking about it yourself. Ask yourself: what do I think the king of crypto should be? You should be the leader of your own reality. If you want to get clear on your own crypto convictions instead of absorbing everyone else's narratives, that's exactly the kind of thing I love thinking through with people — join Jerry Banfield Family and we'll work out what you actually believe and why.
Bitcoin's technology is extremely limited
Bitcoin's technology is extremely limited. This is a cold, hard fact that no Bitcoin maxi would argue, although some of the BSV people get seriously delusional. Bitcoin is powerful as a monetary network, but by itself, it can't do much, and that extremely limits the value proposition. Unfortunately, I was really hyped about Bitcoin 12 years ago. I was still hyped about Bitcoin three years ago, until I saw all this stuff.
Here's what Bitcoin can't do. It can't host modern apps. It can't host websites. It can't run AI. It can't run full-stack software. It can't provide decentralized cloud infrastructure. It can't do smart contracts at any kind of scale or significance. And it can't give coin holders direct on-chain governance. That is not king material. That is an impotent, useless king. Even if you're trying to say Bitcoin's the king, it is a king where everybody's plotting against them to dethrone them.
Bitcoin almost always depends on other systems to be useful. Now, it might make sense that a human king in a kingdom would depend on their subjects. But when we're talking about a technological king, you should be able to stand on your own. Bitcoin needs a layer two for payments. It just happens that ICP has the best Bitcoin layer two, and it's the only realistic system I see that would have any trustworthiness in scaling Bitcoin out. So even if you're bullish about Bitcoin, you've got to be bullish about ICP too, because there's no better system to scale Bitcoin out to the masses.
Almost everybody holds their Bitcoin directly on an exchange. Well, technically that's not accurate, because most Bitcoin is held off exchanges, but you don't know how many of those wallets are actually active, and most of the wallets are tiny. It's a small percentage of supply. So the average person holding Bitcoin is holding it on an exchange, but the majority of Bitcoin itself is not held on exchanges. Does that make sense? The crypto normie who's holding Bitcoin is letting it sit on an exchange. Even if you want to buy crypto, you're usually going to need to go through an exchange. And even if you're not holding it on an exchange, you probably have some custodian holding it for you — which is like, why don't you just use a bank? At least if something is screwed up, a bank can go in and manually fix it for you, which may not be the case with Bitcoin.
Basically, Bitcoin can't do almost anything by itself, because it needs bridges or wrappers for any kind of DeFi. It needs other chains like ICP for any app, and it needs centralized services for user experience. If the king needs everyone else to do the work, it's not actually the king.
So ICP is the strongest coin in crypto, and that's why I say ICP is the king. It has been through the absolute most BS. It has been through the most crap out of any coin in crypto. It has gotten the most unfair treatment out of any crypto. ICP has done the most work in all of crypto and put up with the most nonsense out of any coin because of the manipulated rug pull. The team has created the best technology in the world and has gotten the least credit for doing it. And that's because it threatens everything else.
Bitcoin's decentralization story
Most people talking about Bitcoin being the king will say it's the most secure thing on earth. Well, if you consider all the third-party stuff that's built on top of it to access it, I would significantly disagree, since most people think they're transacting Bitcoin when they go on Coinbase or Binance and buy crypto. That's not transacting Bitcoin. That's on Coinbase's website and Binance's website. You're taking a leap of faith that they actually are transacting Bitcoin for you, when they can't even prove that they are. If you can withdraw it off the exchange, then you probably did, but until you get it into your own wallet, you can't even prove that anything actually happened.
But even worse than that, even directly on the Bitcoin blockchain itself, people think Bitcoin is this standard of decentralization and that it's so secure. I disagree. First off, you can easily see from your own research — go look at the Bitcoin mining pools. Mining is heavily concentrated through large pools. But even more obvious, most users don't mine or run nodes. Most individuals hold Bitcoin through exchanges, ETFs, or custodians. They don't even actually hold the keys to their own Bitcoin. And on top of that, Bitcoin holders have no say at all in the governance of the protocol. There is some tiny decentralization, and it has operated successfully with the system it has set up, but the average Bitcoin holder has almost no direct influence over the future. There's a tiny number of people — like five people on the Bitcoin Core GitHub, like five or so Bitcoin mining companies and pools who have one single person in charge. That's like 10 people who have the actual Bitcoin infrastructure that can't even do hardly anything itself without all this stuff built on top of it. These are not the properties of a technology that I would say is king of anything. If you want to dig into this yourself — pull up the mining pools, the wallets, the governance — and get clear on what you actually make of it, I'm happy to go through it with you; join Jerry Banfield Family and bring your questions to a weekly call.
How is Bitcoin prepared for the age of AI?
Even more important going forward: how is Bitcoin prepared to be successful in an age of artificial intelligence? AI needs compute, data, identity, payments, apps, automation, fast transactions, and web services.
So how does Bitcoin's blockchain stand up in an environment where AI is building everything out? Bitcoin may be useful as money — again, if you build stuff on top of it to try to use the actual blockchain, which is then questionable, because how much of the blockchain's value is even translating into all this third-party stuff? Bitcoin can't do almost anything in the future for AI infrastructure, certainly not things like micropayments — outside of ICP, to make chain-key Bitcoin payments. Bitcoin is built for digital money, but ICP is built for the AI internet. That's the king. When your crypto is built for the AI internet — versus things like Near Protocol, or Bittensor TAO, which make me laugh, because they're a joke; they can't hardly do anything on a blockchain. ICP is built for the AI internet.
Bitcoin is absolutely losing momentum as time goes on. I think almost anybody just looking at the basics of Bitcoin charts can see that the momentum is slowing. This is not going to go up forever. And all it takes is research for people to realize that Bitcoin has become a Ponzi scheme at this point, at this valuation. It is not the king. Whoever figures out the truth about how little Bitcoin can do without everything else built on top — that's the realization. On its own, it's almost useless. It's way overvalued. It's extremely speculative. Only people thinking of it as a king based on market cap even keep it up there. Bitcoin is not very useful. It is becoming a meme coin.
Now, people have become Bitcoin millionaires, that's true. But hardly anybody was a Bitcoin millionaire in 2014, 2015, 2016. It's still very early on in ICP's history, especially with the rug pull, which Bitcoin did not have to deal with. So there are going to be a lot of ICP millionaires in the future. And this definitely is not financial advice — although with this shirt, I might look like a financial advisor.
ICP fits the real definition of a king
ICP fits the real definition of a king. To me, this is what a king of crypto should be able to do. A king should be able to host software directly on chain. No other crypto can do that. If you're going to say you're the king of crypto, you should be able to do stuff that's important — not some dumb thing that's not important, like, oh, we can shove a directed acyclic graph over there, look at this tiny useless thing we can do that nobody else can do. No. You should be able to do something that's really important that nobody else can do.
Do you think anybody's trying to use AI right now to reverse engineer Bitcoin, Ethereum, or any of these other coins? No. Are they trying to use AI to reverse engineer ICP? Yes. That's the king. People are trying to figure out how the king works. You're not doing that with these other ones.
ICP can host software directly on chain and serve web front ends as proof. You can go to jerrybanfield.com, which is a website you should be on every day reading. Everybody's like, who's going to be on jerrybanfield.com every day? Well, I've got a blog. I have entire books — like 10 different books — all published on my blog. I've put all this on ICP, 800 posts and counting, directly on the ICP blockchain, which no other blockchain could do. No other blockchain could even do anything close to this. I built an entire website, 100 PageSpeed score, fully indexed on Google, all of it fully on chain, all of it built directly using Claude, taking my own videos and books and putting them on there. You could literally read probably for two or three hundred hours on jerrybanfield.com, and I just put this up in the last two weeks from my existing videos. If you want some deeper archives of my content, it's on there. This will be a permanent archive that can't get taken down, censored, or banned, so that I have guaranteed control over my brand. This is what the king can do. The king can build an entire website fully on chain and do something genuinely useful, like solve a real, huge problem for my business. It can run all the backend logic to support that. It can store applications, host decentralized apps, support smart contracts, integrate with Bitcoin, and use chain-key technology, being the best Bitcoin layer two and the best Ethereum layer two. If seeing a whole site running on-chain makes you want to build or host something on ICP yourself, that's one of my favorite things to walk people through — join Jerry Banfield Family and we'll look at what you want to build.
A true king has on-chain governance
And here's a big one: the king should have on-chain governance, because to me, a true king is one who listens to their people. Like Nelson Mandela in his book Long Walk to Freedom talked about the ancient African kings. Do you know how they governed? There were obviously different African kings and they governed differently, but the ones Nelson Mandela talked about governed through love, respect, listening, and understanding of the people. The king would have all the people come to his court, and every single person would have a chance to talk and share their opinion. Everyone. It was all men, but the women would influence the men; they had their role, they did their thing, they were important. The men would all show up together. Every man would speak, and the king would sit there and listen to every single man. Then the king would try to put it together and say, at the end of what every man said, okay, so you all basically said this, this, and that. And from there, it'd be up to all the rest of the people to see if they agreed with the king or not. If they didn't agree with the king, they would all adjourn and start over again another day.
The king's job was to take in the will of the people and to manifest it. All the desires of the women were expressed to the men. It was the man's job to know the desires of his woman and then express those to the king. It was the king's job to listen to all the men, who would listen to all the women. And it was the king's job to bring all of that into very clear action. The king was a genius who took in huge amounts of data and simplified it so that everyone could be as happy as possible. That's what ICP does. It solves all these huge problems with one single simple solution — a traditional king who is able to serve the people. Because if you don't have on-chain governance like ICP does, you aren't the king, because you're not listening to the community.
On ICP, you can go into the network nervous system, and any person who has even one ICP — which is just a couple of dollars — can go in and vote on exactly what's happening. You can view proposals. These are proposals you can go and vote on, right inside my actual wallet. If you don't have on-chain governance, you can't do that. You can go in, vote, and participate with your governance, and these are how you earn rewards. So, for example, I'll vote yes on a proposal: click yes, vote with all my neurons, and all my followers will vote. I have then participated in the governance on the Internet Computer Protocol. That's a true king — when every single man, woman, and child with at least just $2 of ICP can go in and have their say. And what I love about DFINITY is that DFINITY actually listens to the community on big decisions and lets the community use the on-chain governance to vote, and makes their decisions off of that. That, to me, is a true king. Bitcoin, you can't do that. You can dig into a lot more of this on my ICP Crypto playlist.
If Ethereum goes back to its all-time high, don't worry about any of these other coins. ICP is the king. None of the other coins matter; don't even think about them. It's just like if you're married — you don't need to be thinking about other women. Same thing in crypto: if you're married to the king, you don't need to think about anybody else.
ICP makes Bitcoin more useful
Even better, ICP makes Bitcoin more useful. ICP does not need to ruin and annihilate Bitcoin. The only way I see Bitcoin successfully going forward right now is through the integration with chain-key Bitcoin. Through that, Bitcoin can become more programmable, more usable, integrated with smart contracts, useful in DeFi and across applications, and secure. So the best version of Bitcoin may live on ICP. If Bitcoin even wants to stay the theoretical king of crypto, it's going to depend on the technological crypto king to take it there.
I got a little ahead of myself and already demonstrated the network nervous system, showing how you can stake, vote, and participate in governance. If you want help with that, you can join Jerry Banfield Family. A lot of the calls I have are with people who have ICP and want to get off Coinbase, who want to participate in the governance and want help. If you have questions about ICP, want to share them, or want to post screenshots, we can go through it together on the call.
The "rug pull" story is mind control
Let's wrap up this idea of ICP being a rug, and somehow that being held against it. That is the propaganda, the manipulation, the mind control. Somehow you think that because crypto exchanges listed the Internet Computer Protocol ridiculously high — like 20-plus times higher than it should have been listed — and then it naturally crashed because that was crazy, that's all there is to know about it: that it's a rug pull. You have been a victim of mind control. You've been a victim of being intentionally misled. And when you realize, oops, I fell for the propaganda — I remember reading historical fiction books where you'd hear people listening to the state radio, like from the Soviet Union or the Third Reich.
You'd be like, how can any of these people believe this propaganda they're being fed? And it's the same thing when you see people looking at ICP today and saying, oh, it's just a rug pull. Okay, well, you're in crypto. If you're going to just believe authority and take in all the propaganda, why are you in crypto? Back in the day in 2014, we did not get into crypto to be a part of the propaganda. We got into crypto for a system that gives us a chance to get outside of that. So please, if you think ICP is just a rug pull, to me you are just in the propaganda trap. You've been fed the story you're supposed to buy into, the one that will disempower you and stop you from seeing the true king. Because once you see the true king, the rest of crypto is useless. All the false kings, all the false idols, all the false gods in crypto are desperate for you not to know who the true king is. Because the true king gives token holders direct governance. Nothing else in crypto does that — fully on-chain voting, where the wallet, the voting, and the entire process are all completely on chain. No other crypto does that, and that is essential for any real decentralization, any real infrastructure.
This is the thing: ICP is the king because it's infrastructure. It's not just a Ponzi scheme trying to go up in price. ICP is not just trying to be money. In my opinion, it's going to be the absolute number one financial instrument in the world: the infrastructure for websites, apps, AI, smart contracts, decentralized hosting, Bitcoin, chain-key assets, digital identity, tamper-proof services, and full-stack Web3. When you build all that in one environment that's secure and tamper-proof, it helps stop cybercrime, which is one of the biggest problems in the world today. And then it just happens that, well, if we already have all this stuff built on ICP, then taking payments is super easy. Behind that, if you get governments like Pakistan and Switzerland moving their infrastructure online, they will have built-in ICP payments. Do you understand that? That's the money king — not Bitcoin. When you've got your website built on ICP, taking ICP payments is super easy. And when you have people already with ICP internet identities through Internet Identity, which is now as simple as using your Google or Apple account to sign in, then money is all built into it. All Bitcoin has going for it is this idea as a money asset.
ICP is not just a money or a crypto or a coin like all the rest of these are. ICP is an entire blockchain cloud app platform and AI-ready internet infrastructure that other people are desperate to reverse engineer — but it's unlikely they're going to be able to do it, because ICP already has first-mover advantage. They've already got governments onboarding. They already have all the infrastructure set up. And nobody's trying to reverse engineer Bitcoin at this point. For decades, people have tried to reverse engineer Bitcoin. They've created their own versions. They've literally copied the blockchain, and none of them is as valuable as Bitcoin. ICP is first mover in the most important category in the world right now, which is secure computation — AI-protected and safe, both protected from AI hacks and safe to run AI and use for AI. ICP is a secure cloud computing platform that's decentralized, worldwide, transparent, and has a monetary instrument and governance built in. This is the most important technology in the world, and it is flying under the radar because it's supposed to fly under the radar. You're not supposed to know about it yet, because once you know about it, the opportunity is gone. It needs to be prepared and gotten ready more.
If Bitcoin and ICP were companies
So let's treat Bitcoin and ICP as if they were companies. How would you compare them? How would you appraise them? This is what you need to be able to do in crypto. If ICP and Bitcoin were companies, how would you compare them? Bitcoin has a massive brand — that's true. It does have a huge market cap. But again, for crypto, is market cap the most appropriate way to judge a coin? The existing entities that have power in crypto, like crypto exchanges, do want you to look at market caps and prices, because that's how they profit. They do not want you to look at technology, because there's almost no money they can make off you when you look at technology — and not market cap, branding, narratives, simple products, and limited functionality.
So Bitcoin has the old version of crypto, the dial-up internet version of crypto, locked down. That's true. But in the future we're going toward, ICP is the king of the future of crypto. So I'll respect that Bitcoin was the king of the past in crypto. But there's the new direction the future is going, and there's the old crypto. Bitcoin was the king of old crypto — just get your marketing out, make a huge brand, have narratives and a simple product and limited functionality. That's old crypto. New crypto is: do you have a business model? Do you do something actually useful to people outside of crypto? Is there something more to your coin than just price-go-up?
ICP has a huge product surface area. I showed you my website earlier. I can't do that on Bitcoin or any other crypto. This is real utility, real products, real problems — just as a web host, even in the simplest, easiest-to-understand way. ICP has the absolute best web hosting infrastructure in the entire world. Is that sinking in? ICP has the best web hosting infrastructure I've ever seen, and I've looked at AWS, Google Cloud, and WordPress. ICP is vastly superior because it has a coin attached to it, because it's on a blockchain. The technical capability of it is so far ahead of everything else in crypto that other cryptos are giving up. They are literally quitting even trying to innovate. Before ICP was around, people were trying to innovate these foundations. Now, as quietly as they can — and some of them publicly — they're giving up. They see they have no future. They are finished. A lot of them don't even have roadmaps anymore. They're not even trying to make anything, because ICP is the king of crypto in the future. It has all the technical capability, all the product surface area, all the real-world use cases, vastly superior options.
ICP is the only crypto I can easily be a developer on, and the only one where I can actually use the product without anyone ever knowing it has anything to do with crypto. When you go to jerrybanfield.com, is there any indication — besides me talking about crypto — that it's hosted on a blockchain? And yet every time you go to my website, you are creating a transaction directly on the ICP blockchain, asking the blockchain for my website, and then it sends you my website. I could only build that on ICP. That's why ICP already has the biggest AI relevance, because it's the place you can use AI to build almost anything securely with built-in payments, and it's easy to plug in third-party stuff if you want to. ICP is also the best solution we can see right now to host the future of the internet.
So a serious appraisal of Bitcoin, of ICP, and of all the other cryptos wouldn't ask which one's the biggest market cap and crown a king based on that. It would ask: what does this actually produce? Tell me the business model for this. Bitcoin obviously is the king of crypto history. But the future, baby, the future — ICP is the king of the future of crypto. That's why you have coins, like I talked about with Sui, literally pretending like they're ICP. The co-founder of Sui, seven months ago, is trying to act like his blockchain does anything close to what ICP does. The founder of Sui sees where we're going in crypto, and he can see ICP is where the future's headed. Since they see the truth of where the future's headed, they're acting like they're going there too. Imagine if I was selling vacations and I actually wasn't going there. Imagine I sold you on all these vacations and said I was going to lead you there, but then somebody else next door actually took all the people on the trip, and I was like, thanks for your money, but I was never planning on going there anyway. That's the rest of crypto. Everything else in crypto is all disappointments and just people saying anything they can to get money out of you. ICP is the king of the truth.
Michael Duffy — I watched his video this morning and he inspired me. He did a great ICP video. He clipped me, Bobby Oh, and Dominic Williams in it. And he inspired me, because I'm like, I need to get Michael Duffy off the idea that Bitcoin is the king of crypto. It's not. ICP is the king of crypto. Bitcoin at best is the king of old crypto. ICP is the king of new crypto. The one thing that differentiates me from a lot of people is I think about where we're going from here. I don't spend much time looking at where we've been.
Won't ICP trend further down with the market and Bitcoin, but only later go to astronomical numbers? Here's the thing: with ICP, you don't need to worry about the day-to-day price or the short-term price action. What you need to look at is, is this in position to dominate over the next decade? If the answer is yes, then for me, I'm trying to buy as much as I can before other people know about this. I don't pay much attention to short-term markets or prices. Every month I look at it and I'm like, do I want to buy more ICP? This month I bought 995 more ICP, even though I had to take a credit card cash advance at 12% APR to buy it.
Why now is the time to accumulate
I share my own positioning here as my conviction and my research, not as financial advice or a recommendation for what you should buy — those are your own decisions. In most scenarios, my view is that ICP goes up at least double, if not 10-plus times what it is now. So I'll pay 12% APR happily, because my expected return would be at least 5X at an absolute minimum if I was desperate and ran out of other money to pay my rent. If I can afford to hold onto it longer, which I certainly hope, then my expected return may be 10, 20, 30, 50, or 100X from what I bought it at today. Every month I'm like, do I want to buy some ICP this month? If the price is toward all-time lows, yes. So it doesn't really matter to me what happens in the short term. The lower it goes, the more I'm going to buy. What I'm not going to do is stack ICP up, especially over $5, when you can buy ICP at $2. I know psychologically I'm not going to be able to buy any more once it gets up over like $5. So I'm stacking up. This is the king, and I'm stacking right now.
At what price am I selling a few ICP? That depends on when I need to pay my rent. If some of these business systems I'm building bring in more Zoom calls and more Family members, then I hopefully won't have to sell any ICP until it's $100. I would love to not sell any of my ICP until it's at least $100, because I'm looking at a 50-plus X on all the ICP I bought. Now, if your boy gets desperate and I can't make any of these business models work, then I may need to sell some to pay rent and avoid bankruptcy — but that should not happen, hopefully, for anywhere from four to six months even if things go poorly in the rest of my life. So I have no intention of selling any ICP anytime before like $100, if I can bring in enough revenue. If my revenue isn't that great and the price shoots to 20 within the next three or four months, I might unload a couple thousand ICP, so I could take 40 grand and pay down some debt and make sure I can stay in the spot I'm in.
To me, the ideal exit point would start at $100, because one of the worst things you can do is sell early. You'd think you'd feel worse losing money, but I feel worse selling early. Imagine being in on ICP, you buy it at $2 and $5 and $10 and $12, and then you start selling at $15, and it goes to $500. I've done that with Dash. It makes all the money you made seem worthless, and you just go around feeling like an idiot for years. So to me, the worst-case scenario is to sell the king early.
This is like the ultimate fair-launch coin at this point — you're getting it cheaper than the VCs bought it, in a sense we're the new VC investors. There's a lot of evidence that ICP is the king. I believe there are a lot of scenarios where ICP hits a $1 trillion market cap, and that's a thousand X from now. When that will be, how long it will last, or how much volatility there will be along the way — those are all unknowns. I'd say there's probably a 50 to 60% probability that ICP hits a trillion-dollar market cap one day, which is a thousand X from today, June 27, 2026. That's why I have 3,000 ICP locked indefinitely. I will not be missing that top. And I'm trying to load up as much more as I can, liquid and short-term staked, while compounding the maturity in my long-term stake. Again, this is my own conviction and not financial advice for you.
The whole thought is: you pay off your debt and go back into debt. Here's what's really cool with ICP. Let's say the price pumps to $20 or $30. What I may do is take my ICP, send it over to something like Liquidium, and take a loan out against it. If the ICP price crashes, I don't have to repay the loan — I just lose my ICP. If the ICP price pumps like crazy, I could actually increase my loan and get even more money. That's why I'm taking credit card cash advances right now to buy more ICP, because the few thousand dollars of ICP I bought, I might be able to send over to Liquidium in a few months and get a loan for 10 or 20 thousand dollars against that same ICP that I bought for a couple thousand. My goal is to be the realest crypto YouTuber out there.
Are you tired of these crappy coins? Me too. Although the future of crappy coins will also be on ICP. What's going to happen, in my view, is that once the rest of the blockchains, the other layer ones, realize the game's up, everybody's just going to move onto ICP and launch a zillion crap coins on ICP. So yes, that'll shoot the ICP price up, but there'll be a zillion crap coins and SNS projects all hosted on ICP in the future. We're not getting out of crap coins; they'll just be on ICP instead of all these other junk chains. The same realization I went through here is the one any honest Bitcoin maxi eventually hits, which is what I get into in when Michael Saylor discovers ICP is better than Bitcoin.
Thanks for watching. I really appreciate each of you. Have a great day.
Every Bitcoin Narrative Makes More Sense for ICP
From my video published June 23, 2026.
Every single Bitcoin narrative makes more sense on ICP. This will be the most important Bitcoin video you ever watch, and it might be one you don't want to watch if you're a Bitcoin maxi, because the reality as I see it is that Bitcoin has sold us a dream. ICP has made the technical reality of executing that dream successfully possible. I'm going to lay out all of that here for you, which, if you're a regular on my channel, will be the same stuff I say every day. If you're new here, it'll be what could be a rude awakening, or it could be the information you've been looking for.
Today's version of Jerry Banfield is chill. If you want the really wild swearing version of Jerry Banfield, you can get that on the Sui stream I did yesterday, where we went all out. I just got a massage. I'm hella relaxed today. Let me tell you what I mean.
The peer-to-peer cash narrative
Right now, for example, the peer-to-peer cash narrative is what Bitcoin introduced. Bitcoin gave us the idea of having money that we didn't have to depend on a centralized entity for. That's huge. The problem, though, is that the reality of peer-to-peer cash that the Bitcoin dream was selling has fallen apart. The reality is that the Bitcoin blockchain can only do about seven transactions a second, which is not scalable. That's not going to work for a planet with billions of people. And the reality has left us at a point where 99% of so-called transactions with Bitcoin actually happen on a centralized third party, which totally defeats the point of peer-to-peer cash.
If I'm going on Coinbase and supposedly buying Bitcoin on there, I'm trusting that they actually have it on the blockchain. That's not peer-to-peer cash. That's me going right back to Big Brother. It doesn't really matter whether it's Coinbase or a bank. And now the narrative for the future of Bitcoin is that banks, ETFs, crypto exchanges, and governments are just going to trust-me-bro hold your Bitcoin for you. What happened to peer-to-peer cash? When I got into Bitcoin 12 years ago, I thought this was going to be something where I was going to have my Bitcoin, you were going to have your Bitcoin, and we were going to send it to each other. Not that I'm going to go over to Coinbase, buy some Bitcoin, and just let them hold it and speculate on the price.
Meanwhile, ICP has the technology and it's active now. It's not like maybe this will be out someday, or we're working towards this, or we're going to be able to do this. ICP has the technology right now to actually do peer-to-peer cash. I used to have points where I was a Bitcoin maxi, where all I held was Bitcoin, where I thought everything else was crap. And once I used ICP, I thought, this tech is so good, this makes everything else useless. Most people in crypto have never actually used ICP tech.
ICP is doing 161 blocks a second. While most chains are lucky to do a block a second, ICP has done more transactions than any other blockchain. It does 161 blocks a second. What's different about ICP, though, is that it provides the entire infrastructure. Right now, the fatal flaw with Bitcoin is that all it is is basically a spreadsheet secured by cryptography. That means you need a wallet. Even if it's a hardware wallet, you're still depending on a third party to manage your access to the blockchain. You are not getting in there and accessing the Bitcoin blockchain directly yourself.
ICP sells the reality of peer-to-peer cash, where you can go into the ICP blockchain directly on a website URL and then make the transactions. For example, my website at jerrybanfield.com is hosted on ICP's blockchain. No other crypto is even close to being able to do something like this. No other crypto could even come out with something like this on their blockchain within probably five years. DFINITY, like Bitcoin, has been in crypto a long time. It's taken them 10 years to set this up. And this is what you need to be able to do.
Someone asked whether this means banks could use ICP and we wouldn't even notice it. Absolutely. ICP is the only crypto that could be used and you wouldn't even know it. Especially with cloud engines, governments are looking to move their infrastructure onto ICP because they want all the benefits of the blockchain.
Take their network nervous system as an example. The ICP I'm holding is in my real wallet, my only ICP wallet that has money of any significant value in it. This is something you can't do with any other blockchain. I'm directly in the blockchain interacting with my wallet. In other words, I don't need a third-party wallet to interact with the blockchain. I don't need a crypto exchange. I don't need MetaMask. I don't need a hardware wallet. I'm directly in the blockchain because ICP is the only blockchain that can actually serve web just like regular websites on Amazon or Google. ICP is the only blockchain powerful enough and designed to be able to send directly to your browser.
Now, you might assume all these other things in crypto are built like that, but they're not. They have a tiny little blockchain similar to Bitcoin or Ethereum, and then they're just sending transactions, but all the rest of the infrastructure is hosted in the rest of the cloud. Even people who aren't crypto-savvy can grasp this. These are things a regular person needs to understand to see through all the inaccuracies in crypto, because Bitcoin is being sold to you like it's some savior, like it's doing these amazing things, but it's doing almost nothing. By comparison, ICP is doing everything you could want a blockchain to do, except have the price constantly go up.
And why is that? Well, because once you see what I see about ICP, you can see everything else in crypto is just like them old sugar daddies. They be telling them girls "you can have whatever you like." They be tricking when they telling them girls that. Every other crypto is like a sugar daddy that's tricking. There's no reality to what they're saying. ICP is the only crypto that's not basically out here tricking, promising this while delivering that. You need to be able to go straight into the blockchain itself to eliminate third parties, and only ICP does that.
I'm working on setting up the one-on-one call included in the jerrybanfield.com membership, and I think I'm planning to expand locally so that I'll have an in-person get-together every single day for people who are a member. Anybody online can come whenever they want in person. What do you think of this? I'm thinking I'm going to take like an hour a day, every day, and have an in-real-life meetup for members. If you'd rather talk it through, you can join Jerry Banfield Family any time.
Scaling Bitcoin: ckBTC with no bridges
You can swap and "frag" Bitcoin and ckBTC with no bridges. In fact, the best Bitcoin scaling solution we have in the world right now is actually on ICP. Did you know that? If you go to the ICP dashboard at dashboard.internetcomputer.org and go to multi-chain Bitcoin, you'll see that if you have any hope of Bitcoin actually delivering on any of the things it was founded upon, ICP is the best tech in the world to do that. All the other wrapped tokens get you back to a centralized Bitcoin. You bridge with those, or use some multi-sig wallet. And you know what happens to multi-sig wallets? Something irresponsible happens with multi-sig wallets. It's inevitable. It's just a matter of time before the wallet gets compromised, a couple of people on the team get paid off or get phished, and there goes everything.
Someone mentioned having some ICP and some TAO. TAO is like that TI song, "you can have whatever you like." It's just a sugar daddy tricking, with no ability to actually deliver. TAO, from what I can see, is an absolute trick. I think Bobby Oh did a debate on it. They're doing nothing important. ICP is doing everything important in crypto, which is why you don't hear about it. Because once you hear about what's happening here, it's so remarkable that you wonder how anybody could talk with any integrity about anything besides ICP.
Be your own bank
Another thing sold in the Bitcoin dream was to be your own bank. This idea that you just sit there with Bitcoin on your computer and governments couldn't take your money from you, and your corporation or whoever you're afraid of, the evil gangs down the road in some of the rougher spots in the world, couldn't just take your money. Well, the reality of it is, you're selling a dream that when you wake up, you see it doesn't work out. Bitcoin sold the dream of letting you hold your own assets. But the problem is, the blockchain itself is not powerful enough to support that. So you always need some third party to help you hold your assets.
Let me give you a concrete example. Let's say I take a trip to a country that's a little hostile, or maybe where the people don't have that much integrity stopping them from just stealing my crypto. I don't want to dime any country out in particular, so let's just say I go to one of those countries. I fly in, and I'm foolish enough to fly in there, and I've got my phone and I've got some hardware wallet with me because I've got my Bitcoin and I'm self-custodying it. Not my keys, not my crypto. So I've got this hardware wallet. And where do you imagine I'm trying to hide it? The only place I could hide it and hope they might not find it. This reminds me of Pulp Fiction and that watch conversation. So I'm going into this country with my hardware wallet just stuffed up there. And they decide to search me. They're like, "Mr. Banfield, you're going to pull this hardware wallet out for us?" And I'm trying to keep my keys, my crypto. And they steal it. There goes all my Bitcoin.
So you say, well, you should have just left your Bitcoin at home. But now I'm traveling to a foreign country where I might need my Bitcoin, and I should just leave it at home? So if somebody breaks into my house while I'm gone, they're just going to steal my hardware wallet and it's gone. Does that sound good? You see, the Bitcoin dream doesn't hold up in reality.
Now let's go back to this hostile country, because if I'm trying to travel, I want to take my Bitcoin with me. What if I get stuck in this country? What if I need to pay off a bribe? So you say, well, you shouldn't have had a hardware wallet, you should have just had it. Okay, well, where should I have had it? You should have had it on your phone. Okay. So I've got Coinbase, and they force me at gunpoint to open my app up and withdraw my Bitcoin from Coinbase and send it to them. Same problem. They just stole all my Bitcoin. And look, I'll just delete the Coinbase app, you say. But they can go in and see what apps I've installed and make me install a Coinbase app at gunpoint.
How ICP sells this reality
So let's give you an example of how ICP sells this reality with the same scenario. I want to keep that same Bitcoin, because for some reason I just can't let go of Bitcoin, and I'm in the know enough to transfer it to ICP and over to chain-key Bitcoin. So instead of having a hardware wallet that I'm carrying precariously, instead of using Coinbase, let's say I put my Bitcoin onto ICP and ckBTC. Because the phone has a secure environment in it, now I go to that same hostile country. I whip my phone out and I open my Coinbase account, and there's nothing in there. And I don't have anything to pull out of my body as a hardware wallet, because I don't need it. I have my ckBTC sitting on an OISY wallet on Internet Identity, but the hostile authorities don't know that because it's in an incognito private browser window.
Now, if I personally went around the world with my big Jerry Banfield face, they could easily look me up on ICP. But you're probably not a public figure like that. So you could take your Bitcoin and your ICP all over the world on OISY, at oisy.com, because that's hosted on ICP. And as long as you had an internet connection, you'd be able to discreetly access your Bitcoin, your Ethereum, your ICP, your other tokens, your stablecoins. You could go all around the world with your phone, and malicious authorities at gunpoint could not get you to give up your crypto because they couldn't find it. Because it's in an incognito window, stored securely inside the phone, directly interfacing with a browser interface, they couldn't get to it. That's just one single example of one single way the Internet Computer protocol delivers on the real Bitcoin dream that Bitcoin doesn't have. It would be difficult to move your Bitcoin around discreetly without ICP, as I just described.
Someone pointed out that all crypto is easy to hide if you want to. Yes, you can certainly do that, but you always run into the same issue: even if you are trying to hide your crypto on different hardware and software wallets, different exchanges, and different addresses, you still are stuck depending on the blockchain. With ICP, I'm not trusting anybody besides the blockchain. Bitcoin's whole idea was to remove the trusted third party, but it's failed to deliver that in reality, because the main way 99% of people interact with Bitcoin today is through a so-called trusted third party, such as a crypto exchange, a bank, or a hardware wallet. Even one of these cards is a trusted third party. Like we saw with Ledger, after all this time, people thought Ledger was so great and secure, and then you find out it has a backdoor. There's literally a backdoor coded into it, and they phrase it as, "Well, we'll help you recover your crypto." That is useful, but it's also defeated the whole promise the wallet was sold on.
ICP is the only thing that truly can remove that third-party dependency. ICP is the only thing that can deliver the dream of Bitcoin in the world. In reality, no other crypto is even close. In fact, the most bullish signal I see for ICP is that other cryptos are trying to position their marketing to act like they're ICP, like I highlighted with Sui yesterday. One of them sugar daddies is trying to trick girls saying "you can have whatever you like." You can't. Because at some point, the trick is going to be up. You can dig into more of this on my ICP Crypto playlist.
Digital gold
Bitcoin, at this point, does have marketing, and it was the first thing that gave us a taste of decentralized money. But the narratives around Bitcoin today, like digital gold, don't hold up. Digital gold doesn't make sense for Bitcoin. Maybe I'll make this point better when I get a real gold chain, but gold is real gold. There's gold in my computer right now. There's gold all over my house in different electronics, not very much, but it's there. There's gold that you can wear as jewelry. There are all kinds of real uses for gold. You see how gold has a whole bunch of things you can do with it, whether it's to have some bling, or to put it in a gold bar and transact it for money, or to put it into a computer, an electronic device, or cables. There are a lot of real things you can do with real gold.
The digital gold analogy does not work with Bitcoin, because Bitcoin is not digital gold. Almost the only thing you can do with it is hope the price goes up. What else can you do with it? There's almost nothing else you can do with Bitcoin besides go to a third-party website like an exchange, buy so-called Bitcoin there, which you don't even know if you actually have as real Bitcoin on the blockchain, unless you take that Bitcoin off the exchange and put it in another third-party wallet, which hopefully you don't lose the recovery phrase to.
Someone said it's true, those other blockchains doing fake advertising and telling lies, they are. And the more honest each of us gets, the clearer it becomes. I was fooled by all these blockchains in the past, but the more integrity I got myself, the more I was drawn to see through all the lies. And to me, digital gold is the biggest lie around Bitcoin. That is just marketing language. That's not actually true. What would digital gold have to be? Digital gold would have to be something with real value inherently. And if it's going to be digital, that would mean something you can use for a wide variety of purposes, like how real gold can be necklaces, watches, rings, computer parts, or a whole bunch of other things.
Bitcoin used to have a real purpose
Bitcoin used to actually be more valuable, because a lot of the altcoin exchanges back in the day didn't have a lot of money. This was before some of you were born. Most of you are in your 30s and up now. But back in the day when I started in crypto, all you had on the major exchanges was often Bitcoin. All you could do on Coinbase was buy Bitcoin. I remember when they first released Ethereum, it was like, whoa, a second coin. But if you wanted to trade altcoins, what you had to do was buy Bitcoin and then send it off Coinbase onto some sketchy exchange that didn't do KYC, and God knows what they did with your Bitcoin. Lots of times they just stole it. Like FTX, Celsius. How many more do I need to name? Mt. Gox. There's a whole bunch.
So you'd send your Bitcoin onto some altcoin exchange, and then your Bitcoin would be swapped against hundreds of altcoins. That gave Bitcoin a clear purpose. Bitcoin was the crypto you could swap for everything else with. You'd wait forever to send your Bitcoin from one exchange to another, and then you could swap and play all the altcoin games on that exchange. That gave Bitcoin a lot of real utility, because Bitcoin was being used as a reserve asset against all the rest of crypto. Plus people were just holding it. Now, with stablecoins, Bitcoin is not being used the same way it used to be.
Once you discover ICP, you see that ICP can be used to trade crypto, it can be staked, and it can be used for governance. The things you can do with ICP are so much greater than Bitcoin. For example, with ICP, you can stake your ICP and earn. I'm actually earning higher. If you look at my neurons, one of them is earning 8.68%. That's going to be a lot better than you get at the bank. Now, if you're brand new, you're only going to get like 6%, I think, or that's the max. So a brand-new neuron locked for only 14 days is getting around 2% APR on a potentially appreciating asset. Not financial advice. So my ICP can be locked up and I can earn an APR on it.
Yes, ICP is inflationary, and that's fine
All the silly haters that haven't thought things through come along and say, well, ICP is inflationary. First off, did you think I didn't know that? And second off, yeah, so what? If you're going to have an infinite-computation-based platform, it would be insane not to have it be inflationary. And Bitcoin is inflationary also, didn't you know that? Just because it has a cap that could be relevant in a hundred years, Bitcoin is unlocking the supply with mining. In that sense, it is absolutely inflationary. There are millions of dollars in new Bitcoin being unlocked every 10 minutes.
There's as much Bitcoin unlocked via mining as there is in a whole month of ICP voting rewards and node payouts. So the inflation Bitcoin is experiencing every 10 minutes is the same as a month in ICP. Now, ICP is valued a thousand times less than Bitcoin right now because the crypto market is desperate to keep Bitcoin going. But let's use the calculator.
At the current market price, Bitcoin's inflation is actually about four times as high as ICP's effectively right now at the current market cap. Because every 10 minutes or so, you're getting around three Bitcoin unlocked. Let me run the math: three Bitcoin every 10 minutes, that's around $180,000 of new Bitcoin created every 10 minutes, so that's roughly a million dollars an hour, which is about the same range as ICP. A million dollars of Bitcoin every hour, times 24 hours a day, is $25 million more Bitcoin every day. Running it out as three Bitcoin times roughly $65,000, times about six blocks an hour, times 24 hours a day, times 30 days, that's around $800 million of Bitcoin inflation every month. And it's all paid to miners.
Meanwhile, on ICP, the inflation is a few million dollars a month. So right now, ICP's inflation is relatively a little bit higher than Bitcoin's, maybe by a factor of three or four. So even though Bitcoin technically would have lower relative inflation in terms of the amount, it has $800 million in Bitcoin unlocked via mining every month at the current price, and you can't get access to any of that except by trying to buy some Bitcoin mining company. Meanwhile, on ICP, I'm earning 8.6% APR voting. My token is locked up, which is giving me rewards, and it's giving me a chance to vote on every one of these proposals. That gives it a clear purpose. Right now, if you look, the majority of ICP is locked up, and it's not even dissolving. In the last year, there's $462 million locked. So a little less than half of the ICP supply is all locked up.
I may end up buying more ICP, especially if it goes below two. I'll buy some more there too. It's nice to see members of the family in the house, including members on YouTube, on the ICP channel, and on jerrybanfield.com.
Real digital gold: staking, governance, and burning
So Bitcoin's idea of digital gold really falls apart when you compare it to ICP. You ask, what can I do with Bitcoin? Well, I can hope the price goes up. On ICP, you can stake it and participate in governance, which the bigger ICP gets, the more people will care about. The more people will care about the decisions made on the network. And unlike some who suggest DFINITY just bullies the governance, from what I've seen, DFINITY does a great job of actually listening to the community on things like Mission 70. They let the community vote on it without making the decision themselves.
So with ICP, you can lock it up and earn rewards. But more importantly, you know what else you can do? You can actually pay your web hosting bill. If you go to jerrybanfield.com, you'll notice my blog has 743 posts. So if you'd prefer to read, I have 743 posts. I'm cranking, using Claude Code to take all my videos and all my books and turn them into blog posts. Now, how do I pay this web hosting bill? Well, I buy ICP. I send it to my Claude wallet, so I don't get anything screwed up with my main wallet. It's a different seed phrase, a different identity. And then I burn the ICP to pay my web hosting bill. Do you see? That's real digital gold. Paying my web hosting bill is very useful. And then the node providers get paid to host all the websites. All these blog posts are directly hosted on the blockchain. That's real digital gold, when you can stake it and when you can burn it. And then ICP also has the best launchpad anywhere in crypto.
ICP versus the hype: Hyperliquid
Someone asked what the difference is between ICP and something like HYPE. There's an absolutely massive difference. It's the difference between people understanding what's really happening versus people not even thinking or researching at all and buying on hype. So Hyperliquid right now: if most people looked at Hyperliquid and then scrolled down to find ICP, they'd figure ICP is a rug pull, a ghost chain, nothing's happening, right? Hyperliquid is up in the top 10, a huge deal. That's what people think on the surface. This is why in life you've got to dig deeper.
First, if you look at Hyperliquid right now, this to me is one of the riskiest coins in crypto. Two-thirds of the tokens are actually locked. In 99% of scenarios, this price is going to dump all over everybody holding it, and in 99% of scenarios, people holding this are going to lose a lot of money. And what's worse, what does the token even do? Well, it powers some app that I'm not even allowed to use in the USA. It says it's a decentralized exchange, but it's best known for perpetual futures and spot trading. It says it's a DEX trading platform, but it can't technically deliver that for real, because as far as we know it's not hosted on ICP. Therefore, it's hosted on centralized infrastructure somewhere that can be hacked, or you can't verify what's happening on it.
So Hyperliquid is a perfect example of the reality not matching the marketing and what people think. This is not truly a decentralized exchange in any meaningful way that I can see, because the Hyper Foundation, to me, has full control over this. That's not decentralized. Now, you might not have to KYC currently, but just imagine when the party is going to be over and you do have to KYC. And who are you going to KYC through? It turns out their blockchain can't support doing all of it on the blockchain, can't support hosting a website directly on the blockchain. And again, this is another trust-me-bro setup. This could easily collapse into absolute oblivion like we've seen a lot of these other projects do. HYPE, its ticker, is all hype. It's a trading platform, another exchange that we don't need. Another example of people getting tricked into something based on a dream rather than reality.
Someone asked whether on-chain NFTs will have a bull run in the future. Absolutely, yes, because on-chain NFTs can have real value. You could actually use them in a game. You could give them more utility than all these NFTs that are hosted off-chain that are hard to do anything with. Now, which on-chain NFTs? I don't know. I don't hold any Motoko Ghosts or any ICP NFTs.
Keeping the streams short, and the channel lineup
I'm aiming to keep these live streams at an average of 30 minutes, with a hard stop at 40 minutes, so you can watch them after I'm live and not get overwhelmed. My plan now is to also make going live my only form of content on all six of my channels. For example, you've got this Jerry Banfield channel. If you want to hear me talk about dating during live streams, I've got a dating channel. If you want to see me play video games, I've got a gaming channel. If you want to learn how to do YouTube, I've got a YouTube coach channel. This is my ICP crypto channel. And if you want to hear my thoughts about money without it being specific to crypto, this is my formerly crypto-reviews channel.
Updating canister cycle costs as the ICP price moves
Someone raised a concern about the delay between sudden ICP price changes and updating a canister's cycle cost. What's nice is that ICP, with the network nervous system, can pretty rapidly update, and they have a running average. It looks like they've certainly accounted for that. If you look at the cycle conversion rate, it has a 30-day moving average. So if the ICP price blasted up all of a sudden, one of the nice things you could do is just burn the cycles right when the price shoots up and then let the computation sit there. Right now, I'll burn the minimum cycles necessary for my website, but whenever the price pumps a bit, then I'll burn some extra cycles that I've got sitting there to serve my website.
Why now is the time to accumulate
To me, this is a buying opportunity. Let's look at Hyperliquid: this is not the buying opportunity. This is the absolute worst time it's ever been to buy Hyperliquid. Bitcoin is also one of the absolute worst times to ever buy. The only time that was worse was within the last year. Look at a Bitcoin price chart for all the hype: it's down 40% in the last year. Horrible time to buy Bitcoin. The price could go down a lot more, especially when people find ICP.
Now, ICP, meanwhile, is at all-time lows. ICP is down a little more than Bitcoin this year. But let's ask a question: which technology is solving real problems? ICP is solving real problems. And are there huge things in the works for ICP, as far as I can see? Absolutely.
Censorship resistance and dirty Bitcoin
Let me cover two more things in terms of the Bitcoin dream. There's censorship resistance on Bitcoin. Right now, they've got dirty Bitcoin. If you get your Bitcoin from certain sources, it's considered dirty Bitcoin. Now, that wouldn't matter if you were able to interface directly with the blockchain. But because you have to interface through crypto exchanges, if you get some dirty Bitcoin that you accept payment for and deposit into your crypto exchange wallet, they're not going to give you that money. They're not going to swap that for you, and you're not going to be able to sell it. Does that sound like censorship resistance to you? That's the problem with Bitcoin. That is inevitable.
That dirty Bitcoin will mean that the blockchain can be censored based on where the payments went. And you can't stop that, because you have to have third-party entities that manage the interaction between the user and the Bitcoin blockchain. So Bitcoin can resist censorship of purely one transaction from one account to another. But on ICP, you can build censorship-resistant entire applications. And that's what you need. Because then you could build some truly decentralized exchange where people could swap cash or bank transfers with each other directly for crypto. And you could build all that on the blockchain, and outside of a network nervous system vote to take your application down, which would have to be done publicly, it stays up. Or perhaps there's some kind of tomfoolery that could be done with three nodes, but in most cases there would have to be very clear transparency as to what was happening.
Whereas on Bitcoin, your Bitcoin could get censored by any exchange for any reason at any time. It could even be fraudulent. They could lie to you and say you got dirty Bitcoin and just keep it and then sell it themselves. So Bitcoin sold this dream of censorship resistance, but it can't actually do it, because the blockchain itself can't serve websites. It can't hold meaningful amounts of data. Meaningful to me would be terabytes. The whole Bitcoin blockchain itself is still gigabytes, and that's all the transactions for 15 to 17 years.
Sound money and the future financial system
Because of these properties, Bitcoin cannot be sound money. It can't be any better than the US dollar, because you're trusting all these third parties and you don't even know if they actually have the Bitcoin. If they're not trustworthy, they can sell Bitcoin they don't actually have on the blockchain, which it looks like a lot of crypto exchanges have been doing. That guarantees price suppression. It's just too attractive. If I'm an exchange and I have 1,000 Bitcoin, why not sell 2,000 Bitcoin? This is where Bitcoin's dream falls apart, because you're not actually using it on the blockchain.
But on ICP, we can have a future where you don't even have crypto exchanges anymore. Especially once you get the infrastructure built, like people having their websites on ICP, then ICP is in place to be a truly financial system, a true decentralized financial system. Someone made the point that, as a canister owner, they wouldn't pre-buy too much in anticipation of a spike in ICP valuation, and that if ICP spikes, they'd sell the ICP while waiting for canister cycle costs to update. Yeah, it might make sense to do a little of both.
So I've covered effectively the difference between the dream of Bitcoin and the reality. Bitcoin can never be the future financial system that it actually has been sold to you as. Books like The Bitcoin Standard sold that dream. I watched hours of the author of that, Saifedean Ammous, do a podcast. I used to believe that stuff before I looked into the technical reality of what he was saying. And the technical reality is that none of that dream is possible on Bitcoin without having third parties compromise all the interactions between the blockchain and essentially strip all the value from the blockchain into their infrastructure. This is the same realization I went through when I ended up going all in on the Internet Computer, and it's the same wall any honest Bitcoin maxi eventually hits, which is what I get into in when Michael Saylor discovers ICP is better than Bitcoin.
So I hope I've made this point clear. If I've helped one person see through the Bitcoin narratives into the truth about Bitcoin, then this was worth it. The truth is, Bitcoin was a nice prototype. But Bitcoin being the largest market cap is ridiculous. Bitcoin and the narratives that go with it, like peer-to-peer cash, digital gold, be your own bank, censorship resistance, and sound money, are all ridiculous at this point. The future financial system narrative is the most ridiculous of all.
If you want more Jerry Banfield, the best way is to go to jerrybanfield.com. I just had a Zoom call a little while before this today. You can DM me at any time, and there's a Jerry Banfield AI in there trained on a bunch of my videos and books. I'll soon be having in-person meetups too for members. And you can schedule a call if you just want to talk. As for when the next pump is coming, I don't know. I just know this is the time to accumulate, because when the next pump comes, accumulation time is over.
Why Bitcoin's Future Is Being Built on ICP
From my video published June 17, 2026.
The future of Bitcoin building is on Internet Computer Protocol. Right now, more than 99 percent of Bitcoin transactions happen directly on third parties, which greatly diminishes the value of the network. Internet Computer Protocol has the absolute best Bitcoin layer two, and now there's a superpower coming out on it: you're getting Caffeine AI and a Bitcoin layer two in the same environment. Very soon, you're going to be able to build your own Bitcoin apps.
Whether you want to build a Bitcoin wallet, a Bitcoin meme coin launcher, Bitcoin DeFi, or a Bitcoin game, you're going to be able to build all of that directly with AI. You're not going to need to pay developers a whole bunch of money to make an app. If you have an app idea, you'll be able to make it yourself.
What you'll actually be able to build
Imagine being able to play poker with your friends. Now, I don't gamble, and I've struggled with gambling addiction in the past. I'm glad I haven't placed a bet in a long time. But let's say you want to play poker with your friends, and you want to play on the blockchain so it's provably fair, and you want to gamble with Bitcoin. What Caffeine AI is going to do soon, from what I can see, is let you tell it: make me a Texas Hold'em poker website where you sign in with Internet Identity and where you place your bets with Bitcoin. Then you'd be able to take your Bitcoin and play poker with it with your friends on a provably random blockchain with no rake at all. You could even scale that up if you wanted to. That, to me, is the future of technology.
I'm doing this live right now. I'm live as I'm recording this, playing some Call of Duty and talking about this, because of what I see in the future. If you want to build with Bitcoin, Bitcoin builders especially really care about decentralization. And right now, it's difficult to build any kind of application that has real utility for Bitcoin that isn't centralized.
The centralization problem almost no one sees
What almost nobody holding Bitcoin understands is that almost everybody who interacts with Bitcoin does so through a centralized third party. For example, if you're trading Bitcoin Runes or Ordinals, the website you're doing that on is a centralized third party, which means you're not even actually interfacing with the blockchain yourself. A third party is completely between you and the blockchain.
It's the same issue if you're buying Bitcoin on a crypto exchange. You don't even know if you're buying real Bitcoin, because you're going through this centralized third party. And if you want to make apps right now, it's very difficult to integrate Bitcoin into any kind of DeFi app, or any kind of application that isn't totally controlled on a third party. Right now, literally the only way to do that is Internet Computer Protocol.
What you're seeing is that Bitcoin developers are discovering Internet Computer Protocol is the best place to build with the best decentralization and security that you can possibly have in a Bitcoin app. So a lot of Bitcoin builders are building on Internet Computer Protocol right now, even before Caffeine AI has come out. Still, it's hard to build a Bitcoin app that has any real decentralization or security behind it unless you build on ICP, and it's hard to do that because you have to learn how to build on ICP in the first place.
Why Caffeine AI changes everything
With Caffeine AI coming out, that's going to change everything. Anybody will be able to code some kind of Bitcoin app through vibe coding, through talking to Caffeine AI, which will build out the front end and the back end for you fully on chain. You'll have a direct website URL you can give to somebody. This is so much easier than trying to make an app for the App Store. You just can't appreciate how easy this is unless you've actually tried to build your own app, and most people have never tried.
Imagine you want to build a hyper local version of Uber or Lyft. You could do that now with Caffeine AI. You could say, hey, make me a local version of Uber or Lyft, and I want everybody to be able to pay with Bitcoin and ICP. Then you could build that, you could own that, and you could just use it with your friends or your family members, or you could start promoting it and getting local drivers out there.
This, to me, is where any real usage of Bitcoin comes from: people being able to easily build apps with it. Right now with Bitcoin, all you've got is narratives and centralized third parties holding everything. You've got people talking about how Bitcoin is digital currency, but what you don't have is people actually making direct, on-chain Bitcoin transactions. Almost everybody is transacting through a third party like a crypto exchange. And in that case, if the exchange isn't honest, it's selling extra Bitcoin it doesn't even have. That's extremely unsustainable for the long term, and it drains the value. Once you can start building Bitcoin apps yourself, that's going to give a whole lot more utility to what you can do with Bitcoin besides just letting it sit on an exchange.
Short term bullish, long term something bigger
In the short term, I think ICP and Caffeine AI and people easily building all these Bitcoin apps with Chain-key Bitcoin is going to be very bullish for Bitcoin, for Bitcoin DeFi, and for Internet Computer Protocol. But in the long term, once you start building stuff on ICP, you're going to start to wonder why you even need Bitcoin anymore. If I can build this application on ICP, then why not just have ICP instead of Bitcoin?
That's the point I'm at now. I've come to believe I don't see the point in even having Bitcoin, because I'd rather just have ICP. With Bitcoin, you're just hoping the price goes up. You can't get any staking rewards directly on it. This is why the fees are expensive to transact, and this is why almost everybody holding Bitcoin is doing so on a third-party exchange. They're not even actually holding it in their own crypto wallet, which is a huge problem, because if that's how you're holding your Bitcoin, you don't even know if you have real Bitcoin or not.
What I see for the future is a transition: people going from holding Bitcoin on exchanges, to building their own Bitcoin apps. But the end game, to me, is building on ICP. Once you start building on ICP, you're not going to even need Bitcoin anymore. In the short term, though, I think Bitcoin DeFi could really take off, because Bitcoin has the branding and everybody knows about Bitcoin. When you're building apps, having that Bitcoin branding is going to get people on board a lot easier.
So what's going to happen? I think this cycle ICP is really going to go nuts, and part of ICP going nuts is going to be with Bitcoin, with people building all these apps with Caffeine AI that have Bitcoin integrated, because Bitcoin has the name recognition. But long term, I see it all transitioning just to ICP. I think Bitcoin is going to have diminishing returns. In the short term, it could actually create a significant amount of scarcity for Bitcoin, because as you start moving Bitcoin off of all these centralized exchanges and onto ICP to use for all these apps, that could pump Bitcoin quite a bit. But in the long term, in my belief, ICP is going to vastly outperform Bitcoin. In the short term and foreseeable future, they're going to be able to grow a lot together, and it's ideal to be aware of and use both of them for sure.
If you're into Bitcoin, research ICP
If you're into Bitcoin, you absolutely want to be figuring out what Internet Computer Protocol is, because to me that's the best chance of having any real Bitcoin decentralization, of having Bitcoin apps that aren't just controlled by third parties. ICP is the network most like Bitcoin. Bitcoin is like a proof of concept; it shows you what's possible. But ICP does everything you really want a blockchain to do.
I'm really excited to see the future. I think we have so much to look forward to in Internet Computer Protocol: Bitcoin apps that aren't totally centralized third parties, and more things you can actually do with your Bitcoin besides just trade it on some exchange and hope the price goes up. I think this is going to be a really exciting time to be in both, although I think the returns are going to be better on ICP. The main message, though, is that if you're excited about the future of Bitcoin, you need to be researching ICP, because this is where the vast majority of Bitcoin building is going to happen going forward. If you want to dig deeper into how I think about all of this, you can follow along with my ICP Crypto playlist.
Every Crypto Except ICP Is a Meme Coin, Even Bitcoin
From my video published June 17, 2026.
Every cryptocurrency except Internet Computer Protocol is a meme coin. If you're wondering what a meme coin exactly is, I asked ChatGPT. A meme coin is the type of currency that's typically inspired by internet jokes or popular culture, created more for entertainment or community engagement rather than for serious technical innovation or utility. When you see the technical innovation and utility that Internet Computer has, everything else looks like a meme coin by comparison. Meme coins are often highly speculative and driven by social media hype, community support, and online trends rather than fundamentals or use cases. That's exactly why ICP is different, and I want to give you a quick look at why.
Dominic Williams at ICP put out a video yesterday showing how AI on ICP is bringing out the self-writing internet. You can find him at @dominic_w. This is a massive deal, because you'll be able to just talk to AI and it'll crank out a working URL for you. If you want to understand exactly how that works, his video walks through and explains the entire paradigm. AI is so much bigger than all of crypto combined. I've shown this before: AI on Google Trends has four or five times as much traffic as Bitcoin and crypto all combined. And ICP, through the DFINITY Foundation that launched it and remains the main contributor, has made something that is dropping jaws in the AI community. Next to that, everything else in crypto is just highly speculative, and the average person who isn't in crypto already knows that.
Even Bitcoin Is a Meme Coin in My View
To me, even Bitcoin falls into the meme coin category. Ethereum, Solana, they're all basically meme coins where the value has nothing to do with what the technology can actually do. It's completely speculative, community-driven, and volatile. Let me dig into that definition a bit more, because I know some of you will push back. I don't even read my YouTube comments anymore, because there are so many people who are just toxic and nasty, along with the bots and scams. So instead, you can talk to me directly on the blockchain. That's something no other crypto can do. If you go to my VIP chat, I read it every day. That's real utility. It's a Discord or Telegram style application that runs directly on the blockchain. It has a crypto wallet built right into it where you can swap cryptos and even make your own meme coins. This tech is genuinely useful, and I use it every single day.
Here's a question worth sitting with: do you use the tech of the blockchain you're invested in every day? If your coins are sitting on a crypto exchange, you're not even using the tech itself. You're operating through a third party that in many cases is selling you crypto they don't even have. And even when they do have it, they're often not moving it on the blockchain at all. If you've never taken your crypto off an exchange, you've never actually used the technology you're investing in. With ICP, I use it every single day. So when more awareness comes around for what ICP is versus what everything else is, I believe it'll become obvious to everyone. Everything besides ICP is a meme coin: community driven, with all kinds of people promoting it on social media and forums.
Take XRP especially. That's just people talking on forums. Do you use the XRP blockchain every day? I don't. Does anybody else? According to the data I've shown in previous videos, hardly anybody is using it. Go look at the Explorer. Go look at the growth. And look at the volatility. These cryptos are extremely volatile, and here's why: every crypto besides ICP lacks real-world applications or use cases. Even the layer-one blockchains lack real-world use cases that don't depend on centralized tech to finish the job.
The Third-Party Problem
A lot of you would argue, "Ethereum's not a meme coin, Jerry. I can build DeFi and swap coins on Ethereum." No, you can't do that yourself. You need a third party, often Amazon, and often several third parties. You need MetaMask, then you need another third party, then you need an oracle, all of these middlemen just to interact with the blockchain. You yourself can't do anything with the Ethereum blockchain unless you're using an official Ethereum wallet you've downloaded onto your own computer. If you're using the Bitcoin blockchain, I hope you've downloaded a Bitcoin Core wallet and indexed the whole blockchain, because then you'd be using the blockchain directly without a third party. All these other cryptos rely completely on third parties.
Things like games and NFTs? You can't put those on a blockchain on any other crypto. It's just a meme coin. These coins also have abundant supplies, and it's often not even clear who holds them. Some examples are obvious: we already know Dogecoin and Shiba Inu are meme coins. But all of these coins besides ICP lack fundamentals. There's no real utility, especially compared to ICP. All these apps that are supposedly "on Ethereum" or "on Solana" are actually running through third parties. The blockchain itself can't do almost anything without Amazon hosting the website, without oracles feeding in the prices, without some centralized entity doing everything to maintain the whole system.
The Argument That Bitcoin Is a Meme Coin
So I asked ChatGPT to give me the argument that Bitcoin is really just a meme coin. Many people consider Bitcoin a revolutionary financial asset, but there's a compelling case that it's just a meme coin. Keep in mind that technologically, Dogecoin is a copy of Litecoin, which is a copy of Bitcoin. So if Dogecoin is a meme coin and it copied Bitcoin's technology, then it's logical that Bitcoin is also a meme coin.
Here's the key point: Bitcoin's value is driven by hype and speculation. I've talked to people who have huge amounts of money in Bitcoin, and I'll ask, "Have you ever used the Bitcoin blockchain?" Well, no, it's sitting on an exchange. Do you even know if you have real Bitcoin? You don't know if you have real Bitcoin until you sell it and put the money in the bank, or until you take it off the blockchain yourself. Bitcoin's price is heavily influenced by public perception, media coverage, and social momentum. It is not influenced by what the tech can do for humanity. In my view, ICP is the only thing in crypto with technology that can be genuinely useful for humanity.
Bitcoin gained a lot of its traction purely through hype. And all the things you're hearing about Bitcoin, like the ETFs, only reinforce that. BlackRock is making all kinds of money while taking almost no risk, off of other people buying Bitcoin and letting BlackRock hold it. That completely ruins the value of the blockchain itself. The Bitcoin blockchain is slow and not practical at all for day-to-day transactions. Paying taxes in Bitcoin is ridiculous, because it'd be more complicated than just using the systems you already have. The "digital gold" narrative is largely speculative. It's not tied to concrete fundamentals.
What are concrete fundamentals? Technology with a real use case, where you can use AI to create running web apps. Where you can put your own version of Discord or Telegram fully on chain, without some centralized entity controlling and censoring it. Where you can actually give crypto away. I've done several of these giveaways. In one, I gave 320 people $1.50 worth of BOB. In another, I gave a thousand people a collective 20 ICP, which is about 20 cents each. Do you know of any other way you could easily send a thousand people you don't know 20 cents, with built-in protections against bots? That's real utility.
Why ICP Tech Actually Matters to Me
My website is hosted on ICP, and I can tell you firsthand that this tech matters. When I found ICP, I dropped my old website host after years and years of researching for the absolute fastest and best solution, which was Kinsta. I'm actually still getting paid through their affiliate program even though I haven't used it in a year. Their solution is to run WordPress on the Google Cloud Platform, and then you have to pull in all these other third parties just to host a website. Not on ICP. There, you stick the code right on the blockchain and it's practically infinitely scalable. I can have 100,000 people go through my website and it won't crash, because it doesn't use much computation, and I can stock up a huge amount of computation for dirt cheap on ICP.
This is the only thing in crypto that isn't absurdly and completely based on speculation. All these other altcoins, their values today are not based on how good the tech is. They're based on narratives. They're based on manipulated prices. They're based on people talking who have no idea what the tech does. And they're based on people's ignorance of real tech, which is Internet Computer. The more popular this gets, and the more people build on it because it's the best tech in crypto, the more they'll see that Bitcoin and Ethereum are meme coins.
With Bitcoin, there's no intrinsic utility beyond speculation. The store-of-value claim is ridiculous to me. I could make up a Jerry Banfield coin and call that a store of value too. That's what Bitcoin is at this point. It's not inherently tied to any physical asset or productive system. And Bitcoin mining is a joke, though not a funny one, because people have paid to buy billions of dollars of computer equipment, which inflates the price of all the computer equipment in the world. That equipment gets thrown away every few years because it's useless outside of its one specific case: mining Bitcoin. And the power grid all over the place is getting drained massively. Internet Computer Protocol is millions of times more power efficient than Bitcoin, and the technology can do everything you could possibly imagine with Bitcoin and more. It can do things that even Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and X can't. That's a real technological use case. We're not just talking about fundamentals, hype, and speculation.
People don't use Bitcoin for day-to-day transactions, just like meme coins. Bitcoin is just a meme coin. It's community-driven hype. It's people talking, not really using the tech to do anything meaningful. And the more centralized entities like ETFs and crypto exchanges hold Bitcoin, the less value anything on the Bitcoin blockchain actually has, because third parties are able to manipulate and handle all the transactions and the value never ends up on the blockchain at all.
Bitcoin's scarcity narrative is a joke to me too. The market cap is cited as a reason for its value, but how does that create utility? I created a meme coin, and there are a bunch of other meme coins I shared in a video yesterday. They all have scarcity too. In fact, no more of those coins are even being created. Meanwhile Bitcoin, depending on the price, has tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars of new Bitcoin that can be mined every single day. That's inflation. Last I checked, Bitcoin's scarcity is theoretical, not practical. There are tens of millions of dollars of Bitcoin being mined every day and dumped on exchanges, and in all practical terms, that's inflation. Even Bitcoin's origin is just as murky as a meme coin's. Did the CIA make Bitcoin? Probably.
Why Bitcoin's Decentralization Story Falls Apart
Would the people behind Bitcoin love for it to be adopted by governments? Yes, because if they hold Satoshi Nakamoto's wallet, which translates roughly to central intelligence in Japanese, then they would have a trillion-plus-dollar war chest. If Bitcoin gets to something like a million dollars, they would have trillions of dollars sitting in the wallet they originally created. And you could make the counter argument that, well, Bitcoin created the blockchain industry. So what? Do you care that America Online had an instant messenger 25 years ago? No, you don't, because you don't use it. It's not as useful as all the other things we have today.
In my view, decentralization on Bitcoin is a joke. I've talked about this before. Bitcoin mining is completely compromised. Two single miners, Ant Pool and F2 Pool, or Foundry USA off the top of my head, control the hash rate. If they decided they wanted to cut everybody else out, they could take Bitcoin over completely. That's a US pool and, I believe, a Chinese pool. The two of them control Bitcoin mining. Any thought of real decentralization is a joke at this point. All you need to do is have those top two pools collaborate, and maybe a third one, and you've got total control of the Bitcoin blockchain.
Then the argument you would make against this is, well, institutions, Bitcoin's recognized by governments. That's great. I thought we needed Bitcoin so we could cut out banks and governments. So now we're pointing to Bitcoin being recognized by governments and financial institutions that are hoping to profit off of Bitcoin as the thing that gives it validity. But when I started in Bitcoin, we got into it because we could transact. If you actually downloaded the Bitcoin Core wallet and transacted directly with somebody else using a Bitcoin Core wallet, you could transact without a middleman third party. And Bitcoin mining had some kind of decentralization back then.
Everything After Bitcoin Still Needs Middlemen
To me, everything beyond Bitcoin has basically been created the same way, from copies of Bitcoin straight through to Ethereum. Ethereum added a little bit of functionality, but you can't do almost anything meaningful directly with the Ethereum blockchain. Same thing with Solana. You have to have these third-party wallets. You have to have third-party websites. You have to have all these middlemen interacting. When I staked my Solana a couple of years ago, how did I do it? I bought a Ledger hardware wallet, so that's one third party. Then I delegated it to some other third party. Wow, that's amazing technology, that I have to buy one third-party thing and then delegate to another third party.
Once people see that ICP is the only full-stack platform and start building on it, and you've got projects where you can see the proof, things change. The cycle burn rate on ICP has blown up. We're at all-time highs over the last few months. It keeps going up and up. And this is the equivalent of people paying their web hosting bill. In my opinion, ICP has the best tech in the world for meme coins and for real-world assets. It's the only thing you could even try to call a decentralized physical infrastructure. It's a real-world computer. It has the best technology in the world right now for AI. I watched a demonstration of this twice yesterday, and it's incredible. You're talking about doing things with AI that are blowing people away in the AI space.
Why Almost Nobody in Crypto Is Talking About ICP
Now, you all might wonder, when is this going to happen? Why isn't it happening? Why isn't everybody talking about it? Because the whole system's rigged against you. Because almost everybody in crypto is just paid. And, for better or worse, my own video is a perfect example of this. I made a video called something like Top 24 ICP Altcoins. I was very transparent in that video. I made a proposal to their DAO, and their DAO funded the proposal. And I started the video saying, to be fair, and as a signal that these coins care more about their marketing, that they probably have this in common. I said, all these coins paid me, but none of them paid me to make that particular video.
After I made that video, I was playing tennis, and I thought, holy crap. It's one thing to see it deeper and deeper, but what I just did in my video is exactly what everybody else in crypto does, except they don't put that disclaimer in. They don't tell you at the beginning of the video that the only reason they're saying these are the top 10 altcoins for the next bull run is because they all paid them. The only reason you're not seeing ICP talked about all over the place is because almost everyone who has an audience has been paid to talk about certain projects. And almost everyone who isn't at a high enough level to get paid to talk about projects, what are they doing? They're just view chasing, hoping to get to a high enough level to get paid. So they're just copying the top creators and parroting the same stuff, hoping to get a piece of the action from the communities. That's crypto.
ICP's Trump Card Is the Technology Itself
However, ICP's marketing has a trump card in it. ICP has made technology that's so revolutionary that it will break out of the ICP ecosystem. It'll break out of crypto completely. Because when people see that this is possible and they ask how it's possible, then they find out, well, it's possible because of Internet Computer. It's possible because ICP is a world computer. Then all this money and attention and interest organically flow into ICP from outside the crypto world, from people in AI, from people who are just trying to build websites cheaper and faster and more secure. All of this will flow into ICP from the outside world because the tech is genuinely valuable.
And the tech is valuable because this team at DFINITY has put in more effort, more time, more research into building the blockchain technology itself than any other crypto has. They put in so much effort that they're years and years ahead of everyone else. Why? Because almost everyone else wants to get the money as quickly as possible, and they think short term. As far as I can see in crypto, DFINITY is the only organization, and ICP is the only crypto project, that's set up to be long term. And in my belief that's going to work out over the long term. All these other cryptos, the truth is going to come out about them, that they're nothing more than a meme coin. They're a copy of a copy. Their technology is useless without Amazon, without oracles, without Internet Computer Protocol. One of the main ways some of these cryptos might survive in the future is if they start building the rest of the stuff the blockchain needs to even run on Internet Computer, like Chainkey Bitcoin, like Chainkey Ethereum. The only way some of these DAOs would be able to truly decentralize is to move everybody onto Internet Computer.
Seeing It Before Everyone Else Does
So I realize that in the short term, people like posting charts and talking about how I've been wrong so far on ICP. That's okay. That's happened a lot of times in my life before. I can see so far ahead what's coming that I feel like a crazy person for a while, and a lot of times, by the time it finally comes, it's like it's already passed for me. I think it's going to be a great year for ICP, and I'm trying to help as many people as possible figure this out before it's too late. By the time everybody realizes the truth, that every crypto except ICP is basically a meme coin, most of those are going to lose a lot of value, and that value is going to pour into ICP, and the price will be in the hundreds, thousands. You'll have missed it at $10. If you want to dig deeper into the reasoning behind all of this, I've put it together in my ICP Crypto playlist, and I'm sharing it because I want to help you see this before it's too late.
Bitcoin Is a $1.6 Trillion Spreadsheet. ICP Is the World Computer.
From my video published June 15, 2026.
Why Holding Bitcoin Stopped Making Sense to Me
Bitcoin is a $1 6 trillion spreadsheet while internet computer protocol is the next level of the internet and it's valued almost a thousand times less. If you are holding Bitcoin today this is the most important video you will ever watch about Bitcoin because almost nobody who has Bitcoin is talking about this and this is the most important information in the world and if you're wondering why isn't everybody telling you this well you'll see this is like the red pill in the matrix this will destroy how you even see crypto. To me if people ask why don't you have any Bitcoin you've been in crypto 12 years because I don't see any reason in holding part of a $1 6 trillion spreadsheet.
Bitcoin Is Just a Secured Spreadsheet
What I mean by a spreadsheet is this that Bitcoin is basically just using cryptography to secure a ledger. Do you understand what a ledger is? It's basically a spreadsheet think Microsoft Excel. It tells you who owns what, what address they're at and then when that moves who moved from where now that's valued at $1 6 trillion. That is ridiculous. That is dramatically overvalued.
The Cold Hard Facts About What Bitcoin Cannot Do
Here are some cold hard facts about things Bitcoin does not do. Bitcoin does not host your website. It doesn't run your business app. It cannot host your front end. It doesn't do anything with AI and it doesn't replace any infrastructure. Doesn't solve the biggest problems in the world like cyber. It requires third party histories. It requires third parties to do almost anything. In fact one of the craziest things that you most people in Bitcoin don't know the vast majority of transactions quote with Bitcoin where people are on Coinbase quote buying Bitcoin. That's not happening on the blockchain. This is the Bitcoin blockchain. You can see it mempool space.
The fact is there's only about 10 or so transactions a second with Bitcoin. You can see that this block between these blocks there were 10 minutes that went by and there were a few thousand transactions. That's because 99 of what people think they are doing with Bitcoin is going through a third party. An exchange like Coinbase. Even a hardware wallet is a third party interacting with a blockchain for you that could be compromised that you can't trust it over the long term. Things like ledger wallets found to have a back door in them. Lose your seed phrase. It's gone. This was a useful proof of concept.
The future is internet computer protocol. And almost everybody in crypto is stuck looking at the past stuck looking at price charts and thinks of Bitcoin as a safe investment. That's fucking insane. There's nothing safe about holding onto Bitcoin. Because the exchange we've seen lots of exchanges go to zero and lose all their users funds. You don't even know if you have Bitcoin on an exchange. If you don't have Bitcoin, you they actually have your Bitcoin or not. Here's why. Because if you were able to transact on the Bitcoin blockchain all by itself, like you can on internet computer protocol, you can be sure you're interacting with real Bitcoin.
But you can't because the Bitcoin blockchain is basically a spreadsheet that is not capable of actually doing everything for you. Therefore, you always have to go through a third party to do it for you or make your own kind of solution to try and interact with the Bitcoin blockchain. Are you up for doing that? 99 9 or not. So you're stuck using somebody else's interaction for you. So if you go on a crypto exchange and you place an order to buy Bitcoin and they tell you you've got Bitcoin, you are trusting. And this is the whole point. Bitcoin was supposed to remove that. What I just said.
Bitcoin was supposed to remove third party trust from the equation. You see how all of us in crypto have got Bitcoin. Almost all of it is held by centralized entities today. When you're on an exchange buying Bitcoin, you are taking their word that they have it. They may not actually have it because it's all on their exchange. That means they could sell you Bitcoin they don't actually have on the blockchain. How often is that happening? I believe that's happening very often. I'm not going to accuse particular exchanges, but when you've got it sitting there and there's nothing to stop you except your integrity, and I'd hope all the exchanges in crypto have integrity.
You think somebody has set up a crypto exchange, their primary market share, and they're going to be able to sell you Bitcoin? I don't think so. Do you think their motivation was integrity to do a good job for users? Or do you think their primary motivation was to make as much money for themselves as they possibly could? If that's the motivation, and I would say it is in most cases, then the thing to do to make as much money as possible is just sell all the Bitcoin you want. And then when you've sold too much, crash the price so you can force people to sell it lower.
Then you make money with Bitcoin you don't even have.
ICP Captures Every Bitcoin Narrative for a Fraction of the Price
ICP solves all of this, and it's valued almost a thousand times less. Then Bitcoin. To me, buying Bitcoin right now is absolutely insane. It made sense to buy it when I bought it back in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2020. Even in 2022, it made sense. But when ICP can do everything fully on chain, holding Bitcoin is absolutely insane. And Bitcoin has basically become a meme coin, a cult coin, where people are not listening. People are like, no, don't say anything bad about Bitcoin. I'm like, you're, you're fucked. If you're holding Bitcoin, you are fucked. This is a spreadsheet secured with cryptography. The only future Bitcoin has is people remaining totally ignorant of everything I'm telling you.
I show how early Bitcoin would translate into ICP today in 21 Bitcoin in 2014 Is 550 ICP Today.
Of better technology not succeeding and staying on the download forever, and the world being totally fucked and just blowing up. That's the only future Bitcoin has, because the technical reality is that a spreadsheet, that keeps transactions, where third parties are stealing all the basic value that Bitcoin is supposed to provide is not useful in an environment where ICP can capture all the value that Bitcoin has captured. Why? Because when you talk about all Bitcoin's narratives, all of them work better on ICP. All of them. You want to talk about digital gold? ICP is computational gold. It is processing power gold. You can burn it to do things like host your website, like my website.
This is hosted on the internet computer protocol blockchain. When you go to my website, you are interacting directly with the blockchain. That's the future. ICP is building a new future for the internet. And the fact that it's valued a thousand times less than Bitcoin, which is outdated, mostly useless technology at this point. Would you continue? All right, look at this phone.
Holding Bitcoin Is Like Clinging to a 2009 BlackBerry
Look at this phone I got. This is an iPhone 16. Now Bitcoin was created in 2009. Go get my Blackberry and start using that. Should I start using my Blackberry? Because I'm really attached to, well, this was my first smartphone. Come on. This was my first smartphone and it's good. It's digital. It's, it's cellular gold, baby. It's cellular gold. I'm going to keep using my smartphone from 2009 because it's cellular gold. And I don't give a shit what the new iPhone does. I don't give a shit about new iPhone 16, bitch. I got a Blackberry. That's crypto right now. People holding onto Bitcoin like fucking zombies.
Just like Bitcoin is God. Bitcoin is the digital gold. Bitcoin is the new world currency. It's like, you're not looking up the details of how this actually works. The fact that 99 plus percent of quote, Bitcoin transactions, interactions are all on centralized third parties. They never touch the blockchain. The fact that internet computer protocol has utterly dominant technology that is the rest of crypto useless. The only way Bitcoin even has a viable future from here is by using ICP as a layer two to securely host Bitcoin transactions. Now, I don't think Bitcoin is going to go to zero like most of these other shit coins are because Bitcoin will still have that nostalgia, that meme coin effect of where people know the branding.
But right now, people like Michael Saylor that are out there buying a shitload of Bitcoin, they're not going to go to Bitcoin off of leveraged debt that they can get at a hugely discounted interest rate to keep up with inflation. That is a certain utility. But what would be much more intelligent will be to take that same strategy with ICP. Because imagine if you bought that much ICP, you could essentially, if you bought as much as Michael Saylor just bought of Bitcoin, if you bought that much ICP, you could just guarantee yourself that you just made not financial advice, no shit, but you could guarantee yourself that you just three, five extra money immediately.
If you bought that much ICP, you could push the price up to like $10, $15. And then on top of that, ICP, if you go to the ICP dashboard, you can actually lock your ICP up and get yield. I'm telling you, if you're into Bitcoin, ICP has destroyed Bitcoin. Bitcoin may hold on as a nostalgia, first blockchain or whatever. ICP has rendered every single thing that Bitcoin does useless. Every single narrative is useless compared to ICP. Everything you like about Bitcoin, ICP does it better, faster, and it does all kinds of other shit. And it's in the cloud computing market, which Larry Fink just said, that's a whole asset class.
I lay out why that kind of move is realistic in ICP Can Pump to $100 Anytime.
ICP is the only crypto in that asset class. It is the only cloud computing platform that brings the security of the blockchain. ICP takes what Bitcoin started and makes it what you need it to be. Bitcoin is dial up internet. ICP is fiber. And everybody's, using fiber today. Would you sit there and use dial up internet? Because you are attached to this being the first internet you use? That'd be fucking stupid, wouldn't it? ICP, you can lock it up for two years and earn 6 7 rounded percent. But you can even lock it up. Look at this. You can even lock it up like I locked some up yesterday.
I break down how every one of these narratives works better on the world computer in my ICP Crypto playlist.
You can lock it up for two weeks and earn 2%. And this is directly under your control. This is not some shit ETH staking where you've got somebody else with their fucking wallet trading meme coins. And Bitcoin, you can't even stake it.
Staking, Energy, and the Supply Myth
Now, the Bitcoin zombies come at me with these narratives of, well, ICP has infinite supply. Look, Bitcoin is mining is absolutely unsustainable. Do you remember all the Bitcoin mining narratives that were coming along? Bitcoin mining is gigantically wasteful. And that's going to matter at some point. It mattered before when it got the shit butted out of it. And when you look at ICP, the massive, massive energy efficiency of ICP, not just jerking around with transactions like Bitcoin, but you have full applications running directly on the network. And you compare that to something like Bitcoin. Bitcoin looks utterly useless by comparison. Now, I know the truth may piss some of you off before it sets you free.
I recognize that. And I just did a video about that on my at Jerry Banfield channel. If the truth offends you, it might be exactly what you need to hear. Crypto, more and more people are getting ready for the truth. They're tired of the pain. They're tired of the impatience of watching their coins. They're tired of being confused with what the hell. There's infinite blockchains and there's infinite coins and all of them are shit. All of them aren't shit. There's one that's good. All the rest are shit. Bitcoin is shit. It is a fucking Blackberry from 2009 that has been insiders, bought it up. And maybe there's theories saying that the CIA invented it.
Satoshi Nakamoto means central intelligence in Japanese. So do your own fucking research. All right. Oh, this, whoever launched this is holding a shitload of it, could crash it whenever they feel like. And there's quantum computing coming. And fundamentally to me, this has been a psyop. It's like, okay, let's get a bunch of Bitcoin and then sell it to all of them. We'll hold all of it. We'll make up a shitload of profits on it. And we'll just dump it whenever we feel the top has been reached. Retail holding Bitcoin is insane. It's absolutely insane. Thinking that this is always going to keep going up. That's ridiculous.
You got to look at the technology. And what we've seen is technologies often have a time where they're a big deal, like dial up internet. And where's dial up internet today? That shit is gone. ICP is the future. And that's why it's hidden. Because the more people know what I'm telling you, Bitcoin's value probably drops 80%. If you have even 20 of crypto that understands what I'm saying, especially somebody holding a shitload of money, the money is going to flow out of Bitcoin and into ICP. That's what is going to happen. Not financial advice. And obviously I'm just holding a shitload of ICP and shilling my own bags. If you want to pressure-test your own read on Bitcoin versus ICP instead of just taking mine at face value, you can schedule a private one-on-one call with me and we'll work through it together.
But this, I got into ICP. I dumped my Bitcoin three years ago because yeah, in the short term, I've lost money. And it's okay because there's infinite money and I've got enough money. And the only amount of money you can have is enough money or not enough money. I got enough money. And I'm okay that in the short term, Bitcoin did better. The question is, where are we going from here? The reality is you cannot use Bitcoin without some third party taking total domination over your funds in one way or another. ICP, you can go directly into the blockchain yourself. You can vote yourself. Without a third party system in it, you can use a wallet yourself without a third party wallet involved.
ICP solves all the problems that are there with Bitcoin. It's the best Bitcoin scaling solution. It is the only infrastructure that could support mass onboarding in crypto. Meanwhile, the market is pricing the history, but Bitcoin will not go up forever. There are a lot of risks and very little upside left for Bitcoin. Remember that guy that was talking about, oh, I'll bet you some, amount of money that Bitcoin hits a million dollars. Newsflash, Bitcoin is never hitting a million dollars. Newsflash, Bitcoin's best days are behind it. Just like my 2009 BlackBerry and dial up internet, the best days are behind it. It's gone. It's over with.
There's no point in buying Bitcoin today. The returns you're going to get are going to be shit. There are way too many centralized entities that are operating completely on the paradigm that you don't know what's real and where the value is. And once this starts to become obvious, this and all the other coins are going to lose a lot of money. Because why would, see, it will only take one Michael Saylor to identify this and be like, holy shit, if I put $100 million into this, I will just print money like crazy. And then I can just lock that up on the network nervous system.
This is rigged. It feels rigged. It's only going to take one person with a good amount of money. Now, what you need to recognize, you're like, well, why isn't that happening yet? Because most of crypto is a psyop. Most people inside crypto are working together and they're trying to take as much money from crypto retail as possible. They're counting on you to be ignorant. They're counting on you to not do your own research, to not look at the big picture. They're counting on you to be a fucking zombie, to just do what you're told and respect authority and buy the coins you're told to buy when you're told to buy them.
And then sell the coins you're told to sell when you're told to buy them. Sell them.
ICP Is My Path to Financial Sovereignty
I'm all about helping people become sovereign, empowered beings on this planet. That's why I do videos. And ICP to me is the best option for that in finance. And getting yourself financially sovereign is the pathway to making all the rest of your sovereignty easier. Bitcoin will not do that for you. All the narratives that push Bitcoin, yes, we do need a currency that can transact worldwide. ICP delivers the details. Bitcoin does not. Can you imagine going to the grocery store and telling them, well, we need to wait for your transaction to confirm on the Bitcoin blockchain? You might think, well, I can just go immediately transact.
I talk through this kind of financial sovereignty with everyone in the Jerry Banfield Family.
Yeah, that's because you're using some third party application. And now you might as well use a fucking credit card or just use a credit card. Just go pay with your credit card. MasterCard and Visa are working just fine at the grocery store. Bitcoin is not going to go up forever when people realize it's just basically a spreadsheet with a cryptography algorithm. Gigantically wasting a shitload of computation power and energy. That's not needed anymore. And the only reason you're being sold it is because other people who have a bunch of it are trying to dump on your head. And they need you to keep buying it.
And they need to convince governments to buy it. They need to convince.. When you got governments buying into Bitcoin, the game's up. When you got ETFs coming in, the game's up. That's your last exit liquidity. When you got people.. I've seen people who've sat there and showed me wallets of hundreds of thousands of dollars of Bitcoin. And their minds, they're like, well, Bitcoin's safe. I'm like, the fuck it is. Where do you get holding your money on some third party exchange that may or may not actually have the Bitcoin on a blockchain that's 17 years old, that is vulnerable to quantum computing, that has nothing else but marketing going for it at this point.
And then there's something that really does everything you need it to do that exists, that when this blows up, it sucks. I can tell you in 12 years, investing in Bitcoin has never been a safe proposition. Now, people with authority signaling today get the idea that somehow it is because it's ETF for this rich person or Michael Saylor's buying it. No, I can tell you I've been in Bitcoin long enough. At no point did we think buying and trading this shit was safe. That's why we were attracted to it, because it was fun, because it was exciting. And Bitcoin today doesn't have the upside, it's still got the same dangerous downside it's always had. If you're holding Bitcoin and want to talk through how you're actually thinking about it for yourself, you can book a private one-on-one call with me and we'll reason it out for your situation.
Bitcoin is basically a monument at this point. It's already dying. There's almost nothing meaningful happening with it. It's all talk. It's all smoke and mirrors. Now, where I could be wrong is that I'm betting that people get more intelligent. I'm betting that people see through this deception and see into what's real. I'm betting people outside of crypto don't give a shit about anything in crypto. All they care about is real utility. That's what they care about. They care about being able to use the blockchain into a real world task. You have governments onboarding to ICP right now. And despite that, most people still have no idea about ICP.
The big things are in position. The moves are happening. Once you've got governments using ICP, running their infrastructure, Bitcoin is useless, except as a meme coin. Except as a nostalgia coin. I see Bitcoin could easily go back down to 10 000 from here very easily. If I had to give you my value that I think Bitcoin is actually worth, I would say Bitcoin is not worth more than a few hundred million at this point. People are literally absolutely clueless about the truth about Bitcoin. Every fucking Bitcoin video you watch is a waste of your time. The Bitcoin standard, useless ass book. I will listen to the guy who wrote it, do a podcast.
All the things he's saying are valid, but the detail that's inaccurate is that Bitcoin can deliver that because it's all back to third party shit. Now, all the stuff he says, you apply that to internet computer, then yes, that all works. And this is how the highest level of deception and lying works, is you give people a lot of truth and then you fuck them on the details. You give them a lot of truth. Yeah, the financial system's messed up. Yes, we need more. Yeah, all that, all the Bitcoin narratives. You give them that and then point them in the wrong direction. If you're pointed at ICP, that's the truth.
And right now, people with the supply with Bitcoin, again, it's like mind control. You've just heard this shit so many times because your brain learns through reputation on a subconscious level. So you watch the same stupid ass Bitcoin videos every day and you hear people repeat this zombie stuff about useless ass data. You're not looking at the big picture. And that's the truth. That's where you get blindsided. And the majority of crypto is going to get blindsided because if you don't see this coming in advance, you are going to get ran over when the people who have the most money and the most power see that it's all, they already in most cases know that it's going towards ICP and they're just trying to extract as much value as they can out of as many suckers as possible until that happens.
But once they realize the game's up, all these cryptos are going down. Bitcoin's going down with them because they'll sell their Bitcoin when they're like, oh shit. All right. People are figuring out ICP. When Jerry's channel hits a certain amount of views, they're like, all right, people aren't fucking dumb anymore. Dump this shit and rotate it into ICP. There you go. Like this is what's going to happen when you understand the big picture of the world. Now, the only question is how long will it take? And do you believe people are going to stay ignorant forever? And is the world going to shit or not? Those are exactly the questions I love digging into, so if you want to think your own answers through out loud, you can schedule a private one-on-one call with me and bring them to our call.
If you think the world's going to shit, why invest in crypto? Like why bother? I didn't get into crypto. Like the people who've got into crypto are people that want the world to be a better place and want to invest in that. Bitcoin is not investing in a better world at this point. You're handing money to centralized entities who supposedly have Bitcoin for you. And all the supply shit is a psyop. Like you need to think through that. People are like, well, Bitcoin has a locked max supply. All right. Look, I have 4 000 sheets of paper in my okay? Okay. Now that's a fixed max supply.
I'm not going to buy anymore.
The One-Cent Piece of Paper Test for Fixed Supply
So I'm going to sell, I'm going to start selling those pieces of paper for $1 000 each. And I'm just going to sell as many of them as I fucking can. I'm going to sell $1 000 piece of paper. I'm going to go out. Here's a, here's a piece of paper. I'll sign my name on it or something. I'll draw an infinity symbol on it. I'll sell those for a thousand dollars. Does that have value? Does me capping my supply of pieces of paper that are truly worth less than a cent or maybe a cent or two each. Does that me putting a price tag of a thousand dollars, a piece of paper on it, overvaluing it by a hundred thousand times.
Does the supply of the one cent piece of paper matter? Bitcoin is a one cent piece of paper. There's 21, there's 20 million right now. And it doesn't matter. There's 21 million one cent piece of paper. When you're saying digital gold, you've been fucking mind controlled. That's what you've been. You're just, you've literally heard that shit so many times. Your mind has accepted it as a fact. It's like, have you watched one of those shows where like somebody's, in an awful course of situation and they're told like there's, I'm thinking of Star Trek episode where Jean Luc Picard, and there's like, the guy's got like, five things and he says, how many is it?
Or there's four and he makes him say five. Like that's, that's what's happening. Bitcoin has literally just been mind programmed into the masses. Digital gold, digital gold. You hear digital gold 200 times. Your brain just accepts it. This is the weird part about the human brain that if you just tell it a lie enough times, if you give it a narrative that you can slip in past the defenses and make it sound reasonable, then it internalizes it as truth. That doesn't make it true. If I tell you a hundred thousand times that a piece of paper I'm selling is worth a thousand dollars. The fucked up thing is you'll probably believe it.
And this is what's happened with Bitcoin. Bitcoin was cool when I got into it. It was exciting technology. And a lot of people use their own wallets. Like I had a guy, he had a fucking USB stick and he had his own wallet that he coded. Now that was cool. And that was interacting directly with the blockchain. What we see today, these, these governments, this has ruined Bitcoin. It is extracting value from the masses and it's not going to last forever. Mark my words, especially now if ICP didn't exist, it might be different, but ICP is real tech. And if you want digital gold, ICP is a vastly superior digital gold.
There's way more reasons to use ICP and participate. Holding Bitcoin does not allow you to vote on the future of Bitcoin. Holding ICP does. And that is where things are headed. Bitcoin is totally dependent on everything around it. And ICP sets up to absorb all of Bitcoin's use case. And AI takes this even, we need a whole nother video to talk about AI. But AI is set up to hack all the stuff that the third party shit that supports Bitcoin, all these bridges and exchanges and all this shit. AI makes ICP more important and more needed. And it renders Bitcoin more useless. And this, this is enough for this video.
And I know the title comparison is unfair. All right. I understand all the shit you've been told about Bitcoin. I understand this can be hard to understand if you're new to it. Okay. I get that. I'm telling you this, like I said in my video before, if the truth offends you, it might be exactly what you need to hear. This truth offends people. This is why I don't have a hundred percent of the time. I don't have a hundred thousand views on every one of my videos on my Jerry Banfield ICP channel, because you can't handle the truth. But when you've got thousands of people that can, when you got tens of thousands of people in the ICP community, we have enough of a foundation and it's going, it's, it's going viral.
People are telling other people, people are getting what's happening. Like my recent video, I said, ICP's price chart, is a crypto IQ test. And most people fail. And that's okay. Because the first step to getting smarter is realizing you're a dummy bitch. Like that's the first step to getting smarter is realizing how much more you could know and how limited your information is. And it was, that's how I found ICP. When I realized, I don't know shit that's important in crypto that I know all kinds of stuff. But when I found ICP in 2023, I realized, I don't know what's really important in crypto. I've missed the most important information in crypto.
And what's even worse, everybody talking about Bitcoin was either intentionally hiding it or ignorant of it themselves. That the very best information in crypto, in many cases at the top, is being intentionally hidden. They're telling you to buy Bitcoin while they're planning their exit strategy. They're telling you to buy Bitcoin while they're dumping it, while they're preparing to FUD it with the same energy narrative again. ICP's being, prepared to take the throne. Everything's in position. The question is, who's going to capitalize on that? When Bitcoin holders realize this is the past, this is the future, it's going to be really interesting to see what happens.
Holy shit, I love hearing myself talk.
21 Bitcoin in 2014 Is 550 ICP Today
From my video published June 15, 2026.
Owning 21 Bitcoin in 2014 is like owning 550 ICP today. If you ever wish you'd been able to buy Bitcoin back when it was cheap — the way I did — then to me the Internet Computer is the same kind of opportunity sitting right in front of us now. This is how I think about my own stack, not financial advice. I'm about as biased toward ICP as a person can be, and I'll tell you exactly why.
The supply math: 550 ICP is one one-millionth, same as 21 Bitcoin
Here's the comparison I care about most. Twenty-one Bitcoin is one one-millionth of Bitcoin's fixed 21 million supply. At today's prices, 550 ICP is roughly that same one one-millionth slice of the entire ICP supply. So both positions represent the same proportional ownership of the network — but the ICP version is dramatically cheaper to build.
I started buying Bitcoin in 2014. At the lowest I remember, it was around $170, and a one-millionth-of-supply position cost me roughly $3,570. Today you can own that same fraction of the ICP supply for about $1,397 — less than it cost me to own that much Bitcoin twelve years ago. Same percentage of the network, a fraction of the price. People spam the word "supply" in my comments without ever running this math.
Why Bitcoin in 2014 and ICP today feel the same
What made Bitcoin exciting in 2014 was never the price. The price was depressing — when it fell to $170 we all thought it might be going to zero. But underneath that there was a feeling that this was a genuine technological breakthrough almost nobody understood yet. Even being early, I couldn't imagine it reaching $100,000. It felt like buying a piece of the future, and I felt honored to be in on it.
I get that exact feeling looking at ICP now. Not because ICP is Bitcoin — it's not — but because it offers the same asymmetric setup: a real breakthrough that the market hasn't priced in because it doesn't understand it yet. When everyone finally gets the narrative, the easy upside is already gone. That's what happened to Bitcoin. If you're buying after the ETFs, after the institutions and governments, you missed the part that mattered.
Bitcoin is a spreadsheet. ICP is the whole computer.
Bitcoin is essentially a ledger secured with cryptography — a spreadsheet that tracks transactions, one block every ten minutes. That was revolutionary as the first decentralized money, and I still respect it. But it's a narrow use case.
ICP is a breakthrough in what can actually be built fully on a blockchain: websites, apps, services, social systems, AI tools, entire pieces of internet infrastructure — all running on-chain. Nothing else in crypto comes close. The easiest way to verify that for yourself is to try Caffeine AI and watch it crank out a working website that lives directly on the blockchain. The first time you see it, it clicks: that is why this is early. The technology is way ahead of the public's understanding.
And the signals that understanding is catching up are everywhere: Google declaring cybercrime a national security threat, governments asking for sovereign cloud that only a blockchain can reliably deliver at scale, developers building in AI environments that are unsafe and unverifiable, and real apps like Caffeine AI from the DFINITY team already shipping. This isn't faith. It's the same kind of early data that was sitting in front of us with Bitcoin in 2014 — and back then you still had to wait a few years for the 2017 run. It might be three more years before ICP really takes off. I'm fine with that.
Every dollar buys about 1,000x more of the ICP supply
This is where the present-day comparison gets wild. Put $3,570 into Bitcoin today and you get about 0.049 BTC. Put the same $3,570 into ICP and you get around 1,400 ICP — roughly one three-hundred-thousandth of the entire ICP supply. That's on the order of 1,000 times as much of the supply per dollar.
So if ICP were ever valued like Bitcoin is now, you'd effectively be buying it today at a 99.9% discount. Bitcoin gives you a tiny position in a mature asset, which is generally not how great money gets made. ICP gives you a genuinely meaningful slice while the technology is still early. I hold about 6,500 ICP — one ten-millionth of the supply, the equivalent of owning 220-plus Bitcoin back in 2014. I put my own money here because I actually believe it. If you want a place to pressure-test how much conviction you actually have in a setup like this — and to reason it through with someone sizing up the same questions — you can book a one-on-one call with me and we'll work through it together.
The tokenomics: deflationary beats a fixed supply
People treat Bitcoin's 21-million cap as the gold standard and then dismiss ICP because it doesn't have a hard max. That's surface-level thinking. Bitcoin is effectively inflationary right now — miners unlock roughly three BTC every ten minutes, tens of millions of dollars a day, much of it dumped straight back onto the market. ICP is positioned to become deflationary as a major network milestone cuts inflation sharply and adoption burns supply, which means the float in the future could actually be smaller than it is today.
Then there's staking — the part Bitcoin simply can't match. If I'd held my Bitcoin from 2014 I'd be a multimillionaire, but it never would have paid me a cent of yield. Staked ICP can earn somewhere around 5–6% APR. Imagine earning that on an asset that's appreciating and deflationary at the same time. If ICP ran to, say, $100 and I had a few thousand staked, that's real five-figure annual income on a position that cost a few thousand dollars to build — without touching the principal. Bitcoin has no answer to that.
My verdict: 550 ICP today beats 21 Bitcoin in 2014
We're sitting near all-time lows for ICP. The opportunity was never the asset that just hit an all-time high a few months ago — it's the one at all-time lows that you can verify is real and genuinely different. When I weigh the supply math, the broader utility, the staking yield, and how badly misunderstood it still is, I honestly think 550 ICP today is a better setup than 21 Bitcoin was twelve years ago.
Let me be honest about the other side: nothing is guaranteed. ICP might not work out. Something strange could happen and Bitcoin could run even harder. That uncertainty is what makes this world interesting. But out of the thousands of cryptos I've researched over twelve years, ICP is the only one I'd make this analogy with — and I wouldn't say that about a single other coin. If you want to follow the full case as it develops, you can watch my ICP playlist here, and if you want the position-sizing side of this, I broke it down separately in 100 ICP is enough, 10,000 is God tier.