I had Blockchain Pill live for his first ever live stream, recorded on my channel as a video he'd also clip for X. So we got the best of both worlds: my live audience here, and the best audio and camera views going out on his side later. The whole point of the conversation was simple. We were there to talk about how ICP is the obvious future of crypto, and then we went down a few rabbit holes from there.
Blockchain Pill opened by laying out what he wanted to cover: how I keep my conviction high even when the price isn't moving the way we all want, what's happening in my day-to-day life, and some of the cool projects appearing inside the ICP ecosystem. I was ready for all of it. I'm all in on ICP right now, and I'm buying as much as I can. I just told everyone I'm going straight into the ICP command line with Claude Code instead of going through a middleman like Caffeine AI. Why go through a middleman when I can go straight into the command line? I'm even planning to build a whole new website on ICP for local offers, to try to get ICP out into my local community more.
Someone in the chat asked whether it's worth staying locked when the rates have come down so much and their maturity is sitting at 90 out of 100. At some point the maturity goes back up. It used to be 95 to 105, and they widened it to 90 to 110. I'm compounding my maturity right now, because when prices are cheap, you just compound the maturity so you increase your rewards later. When prices are higher, you stop compounding, take that maturity, and sell it. That's my basic approach. Someone else asked how DFINITY could take revenue from corporate web services that companies have used for years. Those companies run on their own infrastructure, but they pay to essentially secure all that money, and you can't just take that and put it on the blockchain the way ICP can.
Crypto degenerated into meme-coin mania — and that's the truth coming out
Blockchain Pill said something that had been on his mind for years. Three or four years ago he imagined that, looking into the future, crypto would be in a completely different place by now. Crypto used to be a space where innovation was the biggest thing. This cycle, it turned into meme-coin mania, with the actual technology projects, the decentralized-solution projects, pushed into the background. He pointed out that ICP itself started strong, running from around $3 up to $20 in its first six months, and then for the next couple of years it bled along with the rest of the space as people piled into meme coins and then into AI. He asked me what I thought actually happened.
I was genuinely excited about the innovation in crypto back then. You had Steem coming out as social media on the blockchain. You had Dash with privacy. You had Ethereum with smart contracts and DeFi. You had Cardano that was going to be better than Ethereum. One thing after another. But I think we've just realized they've been faking the whole time. Bitcoin was the real innovation. Ethereum improved significantly on that. Almost all the rest of these chains have done very little real innovation while massively over-exaggerating it, and people have finally found that out. They're all tricking, like sugar-daddy chains promising you can have whatever you want when they don't actually have it. They don't have innovation the way ICP does.
So when people degenerate into meme coins, that's actually people starting to see the truth: most of these blockchains are crap, and none of them are much better than Ethereum except ICP. The truth is prevailing. When I was in crypto before, I didn't dig that deep. You could get me with a tiny little narrative, like Steem, where I'd see upvotes and text on the blockchain and think it was fine, when really that "decentralized" social media was mostly hosted on Amazon and the centralized company controlled the domain. We've gotten smarter. We've seen through the fact that these coins have mostly been BSing the entire time. And the more people see that, the more they actually quit trying to innovate anything new, because at this point ICP has already won.
Blockchain Pill agreed that there are hundreds of layer ones and layer twos that are basically a copy of a copy of Ethereum, with zero adoption and zero innovation. People decided there was no reason to buy something like Matic when they could just stick to coins they actually knew, like Ethereum and Solana. But even Ethereum and Solana didn't manage a sizable new all-time high this time around, which is strange. He asked why people went chasing the AI wave, or AI and memory stocks, instead of finding a project like the Internet Computer that's actually innovating, especially when Dominic Williams has called ICP the third big innovation after Bitcoin and Ethereum.
It's taking people a while to get smarter and figure out what's really going on in crypto. Most people in person are extremely skeptical of crypto now. There was a euphoria in the previous cycles, in 2017, 2018, 2021, and now people are in a kind of dysphoria where they think all of it sucks and it's all speculation and marketing. People inside crypto think that, and people outside crypto think the same, which is why they never get in. But that means when they find something that's actually real, they're going to be really excited about it. I actually think people are so vulnerable right now, and so desperate for something real, that ICP could run to numbers that seem insane today, like $2,000 or $3,000. If insiders loaded themselves up on ICP and calculated that they had as much as they were going to get, that's exactly the setup. You can dig into more of how I think about all of this on my ICP Crypto playlist.
The "they" narrative
Remember a few years ago, when all the Bitcoin FUD narratives about how much energy it uses and how wasteful mining is were getting blasted across every major news outlet? China banned Bitcoin, Tesla had to sell some of its Bitcoin because it wasn't carbon neutral. Then where did all that go? Bitcoin didn't stop using the energy. The narrative just disappeared. From what I looked into, there were some steps taken to make mining more reasonable, like mining with volcanoes, but nothing to the extent that the entire FUD would just vanish unless it was largely fabricated narrative in the first place.
Blockchain Pill picked that up. When he says "they" are trying to hide ICP, people leave comments asking who "they" are. To him, "they" are the ones making the narratives and trying to lead people away from the real products and projects like the Internet Computer. He made the point that when people wake up to the fact that ICP exists and actually does what 99% of the other projects only claim to do, they're going to sell their entire bags, and all that money has to flow somewhere. Some goes to Bitcoin, some to Ethereum as the second big innovation, but a big chunk of it, coming out of those hundreds and hundreds of layer ones and layer twos, finds ICP. People underestimate how quickly ICP can grow. It's a roughly billion-dollar market cap project, which is nothing. He thinks it can fly right past the $10 and $20 resistance lines everyone draws, and that people will look back and wonder how they were ever scared when ICP was $2.
Blockchain Pill asked what I thought the "Ethereum moment" for ICP would be, the thing that finally makes people wake up to it. I think it happens when they calculate that their time is up on the rest of these coins, when they see there are enough people like us who've figured the game out, and that if enough more people figure it out, they lose. If I were them, I'd keep extracting as long as people stay ignorant, but I'd be watching closely, especially with AI, watching the conversations to see how many people have figured the game out. A few of us is fine. But once a certain level of the game is figured out, it's over. So I'd be watching the ICP announcements, and when certain things happen, like a government such as Pakistan getting its national messenger set up, or the cycle burn rate suddenly shooting up, that's the signal. Until then, if I were them, I'd be loading ICP this whole time, fighting it, trying to keep everybody out and keep it secret, and stacking, stacking, stacking.
Because look at it from their point of view. They can buy effectively infinite ICP at $2, get all of it, and be looking at a thousand-X just by pushing the influencer engines, pushing the exchanges, engineering it up. All the retail newcomers would be buying at 500, 1,000, 2,000, 3,000, 4,000. Imagine the whole narrative engine in crypto pivoting toward ICP, and it has the real tech behind it. It could go absolutely insane. Then, if I were them, I'd start dumping all over everybody at two or three thousand, take huge profits, crash it again, and launch a bunch of new projects on ICP. Rinse and repeat.
The SNS launchpad
Blockchain Pill brought up a possible revival of the SNS, the Service Nervous System, which I called the best launchpad in the world a couple of years ago. As a product it's incredible: you take your app, decentralize it, hand control to the token holders, and it acts as a perfect DAO where the community votes on what happens to it, and you raise money through a kind of IPO. He noted that at least one successful project came out of it, OpenChat, which still functions and is still being worked on, while maybe 95% of the rest have failed. He asked for my outlook.
In an ICP bull market, the SNS could go insane. You could see 100 proposals a day, 100 launches a day, with people in full euphoria about all these projects built on ICP that are going to change the world. I know a lot of us are down on the price and waiting right now, but that's the most insane bull-market setup ever, because the truth is behind it. The flip side is that if I were them, I'd launch 10,000 BS SNS projects, market the hell out of all of them, and most would just be rug pulls. So the SNS is incredible for both: it's amazing for great projects, and it's amazing for making something that sucks look legitimate.
Blockchain Pill added the economic angle. As the ICP price rises, launching an SNS actually gets easier in dollar terms. If you're raising 100K or 200K for 20 to 30% of the token supply, and ICP is $500, that's only a few hundred ICP, whereas at $2 you'd need tens of thousands of ICP, which is much harder to find. So the higher the price goes, the more activity there is in the SNS and across the ecosystem. It becomes a flywheel that pulls people in from all over crypto, because that's where the money is. ICP becomes easy to bull-post because it has everything going for it. People naturally start asking why they'd go to Solana when everything's hosted on Amazon Web Services and goes offline when AWS does. That feeds the whole machine and everybody looks like a genius. But first, he said, we need the spark.
I think the spark is again about them seeing the time is up. It might be a DFINITY announcement that Pakistan's national messenger app is live. It might be the Swiss government getting everything running, or an enterprise making a big onboarding, or some big Bitcoin layer-two project. We've already seen a bunch of signs that people are building. It's probably going to be a handful of things all happening around the same time. And then you'll have bigger accounts picking up on it, because ICP has the best organic community in crypto relative to its market cap. It could be pretty sudden, and it could look like a lot of small stuff at first. I remember when Altcoin Daily actually bull-posted ICP, and I thought, whoa, this is a big deal.
That's a big account that usually talks about a bunch of junk coins, and all of a sudden there's an ICP bull post. So the spark will probably be several things that look small to us, because we've watched one major announcement after another get ignored. To me the cloud engines look like the platform for it, because there are already enterprises sitting there waiting for cloud engines. So the cycle burn rate absolutely shooting up could be one of the first signs of real, provable adoption, not just Bob.fun burning cycles. Whenever that burn rate goes nuts, now you have proof.
Don't sell too early — my Dash and Bitcoin regrets
And then it becomes an exercise in patience. Right now, while it's sitting at $2, you're thinking, God, I just wish it would go to $20. I bought a thousand ICP recently and I'm thinking, man, if that went to 20 I could pay my rent for the rest of the year. But if it flies to 20, you're going to wonder why you only bought a thousand instead of 5,000 or 10,000. I'm up to about 7,500 now. My brother roasted me on the phone because I told him I took a cash advance on my credit card to buy a thousand more ICP. The cash advance is 12% APR and ICP could go up 10X, so to me it's worth it.
But the real challenge is not selling too early or selling too much too early. That's why you have to have some of it locked up. Say I dumped my whole bag prematurely at a hundred dollars, and then it kept going to 2,000. If I had a meaningful amount locked, I'd still be getting a thousand or two thousand dollars a day out of my locked ICP at that price. That's also why I'm compounding my maturity now. To me, selling too early is one of the actual biggest regrets in this game. When I had Dash, I bought a thousand Dash at $11 and dumped all of it at 87. I thought I was a genius. Then it went to 1,300. You'd think making $77,000 in a few months would feel smart, but missing out on being a millionaire because you took a quick profit doesn't feel smart at all. A lot of people in ICP now are going to feel like idiots when it gets really high, because we'll have dumped so much of our bags. It's all relative: when you buy at $2 and it goes to 50, you tell yourself you'll sell everything and buy back lower, and then it goes to a hundred and you feel like an idiot. That, to me, is the real challenge.
The two-year lock versus the old eight-year lock
Blockchain Pill asked how I feel about the two-year maximum lock that replaced the eight-year lock. Even though the APY came down, he thinks two years is a reasonable commitment and eight years was a little much, especially since he's already been covering crypto for four years, so four of those eight years would already have passed.
I think they did a really good job with Mission 70 to make this more mass-adoption friendly. Eight years is forever. We could be dead by then. Two years makes it much fairer for everyone. I remember looking at the eight-year option when I first started on ICP. I locked for a year, but I was resentful because I was getting such crappy rewards compared to someone who'd locked for eight years. I realized I either had to go all in on eight years or just dissolve. A two-year maximum makes it much more reasonable, where people are happy to lock for two years and then just leave it locked. At any point you can get all of it, and it's easier to compound the maturity the whole time instead of trying to cash out. Eight years made sense for the very beginning of the network, but the average person is never going to get into something and lock it for eight years. I've locked dumb coins like Avalanche for a year off of almost no data, but you don't casually lock something for eight years.
How I keep my conviction: I use the tech every single day
Blockchain Pill asked how I keep my conviction high and my energy levels stable through a bear market like the one we're in, and whether I thought we'd bottom in October. He's a fantastic interviewer, because I wouldn't even think to talk about a lot of these things.
I keep my conviction high based on research and based on the learning experiences I've had in the past. When I bought Bitcoin in 2014, I was in the right place at the right time, but I didn't do enough research, I didn't look at the long term, and I didn't put it all together. What strengthens my conviction now is that I use the technology every single day. I just bought jerrybanfield.org, and I'm going to use Claude Code to crank out another whole website on ICP that I'll then advertise on Google locally. The hard part with something like Bitcoin is that it's just sitting in your Coinbase account while you hope it goes up. It's hard to keep conviction when you're not doing anything with it. But I use this tech every day, and even purely from a web-hosting standpoint it's a huge deal. I've looked for years for the best web host in the world, and ICP is the best by far, and practically free. I have almost a thousand blog posts on my website scoring 100 on Google's mobile page-load test, which is God-level frustrating to even approach on WordPress. To put something like that on a managed WordPress setup I'd be paying around $100 a month. It's nearly free on ICP. I've paid something like $15 in ICP and still have most of my cycles sitting there. So my conviction stays high because I'm using the tech myself and I can see it's incredible. Once people get to try this, there's no going back to the rest of crypto or the old web. This is so much more advanced.
Blockchain Pill said this was an important point: actually using something, and finding it solves a real problem you've had in the past, is an eye-opening moment, and web hosting on ICP is a perfect example of that. Then he wanted me to tell viewers about my community, because he said I'm doing an incredible job with it and he wanted the blockchain crowd to learn what the Jerry Banfield Family is.
What the Jerry Banfield Family is
A year ago I had an awesome community on OpenChat. There were hundreds of people in it who'd only paid about one ICP to join, and I thought, I need a community like that. The problem was that everybody outside of crypto couldn't really use OpenChat back then, because the ICP wallet was too difficult and getting ICP was hard. So I set up something for the inner-circle people who really want to be able to DM me. There are lots of people who watch the lives and want to tell me which video to watch next, and I want the people who genuinely care and want to support me to have that direct access, to DM me, to post a picture, to have access to everyone else who feels the same way. What a lot of us are lacking in our lives is belonging and community, and that's what I'm providing now on jerrybanfield.com. I call it the Jerry Banfield Family, because it's not just about ICP. It's about building a life you don't need to escape from, across AI, crypto, money, and future tech, but it's also where you DM me about your dating life, ask about health, or meet up in person if you're in town in St. Pete. It's about having that inner circle. I realized I need that support too, and I need it from people who are continually invested. The trouble with the OpenChat community was that people paid one ICP and were then in for a year, so it wasn't people who were continually investing on an ongoing basis, and it got a bit too big.
I'd also get spam DMs from all kinds of people on OpenChat. So the Jerry Banfield Family is everybody brought together, very close. Joe Parys is in there, Sky and Will are in there, and several other people from the ICP community. I'm also going to start bringing in people locally from St. Pete and having some in-person meetups. I was praying about it, asking what I could give people that's most valuable, and a sense of belonging over time is genuinely valuable. That's why I named it the Family, like a Mafia thing: you join the family and you stay in indefinitely. We had a guy drop $390 to join for the whole year. It's $49 a month, or $390 for a year if you want to save money and support me up front. I see a lot of other YouTubers doing the same thing, selling Skool communities, including dating channels saying join my community and we'll help you out. I figured I need to have my own.
Blockchain Pill pointed out that as crypto picks back up, most of my audience comes from ICP and crypto, and he could imagine the group becoming a great place for alpha. He said that if we'd had this group before we discovered Tagger, people would have been able to share which projects looked undervalued and talk through them together. He framed it as the inner circle of Jerry Banfield, where you get direct access, you get to ask me questions, and you get to actually talk to me. He was kind enough to say that I take things seriously, that I do the research and don't do things half-assed, even with something like my dating life, and that I have a wealth of knowledge to give to people who actually open up and talk. He said he's excited to be part of the Family and looking forward to watching it grow into a cozy place for a lot of people, especially in the ICP community, and we agreed we're also going to do live streams inside the Family for people who want to tune into those.
Why my community is the one thing I sell
That alpha point matters to me, and I need to put more of this on the landing page. Going forward, it's very important to me that I don't get overhyped on certain projects out of self-interested profit motives, and I'm grateful for this community precisely because it's the one thing I sell. Having it protects me from getting into something like Tagger again. I got into Tagger thinking I'd bring the whole community, we'd all be one, we'd all promote it together, we'd all pump it, we'd all make money, and instead we all got ripped off. Now that I have the Jerry Banfield Family, I can look at everything else from the outside. When new projects launch on ICP, I can evaluate them objectively. If I'd had the Family before Tagger came along, I wouldn't have been nearly as bullish, because I wouldn't have had any reason to drag my community over there when I already had them in my own group, and I could have given much better, more honest reviews from the start. I want to stay centered on the people around me, and have us all in one place.
People will sometimes drop thousands of dollars on some awful coin. I'd rather they pay $49 a month, or $390 a year, and before they buy something, just DM me a screenshot of it. Give me a chance to roast it, or post it in the chat and let the rest of us roast it. The honest truth, though, is that a lot of us don't want to be talked out of our bad decisions. But we still need a place, a group where you can say "I'm thinking of dumping a bunch of money into this project, what do you think?" and have five people tell you "no, hell no, definitely not," and save yourself thousands of dollars. You can talk these things through with everyone inside the Jerry Banfield Family before you act on them. I'm also not going to review every tiny coin anymore. They all suck unless proven otherwise. That's the default now.
I don't try to time the market
Blockchain Pill asked where I think we are in this bear market and whether we bottom in October, with a relief rally or a straight trip down. I never try to predict the timing on this stuff, because if you're not one of "them," they're the ones who can set up timing on things. There was all this hype that 2025 was going to be a huge bull run, and crypto got destroyed. Literally the opposite of the expectation happened. So I don't try to time markets or charts. The only thing I look at is: am I buying ICP today or not? That frees my brain up, because the more you try to predict whether October is the month, the more you set up expectations, and then you over-stack now and get ready to sell, and what if ICP is $1.50 in October instead? I just ask whether I can buy more ICP today. It's at all-time lows, which is the best time ever to buy, and I let the market surprise me, because that's the most honest approach. The past price chart is finished, but none of us know what the future one looks like.
Blockchain Pill reminded me how fast things can change. When I'd taken my break from content creation, ICP was bleeding lower and lower, and then it ran from below $3 to about $10 in three days, a 3X move in a matter of days. He asked what that was like, hearing about ICP exploding through text messages. The funny thing is I'd hardly hear from anybody until ICP went up. I used to give out my phone number, and then my WhatsApp would blow up with messages about ICP, "Have you seen the ICP price?" while I wasn't even looking at it. As soon as the price dropped, my phone went silent again. That really showed me you need to do your research and have a long-term vision, because people got overexcited when the price went up and crushed when it came down. I did sell about 100 ICP at $9, and I'd sold most of my liquid ICP at five or six dollars when I deleted all my YouTube channels, which has worked out since I've been buying it all back at two. But I never touched my main stash. I never listed my account for sale. I've still got that 3,000-plus locked. The day-to-day price fluctuations shouldn't move you emotionally. If someone tells me I'm stupid because ICP went down while Hyperliquid went up 50%, I don't care about 50%. If I wanted 50% I'd do something else with my life. I'm here for 100X, for 1000X.
I want maximum laziness. I want to get in, do nothing, and not have to manage anything. That's what I realized with Bitcoin: the dumbest thing was that I literally had 60 Bitcoin, and I could have done absolutely nothing and been a millionaire. That's what I'm really here for in crypto, to do nothing and become a millionaire. But sometimes doing nothing is harder than doing something. It's so easy to find out about this project and then that project, and this narrative that's going to play out in the next few months, and the meme that's popular this week. There are so many traps in crypto designed to move you away from the gold and into the junk coins, and it's genuinely difficult to navigate.
That's why the long-term vision matters so much. When I look at ICP, I'm here for the next 10 years, Warren Buffett style: get into the right thing and just stay there forever. That's exactly what I should have done with Bitcoin. I remember selling 60 Bitcoin at $1,700, thinking it was fine, I'd just rebuy lower. Did I ever get to rebuy lower? Not in about nine years. So with ICP I don't want to get too overexcited when it runs to five, ten, twenty dollars. I'll feel great taking some profit, but I'd feel much worse missing out on the biggest gains. Can you imagine dumping all your ICP at $20 or $30 and watching it go to several hundred?
Take profits without selling everything
Blockchain Pill made the point that most of us shouldn't have dumped our entire stack at $20 this past cycle, but looking back, taking some profits there would have been smart. If you'd taken even 10% off at $20, you could have doubled your ICP stack now that it's trading at two dollars. The difficult part, he said, is that the moment you take profit out of one coin, you want to jump straight into another, chasing whatever you're hearing about next. His advice was to take that money off the table into your bank account, even hold it in cash, so it's harder to get it back into crypto, back into the casino. Don't dump your entire stack wherever ICP goes, but train the muscle to take a little off at 20, 30, 40, 50, 100, even just 1% or 2% at a time. He thought that's healthy, and I agree.
We ran a poll for the live audience on where they'd take serious profits on ICP, with options around $20, $50, $100, and $250. I'm glad I sold something like 17,000 or 18,000 dollars of ICP last year at five or six dollars, so I do believe in taking profits. That's why I run a three-tiered strategy now. The first tier is an indefinite lockup. If ICP went to a thousand-plus, that guarantees I'd be pulling something like a thousand dollars a day in maturity, so I can't miss out on the top. I believe at least one third of your ICP should be locked for two years, not dissolving, so you cannot miss out on insane profits. The second third should be locked shorter term, like the two-week lock I have, where I'm much more hesitant to lose my age bonus and stop earning my APR, so I just compound that maturity and I'm slower to pull the trigger. The final third is liquid. If it suddenly shoots to 10 or 20 dollars, I might dump that third, pay rent, pay down credit cards, and take those profits. If it then runs straight up from there, I still have so much ICP that I'm rich. If it comes back down, I stack a little more at 15, 10, 8, whatever it is. It's a delicate balance. The worst things you can do are never take any profit, or sell everything. Those are the two scenarios where you screw up.
Blockchain Pill put it well: the only way to actually see the coin trade at the top is if you don't sell the top, so you're going to round-trip some of it. If ICP goes to $1,000, he'll have taken profits many times along the way, with $100 being one of his big milestones for a sizable amount. But, as he said, ICP is $2 right now. If you put 5K or 10K in here and it reaches $100, that's 50 times your money. You're allowed to take some off the table and still be mega bullish. He thinks people will buy ICP at $500 the same way they buy Ethereum at a couple thousand today, because it'll make sense as a top cryptocurrency with all that value locked inside, and that we can't even fathom how high ICP could go if the only narrative becomes "ICP is crypto."
I like that narrative, because ICP is the truth in crypto, and I hope people can handle the truth. It's the real Web3 platform. If you have at least a third of it locked indefinitely, you can take that maturity and be guaranteed to sell the top, constantly. I have about 3,000 locked, earning roughly one and a half ICP a day, and I'm compounding it while the price is low. Even if I sell off the rest of my bag somewhere in the hundreds, that locked portion keeps selling the top every single day. As Blockchain Pill noted, if ICP hits $100, one ICP a day is about $3,000 a month, which in many parts of the world beats a salary. At one and a half ICP a day, that's around $1,500 a day at $100 ICP. I'd love to call my brother and tell him I paid off that credit-card cash advance I used to buy ICP with a single day of ICP maturity.
The reason I'm all in on ICP from now on is partly that I got my community into so much over the years. Collectively, the people following me have put tens of millions of dollars into ICP, and also dumped hundreds of thousands into other projects. Losing money on ICP is one thing, because that will almost certainly come back, but a lot of those other projects are finished and never coming back. I'd never again do what I did getting my community into all these different projects. Some of them on the SNS might at least get bought out, which gives those coins extra life.
That's actually a nice feature of the SNS, that you can buy out a project and take it over. But the real risk for me is fragmenting your investments, because we trend toward a negative bias. If you have five investments and one goes to zero while the other four do well, the one that went to zero hurts your feelings more than all the winners combined. So I just focus on ICP now. I had some EXE before but I sold it. I can't even be bothered to run my own meme coin anymore. It's a distraction. As far as meme coins go, EXE is the only one I'm holding on ICP. I have something like a fraction of a percent of it, and if it goes lower I might try to get up toward 1%, but that's my limit, to leave enough for everyone else who wants to accumulate. If there's one meme coin to do it with, and you like Bob and the Cloud Foundation, go with Cloud. But if you want a pure meme that doesn't revolve around a particular person, my bet is EXE, just for being the pure meme, and the community is still there after years of it being tough and difficult.
Blockchain Pill said the ICP community is very passionate, and that translates into the meme-coin space inside the ecosystem too. It's far more active than you'd expect for the market cap. You just add the ICP ticker to a post and you get two, three, four, five times the likes you'd normally get on X. He wanted to shout out everyone in the community, and so do I.
Enjoy this community while it's still pure
I encourage everybody to enjoy the community while it's where it is today. It's a pure community right now, full of people who are really here for the technology. It's going to get nuts when the price goes up. I remember back in 2023, I was just making regular ICP videos and all of a sudden my views went up 5X, every video getting 10,000 views, and it stopped within a month or two. Having this community now is precious. You might think we just need to pump the price, but there are downsides to that. Wait until it's not just me, Blockchain Pill, Bob, Mike, and a few others. Wait until all the big influencers come in making their ICP videos, and the community gets swarmed with new people ranting and going off in every direction. Some of us will feel nostalgia, like these were the best days. Some of us will feel like the future community got garbaged up and full of extractors, because when ICP blows up you'll have a ton of people bull-posting it while constantly launching their own coins and projects, here to make money off ICP more than to support the technology. So this might be the best, most pure, most organic state of the community we'll ever see.
Blockchain Pill agreed that money will be flowing everywhere. When ICP is $100 or $200, you won't need to spend a hundred ICP to take a sizable position in a meme coin; five or ten ICP does it, and the liquidity in the ecosystem will be incredible. He also agreed a lot of people and cabals from Solana, Base, and elsewhere will come to ICP to extract, because that's where the liquidity and the money will be.
I should say clearly, as both of us are obviously ICP holders: this isn't financial advice. None of this is me telling you what to buy. It's how I think about conviction, research, and my own decisions.
The live poll results came back with most people saying they'd take profit at $100, some at $50, and only a few at $20. That's serious conviction in the room; people aren't even interested in a 10X at $20. The average was probably around $120. I think $100 is a psychological level, and 80 to 100 dollars will be tough to break. But it only takes a narrative, only takes everybody else waking up to the fact that there's nothing else besides the Internet Computer, and it could go absolutely crazy, the same way Ethereum went from a couple of dollars to thousands.
What Bitcoin and Ethereum taught me about research and imagination
Blockchain Pill said the elders are wise because they've lived through more, and that I'm wise because I lived through Bitcoin without doing my own research, and through Ethereum without doing my own research. He thinks that if I'd looked into them the way I've looked into ICP, it would have increased my chances of holding, though he acknowledged it wasn't clear back then. Nobody was waving signs saying Ethereum was going to a thousand dollars. It was a gamble, and people didn't have that much conviction in Ethereum in the early days.
He's right. I remember getting my Ethereum wallet, the old kind you downloaded onto your computer, and taking my Ethereum off Coinbase. It was a huge deal when Coinbase listed their first crypto besides Bitcoin. I put it in a wallet and thought, okay, now I own something else, and I have no idea what to do with this. I actually used Bitcoin for a number of things back then. I got on a sketchy Bitcoin lending platform around 2015 or 2016, where you'd send a whole Bitcoin over and try to lend it, and the scraps of Bitcoin you'd lose back then would be worth more today than the whole thing was. But I didn't do enough research and I didn't think far enough into the future.
What I really notice, looking back, is that where a lot of us miss in our lives is that we're not optimistic enough. We don't see how good things could be. We're very good at seeing how bad things could be, and pretty good at seeing how incrementally better things could be, but most of us are deficient in imagining how amazing things could be. Our imaginations just stop. Blockchain Pill agreed that people tend to see the worst and don't focus on the good. At $200, I could easily imagine Bitcoin going over $1,000, but what was genuinely hard to picture was Bitcoin going over $100,000. If my imagination had been more open back then, that would have helped, but you're also vulnerable when you think that way, because you can apply it to the wrong scenario and convince yourself some junk coin or XRP is going to a thousand dollars and get sucked in.
So it's a delicate balance: you want that imagination backed and verified by research. That's what I love about ICP. When I think it could go back over seven or eight hundred, or to a thousand, I don't feel like I'm just letting my imagination run wild, because I've done a lot of research to validate that. That's the lesson from holding Bitcoin and Ethereum without enough research: I never built that deep, future-facing conviction. With ICP, I have.