I'm using the Internet Computer Protocol to build my own website out as a social network and e-commerce platform that accepts credit card payments and crypto payments, where you can buy digital products and physical products, where you can chat, where you can DM, where you can post like a forum, and almost anything else I can think of. I'm building all of this out at jerrybanfield.com now, and the most essential technological piece of this is the infrastructure it's on, which is ICP. Then, obviously, there's the ability to use AI to build it. I could use Codex, but I'm going to use Claude Fable to do the building and then get everything hosted on ICP.
This is what so many content creators are missing, and to me this is one of the main ways I need to bring ICP to people: to show what I can do with it and why the technology is needed. Shilling the coin on a day-to-day basis is pretty pointless, because the price may not go up for quite a while. But when you go to my website at jerrybanfield.com and see what it can actually do, you see that this is a website with thousands of pages on it.
Collapsing Everything Into One Website
I'm making a big change on it. I'm going to eliminate all these external links, like the ones to Cameo, and all these different products scattered around, like phone calls and other things, and I'm going to collapse everything down into my own site. It's going to be a big change. It's going to be things like my Officer Banfield audiobook, books, and comedy MP3s, all in one place.
I'm going to take all of my eBay auctions off. They were up there, and people put fake bids on them and then admitted to it via direct message, so I put the items back up with a buy-now option so the sales can actually happen. I'm going to collapse everything down, including the meme coin game that I've got on my website. All of this is going to become a social network where you can chat and you can purchase. I've already got the basic functionality of this built out, and what I'm going to do is make it much more advanced, because what I've seen so far shows me that I can build something much more advanced.
As a content creator, my main problem is that I'm always getting pimped out by third parties, and at the end of the day I'm always shilling somebody else's coin or somebody else's platform. What I want in the long term is to be able to have people go straight to jerrybanfield.com and never need to go anywhere else, because they will have a community there, like what Bobby O talks about with a hyper-local social media network. What we need is a combined social network and e-commerce platform, all in one.
I'm Closing My Skool Down
Now, you've got all kinds of course platforms out there, like Thinkific and Kajabi. You've got stuff like Skool, and I'm actually closing my Skool down.
Every dollar that everybody paid on Skool is going to get credit on jerrybanfield.com for the things I release in the future. So everybody who spent money on Skool will be able to just pop into jerrybanfield.com and start buying everything they want there.
Why I Would Never Build This on Amazon, Google, or a Vibe Coding Platform
ICP is the key piece of this technology, because I wouldn't want to build this with AI on Amazon or Google or with some vibe coding platform. The reason I wouldn't want to build this on a vibe coding platform is that the infrastructure itself would leave me very exposed. I would be exposed to getting censored or taken down off of Amazon or Google for any reason at all.
For example, there's an ICP origin story I love. I first thought it was Dominic Williams telling it, but no, it was Adam. Adam talks about why he started building Dragginz on ICP: he had a game that was profitable and had a community, and the hosting company and the investors decided to take the game offline. If he had had that game on ICP, that wouldn't have been able to happen, and what I want is to be free from platforms censoring me.
I built a massive following and made millions of dollars in sales on Udemy.com, and then, in my experience, they basically just stole from me. They banned me for no reason. They kept the hundreds of thousands of people that I brought to the platform with my marketing, people who had never heard of Udemy before. They just banned me, kept all the customers for themselves, kept selling to them, and cut me out. There's every incentive for these platforms to ban anybody, for not even any good reason, because they get to keep all the customers in their database anyway.
There are so many content creators on Patreon and on Skool, and it's very easy to get banned from one of those platforms even if you don't violate the policies. It's not just that, though. You don't have control. On Skool, I can't set it up to sell shirts. I'll probably put this shirt I'm wearing up for sale at some point on my website so that you can have a shirt that I wore in my videos, and you'll be able to find things like that in my store, but I can't sell shirts on Skool. I have to play by their exact rules. I can't set it up so that you can make posts that go out publicly on Skool, and I can't create my own games on Skool and put those there.
On jerrybanfield.com, I can do all of that. But if I didn't have ICP to build this on, I wouldn't feel safe building this anywhere else, especially after I got hacked.
Getting Hacked Showed Me How Fragile the Old Infrastructure Is
I got hacked for $20,000. It's a great reminder of how fragile our existing infrastructure is and why I believe we need blockchain-based infrastructure. What's special about ICP, and what is allowing me to build this, is that once I get my website up there, all the properties of the ICP blockchain protect it from hackers.
As a public figure online, I know that I get targeted by social engineering campaigns from sophisticated scam artists and professional criminals. I have people sabotage almost everything I do, from my eBay auctions, to posting all kinds of crap about me that isn't even true, to phishing me expertly through a social engineering campaign and then sliding malware onto my computer. So I have no doubt that if I just built some amazing e-commerce platform on a regular website, somebody who'd taken an ethical hacking course would take a shot at hacking it and screwing up the website.
Because it's on the blockchain, though, all the stuff that would work to hack regular websites is generally not going to work on ICP, because you have to go through the blockchain. Then I have my Internet Identity to sign in. So somebody is not going to be able to easily spoof some admin credentials, do some sneaky thing through a firewall, or fake something and get into my website and mess it up. They're not going to be able to do that.
No Censorship, Pay Only for What I Use, and Security Built In
I'm not going to be able to get censored by some third party like Amazon or Google if they don't feel like hosting me anymore, and I'm not going to have to pay for computation and storage I don't use. I only pay for what I actually use. Even more than that, I've got security built in. I already have an identity solution, so I don't have to trust somebody else. I have id.ai, which signs in through the blockchain, and everybody else who uses my site gets all the security benefits too.
I don't have to worry nearly as much about my customers getting all their information stolen or having a data breach on my website. Normally, if you were building with AI in a regular hosting environment, those would be serious concerns. Now, the AI still needs to do security audits, and it can build ineffectively or leave little loopholes open even on ICP, but because everything's on the blockchain, it's so much harder to mess with.
Resilience When I Go Viral
Then I have resilience. If one node goes down, my website is still going to serve all over the world anyway. Something like CrowdStrike, when that happened and half the internet went out, is much less likely to take my website down.
Even more importantly, whenever I go viral and get a whole bunch of traffic again, as I seem to always do, all I need is to leave a few hundred dollars, maybe $1,000, of ICP sitting there in cycles, and my website will continue to serve. Even if a million visitors come in and I make $100,000 in a single day from people buying stuff, it's not going to crash.
If I built something like this on Amazon or Google, what happens is you have to pick out a certain level of server. If you get too much traffic through it, it just crashes. On ICP, the nodes have high levels of computation that they can put through. If my website gets queried a whole bunch and then updated a whole bunch in a single day, it just rips through cycles, and that payment goes to the node providers. This is so much more of a scalable and secure setup, and that's extremely important with AI.
Orthogonal Persistence Keeps New Features From Breaking Old Ones
Further than that, as I build this website out to be more and more complicated, the risk of updating something that breaks everything else continues to increase. With Motoko, though, I've got orthogonal persistence, so I can keep building this website out in a way that, at least according to everything I've seen, should not break anything else I add to it.
For example, how much would it suck if you had direct messages and forum posts on a Reddit-style forum, and then you wanted to add a feed to pull all of it together, and you added that feature and it broke the rest of the website? Now you're looking at having to start over or trying to roll back the code or something. With ICP, it warns you and stops you from doing something that will mess up your existing data schema, and that is ridiculous. It's really important, so I'm really grateful for ICP's technology, because this is what I've always needed as a creator.
I mean, if I'd been able to send people to my website instead of Facebook, instead of YouTube, instead of Skool, if I'd just always been able to send people to my website all the time, they could do everything there and wouldn't have to go anywhere else. I could offer them comedy MP3 downloads, I could offer games that I've made, and I could offer all of that in one place.
The One Limitation Right Now: Video
Someday, I hope this setup will be advanced enough that I can just put my videos directly on jerrybanfield.com. Videos are the one limitation right now. Technically I could serve them on the blockchain, but the difficult part is that the cost and the deliverability of streaming or downloading the videos is a little bit prohibitive. For example, I filmed a vlog yesterday, and that vlog was four gigabytes. Just putting that on the blockchain by itself, I'd be looking at probably $20 a year to store that one video. Then I'd be paying additional costs for people downloading it and streaming it.
Right now, I can easily put up gigabytes of MP3 files. What you'll see happening is that the bigger I build my website, the more ICP I'm going to have to burn. I've tested this on a smaller level with less data. I've tested having my Officer Banfield book available to be downloaded as an ebook, and it's pretty cheap. So I'm looking to scale this up to hundreds of different MP3 downloads.
Of course, I can always sell a course on my website that has links to unlisted YouTube videos or videos hosted somewhere else. It's kind of ghetto, but I can still do it. I'm going to have the infrastructure in place now, and when ICP's capabilities get upgraded over the next few years, hopefully we can go straight to serving video too.
AI Plus ICP Is the Game Changer
This is an absolute game changer. It's two things coming together at once: AI being able to build entire websites and advanced platforms like this, and ICP being able to provide the infrastructure where the AI can build in an environment that's safe, tamper-proof, and verifiable.
The two of those things are necessary together; either one by itself wasn't enough. ICP's infrastructure was pretty useless to me before, because it was just too expensive to get a developer to do this. Building this kind of website out could cost anywhere from $20,000 to $100,000 just to have a developer build it in the first place. On top of that, you have to pay them to maintain it all the time. So today I went through with Claude and did a plan to build all of this out.
Why WooCommerce Never Worked for Me
I've tried to build things like this in the past, and it was too much effort. I built it with WooCommerce. It took a massive effort. Things were always breaking. It was expensive. There were security vulnerabilities, and the customization was extremely limited.
What's amazing with this is that I can instantly customize it. "Here, put a notification bell in the upper right corner." Good. "Now, make that a sign-in button." I can just tell the AI in real time to change that, move that, add this, subtract that, and it just does it. I built a WooCommerce version of this years ago, and it was horrible. So to me, this is a major use case for ICP. It's a huge use case, and it's really important.
Maybe I can even find content creators who'll pay me thousands of dollars to help them get this set up for themselves, because cutting out Patreon, cutting out Udemy, cutting out Thinkific and Kajabi, cutting out Skool, cutting all these third-party platforms out and taking full control is, to me, essential going forward.
One Destination, $100,000 in 100 Days
I've set a goal that I want to make $100,000 in the next 100 days, and I see the number one thing I need to do. I need to have one destination to send everybody to all the time, and then I need to be able to make serious amounts of money there.
Right now, I've used kind of a ghetto basic setup with Stripe payment links and simple ICP payments. I'm going to scale this into full cart checkouts where you can add 50 products to your cart and pay one time with Stripe, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and several different cryptos. I'll start offering discounts if you pay in my meme coins, JBBJ or $JERRY on Robinhood, and I'll get those linked on my homepage.
How cool is that? I can take regular credit card payments. I can take crypto payments. I can offer discounts for my meme coins. I can build all of that out on ICP. And I can access it anywhere in the world, on any of my devices, with the exact same Internet Identity that I use to access all the rest of my ICP. This tech is amazing.
Amazing Tech Does Not Mean the Price Goes Up
At the same time, though, it doesn't mean the price is going to go up in the foreseeable future. In fact, I've watched a lot of other coins, like NEAR Protocol, pumping more than ICP, and that's a good example of why most of my ICP is now locked long term. For me, this is not a short-term thing. There's no marketing to push this thing in the foreseeable future.
All my marketing from now on goes to jerrybanfield.com. If I'm talking about ICP, it's to get people to jerrybanfield.com. ICP is a conversation topic; jerrybanfield.com is the destination.
So I'm not encouraging anyone to buy ICP anymore. Maybe this is another video, but in my experience, in the short term there are going to be better profits in other places, like meme coins, liquidity providing on MaxFi, and hell, even stocks. Lots of times there are much better gains there than there are in ICP. This is my opinion, not financial advice.
I think ICP will have its day price-wise someday. But there's every reason for it not to until the technology is being used a hell of a lot by people like me, and by governments and companies, who are actually paying ICP to host. We could need years more for that to happen, especially if DFINITY is not willing to set up a marketing fund on the Network Nervous System and support people like me who've brought so many people into it.
Why My Channels Are Now About Tech and Money
This is why I've rebranded my channels to be about tech and money instead of crypto and ICP. There are a lot of technology things to talk about right now. ICP is an amazing piece of technology and amazing infrastructure for the future, but there are lots of other things going on too, and I'll talk about those as well. If you want to follow along as I build all of this, the videos go into my Tech playlist.
I appreciate all of you who have stayed with me, and I invite you to see the evolution of jerrybanfield.com and to participate in it.
Anything you buy from me now, like the chat membership, will transfer to credits in the future. I'm going to have an awesome leaderboard showing off who has spent the most money, and I've already got that right now.
This thing is just going to keep getting better and better and better, and I hope to see you on jerrybanfield.com.