Justin Bons recently said ICP is a scam, and Dominic Williams had a killer reply as usual. What we're going to do today is deconstruct these weak critiques that people lay against ICP and show how absolutely shallow they are. In fact, the more people that critique ICP and try and go after it, the stronger it looks because of how incredibly defensive it is.
Justin's "Terrible Design" Post
Let's start with the post that Dominic replied to on X, which Blockchain Pill sent me this morning. Justin says that ICP is a terrible design. For the 52,000 supposed views this post has, almost nobody is going to even look further. All everybody's going to see is the 52,000 views — they're not going to look into the details. His entire goal is just to make ICP look, in his words, dangerously misleading. This is a serious critique: he's saying they are dangerously misleading the public, and that ICP can be taken down by hacking a handful of nodes. Okay — well, in five years, why hasn't that happened then?
He goes into all this stuff, but it's useless, because I'll show you my reply and I'll show you Dominic's reply.
My Reply: A Ledger-Chain Maximalist Frame
Here's my reply: Justin's arguing from a ledger-chain maximalist frame. In other words, Justin is trying to use Bitcoin and Ethereum to compare against ICP. But ICP makes all of them irrelevant — and either he doesn't know what he's talking about, or he does. My reply digs into it: ICP is a decentralized cloud world computer architecture. If he evaluates ICP by whether it looks like Solana, Sui, NEAR, or conventional chains, he keeps missing the thing that makes ICP important. This is not a small mistake. This is his entire critique collapsing.
Here's what is key out of my reply: either Justin does not understand the value of ICP's architecture, or he does understand it and he's choosing to frame it in the most damaging way possible, because ICP threatens the narratives behind the chains he prefers. For example, Justin Bons posted on July 1st that NEAR is the most scalable and decentralized crypto today. Ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous, Justin.
Why I Built Crypto Tech Cap
I wanted to make the ultimate rebuttal to all these bullshit kinds of arguments. So I created my own website hosted directly on the ICP blockchain: cryptotechcap.com. If you want to get to the truth and cut through all the bullshit that people like Justin are spinning, then why don't we rank crypto by technology and not market cap? And why don't we use some objective zero-or-one questions to define exactly what your blockchain can and can't do?
My site has full transparency: a hundred questions for a hundred of the top layer ones. That's 10,000 zeros or ones in the spreadsheet, covering the full stack — questions like: can the native application run smart contracts? A hundred questions, and ICP answers yes to 97 of them. Look at NEAR Protocol that Justin's hyping up: it answers yes to 20 of them. That's the difference between the technology — 97 capabilities you would want something to do that are very important, versus NEAR's 20. Now, I'm going to go through and do deeper research to get these answers as perfect as possible, but no matter how it comes out, ICP is going to be utterly dominant over everything else.
Then I get to the tech cap multiple: in my view, ICP should have a $1–2 trillion market cap instead of $1–2 billion. I think it should have at least a thousand-X upside to go to where Bitcoin is today, while almost everything else should be down. So if you want to stop looking at CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap, this is what you should look at: what can the technology do? Not whether people can talk like Justin — out here saying that ICP has a terrible design, but then NEAR is the most scalable and decentralized crypto today. Go into your AI program, go into your favorite AI — if you've got ChatGPT Pro, use that — and ask it: which of these is true? Because one of those claims is obviously bullshit.
Dominic Williams' Reply: Node Count Does Not Equal Security
Now let's look at Dominic Williams' reply. ICP uses a highly sophisticated security and decentralization model, which possibly is over Justin's head — but possibly it's not. Possibly Justin does understand this and he's intentionally trying to distract from it. As Dominic put it, Justin's latest misunderstandings provide a good segue to talk about this: node count does not equal security or independence from centralized actors.
This is what you need to see in crypto: almost everybody who's talking doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about. Dominic Williams does know what he's talking about. I've looked at thousands of people talking in crypto, and Dominic is one of the absolute few people whose opinion I trust, because I've read what he said and I've read what everybody else said. Dominic actually knows about this technology and is at the forefront of it. Almost no one else has a clue what they're talking about in the bigger picture — they know how to talk little tiny things, little ideas, but they don't have this higher level of understanding. Bobby Oh is another person who actually understands this stuff very well.
So look how easily Justin's critiques fall apart. Node count does not equal security or independence. Here's the thing about a lot of these other networks: if someone controls enough stake to control a network, it doesn't matter how many nodes they have. Justin goes and celebrates Solana — he artificially inflates the transaction metrics for Solana in some of his other posts — and then totally ignores that probably half the Solana nodes are controlled by one entity, which ruins any decentralization. There are all kinds of ways that these existing networks with large numbers of nodes can be controlled by one entity or a group of closely related entities, which to me looks like almost all of these networks.
The Truth About "Decentralized" Networks
This is the truth: there's no meaningful decentralization behind all these node counts and numbers. Take Ethereum — there's no more meaningful decentralization left in Ethereum. You've got liquid staking providers, and then Ethereum insiders and early holders have almost everything. There are probably five or ten people that totally control Ethereum, and then it doesn't matter how many nodes there are, because it's five or ten people. What Dominic's post is saying is: why don't you just get those five or ten people and have them host it all, instead of trying to separate it out and pretend like there's all these nodes and all this decentralization when it's really five or ten people?
Dominic goes into more specific details too. For example, he shared a video from a senior Ava Labs technical administrator claiming the company and its CEO own a huge portion of the AVAX supply and secretly operate the majority of its nodes.
Almost all of crypto is lies, secrecy, non-disclosure agreements, and people who don't understand what the hell they're saying just blabbing off the mouth like Justin. Or maybe he does understand — I don't know whether he understands — but what he's saying is provably false and does not make sense in any kind of bigger context. And yet these are the people that a lot of crypto retail are listening to, thinking that they're getting information.
Building Your Own Bullshit Meter
The goal should always be, personally, to be leveling yourself up to where you can discern the truth from the false yourself. I do that this way: the more I am authentic and honest, the harder it is to lie to me, because your lying sounds weird to me. Justin's post just sounds weird to me — this is inaccurate, and I just know it. Even if I didn't understand this subject, I would have a feeling that this is bullshit. Even if I had no idea who he was or what he was talking about. This is how I experience reality. It's not 100% accurate, but I often have a feeling when people are bullshitting me or misleading me, which makes life much easier for me.
Here's the incentive that Dominic looks at: aside from helping all these cryptos that have all these quote-unquote nodes that are really being run by a handful of people, it helps them get rich and it gives them control over the networks — all while people like Justin go around saying that this is proof it's decentralized. And it allows them to keep the rewards down if they want.
What Real Decentralization Looks Like on ICP
Going further into the details, Dominic looks at how, when you have all these anonymous node operators and stakers in these other networks, that's not any kind of real decentralization. I read Dominic's entire post in detail, then put it through AI to make sure I got the key points of it on top of that. You can just see there's a whole other level of thinking on ICP. Instead of just trying to throw a bunch of quote-unquote anonymous nodes out there, they've broken down exactly what gives you the best real decentralization: having people prove their identity in order to even run a node. That makes it much easier to stop all these fake anonymous "decentralization" entities that are just acting as one across a bunch of nodes.
And I love what Dominic said about the legal point in this design. Simply put, as a result of the Internet Computer Protocol requiring node providers to be known — KYC, presenting yourself to the entire governance body — if node providers act in an evil way, for example colluding to corrupt their subnets, they become legally liable worldwide for the results of their nefarious actions. If they seriously disrupt the correctly functioning network, they could face criminal prosecutions under laws such as the UK's Computer Misuse Act from 1990.
So which of these systems sounds better? Having a bunch of quote-unquote anonymous nodes on your quote-unquote decentralized network, and then talking about how many nodes you have, when there's no proof that more than one person actually runs all those nodes a lot of the time? And then if anything happens with those nodes, since they're anonymous, everybody just stands back and says, "Eh, it's not my problem — my node went down, this happened, that happened." That creates a perfect environment where, in some cases, it'd be profitable for node operators to try and steal from or cheat the network, even if you do get slashed. Meanwhile, on ICP, if you go and publicly dox yourself and put your node up, there's every single incentive to behave as a node provider, because you could be facing criminal charges worldwide for misbehaving.
ICP's system is so far advanced, so well thought out beyond these other blockchains like NEAR and Solana — it's just ridiculous. And you can get at the truth of this by asking questions about what the network can actually do.
Don't Get Fudded Out
This is a perfect example of why you should never listen to these people giving shallow critiques of Internet Computer Protocol. You generally should not even read anything on X, because it would be better to take in nothing than to take in junk data. Now, doing this, I have a lot of resilience. I have a strong bullshit meter, so taking in something like this simply adds fuel for my videos. But if you don't have diamond hands, if you haven't researched the shit out of this for a really long time — I would hate to see people in ICP actually getting fudded out by reading something like this and panic selling their coins. Is this going to happen 99% of the time? No. But this is typical of what is happening on X. And if you can see what is typical, and then see how quickly it falls apart behind real investigation and real research, you can see the necessity of becoming someone who knows the truth, looks up the truth, digs deeper about the things that are important — and then stays out of all this other shit. Like this: "NEAR is the most scalable and decentralized crypto today." Ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous.
So don't get fooled, don't get played — look at the technology. I've got Crypto Tech Cap here to help you, and I share more videos like this one in my ICP Crypto playlist. If you want the best with me, schedule a one-on-one call. You can get help — I'll help you get your website on ICP. I have four or five websites on ICP now. I made Crypto Tech Cap in a single day using ChatGPT Pro and Claude, with all my own research and ideas in there, fixing it all up. This is what you can do on ICP. And you can't do that shit on NEAR, Justin. You can't even do anything close to this on NEAR.
If you want NNS and staking help, you want to get your ICP wallet set up, get your crypto off of Coinbase, you want to promote your project, or you want to ask me questions — book a one-on-one call with me.