I am living the life of an Internet Computer Protocol millionaire today, and I'm going to share with you exactly how I'm doing that, starting right now. This is my own experience and my own opinion, not financial advice, but the core idea is simple: in my view you don't need to wait or hope or struggle or hustle or grind for years. You can start living this life right now, in your mind, way before there's any evidence or external manifestation of it. I'll tell you what the lifestyle looks like, why I think this matters so much, and a bunch of practical things I'm actually doing that anyone can verify. Most importantly, I'm leading by example.
This has been quite a journey for me. I've realized that if I'm truly on the way to being an ICP millionaire, then I should live like that's the reality today as much as possible, and my actions now should match, as closely as I can manage, my actions when it's observable and shareable with everybody else. So first, what does my life look like living today the same way I'll live when I have a million-dollar ICP portfolio?
This thinking has led me to make several key changes. What I've found is that if you start to identify as something — for me, an ICP crypto millionaire — then external reality starts coming toward you, because you change your behavior and your expectations. You start preparing for it to happen. And then one day you wake up and everybody else can see it too, but you were living that way a long time ahead of time.
Why ICP, and what's actually in my portfolio
So first, why ICP and why not some other crypto? I've done a lot of videos on that already, and you can watch more of them in my ICP Crypto playlist. My honest opinion: you can't just ape into any old altcoin and imagine you're going to be a millionaire, because most altcoins, if you look at history, go to zero and are bad in the long run. I've put 10 years into crypto before this. I've researched thousands of altcoins, and I've spent hundreds of hours researching Internet Computer Protocol. To me it is different from everything else. It is alien technology. In my view it is the most advanced thing in crypto by far, with nothing even close to comparable. That's why I believe I have the opportunity to create an abundance of wealth as part of being invested in ICP, before hardly anybody else knows about it.
The most critical thing, though, is to start with an internal mindset of wealth. There are many people in the world today who have millions of dollars in net worth, but from my point of view they're not living the kind of lifestyle I'd be interested in living if I had that money. So I've been asking myself a lot: how will you live when your ICP portfolio is worth millions, when you're getting hundreds of thousands of dollars of passive income a year and you literally don't have to do anything for money? And can you live that way today, now? Because the more you can live in the exact existence of what you want, the faster I believe it comes to you.
I believe in full transparency, so let me describe the portfolio I currently have access to. Right now I have 3,000 ICP locked up indefinitely, plus a couple hundred staking. I've turned off auto-staking of new maturity, so I'm collecting my rewards — about one and a half ICP a day comes in as maturity. I just click spawn a neuron, and then I can sell it on Coinbase. It's a money printer, a legal, legit money printer. I also have another neuron with about 500 ICP, so roughly 4,000 ICP in total, plus about 200 liquid ICP.
Here's what 10 years in crypto taught me: several times — several times — I had enough Bitcoin that literally all I needed to do was nothing and just sit on it. When I had 60 Bitcoin in 2017, all I had to do was wait and I'd have been a Bitcoin millionaire. But I wasn't good at waiting or being patient. Now I am good at waiting and being patient, and to me that is a big sign of wealth. A wealthy person can afford to be patient and wait.
So the first key step is honestly asking: are you living as a wealthy person or as a broke person today? Because a wealthy person can afford to wait. If there's a future where the ICP I have now is worth millions, then all I need to do is wait — and the best way to wait is to start living now how I'm going to live then. I'm convinced that also makes it happen faster.
Why I stopped grinding out crypto videos every day
So I looked at my own behavior and asked: am I acting like an ICP crypto millionaire now? And in the areas where I'm not, what do I need to change? One of the first places I caught myself not living like one was grinding out way too many crypto videos.
Think about it this way. When I have over a million dollars in ICP and I'm getting hundreds of dollars a day in passive income, am I going to use my time grinding out crypto videos every single day? Am I going to validate my worth by how many views my videos get? No. Why would a creator be obsessed with views? Because of the money they represent. And I realized that as an ICP crypto millionaire I'm not going to be grinding out crypto videos every day — maybe one video a week to say I told you so, but no more than that.
When I was grinding out those videos every day, to some degree it's a sign that you're broke, because people who are broke are often in the position of having to grind and hustle and struggle just to get by. To me, a millionaire lifestyle has no grind, no struggle, no hustle. You've got plenty of wealth, so you can afford to take time to do things that matter, to show up, to be generous. There's no way I'll be grinding out all these crypto videos when I'm an ICP millionaire. I'll put one video out a week to help people, and then I'm going to do the things I actually want to do — the things that in the long term are far more helpful and inspiring.
Like music. I just published my band's dance album, and as an ICP millionaire I'm excited to have time to make music every day. Music is the most free way I can express myself. These crypto videos are stifling; there's a very small range I can use my voice in. With music I have practically infinite possibilities. Music can alter moods and speak to you, and I'm having so much fun learning about that. This is one of the things that got me to stop cranking out crypto videos every day. At what point are you just going to make the transition? Ideally I'd have liked to be making music the whole way up, because I don't want to be just learning how to make music once I'm a millionaire with all the time in the world.
The same goes for video games. As an ICP millionaire, I'm playing games like FTL: Faster Than Light — games that are fun, challenging, and help me learn and grow. There were a lot of times in the last two years when I refused to play any games because I thought I needed to put everything into my crypto channel. Why? Because deep down I think I felt I didn't have enough money. To me a crypto millionaire is somebody who can afford to play a reasonable amount — not 10 hours a day, but an hour or so to escape, have fun, and challenge the brain. In the last few days I've played maybe four hours of FTL and it's been awesome. And what I haven't been doing is grinding out crypto videos every single day.
This is specifically why I'm making this video — because you need to see how counterintuitive some of this is, and looking back on it in the future is going to be amazing. Over the last year I was grinding like crazy, cranking videos out, and I had a second crypto channel I was also grinding on. Sometimes I was putting up as many as five crypto videos a day — two on one channel and three on my original. I was pouring hours into making crypto videos when, honestly, I don't care about crypto that much. I got into crypto because I wanted to have more money, and then I found Internet Computer Protocol. I'm done. There's nothing else to do except wait. And it's harder to wait when you're obsessed with crypto every day. So I rebranded that second channel to Jerry Banfield Reviews, because I'm very passionate about reading books.
What books taught me about a wealthy mindset
If you want to make your life better, reading books is one of the best things you can do. Books expand your perspective. I just finished Nelson Mandela's autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, and I'm going to put up a video summarizing it and the main things I learned on my reviews channel.
One thing that stood out is that Mandela was picturing being a free man one day, picturing free elections. In 1960s South Africa, on a life sentence, with the government in absolute power promoting apartheid, that would have looked delusional to almost anyone. Yet there he was in prison, living in his mind as if he were already free, picturing what it would be like to walk out. He even did things like keep a garden in prison, play tennis, and make the best of 30 years — building great relationships and expanding his mind. He was able to live more freely in prison than many people live now in freedom, because in his mind he was already a free person. That came to manifest 30 years after he started thinking that way, and the time wasn't wasted, because he was living as free as he could every day.
This is why books are so powerful: you read hundreds of autobiographies like this and you're no longer stuck in your own point of view. Another book, The Courage to Be Disliked, which I just reviewed, was really helpful for getting me into this ICP millionaire mindset. What's sad, and what you see a lot in crypto, is people with absolutely abundant wealth — millions in coins — acting like they're broke. They're mindlessly grinding out clickbait titles, and you can tell it's never enough money. There's only enough money or not enough money. I wonder, if some of these people who don't even seem happy just appreciated all the money they already had, what would they do with their time? Would they even make crypto videos?
A lot of the crypto videos I made were based on "I need more, I need more money." I've done the grind. I ground my way into a half-million-dollar crypto portfolio in a year and a half in 2017–2018, going from a few thousand dollars to half a million. And here's what I learned: if you live that broke life inside — never enough, grinding, hustling, struggling, suffering — then even if you get the million-dollar portfolio, it won't be enough. You could have a million dollars and still feel and act like a broke person inside. Few things look more ridiculous from the outside than someone who obviously has wealth going around acting poor. And I realized I'd been acting in many ways like a poor person.
Why I changed how I do one-on-one calls
One of the big changes I just made is with my one-on-one calls, because I kept asking: when I'm an ICP crypto millionaire, am I going to do calls the same way? You used to be able to pay $100, then I raised it to $200, then $300, because my call schedule kept filling up. But many of the calls I did not enjoy. I appreciated the money, but I didn't enjoy having my time taken up. Some calls were a pure pleasure and I'd have done them for free; others felt like showing up to work, and even at $300 an hour it still wasn't enough — it was like, am I really a wealthy person if I just let anybody hand me $300 and talk for an hour?
I realized that as an ICP crypto millionaire, I won't accept $300 from just anyone to talk to me. I wouldn't let just anyone take an hour of my time for $300, or $500, or $1,000. Why? Because when you have true wealth, you don't need more. You have enough, so you can say no. To me, living the lifestyle of an ICP crypto millionaire means being comfortable saying no to what you're not interested in doing. That means being able to quit a job you don't like.
So I deleted all the toxic crypto reviews off my channel, went down to one video a week, made music, put out thoughts videos, and played games — and people stopped scheduling one-on-one calls, and it's been so nice. I love not having to talk to somebody just because it's $300. But I still want to talk with people; I just want to be choosy about who. There still needs to be some way to ask, and it can't be completely free, because as a millionaire I'm not going to sort through a pile of comment applications.
So here's what I'm doing today: if you're part of my community — people who are invested in my creativity — and you've gotten over even a minor pay gate, you've jumped a hurdle that maybe 99% of people won't. That excludes the 99% who don't really care about talking to me. Then, if you want a call, you have to sell me on it, probably by making a video that helps me get to know you and explains why you want to talk. A lot of my old paid calls were ICP projects pitching me, which made sense when I was cranking out ICP videos every day. But as an ICP millionaire I'm not reviewing these SNS launch projects. I don't need to. I'm not going to invest in hardly any new ICP projects, because I don't need more money — I'll only contribute to ones I want to support in a more charitable way. Reviewing projects for videos is boring to me, and honestly most regular people don't need to concern themselves with them either. The calls I'd actually love are with the people who'd love to talk to me and care enough to make a video explaining why.
I've hammered on this because it's a concrete example: I am turning down hundreds of dollars a day that people were consistently scheduling. Back when I was grinding crypto, at $300 a call I was making $5,000–$6,000 a month on calls (and then blowing some of it on Marvel Snap). Do you see that I'm literally saying no to thousands of dollars a month in order to practice what I'm talking about here?
Why I'm not rushing the process
I know many of you think that's crazy, because I could take that money and DCA more, throw more into my neuron, hold more liquid ICP, and become a millionaire faster in external reality. But when my day-to-day life is already lived as if I'm an ICP crypto millionaire, I see no need to rush. There's perhaps nothing more important I can share than that: I see no need to rush the process. I already feel it inside, and I believe it's coming. I can afford to be patient and enjoy the ride.
The ideal scenario is that by the time you read this, you might already be looking at my wallet thinking he already has millions of dollars of ICP. By the time you see this, that could be true, because I don't check the price. I do not check the price, because I'm already living as an ICP crypto millionaire. It doesn't matter what the price is.
The price doesn't matter when you already live it
Think about it this way. When I do have millions of dollars that you can verify, I'll already have been living as an ICP crypto millionaire the whole time. Does it matter whether I have $900,000 worth of ICP, or $1 million, or $1.2 million, or $1.5 million? Who cares? And that's how I feel today, too. I don't care whether I have $100,000 of ICP today, or $200,000, or a million, or fifty thousand. It doesn't matter, because I'm already living the same lifestyle now that I'll live with whatever it's worth later, and I'm exemplifying that by making the changes I'd make then, now.
I know part of your mind is screaming that this is crazy — that I could speed it up by taking calls and DCA-ing thousands more a month and becoming a millionaire in agreeable, external reality faster. Logically you're right. If I kept accepting calls and grinding out crypto videos and reviewing altcoins, I might get there months or even years sooner. But would I truly be wealthy living that way? If my portfolio hit a million dollars, would I stop taking calls and grinding videos? Or would I look back and wish I'd uploaded my albums to Spotify instead?
I've tried, and I know that if I grind as fast as possible to grab a million dollars of ICP, I can't do my Spotify. I can't publish all this music. I don't have time to read all the books I want and review them, or to make autobiographical videos about the things that really matter — like my relationship with my mother, the things that have really challenged me in life. And what good is my life if I get to be an ICP millionaire but all I've done the whole way there is grind and try to get it, and everything else has been neglected? This is why so many people, in order to validate their position, grind and grind and grind to get somewhere — and then just keep going.
What good is the destination if the journey is misery?
I know people personally who've attained the status of crypto millionaire starting from very little, and yet day to day they're stressed out. They're not enjoying the ride, not having fun. It's a job, grinding and grinding. However you got there — grinding some other job and putting the money in, or grinding crypto videos out — what good is a life where you sacrificed to reach a goal only to find the place you arrived at isn't where you want to live?
When the money is actually pouring into my bank account from selling rewards at the prices they'll be when I'm an ICP millionaire, I want to have seven other YouTube channels besides this crypto channel — seven channels I've poured my time and energy into each week the whole way there. I want a Spotify account that, instead of a few listeners, has a few more listeners. I want to already be really good at making music by the time I have the money to make music indefinitely. This is how you really make change in your life: not by changing your external circumstances, but by changing your internal reality, the way you think. Because the day I'm an ICP crypto millionaire, I don't want to have to change anything about my lifestyle. I want to just ride it out the whole way there. This is the same idea I get into in why AI can make you a millionaire if you change how you think.
Saying no to sponsorships and grants too
Now your mind is telling you that you can't do this, that it doesn't work that way, that you're special and different from me. So here are some very practical tips. First, I've shown you what I'm actually doing — saying no to thousands of dollars. I also won't take any more sponsorships, even ones from DFINITY, and I won't apply for another DFINITY community grant. As an ICP crypto millionaire, why would I need more for myself? Somebody else should have that. I've already been giving away the majority of my community grant anyway — I've sent several people 10 ICP in my open chat, because I'm sitting there with thousands of it and some folks have under 100. I'm like, here, I'll contribute to yours, because that feels good. To me a true sign of wealth is that you have so much you can give to others.
What you may have a hard time understanding is how magical life is. If you've stuck with me this far, you're probably really desperate to make this a reality. And your mind is critical — it's saying what he's describing won't work, that you can't quit your job and expect to become an ICP crypto millionaire. What your mind doesn't understand is that things start happening when you change the way you think and act as if it's already real, in ways you couldn't have seen coming.
How life becomes magical when you change your identity
Maybe somebody passes and leaves you money, and you buy ICP with it, and that's how it happens for you. Or you quit the job you hate and are stressed about every day, and because you quit, you discover other talents — maybe you'd love to be a handyman or a contractor. You've been slaving away in a job, and once you quit you start helping people out, fixing up their houses, making your own furniture, and suddenly you've got an entire business doing something you love. Then you're saving up, putting your profits into crypto, and the price of the crypto goes up. The means you take to get somewhere — the seeds you plant now — are the fruit you harvest later.
It's unreasonable to plant seeds of stress, strain, "not enough," and "I don't like where I am and I have to do this," and then expect a garden full of anything different. It's unreasonable for me to take $300-an-hour calls and expect to feel wealthy in the future because I stashed all that money away, because at some point I'm not going to take those calls anymore — and that point is today. I literally changed my calendar. If I'm a real ICP crypto millionaire, I don't take $300-an-hour calls.
In your life it won't make logical sense until it happens. But if you start making changes that show you're already living the way you really want to live, things come with it. It may not come as fast in some instances, but it comes with more and more joy. I may not become an ICP crypto millionaire as fast as I otherwise would, but it's going to be a joyful path, and even if it takes longer, I'll be enjoying the rewards before it even happens.
A dating story about identity
In some areas of life this makes very clear sense — like dating. When I was living as a single man, thinking as a single man, proceeding through life as a single man, it was very difficult to be in a happy relationship. Women often found me, as a single man, unattractive, and I'd often find women who really wanted a relationship with me unattractive. Even when we'd get into a relationship, I'd be frustrated that I couldn't keep living as a single man inside it. I used to have this scarcity mindset: it's so hard to find an attractive woman who wants a relationship and would like to be with me. Now I live as a married man, and there are attractive women who are nice to me and have great friendships with me all over the place. At my yoga class this morning there were so many beautiful women I didn't even know which ones to focus on. I think about how ridiculous my life looks now compared to 20 years ago, when I was so identified as a frustrated single man, grinding and hustling, literally sometimes trying to find a woman who'd like to be with me. As long as my identity was "I am a single man," it pushed away exactly what I wanted. You can find more of these stories in my Dating playlist.
Here's a clear example. One night I was grinding on a beautiful girl at the club, complaining about my life — I'm so frustrated, I'm so frustrated. Later she called me, but since I was living as a single man, I wasn't expecting any phone calls that night. I was playing World War II online, driving a tank from 30 minutes behind the front lines up toward the front so I could actually use it in battle — which sounds boring even now. I was so distracted I couldn't even tell that this girl really wanted to come over, until I hung up the phone and realized what I'd done — at which point my tank got shot and blown up too, so I was basically playing the game for nothing. I called her back, but she'd already gotten over feeling rejected and was out drinking with her friends. When I asked if she wanted to come over, she retaliated by laughing at me and making fun of me, and I never saw her again. Her feelings were hurt — she'd called me up vulnerable, asking to come over, and I was so engrossed in a video game that I wouldn't even step away from my computer. I thought I could multitask, talk to her and drive the tank at the same time. I still remember it 20 years later. That's a clear example of how, if you're identified as "I'm broke, I don't have enough, my crypto portfolio sucks, it's not big enough," you push away the very things that would naturally be attracted to the identity you actually desire.
If you're into Neville Goddard — I did a video about this on my thoughts channel, and I'd talked about how feeling is the secret five years before I ever found his work — the point is the same: if you want to change your life, you have to change your identity, who you think you are in your own mind right now. Then your mind automatically starts attracting and filtering things according to that identity.
I already have enough
So back to the ICP crypto millionaire. If you decide in your mind, "I am an ICP crypto millionaire," at first it may take repetition and you'll face the opposite. But if that becomes your identity, your mind starts setting its filters based on it. When you catch yourself using the old programming, you say, no — I'm an ICP crypto millionaire. I'm not some broke person who has to struggle. I have an abundant life, plenty of wealth. That's who I am, and I have so much I can give to others. To me a true sign of wealth is having so much you can give, having your time to do what you love, to say what you really need to say, and to be with the people you want to be with.
If you set your initial identity as "I'm an ICP crypto millionaire," everything else in your universe starts to arrange itself to make that real — and unlike Mandela's long walk to freedom, it probably won't take 30 years. Here's a test: if you're checking price charts every day, you're not an ICP crypto millionaire internally, where it really matters. And even if you do hit the number, it won't satisfy you for long; there'll be some other thing, or you'll often waste the millions, the way I wasted my crypto gains in 2017–2018 and ended up in the worst financial position of my life in 2019. If your internal identity is "I am an ICP crypto millionaire," you have no need to check the price and no need to watch videos about crypto every day. I hope this is one of the last crypto videos you watch, because as an ICP crypto millionaire I don't need to hear about your next 100x altcoin. If a video has "100x" in it, I don't need it, because I have enough. I don't need 100x in my life. This is the same place I land in 100 ICP is enough, and 10,000 ICP is god tier.
That "I need another one" energy was a big part of the single-man mindset, and having a wife didn't automatically end it — it took years of work in my marriage to finally land where I have the wife of my dreams and don't need another woman. I have enough ICP today. I'm not even buying more. Somebody in my open chat asked, is 4,000 ICP enough? To me, hitting 4,000 ICP in maturity was my crypto millionaire tipping point. I've got enough. When you have enough, you don't need to buy any more. When I'm an ICP crypto millionaire, I'm going to use those staking rewards to pay off all my other debts, so I can stop paying $3,000 a year in flood insurance on a house that's never flooded in the entire recorded history of the area — so I have more to give back to others instead of to insurance companies.
Being an ICP crypto millionaire is not about buying stuff, either. I'm not changing my car — I love my 2006 Toyota. I'm not getting a new house just because I have more money. When I'm an ICP crypto millionaire I'm in the same house, the same studio, making the same videos, driving the same car, with the same wife and the same kids. Nothing changes. And today, for the first time ever, I feel I've aligned things so clearly that I could express it and put it out there and then look back on it — this will be my ultimate "I told you so" video in the future. There's nothing I'd do differently today based on some numbers on a screen. If you'd like more of this — mindset and "feeling is the secret" thoughts videos, book reviews, my autobiography — I keep all of it going inside the Jerry Banfield Family, where you can ask me questions directly. I genuinely believe these things will help you far more than watching a bunch of crypto videos every day.