Do I still hold ICP, and why would I keep buying it while the price keeps falling? Yes, I hold a large position, and I have not changed my mind. I am all in on the Internet Computer, and I have no plan to sell at these prices. My view is that ICP is the only altcoin I see with a real business system and real technology underneath it, and that the lower the price goes, the bigger the opportunity gets.
Here is what that looks like in numbers. In my June 2026 portfolio post I said I held about 6,511 ICP in total: close to 2,000 liquid, and around 3,333 locked in my main staked neuron on an eight-year lock that I plan to bring down to two years. In ICP at $1 Won't Ruin My Life, posted at the end of July, I had about 1,900 liquid and 5,600 in neurons, and I said I would keep buying even if the price reached a dollar. I also drew a line: whenever ICP goes back above about three dollars, I say I am never buying again.
Here is how I got here. In October 2023 I went all in on ICP, when it was about $3 and Bitcoin was around $30,000, and I walked away from the altcoins I had promoted before. My memoir excerpt on going all in covers the year that followed: a flood of new people, a $25,000 community grant from DFINITY, and then a long stretch where the price fell, my audience turned on me, and I burned out in July 2024.
The reasoning behind staying in comes from How I Stopped Being Stupid in Crypto, which I wrote in March 2024. I had been burned on projects I went all in on before, including a meme coin that lost more than 60 percent of my money, and I decided the fix was not less conviction but more research and one position I understood. I said ICP and Bitcoin were the only two cryptos with real value, but I hold only ICP. ICP runs fully on-chain applications, it runs small AI models on chain, and this website is hosted on it. I also refuse to diversify, so I can be wrong all at once.
The honest part is what went wrong. My holdings were once over 10,000 ICP, and a big chunk of that was staking balances in ICP-ecosystem tokens that were worth far more at the time. Those tokens have since tanked. In 2025, while I was deleting a lot of my online content, I sold several thousand liquid ICP, roughly $19,000 worth in the $5 to $7 range, and I have been buying back since. In July I wrote that my ICP portfolio had gone from about $80,000 a year and a half or two years earlier to about $15,000, and that I had lost at least $50,000 on the position. That is the reason my plan is to keep buying without putting in so much cash that I would be forced to sell to pay rent.
Why keep buying while it is cheap? In the July post I laid out what would make me stop: a big company such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon or Apple shipping a clearly better solution that it was also marketing aggressively, or DFINITY failing outright. Short of either, I think the price is the opportunity. A bear market crushes almost every altcoin, and I think ICP is the one that is hardest to crush, because there is a real business system underneath it. I don't expect a bull market for most altcoins, and I don't expect people to buy them again the way they did before.
The plan I laid out in June is simple. I want to accumulate almost all the ICP I can and keep it liquid until my liquid balance matches my staked balance, roughly half and half, with the staked side on two-year locks. Then I add more to staking. I follow a known neuron so I capture 100 percent of my voting rewards, and I vote manually when I can.
If you are new to the project, what the Internet Computer is explains it in plain English. My thinking on how much to stack and why is covered separately, and the bear case for ICP and why I still hold is where I argue against myself. Below this page you will find every post in this group, newest first, in full. They were written at different prices, so read them as a timeline, not advice. If you hold ICP and want me to look at your own position, you can get a personal video review at https://jerrybanfield.com/review/.
On this page
Every post I have written on this subject is below in full, newest first, each under its own heading.
- ICP at $1 Won’t Ruin My Life (July 31, 2026)
- Internet Computer (ICP) Portfolio: What I Hold and Why I Keep Buying (June 15, 2026)
- Going All In On The Internet Computer (October 30, 2025)
- How I Stopped Being Stupid in Crypto (March 20, 2024)
ICP at $1 Won’t Ruin My Life
From my video published July 31, 2026.
As the ICP price continues to make new all-time lows, I'm wondering how far down we're going on the limbo. And I'm reflecting: could I handle it if ICP reached a dollar? Not only am I saying yes, but I will keep buying more until somehow all the research I've done is invalid. To me, there are two scenarios that would make me stop buying ICP. One would be if some big company like Google or Microsoft, Amazon, or Apple came out with some definitively better solution than ICP that they were also aggressively marketing. At that point, I might consider at least stopping buying ICP. The second would be if somehow DFINITY totally failed and everything went downhill. But until then, everything I've researched about ICP tells me that the lower the price gets, the bigger the opportunity gets. At a dollar per ICP, I could spend a thousand dollars and have a thousand ICP.
Could I Handle ICP at $1?
I think we're coming close to a floor for ICP, where at some point we're going to get to a price where it can hardly go down any further, because you're going to have ICP being bought and burned and used to pay for things like people's web hosting bills. Right now it's so cheap — I've only spent about $20 to host a bunch of websites on ICP. So we could continue to go lower. The thing that helps is knowing I'll be able to keep buying. So I'm okay. I know that if the price goes to a dollar, my life might actually be easier and better than if it went to $10,000, because not much is going to change for me if the price goes to a dollar.
How Wrecked I Already Am
I'm already so wrecked in ICP — I'm just destroyed. I was accumulating back when I got the community grant from DFINITY, when the price was around $12. They sent me a total of $25,000 back in 2024, and I've not gotten anything from them in over two years, two and a half years. I kept most of that ICP and locked it up, and I've just gotten destroyed on that. Do I wish I'd sold all of it and just put that in the bank instead of putting most of it in neurons? Absolutely. But at this point, my portfolio shows about $15,000 in ICP — and I had $80,000. I had $80,000 in ICP maybe a year and a half, two years ago. So I've gotten destroyed on this. And if it goes down to $1 from here, I'd be down to $7,500. But I'm going to keep buying more, even though the price is in the sewer. Because until the thesis changes, until something fundamentally changes, the price doesn't matter to me. The price is the opportunity.
The Facebook Comparison
If you look at history, you can see that sometimes prices for big companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google absolutely tanked and spiraled. I remember Facebook's big IPO tanked down to $38. When I checked, Facebook — Meta Platforms now — was at $539. Anybody who remembers when the Facebook IPO launched knows it was at $38 in 2012, and people were pretty sad about that. And yet look where it's been. It got all the way up to $352, then it crashed down to $112, and now it's up over $500. So the question, in my view, comes down to your own research. Have you done the right research? Are you in the right position based on your research? This is where I believe you've got to go beyond hype and speculation, start figuring stuff out yourself, and get your own conviction.
My videos are like a church service — and that reminds me, I do need to read my Bible a little today. The way I see it, you need to hear about God every single day, even if you're a Christian who reads the Bible, because it's something you don't want to forget any single day. So I do my ICP videos like that. Each one is another data point. Because if you make the mistake of going on X and listening to people, or going on YouTube and listening to the wrong people say stuff that's BS, then you can easily start thinking, oh my God, how much lower is it going to go? Well, to me, I think the ultimate floor would probably be around a dollar, no matter how hard everything else in crypto might crash.
My Take on the Other Coins
And to be fair, I'm rooting for crypto to crash, because in my opinion crypto is crap — crypto is garbage. These are strictly my personal views, but to me Bitcoin should not be $63,000; Bitcoin should be $10,000 at most. Ethereum should be a few hundred dollars at most. These are way overvalued in my view. BNB should be zero — it's a crypto exchange token, and I see no reason anybody should hold it. XRP should also be like a cent or two. Solana? I'd be very happy to see it go back under $10. Hyperliquid should be a few dollars. I think people have no idea what they're buying and how bad of a setup this is — to me, almost all of these cryptos are worthless junk. Cardano, in my view, should go back to a cent or two. Chainlink, under a dollar. All of these have very low floors they could hit, because from what I can see there's almost nothing fundamentally supporting the business system at the end of the day. And BitTensor — I'd be so happy to see this go to a dollar or two, because to me it's utterly worthless: somebody putting together what's basically a simple solution and then presenting it as something amazing. I find that dishonest.
ICP down here, to me, is the one that if a bear market crushes almost all of these, is going to be the hardest to crush, the hardest to put out. So my approach is to be prepared. In my opinion, you should never be expecting a bull market for all these altcoins — I think it's unreasonable to expect one. Now, that doesn't mean it won't happen, but then you've got to bet on people acting against their own best interest, which unfortunately they seem to do.
Words Versus Actions
It's like the woman I dated who said she wants a guy that's authentic and nice and all this stuff, but then watched a story — and said she wants to take it slow, but then she doesn't. What she says versus what she wants is literally the opposite. And when I tried to follow what she said instead of her actions and her body language, it all went downhill. The same thing can happen in crypto: people say they want to be rich in crypto, but if you watch the coins they buy, they are acting poor and investing in what I consider useless garbage. I would like to think we're going to get smarter. I would like to think people have been ripped off so much that there's not going to be that bull market again for most coins. So in my view, the only thing that's going to hold a coin up at the bottom is a real business system underneath it — and I believe ICP is the only thing that truly has a sustainable business system and technical functionality underneath it. So even if we do go to a dollar, my plan is to be ready to accumulate, because to me, if we go to a dollar, nobody's ever going to want to have missed accumulating down there.
So my plan is to just grind away at six YouTube videos a day, bring people into the Jerry Banfield Family, and keep stacking ICP until it goes up. I made the Family super affordable, so if you'd like to join the Jerry Banfield Family, come in there and introduce yourself so we can get to know you, and ask any questions you've got about crypto. The way I look at it, once the price goes up, it's going to go down, and I'm going to keep buying more.
My Neuron Strategy
Right now I hold 1,900 ICP liquid and 5,600 locked in neurons. One neuron is a short-term neuron — it's only locked for two weeks, but I'm still getting an APR on it. It's earned me seven ICP, which — damn, bro — is $14. I've got $14 for doing nothing but locking it. The other neuron I'm auto-compounding and keeping locked as well. So effectively I'm up over 4,000 ICP. And if you're following my neurons, I've voted with one hundred percent participation on everything. Ideally, I'd like to have 4,000 locked short term and 4,000 sitting there liquid. That means I'd like to get at least 2,100 more liquid and at least 1,700 more locked short term. If you do a little math, that's a little less than 4,000 ICP I'm still trying to accumulate. So would I rather buy that for $8,000 or $4,000? I've got to say, I'd rather pay $4,000 to get 4,000 more ICP.
Facing the Fear
I don't know if we're going to see a dollar, but I think it's important to face your fear honestly — to look at it and ask, am I going to be okay if it hits a dollar? I'm going to be okay if it hits a dollar, because I've gotten so destroyed already. I've lost $50,000 or more, and I sold $20,000 to $25,000 worth of ICP in 2025 when it was five or six dollars. So I've essentially been rebuying that back at $2. Don't I wish I'd sold a lot more at nine, ten, twelve? Absolutely. But whenever it goes back above about three dollars, I'm never buying again. I'll compound my maturity, but I'm never buying again — I'm loading up right now. I've already gotten so destroyed. My portfolio might have gotten close to a hundred thousand at the peak; it was eighty-plus thousand before. I've gotten so wrecked on this that it doesn't matter how much more I get wrecked. I've lost at least $50,000 on ICP. I don't care if I lose another $15,000 — it doesn't matter. And to me, this is what helps get through the fear: if you've already gotten annihilated, so what if you lose a little bit more, as long as your research is correct? My research is accurate from the best I can see. If I'm wrong, I can live with that. What I can't stand to do is miss out. And what I can't stand to do is hold any coins that I haven't done deep, deep research on.
I would be disgusted if I'd lost $50,000 in Bitcoin, because from my view I'd have just thrown that away. I'd be disgusted if I'd lost money in Solana, Ethereum, or XRP. To me, that would be totally unacceptable — I would have just gotten totally ripped off on those, because in my view those have no future. But with ICP, if I'm wrong and everything I see is wrong, I can live with that. I can handle losing another $15,000. After you've lost fifty, who cares about fifteen? I'll throw good money after bad to see if we can make this thing come back. So face the fear: even if we do go to a dollar, it'll be okay. I'm going to keep stacking. I'm all in.
And believe me, few people have more to gain from ICP pumping than me. Imagine if this portfolio is a hundred thousand dollars in assets one day — I'm going to look like a genius. Everybody's going to be joining my Skool community, I'll be making hundreds of dollars a day in one-on-one calls as a bunch of people upgrade to calls with me on Skool, and I'll have projects sponsoring me. Don't get me wrong: I'd love to see ICP at $20, because I'm going to make a lot of money when that happens. But I'd also love to see ICP at a dollar so I could buy a whole bunch more. The ideal scenario for me? It goes to a dollar, I stack up thousands more ICP, and then it goes to $20. Remember, sometimes what looks good in the short term, like the price going up, means you're not going to get as rich in the long term. And sometimes what looks bad in the short term — God, what if the price went to a dollar? — well, if it's going to be $20 one day, wouldn't I want it at a dollar? If you want to follow the whole journey day by day, every one of these updates lands in my ICP Crypto playlist.
If you want to see more of me, watch my ongoing vlog — people are really enjoying it, and the average watch time is pretty high on it. Then there's my dating content: if you're single, watch that playlist and follow along in dating. I've also got games, music, my YouTube coach playlist, and a crypto reviews channel too. That's it for today — time for me to check out.
Internet Computer (ICP) Portfolio: What I Hold and Why I Keep Buying
Originally published June 15, 2026.
Do I still hold ICP, and why would I keep buying it while the price keeps falling? Yes, I hold a large position, and I have not changed my mind. I am all in on the Internet Computer, and I have no plan to sell at these prices. My view is that ICP is the only altcoin I see with a real business system and real technology underneath it, and that the lower the price goes, the bigger the opportunity gets.
Here is what that looks like in numbers. In my June 2026 portfolio post I said I held about 6,511 ICP in total: close to 2,000 liquid, and around 3,333 locked in my main staked neuron on an eight-year lock that I plan to bring down to two years. In ICP at $1 Won't Ruin My Life, posted at the end of July, I had about 1,900 liquid and 5,600 in neurons, and I said I would keep buying even if the price reached a dollar. I also drew a line: whenever ICP goes back above about three dollars, I say I am never buying again.
Here is how I got here. In October 2023 I went all in on ICP, when it was about $3 and Bitcoin was around $30,000, and I walked away from the altcoins I had promoted before. My memoir excerpt on going all in covers the year that followed: a flood of new people, a $25,000 community grant from DFINITY, and then a long stretch where the price fell, my audience turned on me, and I burned out in July 2024.
The reasoning behind staying in comes from How I Stopped Being Stupid in Crypto, which I wrote in March 2024. I had been burned on projects I went all in on before, including a meme coin that lost more than 60 percent of my money, and I decided the fix was not less conviction but more research and one position I understood. I said ICP and Bitcoin were the only two cryptos with real value, but I hold only ICP. ICP runs fully on-chain applications, it runs small AI models on chain, and this website is hosted on it. I also refuse to diversify, so I can be wrong all at once.
The honest part is what went wrong. My holdings were once over 10,000 ICP, and a big chunk of that was staking balances in ICP-ecosystem tokens that were worth far more at the time. Those tokens have since tanked. In 2025, while I was deleting a lot of my online content, I sold several thousand liquid ICP, roughly $19,000 worth in the $5 to $7 range, and I have been buying back since. In July I wrote that my ICP portfolio had gone from about $80,000 a year and a half or two years earlier to about $15,000, and that I had lost at least $50,000 on the position. That is the reason my plan is to keep buying without putting in so much cash that I would be forced to sell to pay rent.
Why keep buying while it is cheap? In the July post I laid out what would make me stop: a big company such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon or Apple shipping a clearly better solution that it was also marketing aggressively, or DFINITY failing outright. Short of either, I think the price is the opportunity. A bear market crushes almost every altcoin, and I think ICP is the one that is hardest to crush, because there is a real business system underneath it. I don't expect a bull market for most altcoins, and I don't expect people to buy them again the way they did before.
The plan I laid out in June is simple. I want to accumulate almost all the ICP I can and keep it liquid until my liquid balance matches my staked balance, roughly half and half, with the staked side on two-year locks. Then I add more to staking. I follow a known neuron so I capture 100 percent of my voting rewards, and I vote manually when I can.
If you are new to the project, what the Internet Computer is explains it in plain English. My thinking on how much to stack and why is covered separately, and the bear case for ICP and why I still hold is where I argue against myself. Below this page you will find every post in this group, newest first, in full. They were written at different prices, so read them as a timeline, not advice. If you hold ICP and want me to look at your own position, you can get a personal video review at https://jerrybanfield.com/review/.
On this page
Every post I have written on this subject is below in full, newest first, each under its own heading.
- ICP at $1 Won’t Ruin My Life (July 31, 2026)
ICP at $1 Won’t Ruin My Life
From my video published July 31, 2026.
As the ICP price continues to make new all-time lows, I'm wondering how far down we're going on the limbo. And I'm reflecting: could I handle it if ICP reached a dollar? Not only am I saying yes, but I will keep buying more until somehow all the research I've done is invalid. To me, there are two scenarios that would make me stop buying ICP. One would be if some big company like Google or Microsoft, Amazon, or Apple came out with some definitively better solution than ICP that they were also aggressively marketing. At that point, I might consider at least stopping buying ICP. The second would be if somehow DFINITY totally failed and everything went downhill. But until then, everything I've researched about ICP tells me that the lower the price gets, the bigger the opportunity gets. At a dollar per ICP, I could spend a thousand dollars and have a thousand ICP.
Could I Handle ICP at $1?
I think we're coming close to a floor for ICP, where at some point we're going to get to a price where it can hardly go down any further, because you're going to have ICP being bought and burned and used to pay for things like people's web hosting bills. Right now it's so cheap — I've only spent about $20 to host a bunch of websites on ICP. So we could continue to go lower. The thing that helps is knowing I'll be able to keep buying. So I'm okay. I know that if the price goes to a dollar, my life might actually be easier and better than if it went to $10,000, because not much is going to change for me if the price goes to a dollar.
How Wrecked I Already Am
I'm already so wrecked in ICP — I'm just destroyed. I was accumulating back when I got the community grant from DFINITY, when the price was around $12. They sent me a total of $25,000 back in 2024, and I've not gotten anything from them in over two years, two and a half years. I kept most of that ICP and locked it up, and I've just gotten destroyed on that. Do I wish I'd sold all of it and just put that in the bank instead of putting most of it in neurons? Absolutely. But at this point, my portfolio shows about $15,000 in ICP — and I had $80,000. I had $80,000 in ICP maybe a year and a half, two years ago. So I've gotten destroyed on this. And if it goes down to $1 from here, I'd be down to $7,500. But I'm going to keep buying more, even though the price is in the sewer. Because until the thesis changes, until something fundamentally changes, the price doesn't matter to me. The price is the opportunity.
The Facebook Comparison
If you look at history, you can see that sometimes prices for big companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google absolutely tanked and spiraled. I remember Facebook's big IPO tanked down to $38. When I checked, Facebook — Meta Platforms now — was at $539. Anybody who remembers when the Facebook IPO launched knows it was at $38 in 2012, and people were pretty sad about that. And yet look where it's been. It got all the way up to $352, then it crashed down to $112, and now it's up over $500. So the question, in my view, comes down to your own research. Have you done the right research? Are you in the right position based on your research? This is where I believe you've got to go beyond hype and speculation, start figuring stuff out yourself, and get your own conviction.
My videos are like a church service — and that reminds me, I do need to read my Bible a little today. The way I see it, you need to hear about God every single day, even if you're a Christian who reads the Bible, because it's something you don't want to forget any single day. So I do my ICP videos like that. Each one is another data point. Because if you make the mistake of going on X and listening to people, or going on YouTube and listening to the wrong people say stuff that's BS, then you can easily start thinking, oh my God, how much lower is it going to go? Well, to me, I think the ultimate floor would probably be around a dollar, no matter how hard everything else in crypto might crash.
My Take on the Other Coins
And to be fair, I'm rooting for crypto to crash, because in my opinion crypto is crap — crypto is garbage. These are strictly my personal views, but to me Bitcoin should not be $63,000; Bitcoin should be $10,000 at most. Ethereum should be a few hundred dollars at most. These are way overvalued in my view. BNB should be zero — it's a crypto exchange token, and I see no reason anybody should hold it. XRP should also be like a cent or two. Solana? I'd be very happy to see it go back under $10. Hyperliquid should be a few dollars. I think people have no idea what they're buying and how bad of a setup this is — to me, almost all of these cryptos are worthless junk. Cardano, in my view, should go back to a cent or two. Chainlink, under a dollar. All of these have very low floors they could hit, because from what I can see there's almost nothing fundamentally supporting the business system at the end of the day. And BitTensor — I'd be so happy to see this go to a dollar or two, because to me it's utterly worthless: somebody putting together what's basically a simple solution and then presenting it as something amazing. I find that dishonest.
ICP down here, to me, is the one that if a bear market crushes almost all of these, is going to be the hardest to crush, the hardest to put out. So my approach is to be prepared. In my opinion, you should never be expecting a bull market for all these altcoins — I think it's unreasonable to expect one. Now, that doesn't mean it won't happen, but then you've got to bet on people acting against their own best interest, which unfortunately they seem to do.
Words Versus Actions
It's like the woman I dated who said she wants a guy that's authentic and nice and all this stuff, but then watched a story — and said she wants to take it slow, but then she doesn't. What she says versus what she wants is literally the opposite. And when I tried to follow what she said instead of her actions and her body language, it all went downhill. The same thing can happen in crypto: people say they want to be rich in crypto, but if you watch the coins they buy, they are acting poor and investing in what I consider useless garbage. I would like to think we're going to get smarter. I would like to think people have been ripped off so much that there's not going to be that bull market again for most coins. So in my view, the only thing that's going to hold a coin up at the bottom is a real business system underneath it — and I believe ICP is the only thing that truly has a sustainable business system and technical functionality underneath it. So even if we do go to a dollar, my plan is to be ready to accumulate, because to me, if we go to a dollar, nobody's ever going to want to have missed accumulating down there.
So my plan is to just grind away at six YouTube videos a day, bring people into the Jerry Banfield Family, and keep stacking ICP until it goes up. I made the Family super affordable, so if you'd like to join the Jerry Banfield Family, come in there and introduce yourself so we can get to know you, and ask any questions you've got about crypto. The way I look at it, once the price goes up, it's going to go down, and I'm going to keep buying more.
My Neuron Strategy
Right now I hold 1,900 ICP liquid and 5,600 locked in neurons. One neuron is a short-term neuron — it's only locked for two weeks, but I'm still getting an APR on it. It's earned me seven ICP, which — damn, bro — is $14. I've got $14 for doing nothing but locking it. The other neuron I'm auto-compounding and keeping locked as well. So effectively I'm up over 4,000 ICP. And if you're following my neurons, I've voted with one hundred percent participation on everything. Ideally, I'd like to have 4,000 locked short term and 4,000 sitting there liquid. That means I'd like to get at least 2,100 more liquid and at least 1,700 more locked short term. If you do a little math, that's a little less than 4,000 ICP I'm still trying to accumulate. So would I rather buy that for $8,000 or $4,000? I've got to say, I'd rather pay $4,000 to get 4,000 more ICP.
Facing the Fear
I don't know if we're going to see a dollar, but I think it's important to face your fear honestly — to look at it and ask, am I going to be okay if it hits a dollar? I'm going to be okay if it hits a dollar, because I've gotten so destroyed already. I've lost $50,000 or more, and I sold $20,000 to $25,000 worth of ICP in 2025 when it was five or six dollars. So I've essentially been rebuying that back at $2. Don't I wish I'd sold a lot more at nine, ten, twelve? Absolutely. But whenever it goes back above about three dollars, I'm never buying again. I'll compound my maturity, but I'm never buying again — I'm loading up right now. I've already gotten so destroyed. My portfolio might have gotten close to a hundred thousand at the peak; it was eighty-plus thousand before. I've gotten so wrecked on this that it doesn't matter how much more I get wrecked. I've lost at least $50,000 on ICP. I don't care if I lose another $15,000 — it doesn't matter. And to me, this is what helps get through the fear: if you've already gotten annihilated, so what if you lose a little bit more, as long as your research is correct? My research is accurate from the best I can see. If I'm wrong, I can live with that. What I can't stand to do is miss out. And what I can't stand to do is hold any coins that I haven't done deep, deep research on.
I would be disgusted if I'd lost $50,000 in Bitcoin, because from my view I'd have just thrown that away. I'd be disgusted if I'd lost money in Solana, Ethereum, or XRP. To me, that would be totally unacceptable — I would have just gotten totally ripped off on those, because in my view those have no future. But with ICP, if I'm wrong and everything I see is wrong, I can live with that. I can handle losing another $15,000. After you've lost fifty, who cares about fifteen? I'll throw good money after bad to see if we can make this thing come back. So face the fear: even if we do go to a dollar, it'll be okay. I'm going to keep stacking. I'm all in.
And believe me, few people have more to gain from ICP pumping than me. Imagine if this portfolio is a hundred thousand dollars in assets one day — I'm going to look like a genius. Everybody's going to be joining my Skool community, I'll be making hundreds of dollars a day in one-on-one calls as a bunch of people upgrade to calls with me on Skool, and I'll have projects sponsoring me. Don't get me wrong: I'd love to see ICP at $20, because I'm going to make a lot of money when that happens. But I'd also love to see ICP at a dollar so I could buy a whole bunch more. The ideal scenario for me? It goes to a dollar, I stack up thousands more ICP, and then it goes to $20. Remember, sometimes what looks good in the short term, like the price going up, means you're not going to get as rich in the long term. And sometimes what looks bad in the short term — God, what if the price went to a dollar? — well, if it's going to be $20 one day, wouldn't I want it at a dollar? If you want to follow the whole journey day by day, every one of these updates lands in my ICP Crypto playlist.
If you want to see more of me, watch my ongoing vlog — people are really enjoying it, and the average watch time is pretty high on it. Then there's my dating content: if you're single, watch that playlist and follow along in dating. I've also got games, music, my YouTube coach playlist, and a crypto reviews channel too. That's it for today — time for me to check out.
Going All In On The Internet Computer
Originally published October 30, 2025.
This is an excerpt from my memoir, I Was Famous on the Internet — my honest story of 14 years of internet fame and what it really cost, and why I deleted it all to choose real life.
Going All In on Internet Computer Protocol
When I first started to understand this bigger picture in crypto, Internet Computer Protocol looked like the one crypto that could solve all the problems I had been pointing out for years. It was the only blockchain I had ever seen where you could go directly to a website hosted fully on-chain. The technology is so advanced that you could type in a URL and step straight into the blockchain itself. ICP makes it possible to self-custody everything with ease and to run every kind of transaction you could think of directly on-chain—playing an entire crypto game, streaming videos, publishing a podcast, hosting pictures and files, even creating coins with their own websites. All of it can be natively on-chain.
When I realized this, I thought I had struck gold. I told myself, I’ve got the best information in crypto, and hardly anybody knows about this. The lone exception was Dominic Williams of Dfinity occasionally talking about it on his X profile and a few people with smaller followings than me in the ICP community. After years of refusing to ever go all in on a single coin—especially after being burned in 2018 when Steemit Inc rug pulled Steem—I went all in on Internet Computer Protocol.
That decision turned my crypto channel into chaos. My audience was in uproar because I was abandoning every coin I had promoted before. I even gave up on Bitcoin, saying publicly that ICP was the future and not Bitcoin. When I made this change in October 2023, the ICP price was $3 and the Bitcoin price was around $30,000. You can do some simple math to see how that has worked out for me so far.
Initially when I went all in on ICP, a flood of new people showed up who were excited about also finding something real to invest in. The ICP price was sitting at all-time lows, and in the next few months it spiked to the highest levels it had seen since the disastrous manipulated launch. Other projects were launching on ICP at the same time, and I promoted them freely. I gave them exposure that other influencers would have charged tens of thousands of dollars for, but I did not ask the teams for anything because I just wanted to support the ICP community.
Over the following year, I created hundreds of videos about ICP. Dfinity even gave me $25,000 in support after I applied for a couple of community grants, and I brought record numbers of new people into the ecosystem for free. In just a few months, I became the number one voice online for ICP. For a while, it felt like everything was finally aligning and I was so proud all the haters who said I would never get another sponsorship were so wrong that I now had my largest deal ever.
Then, just like before, I started to see how rigged and corrupt the entire system was. At first, I thought the only issue was ignorance—that people just didn’t understand. I kept believing if I explained how ICP was different clearly enough, people would get it. After a year, though, it hit me: the problem wasn’t ignorance. The entire system was corrupt.
People were operating in crypto just as blindly and mindlessly as they had watching gaming streams or buying courses. Once they had been tricked into buying a certain coin, they didn’t want to hear about anything better. They covered their ears when I explained there was a blockchain that rendered their investment irrelevant. They unsubscribed when I showed them data proving their coins were built on fraud. Instead of thanking me, most of them turned hostile.
When I said ICP was the best technology in the world, they cheered me on as long as the price went up. At the end of 2023, when ICP reached a local high, my crypto channel viewership peaked. In May 2024, when it shot up again, people rallied behind me. The moment the price started to drop, though, the same people turned on me.
I had believed that when people finally understood ICP the way I had, they would sell off their entire altcoin portfolios and put everything into ICP. I thought it was obvious that the truth would speak for itself. What I came to realize, painfully, was that I had been naive and idealistic all over again. Meanwhile, I noticed that so many of the top crypto YouTubers were corrupt. From my perspective, they cared more about hype and profit than about real technology. If you've ever gone all in on a conviction and felt alone holding it, that feeling is a big part of why I love thinking these things through together, and you can set up a call with me and do exactly that on our call.
I personally introduced two of the biggest names in the space to Internet Computer Protocol, a project I believed was the best technology in all of crypto. These were people with massive audiences, and yet they had literally never heard of it. If they had, it was only in passing—dismissed as a rug and written off without a second glance. I brought them into it and even appeared on their channels, making videos to talk about ICP. Their audiences hated it. They didn’t want to hear about a slow and steady, legitimate project that required patience and vision. They wanted the Ponzi-scheme vibe, the hype coins, the promises of an instant 10x. ICP wasn’t that. It didn’t vibe with what they were addicted to.
As the price of Internet Computer kept dropping, everything I said started to sound wrong to people. They pointed out that a lot of the coins I had trashed had gone on to make massive gains. I had given some of those coins one-star reviews, called them garbage, and yet they had 10x’ed while ICP had fallen. From their perspective, the technology I was championing looked useless if the price fell.
By July 2024, I felt hopeless again. I was a year and a half into building a new crypto channel, convinced I had found the most valuable and most important information in the industry. Yet it seemed like most people didn’t just ignore it—they actively resisted it. They fought against me, bashed me, unsubscribed, and flat out refused to watch.
Even the people who had stuck with me grew weary. My original viewers burned out from seeing me talk about ICP day after day. At the same time, my most loyal fans demanded that I repeat myself endlessly to assure them that ICP really was as good as I said it was despite the price dropping. If I tried to teach viewers how to do research, they tuned out. If I explained how I discovered these insights for myself, viewers got bored. None of it seemed to matter.
What the hardcore fans really wanted was the same thing every single day: an Internet Computer Protocol price prediction. That was it. They wanted me to say the price was going to go up. I gave them plenty of those videos. I gave them what they wanted, even as I felt like I was wasting my life. I even told them that if I was wrong about Internet Computer Protocol, I would delete my channel and walk away from the internet for good.
Another Burnout
I hit such a wall of burnout in July 2024 that I announced I was quitting. I said I was done, just like I had back in 2020 when I declared I was finished with everything. Unlike 2020 when I sold all my equipment and later bought it back, this time I thought it would be smarter not to sell everything right away.
Thanks to all the Facebook gaming money, I had a proper studio built again. I had two computers I’d put together in 2021, and between the two they cost about $5,000. I had an incredible livestreaming and gaming setup where I could go for three or four hours straight, streaming crypto talk the entire time. Many of my ICP livestreams would make me hundreds of dollars when the price was up. Sometimes people even dropped $100 or $200 tips, thanking me for the profits they believed they’d made because of me.
The second the price dropped, though—even just from $10 to $9, or from $14 to $12, or from $9 to $8—people spiraled into dysphoria. They blamed me, told me I was wrong, and the tips stopped cold. It was the same cycle I had lived through on Facebook Gaming and on Udemy. I started to believe this was how the entire internet worked. Everywhere I went online, it was the same nonsense: the same narrow-minded viewers, the same restrictive platforms, the same cheating and lies at the top.
I felt the same despair I had felt in 2020 resulting in a two hour live stream titled Goodbye, explaining to my viewers why I was done. I told them I was tired of all this online crap. I said I felt like I had failed, that I was useless in crypto. Nobody wanted to hear the truth. Nobody cared about real technology. All people seemed to want was confirmation bias, lies, bribery, and to follow the same person repeating the same garbage day after day. I told people I was done with this online grind and that I wanted to move offline. I wanted to do something real. I was already thinking about massage school, yoga teacher training, hypnotherapy, or some real skill I could apply to help people in person.
I remembered being in the depths of my frustration back in 2022, when I took a five-hour driving meditation. I didn’t listen to music, didn’t play audiobooks, didn’t make phone calls. For those hours, I just asked myself one question: What do I do with my life now? This was three or four months after I had been canceled on Facebook. I had just gotten my mom a new dog and driven him from Miami, Florida to her small town in Mississippi. On the way back to St. Petersburg, Florida, I let that question simmer: What do I do with myself now? If you're sitting with a question that big about your own life or your own path in crypto, you're welcome to book a one-on-one call with me and talk it through on our call.
The clear answer I heard was life coaching. That was where I could really help people. I had the skills and the experience. I’d lived through so much—fixing my own health problems, addiction and recovery, building and maintaining a happy marriage, parenting, going through business transitions. I had real experience that mattered and that could make a difference for people. Unfortunately, my mindset in 2022 was still locked on doing everything online. I tried offering life coaching through Zoom. Almost nobody was interested because no one saw me as someone who could help them with life. They only saw me as a gamer and wanted me to keep being the gaming guy. They wanted me to stay stuck in the role I had outgrown.
Struggling to Quit and Reinvent Myself
My attempt to quit in July 2024 was thwarted by financial insecurity and impatience. I had so much of my money tied up in crypto, and most of the profits I’d made had gone right back into ICP. That left me with very little cash in the bank. As a family, we didn’t have much on hand either, which meant if I stopped doing YouTube, I would need to find new income quickly. Otherwise, I’d have to depend on my ex-wife to support me, and she was not thrilled about that idea. She had already gone through 5 years of financial insecurity with only a brief break when I blew up on Facebook gaming. She valued me making my own money and made it clear she didn’t want to carry the weight for both of us. At the very least, she expected me to pay my half of the bills which came out to several thousand a month.
She was already paying the mortgage and her student loans, which ate up most of her paycheck. She wanted me to keep covering things like groceries, utilities, and my monthly massages. After a few weeks of flailing and trying to figure out what to do, I bounced through ideas like becoming an in-person life coach or going to massage school. I even reached out to a local massage school about enrolling, but I couldn’t see how I would afford it. The thought of spending eight months in school without steady income terrified me. If I did that, we’d be broke. I knew I’d run out of money within a month or two. All my crypto was locked up, I couldn’t cash it out, and even selling my accounts wasn’t a simple option.
That’s when I started thinking of writing books. I thought maybe if I wrote books, they could generate leads for life coaching and eventually lead to in-person events. I gave it a shot for a week, but quickly got frustrated with the process. I tried dictating, but I didn’t yet have a solid workflow with ChatGPT like I do now. Writing by hand felt painfully slow. The first idea I had was to write a book about mastering yourself, something I imagined I could use locally as a magnet for life coaching clients.
At the same time, I started reaching out to people I’d known for years in AA and at yoga, asking to meet in person. Those conversations were incredible. They reminded me of 2020, which was one of the biggest growth periods of my life. Back then, I had spent a few months mostly offline, doing my in-person show, meeting tons of new people, and building friendships in real life at a time when everyone else was moving online. I felt that spark again, connecting with people face-to-face and talking deeply.
Still, writing remained a challenge. I couldn’t write fast enough, and I grew frustrated with how inefficient my workflow felt. I shifted from the self-mastery idea into a more general life coaching book, but then I thought, I have all these crypto followers—I should write a crypto book first. I began working on it, but after a few days, I was already frustrated with how long it was taking. That’s when I had the thought: why not just make videos for the book instead?
As soon as I started making videos for the book, I rationalized that posting them as regular videos would be more efficient. So I ended up taking what was supposed to be a book and turned it into a three-hour crypto video. Since most of my followers thought I was done with content, they were excited to see anything from me at all. This wasn’t just any video—it was a deep, three-hour dive into the insane system I just explained concluding with why ICP was the only crypto I invested in. To my surprise, that video did far better than most of my content had been doing before. It spread widely on YouTube and gave me a momentary sense of revival, even though I had originally intended it to be a book.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my ICP Crypto playlist.
How I Stopped Being Stupid in Crypto
From my video published March 20, 2024.
I don't want to be stupid anymore in crypto. I've been in crypto 10 years now, and there's nothing I've ever done in my life that's made me consistently feel so dumb. From your point of view, I got into Bitcoin when it was as low as $170. I've made hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits in crypto. I've made a profit every year, 10 years in a row. But inside, most of the time I've been in crypto, I just constantly feel stupid. I feel stupid whether I bought something too high and sold it low, or whether I bought it low and sold it not high enough, or whether I missed out on something else that ended up doing really well.
The main times I've felt stupid in crypto have been going all in on projects that turned out to be absolute garbage, which I've done at least twice now. That's exactly why I was very scared to go all in on another project. Is this something you can relate to?
The decisions that made me feel dumb
Even last year I was buying meme coins myself. Even though I was very critical of most projects, I bought this one meme coin and put out a five-star review of it, and it tanked right after that. I lost more than 60 percent of my money in it. I remember sitting there looking at myself and my own video online, thinking: how can you do this? How can you be this dumb after you've been in crypto so long? Why should you be putting videos out here that people are watching when you're as bad or worse than a total newbie?
Ironically, the point where I've started to become smarter in crypto is where I realized exactly how dumb everything I was doing looked if you looked at it from the outside. For example, just a year and a half ago I bought a crypto I'd never heard of before off of one single 30-second video on TikTok. I immediately put a few hundred dollars into it, which triggered my confirmation bias, and then I bought more, and I ended up having thousands of dollars in that crypto before finally dumping it when I found something better.
Someone watching live said I was being too hard on myself, and I agree. At the same time, how many of you are thinking about buying a crypto right now? How many of you are in the same spot, where even if you're doing really well in crypto and you've made a bunch of money, you're on edge about the next dumb decision you're going to make? You're almost afraid to even do anything, because do I want to sell now? Am I going to feel stupid if the price pumps afterward? Should I follow what Jerry's doing and go in on ICP? What if I miss out on this other stuff?
A lot of times in crypto, I've noticed I was making decisions more on what I was afraid of, like FOMOing into something because I didn't want to miss out on it. I was constantly setting myself up to feel dumb, but at the time I was doing it, I thought I was being so smart. I filmed a video one time where I was trying to show people how to make a hundred dollars a day trading on Bittrex, and I managed to lose over a hundred dollars while I was filming, in a single hour, just buying a crypto high and selling it low several times on relatively small trades with about a thousand dollars. If any of this sounds familiar, I'd gently encourage you to get honest about your crypto investing skill the way I finally had to with mine.
The good news is, I know almost everybody in crypto feels like this. I talk to some other crypto YouTubers, and I have one-on-one calls with you all scheduled every week, and I know this is a very common feeling in crypto. The best part is that it pushed me to ask myself: how do I actually feel smart in crypto? What can I do in cryptocurrency so that on a daily basis I feel like I'm applying all the intelligence I have? And how do I even know if I'm being smart or if I'm being dumb?
Clarity is how I tell smart from stupid
From 10 years of experience in crypto, I can say that usually when I'm confused, that indicates I'm not operating in smart mode. Where there's confusion, there's no clarity. Smart, to me, comes with a sense of clarity. Clarity means I know exactly what I'm doing today and why I'm doing it. The experience and the research I've done in the past have put me in a position to be successful today.
Confusion is waking up and having an altcoin portfolio of 50 different altcoins and wondering: should I buy any today? Should I sell any today? Which one should I hold? Should I research some new ones? That feels like I'm just blowing my brainpower all over the place trying to figure out what to buy and what not to buy. What I want to do instead is focus it.
So what I've learned is that if I want to feel smart and make good decisions in crypto, it comes down to lots more research, much less trading, very well researched and thought-out positions, and exiting any position immediately that is not well researched and thought out. For me, I can simplify it so much, because to me stupidity is exemplified in making something simple complicated. Crypto really is pretty simple if you cut through all of the marketing and get into the technology. And I'll be honest: I contributed to a lot of the confusion in crypto myself. To me, genius is taking something very complex and making it extremely simple, so that anyone can understand it. I'm going to do that right now.
The only two cryptos I see real value in
Internet Computer Protocol and Bitcoin are the only two cryptocurrencies that I see having true value beyond marketing, hype, and speculation, and true potential to go into the future. I don't want to hold Bitcoin myself, though, because I think it has about the same level of risk that Internet Computer does, but it doesn't have nearly the upside and the staking rewards that I see for Internet Computer.
Out of the thousands of altcoins I've looked at, and the more than 200 I've reviewed on video over the years, Internet Computer Protocol is the only project I see with real internet-transforming technology, the largest research and development team in blockchain, and something that's so good that I just want to talk about it in every single video. After researching for a decade, it's the one I keep coming back to, and it's the reason it's the one altcoin I love after researching thousands of them.
To me, intelligence is being able to figure something out in your life and simplify it so it's easy for everybody to understand, and then move on with my life. I felt real stupid in crypto when I was watching hours and hours of videos every day, doing all this research, and then still making bad decisions like buying a meme coin I hadn't researched, only to watch my money go down as I checked the price chart all day. What I love now is this: a smart investor, to me, is a well-researched investor who has found something that is truly an outlier, that is massively undervalued, where there's something real there. I feel very smart today being all in on Internet Computer. If you want to go deeper on the project itself, I keep that conversation going in my ICP Crypto playlist.
Going all in without repeating my old mistakes
I was very afraid to go all in on Internet Computer, because I'd gone all in on cryptos before and felt massively dumb when they fell apart. However, I learned from that. I realized what I didn't do before was look more into the technology. The cryptos I went all in on before did not have any game-changing technology.
Internet Computer Protocol is the first crypto where you can build everything fully on chain. It's the only crypto that currently runs small basic AI models on chain and that, in the future, could run bigger, scalable AI models directly on chain, to have AI on chain even writing its own contracts. I've done a lot of videos about Internet Computer, so I'm not going to go too deep into all of that here, but if you want the long version of why I committed, that's exactly what I covered when I explained why I invested my life savings into ICP.
Going all in on Internet Computer, I feel smart, because I'm not betting on marketing. I'm not betting on hype and speculation. I'm not betting on people just building somewhere and hoping everybody else FOMOs into it. I'm betting on technology that does so many things nothing else can do. There's no other crypto where you can build a website on chain. There's no other crypto out there that runs as a real-world computer, where you can just build your application and have the database, the NFTs, and the pictures all on chain. There's nothing else even building something comparable. I feel very smart, because it looks to me like the future is going toward Internet Computer.
And unlike my previous all-in investments, I haven't made the mistake of just jumping into it without looking at the downsides. On the cryptos I went all in on before, I did not try to find every bit of criticism before I invested. On Internet Computer, I looked and looked and still keep up with all the criticism, every reason everyone says something's wrong with it. It's like my marriage. We've been together 13 years, married for 11 or 12. I know all of my wife's downsides, and she knows all of mine. Where I've consistently felt stupid in crypto was where I got surprised by the downsides of what I had invested in, and those downsides were consistently technology that wasn't worth using by itself, technology that, if it didn't have a crypto coin attached to it, nobody would use.
Internet Computer Protocol is the only technology in crypto that I see people will actually use and build on even if it didn't have a crypto coin attached, because of what it can do. Now, time will tell. And yes, I realize that if Internet Computer goes to zero, I'm going to feel real stupid again. But at least this time, I did my full due diligence. I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours researching it. I tried to find every reason it could possibly not work out ahead of time.
Why I refuse to diversify
Instead of throwing out new cryptos every day for you, and having a low percentage of actually being correct, I just put one thing out, and then I'm either going to get a 100 or a zero on it. I like to be an all-or-nothing, 100 kind of student. Personally, I would rather take a very high-confidence shot at being 100 percent correct, instead of the model most crypto YouTubers pursue, where they throw out 50, 100, 200 coins, and they're wrong on 90-plus percent of them, at least in the long term, and in the longer term they're wrong on 99 percent of them.
And yet they'll focus on the one or two they were right on. If you add all of it up, I'm unwilling to diversify. Being wrong about something leaves me feeling dumb. Even if I was right nine times, the one I'm wrong on leaves me feeling more dumb than all nine I was right on. So with being all in on one single crypto, I'm either getting a 100 or a zero, and because I just have one, it doesn't matter what the price is every day, because I'm not leaving and the research hasn't changed. It makes things super simple.
When things in life are simple, it's easier to focus your genius. I have a simple relationship with my wife, a simple crypto channel here, and a simple investment strategy. Because my whole life is simple, it gives me the space to feel smart. I think almost all of us have a lot of intelligence we're not really tapping into. When you've confused yourself, put in a bunch of junk data, and spread yourself all over the place, it's easy to make a bunch of mistakes, and even if you do a lot of other things right, the mistakes leave you feeling dumb. That's why simplifying my crypto down to one position has done more for my peace of mind than any trade ever did, and it's the same reason I love talking these things through together — you can join Jerry Banfield Family and bring them to a weekly call.
I'm not afraid anymore
So this is my approach: take a safe, sane, and simple investing strategy by being all in on ICP. I'm excited to see how this works out. I'm not afraid. I've done my research. I'm feeling very smart today, and I hope you are as well. For more of how I think about all of this beyond ICP specifically, I keep those broader crypto and money conversations going in my Crypto Reviews playlist.
One last thing that sums it all up for me: this entire website is hosted on ICP. That, more than any price chart, is why I feel smart holding it. I'm not just betting on a coin. I'm building on the technology I believe in.