This is a day in my life with active cryptocurrency addiction, which is the way I've experienced Bitcoin and altcoins since I first got in. I'll also share the treatment that has worked for me to have a very healthy, sane, and easy approach to crypto investing, and I'm going to warn you about the dangers of cryptocurrency trading, because I've had my finances completely destroyed. I even destroyed my entire business online with cryptocurrency. Trading crypto is very dangerous, and most of what I see people doing and telling me about looks more like cryptocurrency addiction to me than smart investing, more than being a person who's building a healthy, successful financial future.
I'll tell you the signs of cryptocurrency addiction I've experienced myself, and I hope this helps you. If you're in it, the first step to getting out of an addiction is coming out of denial, so I hope sharing my story helps you come out of denial in any place where you might be rationalizing and saying, "Oh, that's ridiculous, I'm not addicted to cryptocurrency."
What a cryptocurrency addiction actually is
First, let's begin with what a cryptocurrency addiction is. Addiction means having a compulsive need for, or being dependent on, a habit-forming substance, behavior, or activity. The first clue, in my experience, is simply that you're in it. If you're watching crypto videos at all, it seems to me the majority of people who watch them are interacting with crypto in a way that's compulsive or dependent. The opposite of addiction is connection and sanity, where you're doing something very logically, very reasonably, and it's benefiting you and making your life better.
How I operated when I was addicted to crypto
So how did I operate when I first got into crypto, and for the many years I was in it? I was looking at price charts all day. The first sign I had that I was addicted to cryptocurrency was checking the price more than once a day. There's absolutely no valid reason I can see to be checking the price more than once a day. I have around fifty thousand dollars or so worth of cryptocurrency right now. There are days I don't check the price at all, and if I didn't make cryptocurrency videos, I probably wouldn't check the price more than once a week. The fact is, if you're checking the price 5, 10, 20, 30, 50 times a day, that looks like an addiction to me, because you don't need to see the price, and you don't need to be buying and selling and trading crypto every day. The matrix is trying to trick you into doing this, because that's how it's ripping you off, and that's exactly what happened to me.
In 2014, when I found Bitcoin, I knew this was going to be huge and I got really excited about it. But because I was already in the habit of being addicted to things, instead of having healthy boundaries and a completely sane approach to Bitcoin — like dollar-cost averaging, just buying a little bit of Bitcoin every day, accumulating it, and holding it until it went to wherever it's at today — what I did instead was buy it with all the cash I had in the bank. I'd load up on Bitcoin, then I'd get afraid and sell all of it, then I'd buy again and sell, buy and sell. Meanwhile, Coinbase is making money on every transaction. All the people whose videos I'm watching and whose articles I'm reading — everybody else is making a profit on my addiction.
When I started in crypto in 2014, I was waking up and checking the price chart as soon as I opened my eyes, and I was constantly on Coinbase, or reading crypto articles, or thinking about my next buy or sell all day. Even though I had a wife and a great relationship, we were doing things together, I had a business online that I was building, and I had plenty of other hobbies and interests like video games, I was obsessed with crypto all day, which, looking back, was completely unnecessary. All I needed to do was set up a fifty-dollar-a-day recurring buy — or, if I could only afford less, a hundred dollars a week — and just buy automatically. That's a sane way to approach crypto investing.
But what was I doing instead? I was at the gym on the elliptical, trying to listen to an audiobook, trying to decide: should I buy one more Bitcoin right now, or should I wait? The price is $620. Oh, it just dipped, and I'm constantly refreshing. Oh, it's down to $610, okay, let me just buy a half Bitcoin right now, and when it goes up to $650 maybe I'll buy some more. If it goes down, I'll buy some more. Then it drops, so I buy some more, and all of a sudden I've got like five Bitcoin and now I'm paranoid because I'm holding it all on Coinbase. Then it drops to like $500, and I'm looking for articles: why did it drop, what just happened? I'm getting scared, then I sell all my Bitcoin out of fear, I put the money back in the bank, I'm waiting days for the money to land, and then I can't wait, so I'm sending a wire transfer, paying a $15 fee, and I'm back buying more Bitcoin on Coinbase. Meanwhile, the rest of my life is being neglected.
The signs I now recognize from my own experience
This is what I see in a lot of people too — neglecting the rest of your life and wasting a ton of time. For me, if I was watching more than an hour of crypto videos a day, that was an addiction. It's not productive. I read the book Everyday Millionaires, and yes, the people in it who became millionaires through smart investing do research their investments, but statistically they generally only spend about five hours a week on it. They're not putting 20, 30, 40 hours a week into watching crypto videos. Under no circumstances, in my opinion, for healthy crypto investing, should I have been watching more than an hour a day of videos. That's enough. If you're getting a healthy seven or eight hours of sleep a night, you only have 16 hours in a day. You probably have to work, you have family, you need time for exercise, and you should have a diverse range of interests.
I don't like the word "should," but what I found is that when I was addicted to crypto, I was putting five, six, seven, eight hours a day into it, watching mostly time-wasting videos. If you're watching videos about technical analysis and price charts and you're not a professionally educated trader who's been doing it for 10 or 20 years, then you're an amateur, and I believe you've been tricked into day trading — which is exactly what happened to me. There was no reason, when I was 29 or 30 years old, educated in criminal justice, having been a corrections officer and a police officer and a graduate student, that I should have been trading Bitcoin. I had no experience to validate it, and I paid the price by losing thousands and thousands of dollars just trading Bitcoin. I wasn't even trading altcoins, because they weren't on Coinbase at the time. I was only trading Bitcoin, and I lost thousands of dollars when I easily had the chance to become a millionaire by setting up a $50-a-day automatic dollar-cost-averaging buy. And that's exactly what I did once I got into a healthy place.
Why my treatment started with complete abstinence
If you're addicted to crypto, the ideal treatment to begin with, in my experience, is usually complete abstinence. There are other ways that are possible, and I'll describe those, but for me the first step was to just sell everything and stop. When you're addicted, you get into these emotional spirals and confirmation bias, where, because you're holding something, you're then hooked emotionally to it. If you're holding a certain crypto, you'll relentlessly try to find reasons you were right about the decision you made. If you want to get out of addiction, coming out of denial is the first step — to say, "Look, I'm not doing this in a way that's healthy or that makes sense for my life."
Some of the people I see with the most acute addictions are doing this with large amounts of money, but from the outside it just looks sick. It looks like mental illness. That's how my crypto addiction looked to my wife 10 years ago when I first started buying crypto. From her point of view, it was just mental illness that had at least finally stopped manifesting in alcoholism and gambling — my new crypto enthusiasm was just another way for me to express my gambling addiction. If you've ever experienced addiction to alcohol, drugs, gambling, or other behaviors, or codependency, then it's very likely worth taking a deep look and asking the people in your life whether you're interacting with crypto in a way that's addictive.
When I realized, after about a year in crypto, that I had a behavioral addiction to it — that yes, I was probably right about the future of crypto, but the way I was engaging with it was addictive and toxic and was destroying my finances — the only way I could get out was to stop doing crypto completely for a while, to just forget about it and focus on building my business. And that's what I did for about a year. I focused on building my business teaching classes online. I still kept up with crypto a little bit, but by setting these new habits and taking months off, I was able to reset my behaviors. Then I was able to get into cryptocurrency without an addiction. I came back and started DCAing fifty dollars a day into Bitcoin. At the time I was making a thousand dollars-plus a day teaching on Udemy, so fifty dollars a day was an insanely reasonable amount to put into Bitcoin. I just left it on Coinbase, stacking up fifty dollars a day, and often I was getting a Bitcoin every week or two stacking into my account.
How the addiction sucked me back in
And then I got sucked back into cryptocurrency addiction. As the price of Bitcoin kept moving, as I saw all these big profits coming in, and as my views on my crypto YouTube videos started to explode, the addiction pulled me back in. I had the worst crypto addiction I've ever experienced for about two years. All day, every day, all I thought about was crypto. My emotions were completely tied to crypto. I got in right before the bull market got going, and for about a year and a half, while all the prices were going up and everything was going great, it was one heck of an emotional roller coaster.
While I did make hundreds of thousands of dollars, a year and a half after the 2018 bear market arrived, I was in the worst financial position I'd ever been in. One characteristic of addiction is that all the gains you get will tend to be wasted. If you're doing cryptocurrency investing with a healthy state of mind, and not in a way that's addictive, you often can really transform your financial life. But if you're doing it as an addict, in my experience you're guaranteed to lose — you're either going to lose all of your money or waste a bunch of your time. Even if you do make some profits, if you calculate all the time and energy you put in to get them, you often made less than you could have made just working a job, and you did nothing that made a positive difference to the world.
I have all the skills now where I could make a lot of money trading crypto. I could make hundreds of thousands of dollars more a month in crypto. But not only would that not add value to the world, it would extract value from you, and that's why I don't do it. That's why I'm making a video about cryptocurrency addiction instead of making some video to try to get you to trade. Most everybody else who's trying to get you to trade and telling you about all these altcoins — many of the creators you might watch besides me — are addicted to crypto too. If you watch them and learn from them, that's how I got my crypto addiction: the people I watched and learned from were addicted to crypto. When you're addicted to something, you always pay a price.
How my crypto addiction destroyed my business
While I made hundreds of thousands of dollars from my cryptocurrency addiction in 2017 and 2018, I probably would have made hundreds of thousands of dollars anyway if I'd focused on my business as a YouTuber, an online course creator, and a gamer — and I wouldn't have been stressed out and struggling, and I wouldn't have had the crash of 2018 and 2019 to deal with. When crypto crashed, I sold everything before it crashed and took my profits, but my cryptocurrency addiction destroyed the rest of my business. I had a YouTube channel with hundreds of thousands of subscribers in 2017 and 2018 on all kinds of topics. My crypto addiction led me to put out all kinds of really crappy videos that were just relentlessly promoting a couple of different altcoins, and I wrecked my YouTube channel — which was my number one business resource at the time — with my crypto addiction. By 2019, my once-thriving YouTube channel was dead. I neglected all my other business models, and by the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020, I was in the worst financial position I'd ever been in.
Now it's clear that the addictive way I went about cryptocurrency investing led to that destruction. This is what I see in a lot of people who schedule one-on-one calls with me at jerrybanfield.com: even if you're making money in crypto, you're neglecting and destroying the other areas of your life — your family, your health, your business, your career. You're neglecting all these other areas, and when the market crashes and there's no more crypto money, you're going to be just like I was, where all of a sudden you had all this money and now it's all gone, and you wrecked all the other ways you can make money or enjoy being rich, like having great relationships and good health. If you want to talk through where you actually are with it, that's exactly the kind of conversation I have every day with people inside the Jerry Banfield Family.
Getting back in — and getting honest again
Again, I exited crypto to try to get out of the addiction, and while I took years off, I technically still made money on it, because there were some things I just couldn't get out of that kept paying me anyway. In 2021, I had a friend who, finally, just to get him to leave me alone, I gave three hundred dollars to put into his garbage coin. In 2022, I ended up selling that at the top for $15,000, and that got me back into crypto again. When I got back in, I started off with an addiction, acting the same way I had before — despite the fact that by 2022 I had eight years sober and had conquered a lot of other behavioral addictions in my life. I once again got sucked into crypto addiction for about a year.
Finally, last year, when my crypto channel — I'd started another new crypto channel — was thriving, I was promoting all these different altcoins, my channel was blowing up, money was coming in from zero to $10,000 a month rapidly, and Joe Parys was coaching me every week, I realized I'd done it again. I was in active crypto addiction, and I wasn't giving great value to the people who were watching. I was just an addict hooked on all these things. Thankfully, when I started trying to come out of that and teach a sane, straightforward crypto investing approach that everyone could follow, my channel got terminated. Long story short: the crypto mafia, who have huge networks of bots to promote certain cryptos they're invested in, attacked my channel with their bots. Only because I already had a channel with hundreds of thousands of subscribers and no history of policy violations was I able to get my crypto channel back. A lot of other people would have just lost their channel in those circumstances and never been able to show up again.
But I got my channel back, and that's when I was able to re-remember all the lessons I learned in cryptocurrency addiction, and remember that with a behavioral addiction, thankfully, you often can set healthy boundaries — but you've got to make adjustments. The adjustment I made with my crypto investing is that this needs to be a balanced, healthy part of my life that I'm completely transparent about, that anyone else could follow. And that means simplifying. This whole pattern of quitting the hype and coming back grounded is something I went through publicly when I fired myself and quit crypto hype for real education.
The treatment I found is extremely simple
Fortunately, the treatment I see for cryptocurrency addiction is extremely simple. All you need to do is simplify. Stop trying to trade. Never, ever leverage or options-trade. Stop putting hours and hours a day into crypto. Figure out the single best cryptocurrency based on the tech, the team, and the potential for the future, simplify, and cut almost everything else you're doing in crypto. That's how you can stop being addicted to cryptocurrency, and that's exactly what I'm teaching on my videos and my channel now. I did this exact process myself. I looked through my whole crypto portfolio and found that the Internet Computer Protocol was vastly superior — by far, not even any reasonably close competition — in terms of technology and future potential. That's why I went all in on Internet Computer Protocol, and I did an hour-and-42-minute video last week explaining exactly why I invested my life savings into ICP.
Having everything simplified makes it much easier to not experience addiction. Now that I'm all in on Internet Computer Protocol, there's only one crypto whose price I care about, which means there's only one thing I might be tempted to watch change on a daily basis. If you've got a whole landfill of cryptos that you're trying to care about, then yes, it makes sense that you're always checking price charts, because you have so many coins you want to know about. But now that I'm all in on Internet Computer Protocol, because I did a ton of research, it looks like by far the only place you can build everything fully on-chain.
Now I don't need to research and watch crypto videos. If I didn't create crypto videos, I wouldn't look at anything for crypto most days. In fact, I've started setting a boundary to be healthy with crypto: I only need to serve my existing audience by making one or two crypto videos a week. At this point, I'm often saying pretty much the same thing every time, so I can say it once a week in more depth — like in this video — instead of doing seven 20-minute videos to break the points up. I put all of them in one single video that I can do in one take on my live stream, and I did the same with the video before that.
The freedom I have now
This is freeing me up. I have all these other channels now — my music channels, my video channels, and once a week I review a crypto or talk about ICP. I have an autobiography channel, a thoughts channel, a gaming channel, and a creator channel. Now I have all this time to do other things and build my business off of things that aren't just crypto. That, to me, is finally freedom from addiction, where I'm not compulsively doing crypto — I'm doing crypto because there's joy in it, because I'm adding value to the world. I generally spend an hour or less a day doing research for my videos. Most of my audience watches crypto videos — between this channel and my other channel, I have 50,000 subscribers who want crypto videos from me — and I spend seven hours or less a week researching crypto myself. Why? Because most everything in crypto is just noise. It's food for addicts to take in, to waste your time, to get you to trade.
So, to me, the treatment for crypto addiction often is to stop completely, if you can't change your behavior in a way that's healthy, supportive, and balanced across the rest of your life. And if you're in denial, if you don't think this is an issue, ask everybody else in your life: do you think I have healthy crypto investing practices? Be transparent with the people in your life. Tell them everything you're doing when it comes to crypto, and see their reactions. My crypto investing looks reasonable to my wife now. I put in about an hour a day, and I DCA consistently into Internet Computer Protocol, like once or twice a month. Because of that, I don't need to see the price on a daily basis, and there are days where I don't see the Internet Computer Protocol price at all, even though many of you know me as a crypto YouTuber.
It's been a long journey to not be in crypto addiction, and it takes conscious checking every day to make sure I don't slip back into it, because I've slipped back a lot, and I never want to do that again.
How my other addictions opened the door
So I hope my story is helpful for you. If you are in crypto addiction, the first thing is to stop denying it and be honest. And then there is a way to come out of it. If you're in other addictions — things like alcoholism, drug addiction, other behavioral addictions — treating those may be a gateway to also coming out of your crypto addiction. As long as I was drinking, I had no hope of treating any of my other addictions, like my gambling addiction. But once I got sober and quit drinking, I was finally able to treat my gambling addiction and all my other addictions as well. Now I have a balanced, healthy, sane, sober life, and that's what most of the people in my life are telling me. When I was in addiction, the people in my life were telling me I was in addiction and that I needed help. I'm glad the people in my life, like my wife — who's not in addiction and who knows my life — are now saying, "You know, you're doing really good. I'm impressed." That whole shift, from hopeless to happy, is something I've written about in sharing what it's been like reaching 10 years sober.
So I hope this is helpful. If you want to ask me whether you're in crypto addiction or not, most of the people who schedule one-on-one calls with me are in crypto addiction, and that's what motivated me to make this in the first place. If you enjoyed this and want to keep following along with how I think about all of it now, you can watch more in my Money playlist.