The price barely matters if you pick the right crypto. Most of you in crypto waste huge amounts of time agonizing about whether prices are up 10 or down 5 and where they're going in the short term. And I invite you, if you want a better experience in crypto, if you want to relax and just get money — isn't that what we're here for, to relax and get money? — let me give you an example of how you could have done that in crypto. And I'm going to give you an example of how you can do that today also, because it's too late for Bitcoin.
What Buying Bitcoin in 2014 Really Looked Like
Here's a perfect example. In 2014, when I started in Bitcoin, people were doing the same thing as 12 years later: agonizing over prices. At the beginning of the year, Bitcoin topped out over $1,000. Now, in the short term — and by short term, I mean for years — if you bought Bitcoin at $1,000 in 2014, you would have had to wait a couple of years just to get back to even. Think how silly that looks today, when Bitcoin's up in the $60,000s, that you could have gotten a 63x. If you bought Bitcoin at the highest price it sold for in 2014, you would still have gotten a 63x today. And there are not a lot of places in the last 12 years you could have gotten a 63x. That's at the absolute highest price Bitcoin was in 2014.
At around the middle is when I started buying, when the price was around $500. And I agonized, and I refreshed Coinbase, and I looked at articles, and I wondered what was going on with the price. I wasted so much of my precious time and ended up selling a bunch of Bitcoin at $500 and trying to buy it lower at like $400. And then it was nuts. My brother at his wedding said it was like an addiction — I was sitting on his phone on the way to his wedding, in his car, on Coinbase, trading Bitcoin.
Here's the thing: if I'd have just bought an amount of Bitcoin I could afford to hold and left it there, I'd have gotten a 126x return on the Bitcoin I was buying in 2014. Today, for every dollar I put in, I'd have $126. That means if I put in $100, which was no big deal in 2014, I'd be sitting on $12,000 worth of Bitcoin today. From today's point of view, it looks like you couldn't have lost.
And I actually did buy 10 Bitcoin. I bought 10 Bitcoin at the bottom when it was $170. And I bought all the way down from a little below $1,000, like $600 and $700 — I bought all the way down. At the time, I was just hoping to get back to $1,000. When I was buying at $170, I was hoping to get back to a price of $1,000. In fact, my plan was to start selling at over $1,000, and I did videos talking about how to DCA in and then sell it over $1,000. And I ended up having 60-plus Bitcoin when the price was $1,700 a few years later, because I just DCA'd and I just kept stacking. For a while, I was doing all right. And then I traded all these other altcoins, and I put all this effort into making more and more money. I'm like, if I trade these altcoins and I work really hard, I can make more money.
But the simple truth today is that I was in a position where any Bitcoin I bought in 2014, I literally could have bought it and done nothing, and I would have made a minimum of a 63x. And if I'd had the patience to hold on to even one of those 10 Bitcoin I bought at $170, I would have made a 372x on my money.
The Quantum Moment: The Daily Price Doesn't Matter
Now, if you can really hear what I'm saying, this is a quantum moment. This is where you realize, wow, if I pick the right project, it doesn't matter at all on a day-to-day basis what the price is. Because if you're in the right project, the price in the short term — over a year, over a couple of years — doesn't matter. It doesn't matter whether you get a 63x or a 372x. If you only have a dollar to invest, maybe it does, but most people in crypto are working with at least $100, and it's not generally going to change your life much going from a 63x to a 372x. But what will change your life is wasting huge amounts of time agonizing over whether you're going to get a 63x or a 372x.
Or what's even worse: you spend so much time agonizing over whether Bitcoin's 170 or 500 or 1,000 that you do what I did. When I bought my Bitcoin at $170 — I bought at like $190, $180, and $170 — I had like $8,000 of Bitcoin. Multiply that by 372x if you want to see what this really looks like. So I'm going to get the calculator out. I had $8,000 of Bitcoin in 2014, and I agonized so much and obsessed so much over the day-to-day price that I ended up selling for a small return, figuring I could buy lower. I dumped that $8,000 of Bitcoin, and I sold it in cash to a guy who gave me $8,000 in cash. At the time, I felt pretty good, because I'd bought a bunch of it at 170, 180, 190, and I sold it at 200-something. Today, I'd have $3 million instead of $8,000 in cash.
Now, at the time, when Bitcoin was $170, it was the roughest time to be in Bitcoin we've seen over the last 12 years. It had just pumped over $1,000, and the crash wrecked everybody: it's done, it's over, that was its one pump, this is it, this was cool, but it's finished. There was no context to ever expect it would go up again. That was the one single pump, and a lot of us thought, that's it — crypto, literally, crypto is over now. Nothing's going to happen. And for years, it seemed like nothing was going to happen, and it didn't happen either. Today, you can look back and be like, man, you could have bought at any point in 2014 and been in massive profits.
But where I screwed up was short term. Is it 170? Okay, it's 200. And trying to trade. Because almost everybody in crypto makes money off you trading. Almost nobody makes money off you holding, except the project you pick. So this lesson is, to me, one of the most important things you can learn in crypto, if you're in the right project.
What Exactly Is the Right Project?
Now, to finish, let's define what exactly is the right project. That's the most important question you should be asking in crypto. Not how much is the price going to go up, but which project is the right project to be in and stay in for the next decade? Because your life is too short to be trading — unless you're a mathematical genius and you know how to use AI. If you don't know what the cutting edge of trading looks like, you have no business doing it. You're playing a game rigged against you. And I was delusional in 2014 to get into crypto with no trading experience and think I'm going to make money. It cost me thousands of dollars, and what I would argue is worse, it cost me being a multi-millionaire today.
If I would have only been focused on: is this the right project? Can I hold this indefinitely? What kind of returns could I get holding this over the next decade? That would have been a totally different mindset. And I did shift into that mindset for a while. I bought $50 a day, DCA'd into Bitcoin for like a year, and then I eventually worked that into hundreds of thousands of dollars in altcoins. But then I sold it all and went back to zero and had to start over again.
So the key thing is to identify: how do I know what the right project is? And to me, the way you know what the right project is, literally today, is as simple as asking ChatGPT. Especially if you have ChatGPT Pro, ask it to go through the top 100 cryptos and review what Bitcoin was in 2014. It was five years old. It was the first big breakthrough in a new technology. It was a totally unproven market, and almost no one liked it. Almost all the coverage it got was negative. Almost everything from any authority said, well, people are just using this to smuggle drugs and pay for illegal stuff — that's almost all any authority said about Bitcoin. This was six years before Michael Saylor got into Bitcoin. And it was hard being in back then. You could mine Bitcoin off your own computer back then. I remember getting my first hardware wallet, and it just seemed like alien technology.
So you could use ChatGPT Pro today and say: look through the top 100 cryptos and tell me what is most similar to Bitcoin in 2014. This is as easy as it gets today. You can literally use the AI to think for you. And what you want to look for is an outlier — a project that has a chance, that is drastically underpriced. Crazy underpriced. We can see now that Bitcoin was crazy underpriced, but at the time it was harder to see.
The Same Opportunity Today: ICP
So today there's an even easier opportunity, and I talk about it in like every video. This isn't financial advice; this is my research. The opportunity, obviously, is ICP. It is so similar to Bitcoin in 2014. ICP has been out for five years. It solves a gigantic new problem that almost nobody even realizes how important it is that it solves. ICP is not just a crypto. It is a blockchain cloud. It is a new infrastructure to build the internet. And this is why my ICP channel is devoted to it every single day — all I do is talk about ICP. Here's an example: AI just solved ICP's biggest problem. Next video: ICP is Nvidia before the AI boom. Will AI buy all the ICP off exchanges? ICP will be the first and only project to decouple from Bitcoin. And I mentioned this in one of my other videos: one order can make ICP the number one crypto overnight. ICP is taking on the entire tech industry. Is buying ICP like buying Ethereum in 2016? Yes, yes — I've already found the same thing.
Because this is how I've gone at it. I've gone at it looking at: okay, I was in Bitcoin in 2014 — where is the exact same opportunity today? Because any opportunity that was there in the past, there's another opportunity just like it today. Life kind of fundamentally does that. It kind of stays the same. There's always upsides. There's always downsides. There's always opportunities. There's always traps and pitfalls. So what is the same opportunity today? It's Internet Computer Protocol. It's the exact same opportunity. In fact, it would take a 1,000x for ICP to get to where Bitcoin is at today.
Why Most People Can't See the Opportunity
But most people can't see the opportunity that ICP is, because all you look at is price. And I guarantee you, if the same people in crypto today were in Bitcoin in 2014, you wouldn't have seen the opportunity in Bitcoin either. Because all you would do is look at the price on a day-to-day basis. All you would do is talk about, well, it's at 170 — when are we going to go back to 200? I think it'll get back to 500. You wouldn't have the long-term vision to say: this is going to get to 100,000 one day, and I can literally do nothing as it goes there.
Today, the same opportunity is in ICP, but most people are blocked from seeing it, because almost all people do when they look at ICP is look at the price chart. You're used to looking at the Bitcoin price chart. And when you look at the Bitcoin price chart, it doesn't look so good over the last year, does it? The Bitcoin price chart looks pretty bad over the last year — not much different than ICP. It's down 46% in the last year. But most people for some reason just look at the chart going back to when CoinGecko started tracking it. And here's the thing: the Bitcoin price absolutely sucked compared to where it's gone since then. So to me, the opportunity is to find something where the price absolutely sucked when you bought it, and then that whole journey was still ahead of you.
The IQ Test in the Price Chart
When I look through crypto today, the only thing that feels like that — and it's not close, there's no close second, there's no "well, if ICP didn't exist, then..." — no. There's only one thing. I just quickly scrolled past it; that's how rigged this is. There's only one thing. And this is an IQ test right here. This is meant to keep out the masses, because the masses look at the chart. If you looked at it, Bitcoin's down 49% or something in the last year, and ICP is down 58%. Unlike Bitcoin, though, ICP actually was four times higher at one point in the last year than it is today, which Bitcoin has not been — Bitcoin is not even close to where its all-time high has been. Its price has done nothing but suck for a year, and people have watched so many videos wasting so much time about it. ICP did a quick little 3x in a single week. That's pretty interesting, isn't it? But for some reason, this is the only chart people think matters.
And this is the opportunity, because 99.7% of people can't see through it — the same way 99.7% of people could not see that Bitcoin at every single price in 2014 was a fantastic opportunity over the next decade. And yes, in the short term, I've lost hard on ICP. Just like if you bought Bitcoin at $1,000 in 2014, you lost hard for years. But it still worked out pretty nice, didn't it?
Millions of Dollars for Doing Nothing
So to me, all I focus on is: what is the number one piece of information I could give people in crypto? It's that ICP is basically Bitcoin 12 years ago. That's the case I keep building, video after video, in my Crypto Reviews playlist. If you just missed Bitcoin, all right — you weren't in it. But to me, the worst thing is that I was in Bitcoin, and while I did make hundreds of thousands of dollars in crypto over the next few years, I missed out on millions of dollars I would have made by doing nothing. It gets no better than that. It gets no better than making millions of dollars doing nothing.
Today, out of the top 100, I see one single opportunity. All the other ones have diminished potential returns compared to their risk. There's one opportunity today, in my view, to make millions of dollars over the next decade by doing nothing. And by doing nothing, I mean buying and holding ICP.
Staking: What Bitcoin Can't Do
And you can even stake your ICP and get a return on it — unlike Bitcoin, which you cannot do that with. On ICP, you can stake your ICP and get 6.54% back. Now, imagine if you could get a 60x or a 100x and get that 6.54% without having to touch your principal. Imagine if I had gotten that in Bitcoin over 10 years — that would be over a million dollars. Over a million dollars I would have gotten without touching my principal. I'd still have $3 million sitting there, and I'd have gotten over a million dollars again, paid out for doing nothing.
The Strongest Proof: My Website Runs on ICP
So if you found this valuable and you want some more proof, I've got the strongest proof. My website at jerrybanfield.com is actually hosted on the ICP blockchain. This is a huge deal. This is proof of how powerful this tech is. No other blockchain is even close to being able to do this. I've built an entire business system that you can't build any other way. This is the best way in the world to build a business today: to use AI to build out your own business on ICP. That is a huge deal, just like the world's first cryptocurrency in 2014 was a huge deal.
When you go to jerrybanfield.com, you are creating a transaction on the ICP blockchain, but you're not paying anything. Then if you do want to pay something, you can buy my chat and get lifetime access to chat directly with me on my website. I've tested this to make sure it works with an ICP payment. This technology is incredible. It has blown me away — I'm a tech geek, and this has blown me away. This has been a dream come true. If you want to talk to me, you can pay to talk to me whenever I'm online and have a conversation with me. I even bought a meeting straight through my own website to test it. All of this is facilitated by blockchain. This is amazing. If you missed Bitcoin in 2014 like I did, I found something for you.
I hope this information is helpful. If it is, go to jerrybanfield.com, buy the chat access, talk to me, and tell me about it — I don't read the comments, but if you want to have a conversation with me immediately whenever I'm online, that's how to reach me now. Or you can join the Jerry Banfield Family on Skool, or you can schedule a call with me.
And I'm going to keep adding a bunch of other stuff on my website. I've got games directly hosted on the blockchain that I built with AI sitting right there, and I've got a leaderboard — I tested it with my beta testing profile, and whoever buys the most stuff sits there indefinitely on my leaderboard as well. Hope this was useful information for you, and I hope to see you at jerrybanfield.com soon.