Crypto is freedom is a huge lie. People, including me, were really excited when Bitcoin first came out, and we started imagining that we could be free of government tyranny and centralized control. But the centralized powers have discreetly snuck back in and taken control of crypto almost completely, to the point where, in my view, crypto is more of the same lies. And in fact, crypto has extracted billions and billions of dollars and huge amounts of hours of people's time. If anything, for most people, crypto is more bondage. It's putting in a bunch of time and energy only to lose money. It's buying a meme coin and then selling it and taking profits and then buying some other coin that tanks and goes to zero, all while you put hundreds of hours of time into it and thought you were getting richer, but it turns out now your bank account's drained.
How the centralized powers snuck back in
It is having people now put money into institutions like BlackRock for ETFs, where now BlackRock holds the Bitcoin and not the people themselves. And BlackRock, if they're honest, will only sell one Bitcoin for each Bitcoin they have to their investors. But if any centralized organization who has a bunch of Bitcoin chooses to double, triple, 10x sell their Bitcoin — say they only have a thousand Bitcoin, but they sell 10,000 worth to investors — now crypto is exactly the same thing that we're already used to everywhere else.
And I would like to see a future where crypto does equal true freedom. So what exactly do we need to have happen in order for that to actually manifest? This is the kind of question I keep coming back to across my Money playlist, and I think it's worth working through carefully.
What crypto would need to actually equal freedom
Well, first, we need to be able to directly interact with the blockchain ourselves. Right now, the main way that crypto has been compromised from offering any true freedom is that most people keep their crypto in a way that you have a third party between you and the actual blockchain — even if it's in your own wallet. If you have a Ledger or Tangem or Trezor or MetaMask, in these cases there's a third party between you and the blockchain that can be compromised, and that can cause you to lose some or all of your crypto: whether it's hacked and stolen, whether the exchange goes down like FTX, or rather a government decides to seize your crypto, which can happen on any exchange, or whether the third-party provider gets hacked and you get tricked into making a fraudulent transaction, or you end up losing your Ledger or your hardware wallet and then can't get another one. This is what has happened to so many people in crypto.
And the first thing we need to do to take some real freedom back for crypto is we need people in crypto to be more open, more educated. Because the existing state of finance in the world is that people get tricked into all kinds of bad investments, putting money into things that end up working against them. For example, when people throw money into mutual funds carelessly, just hoping to get a better return and keep up with inflation, then they're funding all kinds of these companies to have centralized power and control right back over them. People throwing money into mutual funds — some of it ends up in Facebook, then they end up getting their posts taken down by Facebook, and then they complain when really they just contributed to funding the company that then censored them. Our whole system is set up like this right now.
Why a third party always stands between you and the blockchain
And while crypto initially had some hope of giving us a better deal, with most people holding their money directly on an exchange or in some third-party wallet and not even interacting with the blockchain, most of the people in crypto are extremely vulnerable to losing money. In my experience, Internet Computer Protocol is the only blockchain out there where anyone can easily directly interact with the blockchain, and you do not need any more third-party wallets — you can have your entire wallet on the Network Nervous System or in any of these other apps. Because Internet Computer is the only full-stack crypto where you can build your whole website, an order book exchange, AI on chain, full Web3 social media apps like Taggr and OpenChat directly on chain. Internet Computer is the only crypto that I've found that is practical and easy to use, with low transaction fees, that does not practically require a third-party wallet.
Now, yes, I'm aware that technically there are official wallets. You can download the Bitcoin Core wallet and download the whole Bitcoin blockchain — like a half terabyte of data — and wait while your computer does that. But for most people that's too difficult. And that ends up being a hot wallet also, where even one of the Bitcoin Core developers got their roughly 100 Bitcoin stolen out of their hot official Bitcoin wallet. So Internet Computer is the first crypto that I see that really gives us a chance to take back true freedom in crypto.
Why I think Internet Computer is the one real shot at freedom
And this is one of the reasons that, in my opinion, Internet Computer appears to be getting censored. Because on Internet Computer it's very easy to do your own staking, which cuts out third parties — unlike Ethereum staking, which has become huge, centralized entities. They say they're a DAO, but technically they're not a DAO; the token doesn't give you any real control, and you have to rely on the developers, who then get to have all the real power.
So both Bitcoin and Ethereum have been totally compromised at this point by centralization, the way I see it. With Bitcoin mining, there are only two or three big mining pools that have control of almost all the hashing rate. When I started in Bitcoin, you could — well, technically it wasn't easy, but if you had the technical expertise, you could just plug a computer in and start mining some Bitcoin. But today the network is so huge, and then it's been centrally funded by things like Bitcoin mining company stocks, so now Bitcoin mining is centralized. And transactions could easily be censored if these mining pools decided to do so. Ethereum already has been censoring transactions, and you've got three or four Ethereum stakers who hold the vast majority of Ethereum. So that's not freedom. That's the same old thing that we've got in the rest of the world. In fact, with all these hundreds of governments in the world, you might argue our current geopolitical system offers more freedom of choice than crypto does. This is the same pattern I dug into in the biggest crypto lie that 99% of Bitcoin, ETH, and ICP holders believe.
Internet Computer Protocol definitely has some centralization as well, with heavy reliance on DFINITY at this point. But at least the technology looks, in my opinion, to be our best chance to have any freedom in crypto. Because right now, the way Bitcoin and Ethereum and all these other cryptos except for ICP are operating is taking away people's freedom. You can see how I think about ICP specifically across my ICP Crypto playlist.
The freedom that's been stripped away over ten years
Having a few thousand dollars in the bank that you can use to travel somewhere — at least there is constant inflation, so the value of your dollars is going down, but having some money in the bank is at least a bit of freedom. But for the billions of dollars that people have got ripped off on all these garbage coins in crypto, that's people's freedom being taken away by lies, by market manipulation. In crypto, market prices are horribly manipulated. There appear to be blatant insider trading, and exchanges collaborating with coins to intentionally pump and dump coins at certain times. And that's not freedom.
Now, the one way I'll say it is freedom: you can buy into any crypto you want to. But many of these exchanges are blocking users from certain countries, and many of these ICOs are not even allowing people in the US to participate. Ironically, crypto felt much more free 10 years ago when I first got into it. Now crypto feels, by comparison, much more heavily regulated, and a lot of the freedom that was there 10 years ago has been stripped away.
So I hope to dispel those of you going around feeling like you're really being free with crypto — you might question that. I don't totally believe any thought that I have, and it's good to question some of these thoughts, because some people get lined up politically on things: if you believe all these other things, then you're into crypto because you believe in freedom. That's probably how I got into crypto myself. But today I know that you've got to be very careful with freedom. Because even if there's some truth to crypto as freedom, freedom is challenging. And what you can see with all these meme coins is that people use their freedom in crypto to often make bad financial decisions.
Crypto creators have almost no freedom
And then when it comes to content creators in crypto, content creators in crypto have almost no freedom if you want views and money. And why do you think most people create content about crypto? Views and money. So if you want views and money, you want to be a crypto creator, and most content creators hype up altcoins relentlessly — either picking a small coin, loading their bags, and just hyping those up.
Even me — what do I do? I talk up Internet Computer in almost every single video, and now I'm talking about Taggr and OpenChat in most of my videos too, which are social apps on ICP. So I'm at least leading by example and telling you what I'm doing with my own money and my own research, in what I believe is your best interest — giving you the best of what I would want to be given if I was in your position. But most of the crypto creators are signing non-disclosure agreements, taking money from other coins, and then some of them have taken money and appear to also then be silent about anything that might threaten them, like ICP. So crypto is nasty. If you'd rather just talk this through with me directly instead of through a screen, you're always welcome to join me in the Jerry Banfield Family.
Why I quit crypto for a while — it was the same dirty politics
I quit doing crypto a few years ago because I felt the opposite of freedom. I got to the top of one of the crypto coins I was invested in, and I found it was more of the same. I was going around telling everybody about freedom until I got to be one of the top holders and top witnesses — which was like being a miner — and I found out: this is just the same old nasty, dirty politics, and underhanded deals. You ask for help and somebody's like, sure, I want a cut of this, and I want a cut of that, and I want a cut of that, and I'll help you out, and if you do this then I'll promote you here. This is the same nasty stuff that goes on everywhere else in politics and corporations, isn't it? I told that fuller story in why I believe Bitcoin is a lie, crypto is fraud, and ICP is real.
True freedom is something we can only have inside
So therefore true freedom is something that we can only have inside. And my big life purpose here is to encourage you not to find freedom in external things — like crypto, for example, or whatever country you're in. True freedom is knowing yourself as the creator of the universe, as a sovereign being who has power over what you think about, what you intend, and what you attract into your life. You have more power over your life than anyone else does, and that is true freedom. And that's something that crypto — no matter how good ICP is, or how good the tech is — cannot give you. Crypto cannot give you the level of freedom you already have.
And for most people, crypto actually appears to have distracted them from doing more important things, like going within and taking care of your addictions. I've run into a lot of people in crypto who are in addiction — because, how do you think I got in here? It's law of attraction. People who are addicted to gambling are often addicted to crypto and drawn to crypto. People who are self-centered, obsessed with themselves, drinkers, drug addicts, often get drawn into crypto, and some of the content creators we've seen have very much matched that description. I'm grateful I haven't placed a bet in a long time, but look at my history — how did I end up here? Well, I found crypto right at the end of my drinking and gambling.
Be careful where you think your freedom is
So you've got to be really careful in crypto, and question where you have real freedom versus where you're being manipulated and tricked into certain altcoins, into certain narratives, into taking what US dollars has been used to make — pretty tangible, clear value, although we could question how well that's going to last in the future — and trading away things that can buy you food and pay your rent, dumping them into sketchy altcoins and meme coins. Crypto is not freedom for most people, but I hope it can be in the future.
If this resonated and you no longer believe the old story, here's a related one worth reading: why I believe Bitcoin is the biggest lie in crypto. This whole conversation actually started live on stream, after somebody got me thinking and talking about the "crypto is freedom" lie — and I'd genuinely love to keep that conversation going with you.