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.
The Return to Crypto and the Meme Coin Spiral
As I watched that three-hour video fly across YouTube, I thought to myself, Why bother with books? This is so easy. I realized how much money I could make online if I just stuck with what I already knew. I told myself I might as well keep doing crypto. I figured I would put out one crypto video every day and then spend the rest of my time doing other things I enjoyed. Music was the thing I was most excited about creatively, and that’s where I felt the most joy. I had quit video games again in 2024 after being addicted hardcore, especially to Marvel Snap, and music had become the healthier outlet.
I filmed a new video to tell everybody I was back, that I had quit because just needed to make some adjustments in my business. I started taking one-on-one calls again, charging hundreds of dollars an hour to talk to me about crypto. I got back into doing videos about ICP, reviewing cryptos, and bashing coins. That became my life again for months—back on the same path as before, but with a little bit of rejuvenation after a break.
Coming back to crypto, I realized that for much of my time with Internet Computer Protocol, I had tried to act like some kind of crypto saint or savior, someone who was there just to provide the best information without caring about the money. After my return, I abandoned that façade. I told people straight up that this was just work for me, that I was here to make money. I said I was done promoting projects for free like I had before. If anyone wanted coverage, I expected to be paid, and paid properly.
I began asking coins on ICP for thousands of dollars to do a series of videos and at least a few hundred for a single video. Many projects happily paid me a few hundred dollars right away. I submitted proposals to 22 different DAOs and got funded on 11 projects, each for hundreds of dollars. In no time, I had thousands of dollars in crypto in my wallet again. I figured ICP’s price, which was down, would have to go back up, so I held most of what I earned in ICP. I did sell half and put that money in the bank, which felt good, especially to be paying my bills again.
Unfortunately, the negative energy still dominated the whole environment. I might have 11 projects pay me, but then when I tried to build deeper relationships and ask for larger budgets, the answer was often no. For over a year, I had done incredible free marketing for many projects without asking for a dime. From my perspective, I contributed to these projects raising millions of dollars, launching their coins, and yet a year later, most delivered almost nothing. While I let some projects off easy, GoldDAO really pissed me off because their marketcap was millions of dollars and I had done more for them than almost anyone else. When I asked them for a few thousand dollars to work together more deeply, they rejected me. Instead, they offered me a couple hundred for an update video.
That enraged me. I came out publicly ripping the project, pointing out how little they had delivered and how lopsided the whole arrangement felt. From my view, they were hoarding money for themselves while giving almost nothing back to the community. The rest of the ecosystem still promoted them, while I felt used. That video was toxic, another grenade I lobbed into the ICP community. My truth-telling always seemed to inflame people. What I called exposing corruption and exploitation, others saw as greed. They criticized me for being money-hungry when, compared to what I had helped promote, I had received so little.
After what some called “the GoldDAO drama,” I thought the best move would be to promote my own meme coin. If I was going to put in the work, I might as well make something that could benefit me directly. I had created my own little meme coin months before with the ticker JBBJ and instantly regretted it. Initially, I bought most of the JBBJ supply, and almost immediately I realized the dark potential: if I played it right, I could be rich. I could promote my own coin instead of propping up someone else’s, and my coin could 100x.
The realization made me sick. I dumped everything I had just bought when it was only worth a few hundred dollars, told everyone to sell, and tried to end it within the first thirty minutes. Nobody lost any money, and I breathed a sigh of relief at narrowly avoiding what could have been a disaster.
Except the story didn’t end there. JBBJ picked up a narrative of its own. People saw uniqueness in it. Part of why I had made it in the first place was defensive—I had already seen others creating Jerry Banfield meme coins and selling them as if I was involved, raking in thousands of dollars while I had nothing to do with it. At least if I created one, it would be mine.
That’s how JBBJ was born on ICP. Even though I tried to kill it immediately, I couldn’t take it back or delete it. The coin existed whether I wanted it to or not, and people latched onto it. I figured the best move at that point was to buy 2% of the supply, because like it or not, JBBJ was going to take off with or without me.
JBBJ Rollercoaster
As soon as people discovered my JBBJ meme coin and latched onto its unique narrative, the money came pouring in. The market cap soared from nothing into the hundreds of thousands of dollars almost overnight. I immediately felt stupid for only holding 2% of the JBBJ supply. I had set out trying to be virtuous instead of greedy, and that decision left me in a place where I felt like I couldn’t fully own either side. If I could just commit completely to greed or completely to virtue, I would at least feel consistent and get the full benefits of each. Instead, I was stuck in the middle—greedy enough to create the coin, but too virtuous to give myself the lion’s share of the profits.
I watched random people in the community get most of the holdings, while I sat there with only a few thousand dollars of something I had created entirely by myself. Out of frustration, I dumped the small amount I held and made a video saying I was done with it, hoping it would crash the price and kill the coin so I could wash my hands of it. The price did tank, people were furious, and yet a community still formed around the coin without me. I ignored it for months while I chased other projects on ICP, earning tens of thousands of dollars promoting them. Every now and then I wanted to buy back into JBBJ at a lower price, but it rarely dropped below a $100,000 market cap after surging as high as a few hundred thousand. No matter how much I wanted it to go away, the coin just kept sitting there, sustained by a community of holders who pushed it all over ICP.
It was around this time that the GoldDAO drama happened, and out of that frustration, I decided maybe I should go back in JBBJ. Even with only a small percentage of the supply, I could still claim a much greater share of the profits than I was ever getting promoting someone else’s project. Around then, Dominic Williams from Dfinity started talking about a new Caffeine AI coding application that would allow anyone to build a fully on-chain app on ICP. That lit me up. I saw the potential to finally stop being pimped out by other projects. I imagined creating my own app, pulling all my followers into a space I controlled, with my coin tied into the whole ecosystem. To me, it looked like Utopia—ironically the same name Dfinity had used for a failed product launch the year before. I envisioned using JBBJ as the launch vehicle: buy more of it, pump it up, attract massive attention, then transition all that momentum into my own AI app and website when it released.
I talked about this idea on a live stream, and within an hour the price of JBBJ shot up six times. The market cap had been around $100,000, and suddenly it was exploding. I managed to buy back in with about 1,000 ICP, giving me roughly 3% of the supply before I went live. Even at that new all-time high, my own followers were telling me to dump it and take profits before it inevitably crashed. They were right. Some of the top holders saw the spike and unloaded tens of thousands of dollars’ worth, crashing the price back down. Even so, it still held at two or three times the level it had been stuck at for months.
That’s when I started getting messages from followers warning me that I might be running afoul of the law. Promoting my own meme coin, tied to my own name, alongside my own app on ICP—especially presenting it as an investment—was a serious risk. I ignored the messages for a day but could not stop thinking about them. I then researched it with ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini, and everything I found confirmed it. I could easily face legal issues if I pushed my coin as anything other than a worthless throwaway token. To stay safe, I couldn’t give it any kind of real utility, because that would make it more likely to be considered a security and potentially bring the SEC down on me.
My euphoria about finally escaping the cycle of being pimped out flipped instantly into panic. I went live again, walking back my earlier statements and saying I would have to tone things down severely. I deleted the JBBJ hype videos I had made and my audience was furious. Many had bought at higher prices, and after my reversal, the coin tanked by another 50%. A bunch of people sold and took profits, while others who had bought right at the top lost 50% to 80% within just a couple of days. It was another disaster, another cycle of excitement and collapse that left me drained and conflicted.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Money playlist.