The Elevator Pitch for ICP
Here's the simplest possible explanation of ICP, or Internet Computer Protocol, if you want to introduce a friend to ICP or work on your elevator pitch for it. Here's the most basic explanation: ICP lets entire websites and apps run on a blockchain instead of a traditional cloud provider. If you want to explain it like you're explaining it to a child: most websites live on computers controlled by one company. ICP lets websites live on a shared network that no computer can secretly change.
I'll admit I tried scripting this one. I had ChatGPT put together some notes as training wheels, some guardrails, so your boy doesn't just totally say anything he wants and repeat the exact same idea in every video, and honestly reading from notes in the background made this harder, not easier. At one point I was trying to hit the record button and stop the whole thing, but it had gotten funny by then, so I just kept rolling with it. The lesson I took away: I should just do these off the top of my head. I don't need any training wheels.
If you want to compare it to crypto: most crypto puts money on the blockchain. ICP puts software on the blockchain. The best comparison is this. Bitcoin is, quote, decentralized money. It's a little difficult in practice to actually see the reality of that, but Bitcoin is the first decentralized money. ICP decentralizes the entire cloud computing stack. And as I've repeated in previous videos, I believe ICP is the first blockchain most people may use.
Why Do We Need a New Internet?
The basic idea is that ICP is a huge upgrade to the existing internet. The existing internet infrastructure has been basically the same for the last thirty years, with the difference being that companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have built out their own infrastructure instead of everybody just running their own servers at home. The internet being kind of small back then, huge companies built out massive internet infrastructure, and now they host huge portions of the internet all on their own infrastructure. Which means you have a very few number of companies that control huge parts of the internet, which means you can easily be censored, or you are beholden to them. They can spy on you. They have control over your data. Even their infrastructure has a lot of insecurity built into it, because the software is just sitting there on the device running off the hardware. There's no extra layer of security. They build all these custom solutions, and it's a nightmare.
You might wonder, well, why do we need a new internet? Well, take payments. Our existing payments infrastructure does not work that well with the existing internet infrastructure, because it's all somewhat slow and inefficient, and there are all these layers of security bolted on. Which means it's pretty much limited to just big companies who can afford to pay a lot for security and go through all the regulation. There's a very real need for decentralized money, hence Bitcoin. But once you see what decentralized money is capable of, then you start asking: why can't we decentralize the whole internet? What would we be capable of if anybody could just build a website?
What we need is for people like me to be able to just put their own website on public, internet-hosted infrastructure. And if you want to talk with me, you can schedule a one-on-one call with me. I actually got this idea from being on a one-on-one call with one of you, because he was asking, "Well, Jerry, how do I pitch ICP to my friends?" And I say: it is a huge upgrade to the existing internet. The existing internet is insecure and very centrally controlled, and we need a new internet that is much more secure by design and that has a public infrastructure with transparent governance. That's a huge deal. And some of these other coins are faking like they can do this, but AI will call their BS out. Go look up whether any other coin is even close to doing anything ICP is doing in terms of: could you build the infrastructure of the internet on it? Could this be used to upgrade the infrastructure of the internet?
What's brilliant about ICP is how it interfaces with the existing internet, so you can essentially work on upgrading the internet piece by piece by moving onto ICP — with cloud engines giving you the chance to do that in a private, controlled environment, and the existing ICP mainnet giving you a chance to do it right out in public where anybody can access it. As Bobby O laid out in his recent video, the public-private approach works really well with ICP.
Not Beholden to Anyone
Anyone like me using the public ICP internet infrastructure can go host a website, build an entire app, or a crypto game. And this is very important, because we as the public need a hosting infrastructure that allows us to not be beholden to centralized companies that can easily censor us, take our app down if they don't like us, charge us whatever they feel like, have access and control over all our data and all our code, and delete our entire account anytime for any reason. I just heard the story of a guy who lost his Microsoft account because his account got compromised, so Microsoft deleted it — and he had all his photos and everything in there. And they were basically like, "We can't get your account back. Sorry about that." He has no recourse. There's nothing he can do. His account's gone. All his data's gone.
And even the tech giants themselves need to be able to offer services like blockchain-hosted photos, for example. If you really wanted to make sure your photos were secure and not easily lost or deleted, Google could offer a service — Google Photos on blockchain — and then you could have your photos directly on ICP, hosted globally. That makes sense: if you have precious data you don't want to lose, put it on an infrastructure that's more resilient and harder to tamper with. And with ICP offering cloud engines now, this allows the existing internet infrastructure like Amazon and Google to continue to host, but with a new layer of blockchain put in the middle of that. That is a huge deal.
AI Needs a Better Internet
So the simple explanation for ICP is that our existing internet is getting hacked into oblivion by cybercrime, and AI is changing the way we live our lives on the internet. What we need is an upgraded infrastructure for the internet to be able to deal with AI — and AI needs a better internet infrastructure. Right now, the majority of companies are struggling to implement AI. AI programs themselves are powerful enough to do just about anything if you can give them access to data in an environment like ICP. But right now, the way the infrastructure is, all the different data points are siloed, like Bobby O covers very well in his videos.
I see this myself. I've got a QuickBooks account, a Stripe account, a PayPal account, and bank accounts. I've got all these separate things, and I want AI to work with them. I can't just take the data from my QuickBooks very easily. I can export a spreadsheet, then put that in ChatGPT, then take my website and try to put that in there too. What ICP combined with AI is allowing us to do is start rebuilding all that stuff. In theory — maybe I'll try this — I could build my own system where, especially if I took all my payments via ICP, I could manage all my finances in one place. And especially if everybody else accepted ICP, you could build all of this in one single environment on a blockchain, and then AI could go through and run everything with that.
Right now, big companies especially are using at least five, if not ten to hundreds, of different individual siloed solutions. You've got the data from your accounting over here, your document signing over there, your website over here, and your customer CRM over there. All that stuff can't work together and talk to each other without custom integrations, and if anything breaks, or if the AI has any issue accessing any information in any of it, none of it works. So most companies are struggling to actually implement AI because the infrastructure of the internet is so siloed and so old at this point — and unreliable, if you need things to work every time and be predictable. It's reliable if you just want to access a website. But if you want to tell AI to do the exact same thing the exact same way every single time and calculate it like this, every single point has to be integrated and guaranteed to run. With ICP and the smart contract functionality of the blockchain, you can guarantee that it runs the exact same way every time. For AI, that's really important.
So the simple pitch: between cybercrime and AI, we need a better infrastructure for the internet to run on, and ICP has provided that infrastructure. I guess this is starting to get less simple, but basically ICP is setting up a new infrastructure for the internet. And while that might not sound like an instant-millionaire narrative right offhand — and this isn't financial advice, though I'm personally all in on ICP — if you look long term, in my view the question becomes: what has real utility for humanity? Which crypto project is genuinely serving humanity instead of ripping people off with stuff they don't need? ICP, to me, is the only project I see genuinely offering a gift to humanity: a better way to host your website.
I've never seen web hosting like this. This web hosting is so far ahead of everything else — even just the billing. I've put so many websites on ICP already. Maybe the last time I had this many websites was fifteen years ago when I started online. Your boy made a lot of websites. I made a website practically every week. But I stopped doing that because the hosting infrastructure was so garbage that if I put all my websites on one server and one of them went down, literally all the others would go down too. And if I wanted to host more and more websites, I needed to constantly pay more and more money, even if nobody came to any of them, just in case somebody did come to some of them. I did that for a long time, and it was a nightmare building with WordPress and themes. Everything was more expensive.
My Websites on ICP Cost Almost Nothing
Everything had to plug into each other. Everything got more and more complicated, and it was so annoying. Now with ICP, I've got all my websites there. I've started dating this woman, and I've been getting her website onto ICP — my dating coach. I got her website hosted on ICP too. And cryptotechcap.com is also on ICP. These websites only cost me maybe a dollar or two each to throw up on ICP. Some days there are hundreds of people that come in a single day, and I think I initially loaded up about ten bucks in cycles and haven't had to pay anything since. Do you know how much this would cost to host all these websites on some shared hosting provider?
And do you know what a big deal it is that I can do all of this from my command line with Claude? Here's my actual workflow: I make a video, I dump it in a folder, I tell Claude to run my metadata, and Claude just cranks out a post directly on my blog. Then I run my ICP deploy command, paste it in, put my password in, and it deploys to the blockchain and updates the whole website. This is a big deal. This is not some "maybe somebody will use this coin because somebody else is paying somebody" situation.
The Only Blockchain You Could Use Without Knowing It
If you want to pitch ICP to somebody already in crypto: in my view, ICP is the only crypto where you could use the blockchain and have no idea that you were using the blockchain. You can't use the Bitcoin blockchain without being very clear you're using the Bitcoin blockchain. And you wish you didn't realize you were using the Ethereum blockchain so much, when you had to click 85 prompts to sign in — wallets, recovery phrases, sign this, confirm that, set a wallet spending threshold. How many times do I have to click to send this transaction? You can't just use these other blockchains without realizing you're using the blockchain, because you're having to pay gas fees. Technically some of these other chains have various ways you could pull data from the blockchain, but not without some third party in the middle serving the website. And again, crypto is all about removing the third parties.
What we need in internet hosting is a public infrastructure where the hosting is not owned by some centralized company — where if you want to ban somebody from it, you need to make a proposal to the governing parties, which are the token holders, and all of that should be transparent.
Getting Off Centralized, Siloed Platforms
So ICP, in the simplest explanation: this is an upgraded internet infrastructure. This is a way to upgrade the internet for an age of AI, to prevent the vast majority of cybercrime, and to give people a chance to get off of depending on centralized tech and siloed environments. Take something like Squarespace or Shopify. You get on Shopify, you're in their world now — you're on their hosting, you're playing by their rules. If you piss them off, there goes your whole website and everything you set up. And that's fine if you want to do everything their way and pay their fees. But what happens when you want to set your own store up and build your own rules? What happens if you don't want to pay all the money it costs for Shopify, and when you're setting up a new store you'd like to just build something out with AI and do it your way? What happens when you're hosting a game on Amazon, your game is profitable, people are having fun, and Amazon says, "We're tired of hosting your game," and they cut you off?
This is why I believe we need a new infrastructure for the internet. The existing internet is very centralized and it's insecure. ICP is the solution for the old, centralized internet infrastructure we have. So when your friends ask about it, you can share this explanation with them. I've tried to keep it simple — and no thanks to ChatGPT for making that more difficult than it would have been if I'd just done it off the top of my head. That's what I get for trying to use notes.
Let's Make a Video Together
The conversations I have on calls consistently inspire my new videos. How cool is it if you see me make a video and you're like, "Hey, I had that conversation with him, and now he made a video about it himself"? If you want to collaborate with me on an ICP video, schedule a one-on-one call with me — we can hop on Zoom, and you can text or WhatsApp me at the number you get when you book the call. Then you and I can do a video and talk about ICP together. If you just want to talk about ICP, I'd love to do a video with you instead of just doing one by myself. Pop in and say hi.
And if you want the best experience with me, I think some of the most amazing content I'm putting out right now is on my @JerryBanfield channel, where I've been doing daily vlogs. What I've really been into right now is that I started dating this woman, and she has totally changed my life — and I've been a big deal in her life too. I've been talking about my journey through that every single day. I also have a dedicated dating channel, a games channel, my old music is still up there, a YouTube coach channel, and a Crypto Reviews channel, where you can watch my ICP Crypto playlist. If you want the best experience, start watching my vlogs. They're really heartfelt, you'll really get into my life, and then you'll really want to talk with me and share your life with me.
All right, it's checkout time — we've got to go. Aren't y'all glad I didn't refilm this? I was about to just refilm the whole thing, but that first minute ended up being funny. All right, I'm going to stop talking now.