I believe a lot of people are being robbed and stolen from in crypto, over and over again, and I hope I can help you avoid that by talking about a very important idea: opportunity cost. In my experience, this is making things so much worse than most people realize. Opportunity cost basically means that if you put your money into one crypto, that's money you can't put into another. So I'm not just talking about the obvious losses, because plenty of people have lost money investing in bad coins, getting rugged, and getting ripped off. But to me that's not even the worst part. The worst part is all the things you're not funding because of that choice.
Let me put this in terms of a marriage. If you marry a person and you have a really awful relationship with them, the cost isn't just the awful relationship itself. It's the fact that you could have married someone and had a great relationship instead. When you think about it that way, a lot of people stop at, "Well, I'd rather be single than be in a bad relationship." To me that's only halfway there. Imagine the amazing life you could create being in a great relationship with the right person. The thing to do, in my view, is to immediately clear out whatever is in the way. So you're not just being robbed in crypto of your own personal gains. Because of opportunity cost, you're also helping create a world you don't want to live in by funding all these coins.
What you're really funding when you hold Bitcoin
Let me give you a perfect example of opportunity cost in action. If we look at the crypto charts, right now the market cap for Bitcoin is around $2 trillion. So many people, when they invest in something like Bitcoin, are only thinking of their own personal gains. This happens in the stock market too. To me, that's selfish, self-centered thinking, because you're not considering at all what you're creating by your investing.
I've shown the Bitcoin rich list so many times, and I'll point to it again, because this is the number one thing I think you need to consider. In my view, if you're sitting there holding Bitcoin today, you are making the rich richer. At this point I don't believe you're contributing to decentralization at all. The fact is that about 82% of the Bitcoin is held by 0.28% of holders, and 60% is held by 0.03%. To me that's a shocking level of centralization. So even if you're holding Bitcoin, the opportunity cost is that you're contributing to this huge market cap, and from where I sit that's creating essentially nothing but pumping the whales' bags.
I'm talking about Tether, and Michael Saylor with MicroStrategy. The way I see it, you're pumping the bags of ETFs, centralized funds, and Wall Street by holding Bitcoin. You're helping create a world where the people holding huge amounts of Bitcoin get richer off you. And in my opinion the tech itself is nearly useless at this point. It's just narratives, hype, and speculation. On top of that, I believe you're contributing to a world of massive, wasteful energy and computing usage for mining Bitcoin. But again, that's not even the worst part. The worst part is the opportunity cost: instead, you could be holding something like Internet Computer, and to me there's nothing else like Internet Computer.
The opportunity cost: what Internet Computer offers instead
Look at the market cap on Internet Computer Protocol. The market cap on ICP is only a few billion dollars, less than four billion. That means the market cap for Bitcoin is roughly 500 times larger. So by holding the same amount of money in Internet Computer Protocol, your money would be valued about 500 times more in ICP compared to Bitcoin. But it's not just about that. The real question I ask is: what is the technology you're investing in, and what utility does it have?
In my experience, if you're holding ICP, you're contributing to what I consider the best technology in crypto. Your ICP helps fund coins that are launching on the launchpad. When you hold ICP, you're getting voting rewards, which I believe supports the best governance anywhere in crypto. The most active DAOs in crypto are all on ICP, and you're getting around 13%. So while someone is sitting there hoping the price of Bitcoin will go up, in my view they're just pumping.
People can make the argument, "Well, aren't there some centralized entities holding ICP?" Yes, but the entire market cap is 500 times smaller than Bitcoin. So whoever is centralized in ICP holds 500 times less of the overall wealth. To me, whatever centralization there is becomes nearly irrelevant compared to Bitcoin.
And look at the tech you're investing in. When you buy ICP, you're supporting all these SNS DAOs. OpenChat, for example, has about 23,000 ICP in their treasury, and they hold a bunch of NICP as well. So you're supporting all these Service Nervous System DAOs, which I consider the most advanced DAO technology in crypto, with applications that run fully on-chain like OpenChat. When you're buying ICP, I believe you're supporting real Web3, technology that can allow the true decentralization of applications. OpenChat is like an on-chain version of Discord or Telegram, but the OpenChat token lets you actually vote on proposals and have a real say. Holding Bitcoin, by contrast, gives you no utility in my opinion.
Every coin you hold is a vote for the world you want
So consider the opportunity cost, all the things you could be investing in instead. To me, if we invest in Internet Computer Protocol, we're contributing to a world where we value technology. ICP has, in my view, the largest research and development team in blockchain. Bitcoin is 15 years old and has just a few people on the GitHub who control things, and I think the tech is garbage at this point. So when you invest in ICP, I believe you're saying, "I care about real technology." When you invest in the rest of these coins, I think you're saying, "I don't care about technology. All I care about is narratives, hype, and which government might buy my coin."
When you invest in something like XRP, watch the XRP videos and judge for yourself. To me it's just hype and speculation. The blockchain itself is doing almost nothing, it's a decade old, and I think the tech is garbage. When you invest in XRP, I believe you're saying, "I don't really care about the tech. All I care about are my own gains." But how many gains are you really going to get in something with this big a market cap and technology I consider so weak?
When you invest in meme coins, I think you're saying, "I don't care at all about the tech. I'll just throw my money into anything. Anybody clicking a few buttons to launch a coin can just take my money." Take Dogecoin. People ask me, "Jerry, what do you think about Dogecoin now that Elon Musk has DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency?" In my view, that means nothing for Dogecoin. Dogecoin is a copy of Litecoin, which is a copy of Bitcoin. When you buy Dogecoin, I think you're saying, "I'd like to invest in someone who copied something from somebody who copied something, and it has no real utility."
When you invest in Ethereum at this point, I believe you're saying, "I'd like to invest in a failed world-computer vision that has high gas fees, that's slow, that can hardly keep anything on the blockchain, and that already has a lot of people invested in it." Opportunity cost is showing you, I think, how important it is to make conscious choices about where your money is going. And in my view you're being robbed if you're not taking the time to think about what kind of world you want to create, and investing in things that support the kind of world you want to live in.
Do you want to live in a world where you're making people ultra-rich because they bought Bitcoin before you, or who use things like ETFs to line their pockets with transaction fees on their own customers? Do you want to invest in things like XRP, which to me look like they pay bots, pay people to talk about it, pay for what looks like market manipulation, and donate to everybody's campaign to make sure they get a seat at the table? Or do you want to support people and technology that I believe is genuinely the most advanced in the world and solves real problems we have? I think you're being robbed if you're not thinking about what your money is doing, and from where I sit most of humanity is getting robbed right now.
Most of humanity is investing completely selfishly, thinking only about their own gains and not about what they're doing to the rest of the world. This is how I think the world got so centralized: people just threw their money in without thinking, poured it into Facebook, and then Facebook censors everybody. They poured it into all these companies the same way. So my encouragement is to stop getting robbed and start thinking about the opportunity cost of where your money is. If you want to go deeper on how I think about money and where I put mine, you can explore my Money playlist. For me, I pulled my money out of everything like Bitcoin, because to me that is not the best opportunity, either for me or for the world.