My friends, if you watch the YouTuber InvestAnswers or follow him on X, you will want to know my experience with him, because it might save you a lot of time and energy and help you do your own research. I've spent 30 to 60 hours watching videos that InvestAnswers has made, sharing his crypto research and data. I've learned some valuable things from him too, and I want to call those out first before I go into criticism.
I've loved that he shares two key points in his videos. The first is that you need to skate to where the puck is going, which is a hockey analogy. Instead of what most people are doing in crypto today, just looking at where we're at and the things coming up in the next month or two, he looks further ahead and thinks about where everything is going in the future. Based on my experience in crypto since 2014, researching hundreds of altcoins in the last year alone and doing videos about them on YouTube, it looks to me like the future is going to be fully on chain.
That takes us to part two that I learned from him: the phrase and the thinking that there will be a crypto that is like a black hole, that will suck everything else into it because it is vastly superior to the others and gets great adoption. Now, his thesis that Solana is that crypto is where we disagree, and that moves us into criticism.
What sits behind the data
You also might want to know that InvestAnswers sells a lot of products on his website, up to hundreds of dollars a month, investment and trading products. He draws these huge amounts of data from all these sources and makes the statement in his videos that he's just presenting data. Don't get mad at him. The data speaks for itself, and it's not biased. So my main criticism is that it appears to me that, in some areas, he is presenting either biased data that has intentionally been arranged to tell a certain story, usually in order to promote Solana, which I was holding in my portfolio before I started watching him and while I was watching him, or that he is not putting accurate data in some very key areas that make a big difference.
You also might want to know that InvestAnswers was big into Terra Luna, which was one of the worst crypto go-to-zeros we've seen. He was saying it was going to go to $80,000 before, and well, look where it's at now, very close to zero. Now, if he had 50 or 100 different cryptos in his portfolio, like some people do, that would be a relatively low error rate and not as big of a deal. But he takes this high-quality, very small basket approach for his crypto portfolio, only a handful of things he really believes in, and at the time he had something like a handful of cryptos, and Terra Luna was one of them. That becomes a pretty high failure rate, and it leads me to question how well he really researched and understood it, that he got caught off guard like so many other people did. I did not, and many other people did not, get caught off guard. We saw Terra Luna and it was like, yeah, that doesn't look good to me. That's probably going to go to zero with that algorithmic stablecoin.
Why I made this warning
Now into the things James at InvestAnswers has done recently that led me to make this video and to give him some feedback that he was not taking into consideration in his Discord when I mentioned it in there. I used to watch his videos every day, until I came to research one particular crypto named Internet Computer Protocol. James has had some of the harshest criticism I've seen for it, although it's surface level. He says it's a scam and a rug pull, that the tokenomics are bad, and that there's nobody using it. Well, people in my chat on YouTube were telling me I needed to look further into it. So I actually went and read everything in James's Discord about Internet Computer Protocol that people had written, and I saw people consistently bring things up and never have them addressed, outside of a quick dismissal.
So I started doing my own research, and then I compared it to the data InvestAnswers is showing in his videos. I'm going to give three specific examples here where I don't know what the intent behind them is, but the data was clearly very wrong, and it either makes Internet Computer look bad or it makes Solana look good.
Example one: transactions per second
James did a video where he compared Solana's transactions to Internet Computer's, along with many other metrics. In several of these key data areas, he did one of his comparisons where he lines up about 12 data points and ranks the winner in each one. I think he had Solana winning 12 out of 13, but in some of them he literally just put dashes when the data was available. The data on dashboard.internetcomputer.org is very thorough and very easily accessible. It is easily found by going to the CoinMarketCap page and clicking on Explorer. So, James, why did he exclude data that is very obvious and easy to put on there, and make it look like Solana was way better than Internet Computer? I had Solana and Internet Computer in my portfolio, and I thoroughly researched both of them to see which one had the better technology, team, and future, to skate to where the puck was going.
What I've seen is that Internet Computer is the black hole James is talking about. Internet Computer is the only full-stack crypto platform where you can build your entire application all on chain. You can build the website, all the NFTs, the pictures, the videos, all the stuff that platforms like Solana host off chain. Solana hosts the website off chain. Almost all of the data, videos, NFTs, and code, almost all of that is off chain. All you have on chain generally is addresses and tokens. It costs 10,000 times more to put data on Solana compared to putting it on Internet Computer. So when I found this in my research, and then I saw James doing a comparison that, based on his data, makes Internet Computer look horrible and makes Solana look great, I started to question it. What he's presenting looks blatantly wrong compared to my own research. So I looked further.
Here's a specific example he gave comparing the two of them. He compared the transactions per second from ICP versus Solana. If you just look at the surface of it, without any understanding or explanation, they have about the same transactions per second, which would have been a simple place to just say, okay, they have about the same transactions per second, and move on. Instead, look at the data InvestAnswers chose to present. On Solana, most of the transactions per second are vote transactions, and there's not really something meaningful happening in those vote transactions. Meanwhile, Internet Computer is a full-stack crypto development platform where the transactions are the equivalent of 200,000 Ethereum transactions per second based on the average instructions per second. You've got all these websites and applications. These are in the transactions per second. The data powering this whole network is in the transactions per second.
What he did was drop the baseline transactions per second for both. Because if you'd compared what's happening in Internet Computer's transactions versus what's happening in Solana's, if you'd explained that ICP is a full-stack crypto platform and these transactions are moving a lot of data and actual computation versus Solana being mostly vote transactions and people paying fees to do everything, Solana would have looked bad. So what he did instead was drop the transactions per second with a quick one-sentence dismissal, and then he pulled the ICP transactions versus the Solana-specific transactions.
This is not an appropriate comparison, because ICP has a reverse gas fee model. For example, on ICP, if you use a social media platform hosted on Internet Computer, you don't have to pay any gas fees to sign up for an account, to like, to post, to upload. You don't have to pay anything. The developer has to pay for it. On Solana, if you have an application like that, you would have to pay Solana to do every single transaction, which means tons of Solana transactions get generated, but it's not really mass-adoption friendly. James then compares the ICP transactions, which are pretty much only people swapping crypto or sending crypto, to Solana, which makes Solana look really good and makes ICP look like nothing's happening on it, because you don't need to send ICP or generate an ICP transaction or pay a fee to do almost anything on the network. I'm like, wow, that seems to be grossly inaccurately represented.
Example two: the tokenomics
Another criticism of Internet Computer's status was the tokenomics. He was repeatedly saying the tokenomics are terrible and to stay away from it. Well, I looked, and I did a simple calculation. I took the total supply last year and the total supply this year. With my calculator, I divided 401 million by 511 million, and the actual real inflation on Internet Computer was 3.6 percent. That was the actual inflation. Now, I know he doesn't like token unlocks, and that said, there are token unlocks and locked-up tokens in many of the other coins he mentions that he is not massively critical of. Unlike the rest of them, that all have these token unlocks, ICP has token locks. If you go back to the beginning of the network, there's almost 80 million more ICP that is locked up and not unlocking today versus before, and there's 47 million that is dissolving that was unlocked.
So I researched the tokenomics myself. If you consider the utility of the token, you need ICP to burn. You need to burn ICP in order to use the network. Think of it as similar to needing a credit card on Amazon Web Services to pay your web hosting bill on the internet, which is how most Solana applications are hosted. If you want to pay your web hosting bill on Internet Computer, you need to burn ICP to get cycles.
Example three: the daily fees
This is the last point where his data was blatantly and way, way off, and it's where I said, okay, I need to make a video to warn people what they're getting. One or two things, all right, but this one: he did a video comparing daily fees on the networks, with the basic idea that the fees generated on a network are a good indication of how sustainable it is as a business system. His thesis is that ICP is a ghost town that nobody's using. He put $30 a day in fees on ICP. This information is grossly inaccurate, at least 50 times lower than it should be.
He could have calculated this differently. If he had gone to a specific day and looked at the number of ICP that were burned on that specific day, then sure, there might have been a day where only three ICP were burned. However, he did not choose one of the days where you have thousands of ICP burned in a single day, because that wouldn't have looked good. And that is also not the appropriate way to calculate the fees being paid.
In my experience, the most appropriate way to calculate the fees being paid is the cycle burn rate, because the cycle burn rate is happening constantly, and it represents the real usage of the network. If you want to host your website, for example, you have to burn cycles, and it is very cheap. I have thousands of visitors and it costs like a cent. It is fast and it loads worldwide. So if you calculate the cycle burn rate, and factor in that you have to burn ICP to get cycles, and then that cycles are pegged against fiat, right now you get about 7.4 trillion cycles for one ICP. If you do the calculations, that is thousands of dollars a day being burned in cycles from ICP. That is way different than $30 a day.
Doing the math the honest way
Alternatively, you could make the argument that cycles could have been burned at a different price. Well then, look at the total ICP burned ever and take an average. If you do it that way, it is about $1,600 a day on average, with some days having $10,000, $20,000, $30,000, even $50,000 of ICP being burned in a single day, and then other days there are very small amounts just from ICP fees, as developers get their apps set up and burn $10,000 so that they have got cycles to pay for all the users who are going to come through. So either way, at a minimum, his number is off by 50 times. Instead of being over on the furthest right and looking like nothing is happening on ICP, and then supporting his thesis that clearly nothing is happening on it and it is not sustainable, the real data tells a completely different story.
He also totally misses the fact, from a business standpoint, that DFINITY on ICP is getting voting rewards, which is one of the best business models I have seen out there for a foundation. So looking at this, if you just watched his videos and did not do your own research, you could easily think that Internet Computer was terrible and that it had nothing happening on it.
Always do your own research
This is why you always need to do your own research, no matter who you are watching, even if it is me. And you need to know where people's biases are. Before I loaded my bags with Internet Computer, I actually looked at Invest Answers' criticisms as much as possible. But what I found is that his criticisms, except for just talking about the prices, were easily disprovable. According to the data, they were not accurate.
I hope I have asked, and other people have asked James, to get clear and give a solid look at the data on Internet Computer. I have made this video with the hope that James will cover Internet Computer accurately and present the data that is right there on the Explorer, in the context that it is there as a full-stack crypto platform, or that he will at least present the data accurately alongside everything else in his portfolio.
Full disclosure: I have a bag of 2,900 ICP locked for eight years. I went all in on this because, to me, this is the black hole James is talking about. There is nothing better happening in crypto. This is by far the best technology. I would love to hear James talk about the future, and talk about it based on thoroughly researching it and looking at it.
I appreciate your time here. I make videos every day that I hope will help you make the best decisions and learn in your life, with educational and entertaining material. I am a full-time YouTuber with three channels. I do vlogs, just what is happening in my life as a YouTuber every day, on my original channel. I do crypto live streams on my crypto YouTube, which is where you will find my Crypto Reviews playlist, and this one is on my clips channel. It is also mirrored to X. I filmed this video three times to try to make sure it is as accurate as possible, and I hope that it was good for you. It was good for me.