What's going to happen when someone like Michael Saylor, who likes Bitcoin, finds out about Internet Computer Protocol? In my opinion, we're going to absolutely go wild. If you like Bitcoin, I think you will absolutely love Internet Computer Protocol, because the reasons you probably like Bitcoin are the same things ICP does better. You like that it gives us the chance to cut out the middleman, the third parties, to have direct peer-to-peer transactions. You're hyped about things like decentralization. What you love about Bitcoin, Internet Computer does all of that better.
There are some fundamental problems with Bitcoin that most people doing Bitcoin don't talk about. If someone like Michael Saylor discovers that ICP is the next level of Bitcoin innovation, that ICP delivers the full crypto experience where Bitcoin only gave you a taste of it, I believe it changes everything. Michael Saylor has loaded hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin onto the balance sheet of MicroStrategy, and this has led to other companies loading up Bitcoin, now in ETFs too. He was one of the early adopters at a corporate, high level of Bitcoin. When someone like him discovers that ICP is valued at a fraction of what Bitcoin is, that's when I think it gets wild.
What you really want out of money like Bitcoin
You really want a money that is decentralized, where you can do peer-to-peer transactions. You want a currency that's not tied to governments and constant inflation. The problem is that Bitcoin gives you a basic level of that, but it doesn't give it to you in a way that truly satisfies what you really want.
What you really want out of something like Bitcoin is to be able to go to the grocery store and pay with a piece of Bitcoin. When you get a paycheck, ideally you'd get paid in Bitcoin. When you buy something online, you'd like to be able to pay with Bitcoin, wouldn't you? And while we're at it, wouldn't you like to have all the security benefits of Bitcoin everywhere you go on the internet? Wouldn't you like to be able to use media websites and send people Bitcoin directly online? Wouldn't you like to have your whole website and database and everything on the blockchain?
The fact is, you can't do that with Bitcoin. It's expensive just to do a transaction, and transactions can take hours to confirm and for the other person to receive your Bitcoin. Internet Computer does all of that stuff I just told you, like when you want to host your website directly. This is why I believe that when someone like Michael Saylor finds ICP and sees that you could move your whole infrastructure onto it, eliminating almost all of your IT costs if you got in early, that's a huge moment. In my view, the opportunity with Internet Computer Protocol is much bigger than when Michael Saylor got into Bitcoin.
A company could absolutely blow themselves up with this. I believe an individual with some money could turn themselves from a millionaire into a billionaire on ICP — that's my opinion and my own experience talking, not financial advice. Because if you like Bitcoin, imagine hosting your entire website on Bitcoin. Bitcoin's 15 years old; it can't do that. But Internet Computer Protocol, released a little over three years ago, can. jerrybanfield.com is directly on the blockchain. Imagine the security of crypto with the practicality of having a website.
Bitcoin has put the middlemen right back in
Right now, Bitcoin has fallen into a place where almost everybody who interacts with the Bitcoin blockchain does so through a third party. Even with Michael Saylor loading all this Bitcoin onto MicroStrategy, most of the people buying into that are buying stocks. There are multiple middlemen between the buyer purchasing MicroStrategy stock and the actual Bitcoin being held on the blockchain. The people buying the stock are not actually getting any Bitcoin that they have custody over. To me, the real value of Bitcoin has been lost at this point. All these people buying ETFs are not touching the Bitcoin itself.
But on ICP, you can actually self-custody everything. You can stake everything easily in your own wallet, like I'm doing. This is what we wanted to be able to do when Bitcoin came out. You have media applications like OpenChat, where I sent $60 of ICP to a bunch of different people in the community last night. What's amazing is I did all of this on the blockchain without a third party involved. OpenChat is an application that's hosted directly on the ICP blockchain itself. Imagine building your community on the blockchain.
All the rest of crypto is built on centralized tech. If you're trading on a crypto exchange, you're trading on centralized tech. If you're swapping Bitcoin and posting Bitcoin orders, that Bitcoin most of the time is not moving on the blockchain — it's sitting in the crypto exchange's wallet. When you're trading it, you don't even know if you're trading real Bitcoin until you go to withdraw either your cash or your Bitcoin. Many exchanges are honest, but some exchanges, when someone deposits one Bitcoin, then post their own sell orders for that Bitcoin in addition to the person who deposited it.
On ICP, you eliminate the need for all these middle parties between you and the blockchain, because what you really need in crypto is a real world computer. So if you got into Bitcoin for the narratives, for the decentralization, for cutting out governments — why not expand that narrative to the entire internet? Because as we can see with Bitcoin, it doesn't matter if you cut out third parties if you then put them right back in. By having Bitcoin transactions and Bitcoin mining, you're not having governments interfere with the creation process of Bitcoin. But now you've got ETFs, which are government regulated. You have companies, which are government regulated. You have all these entities people are buying Bitcoin through that put the middlemen right back in. This is the same reason I eventually decided that Bitcoin is a $1.6 trillion spreadsheet while ICP is the world computer.
Internet Computer is the only crypto we have anywhere where you can do all of this directly on the blockchain. And it is the fastest, most scalable crypto out there, getting rapidly adopted right now. I dig into all of this across my ICP Crypto playlist if you want to go deeper on the technology.
A very limited time window
There's a very limited time window before the next Michael Saylor — or rather, before Michael Saylor himself, or someone else, looks at the data I'm presenting and throws in a hundred million dollars. Right now you've got about 10% of the Bitcoin supply on exchanges, which means you've got 180-plus billion dollars worth of Bitcoin on exchanges. I don't believe you're going to get those high gains in Bitcoin anymore, because it's been out 15 years and what you can actually do with it is extremely limited outside of using something like Internet Computer Protocol to scale it.
Internet Computer Protocol is now valued around $5 billion, and there's only about $500 million worth of it on exchanges right now. You get somebody with a lot of money like Michael Saylor, with a company's wallet at their disposal, and they could single-handedly load up a huge amount of the supply.
And here's the thing — you don't get anything by just holding Bitcoin. I wish I'd been able to lock my Bitcoin away 10 years ago; I'd have millions and millions of dollars today. But what's even better than that is the voting rewards on Internet Computer Protocol. If you lock your ICP up like I have, I'm getting around 15% APR. I get 1.3 to 1.5 ICP a day in voting rewards. Imagine being able to lock up your crypto and then earn passive income from it. If you follow me, for example, on the first three categories and you confirm your following twice a year — once every six months — you can earn that passive income of around 15% without touching the principal. That's been my experience; it isn't a guarantee for anyone else.
The inflation question — and the energy question
People immediately freak out when they see those rewards and say, "Oh my God, it's so inflationary. I love Bitcoin." Well, right now, every Bitcoin block that's being mined is cranking out around $300,000 every few minutes in what I'd call inflation. The way they've defined everything, you might not technically think of it as inflation because Bitcoin has a max supply, but every one of these blocks cranks out hundreds of thousands of dollars of new Bitcoin. The same mining pools are getting most of these blocks too. Do you think they're holding all that Bitcoin, or are they dumping it to pay for their costs?
The higher the Bitcoin price goes, the more dollars' worth of Bitcoin is being mined every few minutes. $300,000 in Bitcoin isn't a big deal on its own, but if you add it up — every 10 minutes, 24 hours a day, around 240 times a day — that's roughly $72 million a day in Bitcoin being unlocked through mining. I know it's not "inflation" by the technical definition, but it's $72 million in Bitcoin token unlocks every day. And this is secured by people who've bought huge amounts of computing power and are burning a bunch of energy to mine these blocks. That's massively wasteful in terms of energy.
ICP is not wasting energy like that. The entire blockchain only uses 383 kilowatts in power consumption, and that runs websites like mine and applications like OpenChat. My opinion is that the more educated people get in crypto, the more they're going to find Internet Computer Protocol so much more attractive than investing in Bitcoin. Bitcoin is 15 years old and ICP is three and a half years old, so most people don't know about it yet.
What offsets the new ICP being created
I said I'd talk about what offsets the ICP being created. We're seeing record amounts of ICP being burned. Why do you burn ICP? You burn ICP to essentially pay your web hosting bill. I burn ICP to host my website, and it's cheaper, more secure, and simpler than hosting on any other web host. That's extremely practical. With OpenChat, you can't even build an application like that without using centralized tech anywhere else. There are reverse gas fees, so I don't have to pay to send messages on OpenChat — the DAO pays for that, because this is actually owned by a DAO.
If you love Bitcoin, I think you're going to love ICP even more once you look at it. Just make sure you don't get caught by the liars, because ICP's tech is so good that, in my view, you don't really need Bitcoin except as a keepsake anymore — just to say you have one. This is a future, and the adoption is shooting up. It took years just to burn the first 170,000 ICP. It took over three years for the network to get that much use. And now, in the last few months, we're up to 700,000 ICP burned.
You can see the actual usage of the network to pay for computation, which no other blockchain has. All the other blockchains, you're just paying for transactions, token transfers, and the most basic smart contracts that rely on centralized tech to do everything else besides token swaps or hashes for NFTs pointing off-chain. On ICP, you're paying to host entire websites and entire social applications. You can even have index funds of cryptos like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and ICP all on the blockchain, holding them all yourself, or someone could put them into an index fund automatically for you.
It took three years to get the first 170,000 ICP burned, and in the last month we've burned close to that in a single month. The adoption of the network is rapidly accelerating. This is a very limited time opportunity. Even Michael Saylor was very late on Bitcoin — 2022 was late when he started loading up Bitcoin for MicroStrategy, and others bought Bitcoin in 2021. I believe ICP is going to get discovered by people like Michael Saylor, and the first people who discover it are going to make fortunes. That's my view of where this goes, not a promise.
Do your own research — I checked the lie myself
It can take people longer to find something new like ICP. But if you're into Bitcoin, I think the most essential thing to do today is research Internet Computer Protocol. When I researched it, I looked at all the critics and all the naysayers, and the thing that shocked me was that I could quickly prove what they said wrong almost instantaneously by looking at the data myself.
One of the main criticisms of ICP I heard — besides the obvious price chart stuff, which was manipulated upon launch by criminals at FTX — was that people talked about how bad ICP's inflation was. I'm a person who has always been able to tell if people were lying to me; I've got a little lie detector. And I detected that people were lying to me about ICP. So I went to check the data myself. When they say "do your own research" in crypto, this is what that means: try to see if people are being honest with you or if they're lying to you, and if you think they're lying, go check the data yourself.
So here's what I did. A year ago, the total supply of ICP was 512 million. Today it's 527 million. I did some simple math: 527 divided by 512. The real inflation of ICP in the last year has been about 3%. That's it — 3%. And so many people were talking about how bad that was. From having a bunch of other cryptos, I know 3% is much better than what many of the other top cryptos are doing.
Even with Bitcoin, that $72 million a day being created comes out to about $26 billion of Bitcoin unlocked through mining over a year. Now, sure, if you figure Bitcoin's market cap is around $2 trillion, that comes out to roughly 1%, which isn't so bad. But you need to look at the bigger picture, because ICP's entire market cap is only $5 billion right now, and there's going to be $26 billion of Bitcoin unlocked just by mining in the next year — five times bigger than all of ICP. You need $26 billion to get bought just to cover Bitcoin's inflation. With ICP's current market cap, 3% of the $5 billion supply is about $150 million of new money needed to counter all the inflation. To me, it's just easier for $150 million to flow into ICP than for $26 billion to flow into Bitcoin. This is the same supply math I broke down when I argued that owning 21 Bitcoin in 2014 is like owning 550 ICP today.
ICP is the best technology to scale Bitcoin
To me, ICP right now is also the best technology to scale Bitcoin, with Chain-key Bitcoin. I've talked a lot about how Bitcoin developers are pouring into ICP, because Bitcoin developers don't like building on centralized tech. If you're building outside of ICP and you want a website for your Bitcoin ordinals app, or you want to index your ordinals, you're stuck using centralized tech — unless you build on ICP.
So the bigger Bitcoin gets, the more people from Bitcoin are going to pour into ICP, the more they're going to discover Chain-key Bitcoin, and the more they're going to be building. You can see the 180-something million transactions that have been tracked directly on the blockchain. ICP has the best Bitcoin layer-two technology out there, and in my opinion the best technology in crypto.
I hope I can get you this information in time before Michael Saylor finds it, because if Michael Saylor discovers ICP, I think your opportunity is gone. If he starts buying ICP, I believe the price is going to pump incredibly. Just one single person like Michael Saylor discovering ICP in 2025, in my opinion, could mean over a hundred dollars in price — minimum — because ICP is so small still. And I imagine there's going to be a handful, if not dozens, of people in Michael Saylor's position with billions of dollars in net worth and billions on corporate balance sheets. I believe they're going to find ICP, and 2025 is when I think it's going to happen, because of the apps that are coming out. This is exactly why I made the case to sell Bitcoin, ETH, XRP, and SOL for ICP before it's too late.
Go try the blockchain yourself
So, Bitcoin people: I swapped all my Bitcoin for ICP a year ago. I'm not saying that's what you should do — I'm saying I am very glad I've got a lot of ICP now while it's cheap. That's my own choice and my own experience, not advice for you.
If you want to see what I'm talking about, go try the blockchain out yourself. You can go to jerrybanfield.com — my website is hosted directly on ICP, and my OpenChat community is hosted directly on ICP. You can even build and play games directly on ICP, like a Space Doge game that loads straight off the blockchain and that you log in and play directly on-chain. You can't play games on Bitcoin. You can order a picture onto Bitcoin for $30, but real web3 is being able to play games directly on the blockchain — and then you can have play-to-earn that's fully on chain. No other crypto does what ICP is doing here. If you want to go even deeper and talk it through with me directly, my OpenChat and marketing community are linked from the same place, and you're always welcome to join the Jerry Banfield Family and bring your questions.