I used to love watching InvestAnswers crypto videos until I discovered what I'm about to share here with you. I was a member of his Patreon. I spent hours and hours watching his live streams and the recordings of them. I had bought into Solana under $10. I had Bitcoin. I had Ethereum. I was doing pretty much what he was doing in his videos. I kept wanting to see his comparisons to all these other cryptos, because he talked about having this crypto compendium with all this secret data that he didn't share with anyone. I got into watching him compare his favorite cryptos, like Solana, to these other coins.
Where the comparison stopped adding up
That was going along just fine until I noticed him compare to Internet Computer Protocol. When he compared to Internet Computer Protocol, something appeared to be strange. He appeared to be talking pretty straightforward and honestly in most of his videos, but I detected some deception and something weird going on when he was talking about Internet Computer. I also knew by this point that anytime he had mentioned Internet Computer Protocol, he was incredibly toxic. To him it was a rug pull, a nasty coin, a sham project not worth looking at.
I'm not the kind of person who just generally takes somebody else's word for something. I go look things up myself, just like I looked up the Solana data and the Bitcoin data and the Ethereum data that he presented, just to double check and see where he was getting it from. So I went to look up the data myself for Internet Computer Protocol. What I found is that he was saying things that were instantly provably false, like in five minutes of looking at the official explorer. I could see that what he was saying versus what I could see on the official explorer was not true.
For example, he talked about how horrible the tokenomics were with the Internet Computer. Meanwhile, I was very familiar with the Solana tokenomics and the inflation. When I looked at the data myself, I calculated it. He said the inflation on ICP was horrible, and I calculated it. A year ago there were 513 million ICP. Now there were 529 million. So if you do some division, that's 3% inflation. I started to see that the things he was presenting were not accurate. I'm thinking, wait a minute, this guy has all this data and he makes himself out to be this expert trader who wakes up to check prices in the middle of the night. And yet, why is he saying the inflation is so horrible on ICP when the fact is, in five minutes, I can see there's 3% myself, which was less than Solana? How does that make sense?
Asking questions and getting no real answers
Then I started asking questions in his Discord about ICP, and nobody would give me real answers. Everybody would just say it sucks, it's a rug pull, the team betrayed everybody. And I'm like, okay, well, I looked into this. The tokenomics aren't that bad. Why does he say they are? And there'd be some short answer.
Then came the one that put me over the edge. He did another ICP comparison video, because I wasn't the only one asking about it. He literally compared the transactions on ICP to the transactions on Solana, which we're all very familiar with. But for some reason, he literally put a dash in ICP's transactions. He just excluded it. Now, I knew from doing my own research at this point that ICP had many more transactions than Solana. To see in his videos that he clearly did this left one of two basic assumptions. Either one, he's never been to the dashboard. This is a guy who says he has a crypto compendium with hundreds of the top cryptos, massive amounts of data that he uses to drive his decisions, and you're telling me he's unaware of the transactions on Internet Computer to the point where he puts a dash? He didn't minimize the numbers, he literally just dropped the transactions, then did a comparison of Solana versus Internet Computer and said Solana won the transactions category.
If you look at Chainspec, for example, they do their best to try to drop the transactions to compare them accurately, because Solana does a bunch of vote transactions, which essentially artificially inflate the amount of transactions greatly. And ICP has a lot of query transactions. Chainspec, for example, has a real-time dashboard, and ICP is almost always above Solana in transactions. There are other applications which include all the transactions for every network, and ICP blows Solana away by those, by like 10 times. When I realized this, I thought, InvestAnswers is not telling the truth here, because it destroys everything else he's said. It literally makes Solana look like crap in terms of all the metrics he's comparing. Now, obviously there are still some where you could say Solana was superior. But if he honestly presented the data about Internet Computer Protocol, it would destroy what he was saying in all of his videos. The moment I realized that, I thought, holy crap, this guy is deceiving his viewers severely. Either perhaps he hasn't done his own research, or perhaps he does know this stuff and he's intentionally deceiving his viewers.
Looking into his track record
So I looked into his history. If you search InvestAnswers on Google, and if you search things like "InvestAnswers Terra Luna," you will see some things. InvestAnswers explained why he's very bullish on Terra Luna. InvestAnswers had a meltdown after he said Terra Luna could go to 80,000. He was bullish on two coins. Now, it's one thing. There are a lot of these pumper crypto guys that just say everything's going to go up. It's one thing if you're just going to be bullish on a different coin every day. But you pick two coins. One of them was Terra Luna. The other one was Solana. Both. Terra Luna went to absolute zero. Solana rug pulled and went down under $10. That's not a good track record.
I searched for some other things that he had got his viewers into before I started watching. Turns out he was also pushing Celsius and FTX. So I'm like, this guy is constantly pushing his viewers into these crypto matrix things that destroy them. He got his viewers into Terra Luna, Celsius, FTX, and Solana. Now the manipulation has pushed Solana way back up, but at the time when I first started watching him, Solana had just rug pulled from hundreds of dollars to under $10 before Vitalik stepped in to try and save it. I felt pretty stupid as a crypto YouTuber myself that I got sucked into watching his videos, and it took me months to see through his deception.
The breakout week he hid
Once I saw through his deception, I saw through the last video that finally pushed me over the edge. ICP had a breakout week, where, for maybe the first time ever, it went up higher in price than all the other top 50 altcoins. It outperformed every other top 50 altcoin in price. And James from InvestAnswers chose to drop it from his chart. There were several other crypto YouTubers, like Crypto Banter and Ivan on Tech, that also participated in this. He simply said that the one of these he dropped was a junk coin rug pull. I looked at it, and I'm thinking, the one time ICP would have been forced to shine, as he's showing the top 50 cryptos' price action, he literally dropped ICP from the chart. That is not a little bit of ignorance and maybe I don't know what I'm doing. That is very careful deception.
Then he made a video recently talking about ICP. I didn't watch it, but my followers told me about it. He said that I'm goofy, and he shows a picture of me that I posted in my underwear that you've got to scroll down to find quite a bit. He must have paid an assistant to go that deep. Instead of talking about the tech, he talks about me, which I'm always happy for the free promotion. I've gone viral a bunch of times because other people just can't help but talk about me. So thanks, James, for the free promotion. I hope your viewers discover me and see that I genuinely care about giving everyone the best information I have in crypto, whether it makes me look bad or not. If you want to see how I think through these decisions for myself, that's the spirit behind my Money playlist.
I didn't want to do this. But this experience I've had is valuable, and I hope I can help one of you from falling into the InvestAnswers trap that I did. In my experience, the lesson is simple: verify the data yourself, because even the experts with all the secret compendiums can be wrong, or worse, deliberately misleading.