I'm telling you this because I care about you as a crypto investor. I want you to have the best information and to see through the tricks and the traps. To me, Bitcoin has become a trap today that investors have gotten into. Keep in mind, this is not financial advice. I'm not a financial advisor. I bought Bitcoin as early as 2014, as low as $170, and I was still buying it in 2023. But I would never buy it again. I have tens of thousands of ICP because that looks like the best opportunity to me in crypto, and what I'm describing is only possible on Internet Computer Protocol.
I've been responding to comments about Bitcoin, and the latest one said something like, "It sounds like you've known about Bitcoin and you think you understand it, but your comments don't reflect that." Really? I've been in Bitcoin for 11 years, researching every different aspect of it. And here's what I see happen in the discussion of Bitcoin: it's always directed away from the most important, critical failure points.
The Distribution Problem
People say, "Well, every currency is mostly held by small groups." Yes, but look at the Bitcoin rich list. If you look at the distribution, it's horrible. The reality is that 82% of all the Bitcoin in the world is held by 0.28% of holders, less than 1%. So what is decentralized about that? The response is always, "Well, it's all mostly held by small groups anyway." Sure, but is this getting better? Is this giving us something better than what we already have? In my view, no.
I did a previous video about Bitcoin called Bitcoin: The Ugly Reality Beneath the Doctrine, and if you haven't seen that one, it sets this one up better. It looks to me like Bitcoin has essentially become a religion for a lot of people, where you're not looking at the reality of it anymore. You're looking at confirmation bias, believing what you've seen before. You're looking at narratives. You're repeating doctrine rather than looking at the day-to-day actual reality of Bitcoin, which is what I focus on.
The Centralization Of Mining Power
Many of you who supposedly know more about Bitcoin are likely to say, "No miner controls more than 50% of the hash rate." But Foundry USA controls over 30%, and Antpool combined with Foundry USA, just two pools, does control more than 50%. Just two pools. Now yes, the miners don't enforce consensus, but that doesn't mean their raw power means nothing. That's drastically different. The raw power of the miners is incredibly centralized. The block size wars were as much as a decade ago, eight to ten years ago, and that argument is dated.
Then I said the anonymous founder with a million coins is concerning, and the comment came back, "Well, that's not a big deal, it's only one out of 21 million." That's $96 billion sitting there, and you have no idea who controls that wallet. What could they do with less than 1.5% of all Bitcoin? I'll give you some ideas of what I could do with $96 billion. I could buy a whole country with that much money. This is what people argue so consistently while refusing to look into the details.
Almost No One Actually Touches The Blockchain
I point out that almost everything, 99 plus percent of what happens with Bitcoin today, is people going through third parties that aren't even touching the actual blockchain. The comment seems sensible on the surface: "Well, you don't have to use the third party, you can just go direct, like ICP." Not at all similar. On ICP, you can go straight to a URL on the Network Nervous System that you can simply bookmark. You go into the Network Nervous System, manage all your tokens, stake, and vote, all in one spot, totally cutting out the third party.
Compare that to what you have to do on Bitcoin. You have to download the Bitcoin Core wallet, download the entire Bitcoin blockchain, and that is a hot wallet. Even one of the Bitcoin developers got their hot wallet drained, around 100 Bitcoin stolen, because the official Bitcoin Core wallet is a hot desktop wallet. That is absolutely not approachable to the masses. That's an actual fact. So yes, anybody can download a Bitcoin Core wallet and run a node, but there's also nothing to stop nodes on Bitcoin from doing whatever they want either. There are all kinds of attacks and crazy scenarios that are possible with nodes if someone desired to create them, including ones we haven't even seen before.
Sharing Uncomfortable Facts
The takeaway from one comment was, "You would be better off not talking about Bitcoin than continuing to carry on about it, as I think you push more of us away." Really? Is it because I'm sharing uncomfortable facts that you'd rather not hear about? It's like walking into church and saying you can't actually know exactly what happened 2,000 years ago. When I was a police officer and you'd show up to a car accident that had just happened, people would have completely different stories about something that happened five minutes ago. And yet you're supposed to know precisely what happened 2,000 years ago? There's literally no way to have any certainty about something that long ago, and all the information we're getting comes through centralized, censored accounts. You get booed out of church, and that's what this feels like.
Does every single person who responds, all 100 of them, think the same thing? No. There are a lot of you with open minds. You've been sold this narrative about Bitcoin, but it's just a narrative. In my experience, the reality does not match the narratives you've been sold. I know, because I've seen the narratives and I've seen the reality.
The Myth Of "Fair" Distribution
One of the most critical issues is when people talk about how Bitcoin has "fair distribution because of proof-of-work mining," while ICP and other coins "just gave them out to whoever they wanted, and that's not fair." Bitcoin mining is not at all fair. Can you go in and participate in Bitcoin mining? No. Even when I was in Bitcoin in 2014, it was not approachable for a regular person to get into mining, because you had to have all this technical knowledge. That's a barrier to entry for the masses.
Sure, you could just learn how to be a developer, buy the equipment you needed for thousands of dollars, set it up, and start paying a massive power bill. Is that fair that anyone can do it? No. Those are exactly the things that stop the masses from participating. Proof-of-work mining, from the very beginning, has been a system where the masses are excluded and the rich and the elite get richer. There's nothing fair about that distribution. With ICP, yes, the initial foundation and investors got everything distributed to them, but at least there's some transparency with that. At least people bought into it very clearly. And at least it's not wasting massive amounts of energy today.
A few years ago, Bitcoin mining energy usage was attacked relentlessly. Remember, that could restart at any time. It's less likely now only because all these centralized entities have loaded up on Bitcoin and they want to sell you their Bitcoin and make money off you transacting it. The reality is that almost all the Bitcoin being transacted today isn't even happening on a blockchain. It's been completely compromised by all these centralized entities making a fortune off of selling you a narrative, while the actual technology, when you go to use it, looks very different.
The Reality Of Using The Blockchain Today
Go to the mempool and look at the reality of using the actual Bitcoin technology today. Yes, you can go to a centralized crypto exchange and it'll immediately tell you that you have some crypto in your wallet, but you don't actually know that unless you're using the blockchain. Right now, Antpool and Foundry USA just got four out of the last five blocks mined, with Foundry USA getting three of them. ViaBTC, another big pool, got the other. That's the reality.
The fees: you're paying 40 cents per vByte. The amount of data you can put on a Bitcoin blockchain versus the cost is ridiculous. You can't put hardly any data on the Bitcoin blockchain, and you have to pay 40 cents per vByte. The pictures on our phones work in megabytes, which is a million times bigger than a byte. So at 40 cents per vByte, multiply that by a million: $400,000 for a megabyte of data. Seriously. This technology is so outdated. And it's slow. There were 13 minutes between some of these blocks, then eight minutes, then three minutes between others, and three minutes is faster than average, because the blocks run on average every 10 minutes.
This is not practical for making everyday transactions, which are the majority of transactions people make. Going to the grocery store? Not practical. Sending money to a friend? Not practical. I have a guy in an AA meeting who said, "Can you do a video showing how to send $10 in Bitcoin?" I told him that would actually be very difficult. How are you going to buy the Bitcoin? Sign up for an exchange, go through KYC, verify your identity. Then sure, you can try to withdraw it from the exchange, after you've spent all that time signing up, connecting your bank account, and moving money out of your bank account onto the exchange. Then when you try to send it, just go ahead and wait hours for the transaction to actually be confirmed.
Or I could go on Internet Computer, sign up for a free Internet Identity wallet, hand you $10 in chain-key Bitcoin right there, and you could send it. The reality is that Bitcoin cannot be used for everyday transactions, and that's exactly what we need crypto for. We don't need crypto to put a bunch of money in and save it. Most people in the world don't even have much money saved. They just need a form of money they can do everyday transactions with, without having to go through a third party. And in my view, ICP is the only technology in the world that can do that.
Failed Across The Board
Bitcoin, from what I've seen, has completely failed in almost every way. Its original objective was to be decentralized, peer-to-peer internet money. Today, the reality of how almost everyone, 99 plus percent of people, interact with Bitcoin is through some centralized exchange or ETF. The majority of the hype today is about governments, ETFs, and exchanges loading up even more and then trying to sell it back to the people and take profits.
From where I got into Bitcoin 11 years ago, this looks to me like we've failed across the board. To me, it looks absolutely insane today to be a Bitcoin maxi. It even looks insane to me to hold Bitcoin today, because of the market valuation. As I've said in previous videos, which this particular comment of course does not address, the market cap of Bitcoin now rivals the most valuable companies in the world.
Comparing Bitcoin's market cap to the most valuable companies on earth
Here is an experiment I like to run. If you ask your favorite AI agent what the most valuable companies in the world are valued at today, you can see exactly what it tells you. What you'll notice is that Bitcoin's market cap is actually higher than all but the very highest companies in the world. Bitcoin sits at almost $2 trillion today, and when I look at that number, I don't see why that would be worth investing in. To me, that seems like an ideal point to cash out rather than buy in.
Consider the companies in that same league. When I asked ChatGPT, it gave Apple a market cap of $3.28 trillion. Microsoft came in at $2.9 trillion. Nvidia and Amazon didn't even make it onto the chart it generated, even though they're obviously enormous. Google sat at around $1.8 trillion. Think about how massive Google is and how much I personally use it every single day. Think about everything Google touches, from phones to its search engine dominance to AI to email. That is a staggering level of dominance.
Then you look at Bitcoin valued at roughly the same level as Google, and the comparison falls apart for me. Google has essentially consumed the planet. It's hard to go almost anywhere and find somewhere people aren't using Google. Meanwhile, the vast majority of people in the world do not use Bitcoin, and I see no real reason why they would buy it. For most people in the world, Bitcoin offers no practical value, because you can't easily take $10 of it and hold it yourself without going through a centralized third party, which defeats the entire purpose of the blockchain. In my experience, Bitcoin is almost useless in terms of what you can actually do with it unless you're simply holding it.
The confirmation bias I see around Bitcoin
What I see around Bitcoin is massive confirmation bias. You've been told a thousand times how great Bitcoin is. You've been shilled the same narratives hundreds of times about Bitcoin's decentralization. You've listened to all these Bitcoin podcasts. From my point of view, a lot of people are deep into what feels like a cult at this point, deep into a delusion, and they're not actually using the thing they're defending.
So here's my challenge, offered with love. Try to send me $10 in Bitcoin and tell me how difficult and impractical that is. Go to the grocery store and try to pay in Bitcoin. Try to do everyday things with it. Try to buy some Bitcoin without using a centralized exchange. Try to give away Bitcoin to a thousand people at once. I've actually done exactly that on the Internet Computer Protocol. Try to send Bitcoin out and pay all your employees in it, and see how difficult and impractical that is for everyone involved.
In my experience, all of the things you can do with Bitcoin are easier, faster, and cheaper on the Internet Computer Protocol. I believe that's the technological reality today. And if someone isn't willing to research this and look it up, I have to say this with love: I think they're stuck in confirmation bias and not interested in getting out of it. I'd encourage anyone to look up the technological facts as they stand right now. There are many other blockchains that, in my view, can do everything Bitcoin does and do it much better. There's higher competition than ever, with ICP being what I consider the absolute best, alongside other chains with smart contracts and all these meme coins.
Why I believe this is the worst time to buy and hold Bitcoin
To me, today seems like the absolute worst moment in the history of Bitcoin to buy into it and hold it. When I've needed liquidity, I've dumped it. This is not financial advice, it's simply what I've already done. I sold my Bitcoin at a much lower price and moved into ICP because of everything I'm describing here. I'm making these crypto videos because I genuinely hope they help change someone's life. I'm not telling you to do anything specific except this: go try to look this stuff up and validate what I'm saying for yourself.
I think many people are in this state because they've just listened to others pump Bitcoin over and over again, and they've done far too little research themselves. They haven't checked out the technology, and they haven't asked where the future is actually going. Google has a dominant position and a market cap the same size as Bitcoin, and Google is clearly going to be here for the long term. Bitcoin, in my opinion, could very easily disappear. It does not have the dominant global position that Google does, that Apple does, that Amazon does, that Meta does, that Tesla does.
These companies valued at the same level as Bitcoin are, to me, fundamentally far stronger investments at this point, because they have real products, real value, and real presence all over the world. Bitcoin, in my view, could easily go to zero. I don't actually know what will happen. This is just my opinion, and I hope it's been useful. If you want to keep exploring how I think about all of this, you can find more of my thinking on my Money playlist. What I care about most is helping people take the original value Bitcoin once promised and make it clear and practical, which is exactly what I believe we need.