The Question That Started This
Why the smart money isn't fully in ICP yet? This is one of the biggest questions that once I saw that, I started thinking I need to talk more about this because I've hinted at it, but we need to go deeper. Logically, our brains say, well, if the technology is really this far ahead, then why is the smart money not all in? Because on the surface, it looks too obvious, right? Like ICP does things most of crypto only talks and fantasizes about, like my love life at this point. It already runs websites and apps fully on chain. It offers a vision that could replace more of the current internet stack than almost any other crypto project.
So with this impressive technology, why is the crypto market seeming to completely ignore ICP and why is it not priced incorrectly? You would think if ICP, is that strong than the big money, the insiders, the people really we think know stuff should be all over it, right? Why haven't the richest insiders already put into ICP heavily? Why aren't the venture capitalists, institutions, and the major crypto investors not obviously repositioned into it? Because usually what we imagine is that the people with the best connections, the most information, and the most money get there first. We usually think we missed the great opportunities, but we are saying, we're so, I was going to say lucky, but I'd say more blessed and we did our research.
We're here in ICP before most of them are here. And the answer for why they're not here is not as simple as people need to think. We need to go into the market dynamics, human psychology, and I'm going to get into all that right now. Because I don't think the answer that people come up with off the top of their head is that, well, they all don't understand ICP and they don't care. That nobody cares about the tech, that it's not actually an opportunity. I don't think that the, big money is accurately priced the whole market either. And we're all in this together. Crypto retail and each of us, our behavior matters for what the price is and the adoption is every day.
I think the truth is even more uncomfortable than just people dismissing ICP and not looking at a chart. I think a lot of crypto money, even the big money, especially the big money, still moves on narratives, momentum, and incentives rather than a deep understanding of technology. However, I don't see that this will last forever. This is temporary as a lot of the other booms we've seen in things like the dot com bubble. There was a lot of the same dynamics going on there. And eventually almost all the fake projects crashed and a few very real ones like Google made it through that and have huge trillion plus dollar valuations today.
And I think crypto is going to look the same way in a decade where ICP will be one of the only projects standing with potentially a valuation like Bitcoin. Not financial advice, and it depends on all this playing out how I think it'll play out.
Big Money Moves on Narratives, Not Tech
What happens in crypto today is it's mostly profits and narratives. And the reason that even the wealthiest people in crypto are acting a lot like crypto retails because they're doing the same stuff we're doing. They're looking at price charts, momentums. They're looking at stories. They're looking at what people are buying. They're looking at what they can pump next. I think what you're seeing with crypto investors on YouTube is a lot the same as what the big money, the big money is doing. Is doing also because they're just people like us at the end of the day. Sometimes they have better information and opportunities, but sometimes it's not enough to really get them the best opportunities either.
They might have better access and better deals, but they also have people around them that can deceive them and think just like you and I. And therefore, many of them don't seem to have a better understanding of what the tech actually does or how important this is than you and I do. In fact, I would say a lot of the people in the ICP space have a better understanding of the tech and the future of crypto than many of the insider VCs today. However, some may have an understanding of ICP and will point out their issues going forward. See, ICP is not the kind of project you fully understand by glancing at a chart or hearing a simple narrative.
It takes work and study. Like the entire collective crypto space has to get more educated, which I'm doing my part to help with, in order for ICP to really shine. It takes enough technical curiosity, which how many people are going to start wondering, well, is it important to host apps, websites, the back end, the front end, all on chain? That's not a question I asked for the first decade I was in crypto. It wasn't something I even thought about. And it took me following Dominic Williams and listening to you all in the comments tell me why ICP was special. And I, unlike a lot of us, I actually did my own research and looked at ICP for myself.
And it still took me, it took me months to really get ICP. And I think the rest of the crypto market is at least six months, if not years, behind the rest of us for the reasons I'll cover psychologically. That gap is exactly why I love being around people who did their own homework early instead of waiting on the crowd, and if you want that kind of clarity for your own thinking, you can set up a call with me and think it through together on our call.
The Barrier of Admitting You Were Wrong
The psychological barrier is enormous. Most people do not want to admit they were wrong. And this to me is one of the biggest blocks for ICP, especially in the big money. This is why the human side of the story matters. And we have to think about people with hundreds of millions of dollars. As just regular people like us. Most people will work really hard to avoid admitting they were wrong. I'm a little unusual because I'm sober and Alcoholics Anonymous, the 10th step in AA says, continued to take personal inventory and whenever we are wrong, promptly admitted it. I'm unusual in that respect that I consistently am checking where am I wrong.
Like I just realized how wrong I've been in my dating life lately. Now, what most people do is avoid, will go to any lengths to admit they were wrong, especially, it's actually easier for you and I. When you've got a lot of money and prestige and power, admitting you're wrong can be very expensive, very public. And who wants to have huge levels of power and control and end up having to be wrong expensively in public and rethink years of decisions? I think the confirmation bias and psychological factors are even higher in the big money than they are in regular people.
How Confirmation Bias Protects Portfolios
Confirmation bias in this situation protects existing positions to a shocking level. If someone has hundreds of millions of dollars spread across crypto, like some of these VCs do, maybe even billions in some cases, they are generally on a subconscious level, not even looking for information that makes the rest of their portfolio look weak. It's like how most of us will automatically filter, not hear, disagree with, or immediately fight with somebody that tells us something that could make us question our entire lives. Like when I'm listening to these guys on YouTube talk about how you need to make women chase you and be in your masculine and stop doing all the stuff I've been doing.
I'm just like, wow, I've just really, this makes sense. I find being wrong to be a great relief, occasionally, to help get a better understanding. But most people, most people are actively trying as hard as they can not to be wrong. And they've told their brain, disregard any information that makes me wrong. They're much more likely, most people are much more likely to filter any information in crypto that confirms, they only want to take in the information that confirms they're correct in their existing positions. This is why on my Jerry Banfield cryptos review, I can lay out an incredibly logical, passionately delivered, perfectly, professionally outlined points that destroy a crypto coin to a person operating purely on logic.
A person looking at my reviews purely on logic would just be blown away. But people are not generally looking on logic. They're looking to dismiss threatening information and often living out of fear and therefore closed minded to new opportunities. Scarcity mindset prevents you from understanding ICP. They're much more likely, or rather it's crypto YouTube or somebody with a lot of money to make a fast comment when they see ICP about, oh, look at that price chart and literally not even have a second thought after that. Because if you were to look deeper, do you want to question that 95 of your portfolio? Imagine a VC, somebody who's powerful, got lots of money, lots of people look up to them and tell them whatever they want to hear.
And then they have to pay executive coaches $1 000 an hour to disagree with them. Imagine a VC looking at their crypto portfolio and realizing, that it's almost all out of position. That there's one thing they have that's good and everything else is unsustainable is the nicest way I can say. Do you think in most cases, they're going to just sit there in the boardroom having had this realization and looking at what this could mean? Do you think they're just going to sit there and be like, wow, I was really wrong about all this. Yeah, I was a fool for not doing my research. Man, I can't believe I acted just like an average crypto retail noob on YouTube.
Wow. I really need to make some changes today. Is that what you picture some billionaire doing when they see this? Or are they firing the person who told them that? Or are they deciding to intentionally keep this information quiet until they can figure out a way to deal with it? Because to me, I think for most people, that answer is obvious. Most people are not going to just destroy their whole life because they've gotten better information. And a lot of us also throw good money after bad, which I'm sure I've seen a lot of, saying that I'm just throwing good money after bad on ICP. If you're the one quietly questioning your own positions and you want to think it through honestly with someone instead of just defending them, you can book a one-on-one call with me and we'll look at your own situation together on our call.
We shall see.
Why Investors Refuse to Cut Losses
A lot of investors do not want to cut losses psychologically. Most, whether it's a regular person or a VC, which I'd say is still a regular person, they want to exit. Most people want to exit and profit so they don't have to feel wrong. And a lot of these VCs are no different than you and I. They're in losses on a lot of different positions. They want to sell high also, even if it's to take a tiny profit. I'm amazed how many people I've talked to in person, that they are in losses on junk coins. And they tell me, well, Jerry, I'll buy some ICP as soon as these garbage coins go up.
I'm like, that makes no logical sense. They're like, well, I want to exit on a profit. They want the market to validate their past positions. And this is a barrier to so many people understanding ICP. Even that do understand it, they're holding on to huge crypto portfolios of stuff that is absolutely not going to work out in most cases in the future. And obviously, I'm not a financial advisor and I probably am not God either, at least in the form of this particular body. I don't know what's going to happen for sure. This is what I see. And it looks like to me, most people care more about the market validating their past decisions and making them right.
If you want to keep building the understanding most of the market is still missing, I cover all of this across my my ICP Crypto playlist.
They would rather support a position that they even know is weaker than admit like I did, that I misjudged the entire crypto space. When I sold all my altcoins and my Bitcoin, yeah, in the short term, I sold all my altcoins. In the long term, I've lost. Absolutely. I had to 3x my money if I'd held my Bitcoin comparing instead of ICP. But I think I'm much better positioned for the long term. And in order for me to dump all my altcoins, every one I sold, I had to look at that and say, I was wrong when I bought that. And the next one and say, I didn't do my research when I bought that.
And the next one to say, how did I overlook this obvious flaw when I bought that? And the next one to look at and say, how did I invest in this project with no team publicly? And I sell that. And I look at this next project that has everything's off chain. And I say, how did I not think about how important it was? And I have to sell that. You see the whole, and this, when you scale this up to the bigger system, when you consider all the crypto exchanges and the VC funds and all the people, the journal, the outlets, the media coverage, the influencers, almost everybody in the space is making money based on how things are today.
So if things change, profits change, entire businesses can evaporate overnight. The people with the bigger money are often spread across a lot of different projects and a lot of different exchanges and profit and influencers and money making opportunities. The people with the biggest money have often diversified themselves because they didn't really understand what they're investing in. Well, and the bigger environment well enough to spot something different. So they just threw money all over the whole market using the logic of if you just diversify, things will work out. So they're invested. They're invested across ecosystems, narratives, tokens, and launches everywhere. They're not sitting there neutrally asking which chain makes most of this obsolete.
They're not looking for a blockchain singularity because they don't want to find one. They want everything to work out and they want to make all their money. They want to be right. They want to maximize their portfolio. And I say they, but if you go back three years ago, I could say we, because this is the same thing I was doing. I was buying $50 a day, all these different altcoins. I wanted to maximize my followers and the money I was making. And I wasn't thinking much about the coins I was investing in. I was just thinking about how do I make money for me?
And do you think the venture capitalists are using a drastically different mindset than that? Thus, this creates a structural conflict where ICP is really as powerful and as threatening as I think it is. Then fully understanding ICP creates a serious problem, a serious conflict of interest psychologically on an individual level and across the entire market. Right? ICP does not just compete with one chain like that Bobby O video I saw years ago when I first was researching ICP. ICP is potentially the grim reaper for the rest of crypto. ICP challenges the idea that we need separate chains, separate infrastructure, that we need any other digital gold besides ICP, that we need anything else like oracles.
ICP challenges the entire rest of the whole crypto system. And if one project starts to look capable of doing that much more than the other, and the rest, it's not just an opportunity. It's a threat to everyone's existing positions.
Relationships and Reputations on the Line
And there's more to this too than just individuals holding their own portfolios. So the big money especially is often not operating in isolation. They have friendships that they've developed with founders of coins and exchanges and influencers. And they all have drinks together and go on trips together. These people have relationships. And they're looking at if they, even if they do understand ICP, which is going to be rare, even if they do understand ICP, they're going to destroy their relationships and destroy their friends if they dump all the rest of their portfolio and maximize their own profits. Now, if you've watched enough crime movies, somebody will do it.
Somebody will say, screw all of them. I'll make new friends when I'm that much richer. Somebody will do it. But most people are actually at heart, I think, pretty agreeable, nice people who care about their friends, their agreements, their cooperations, and their reputations. So this makes it very hard for a VC, even that's sitting here watching my videos with a $100 million portfolio and hitting like on every one of the videos, even in that position to that VC, they're sitting there watching my videos thinking, I wish I could do something about this without causing absolute chaos to my life. Thus, this is going to be a very interesting, big money cannot just rotate into ICP the way an independent investor like I can.
Small investors like me sitting there with a crypto portfolio of like $10 000 or so in 2023, I just dumped all my altcoins and that it didn't make much of a difference. I could just dump everything and the markets didn't move. But I don't have to protect a giant portfolio of other change or manage relationships across the industry. I don't have to protect a giant portfolio of other change. I did not have to gracefully unwind hundreds of millions of dollars in positions. You see, if you have hundreds of millions of dollars in all those relationships, you can't just take your profits or accept your losses and move out.
You're looking at destroying like everybody and everything you know. And how do you think you'd be treated for doing that? There's some of these, I don't want to get too conspiratorial, but you might get whacked if you did that and left everybody else hanging out there.
The Liquidity Trap for Large Investors
Large investors place a completely different problem. If you're invested across all these other projects, you can't just dump like crypto retail can. You have liquidity concerns. Like many of these coins, you can't dump $10 million of them in a single day. You can't dump $100 million of a portfolio across the entire market. You have to very carefully wait to even dump for some of these coins, a few thousand. If you try and dump like a million dollars of a coin at once, you could crash the price that day. You have to wait and time things carefully and take small amounts, and that's annoying. And you have to get, ideally, you don't want to sell at the lowest price either.
Because if you dump a whole bunch at once, you get a big red candle down and you pay the price for that. So there's a ton of reasons people that are in this system are even with this information, which most don't have it, I imagine. Even with this information, it's a trap. Luke, it's a trap. Even if some of these people start understanding, which I imagine there's at least a handful that have a very firm grasp on ICP, and they are delicately trying to navigate all of this right now and maintain their profits and their relationships. The more people realize they need to move, which I'd say there's at least a handful, if not dozens, of people realize they're going to need to reposition.
But they have to do it gently. Just like disclosure. You can't just tell people the truth all of a sudden, all at once. You got to give little pieces at a time. It's like, eating an elephant, one bite at a time. You're not going to take the whole thing down. And right now, that's crypto disclosure, basically, is that ICP is the truth, the one blockchain that does everything crypto needs, and basically nothing else is necessary. Except occasionally, if, maybe a tiny exception here and there. But the result is that almost everybody who even knows this is in a position to delay. And we saw this, like, with Bitcoin.
There were people loading up Bitcoin privately while they denied it, and flooded it publicly. And ICP is in the same position, where there's people that are trying to gently increase their ICP positions, but they don't want to increase it too fast. Because if ICP pumps, then the whole game is going to be up. So it's a very delicate process. It takes a special person to make the full shift. Like, this is not just a financial move. It's an ego move. And most of us, I've been talking 19 minutes already. I'm really hypnotized by my own voice. We're only halfway through this outline. We're just, we're going to go for all of it.
It takes a special kind of person to make that kind of an ego move. To dump most of a portfolio into the best long term position requires more than intelligence. It requires humility and emotional strength. And being willing to admit you're wrong and look foolish. And ironically, or perhaps logically, the kind of person that gets in a position to manage money and have a huge amount of power is often not the kind of person that's going to, be real strong on some of these in a lot of cases, but not all. Most people, and especially most people have a lot to lose, would rather defend where they are, stay socially aligned, keep hoping that things stay how they are and they can gently exit.
So this is probably going to happen slowly, but it may happen all at once because ICP becomes dangerous as the understanding spreads. One of the things that, the price chart actually keeps the whole, the ICP price chart is what keeps people and the rest of crypto safe. But the more the technology gets adopted, the price chart is not going to be able to artificially be suppressed by derivatives. When more people understand what ICP does and are not entrenched in the rest of crypto and can afford to dump their whole portfolio like I didn't put everything into ICP and understand that ICP improves everything, not just about crypto, but about the entire internet.
That the technology on ICP is very important for AI, for cybercrime. It can actually run a global financial network on ICP, on the blockchain now from the computation power we have. We might need to get some more subnets added and scale it a little bit, but the blockchain in terms of computation is powerful enough to run a global financial network now for the whole planet from what I can see. And if I'm not accurate about that, I'm happy for somebody for DFINITY to explain what exactly it needs to do before then. Until then, I think I'm right about that and I'll disregard any evidence I'm not.
So this is about rather blockchain can become invisible to the end user. And ICP is the only blockchain that's in a position to become invisible to the end user. And once people understand that, everything else in crypto looks tiny. All the narratives start to look like vaporware. All the valuations look very hard to justify. And ICP therefore is a dangerous idea.
This is the same reckoning I walked through when I dumped everything in Sell Bitcoin, ETH, XRP, and SOL for ICP Before It's Too Late.
The Breakout Will Come From Outsiders
And what's interesting, I think the breakout is likely to come from people outside the current system. Because with what I've just said, who in the current system is going to voluntarily collapse all of this? Most people in the current system are not going to voluntarily collapse all the rest of their portfolio and their profits. I think people who are newer to crypto, especially getting in maybe just off of Bitcoin, they maybe only understand Bitcoin, or crypto retail who's pretty new and just in Bitcoin are going to see, oh, okay, ICP is giving the real vision of what Bitcoin was like a prototype for. And the newer people to crypto, like as you see governments like Pakistan and Switzerland getting involved with DFINITY and partnering to bring on their infrastructure, there's people in those governments, they're probably not invested in the rest of crypto.
And once they understand this, they don't have any reason they can't dump $200 million into ICP and buy all the cheap coins up and take all the profits for themselves. They don't care about collapsing the rest of the system for everybody else because they aren't connected with them and they don't have any baggage or any reasons or any ego or psychological barriers. The new people will not have the same baggage or the same need to defend existing positions and thus they can go straight into ICP. And that's what DFINITY's marketing seems geared towards is getting people from outside of crypto to actually get to using the ICP blockchain and then from there, the money will flow in from money that's outside of crypto.
And all it'll take is one major investor to change everything. It wouldn't take the whole market waking up at once. And this is what's kind of interesting and dangerous to me. It'll only take a handful of serious investors or one large investor like a Michael Saylor or a MicroStrategy or a government level, someone that has a government that decides to put some of their treasury in ICP. The market can look really sleepy. But if someone understands what I understand and they have a lot of money, they'll want to get into this as gently as they can without moving the price. But at the same time, they also may realize like if anybody else finds out about this, the opportunity is going to be gone for them.
And people are often pretty paranoid about missing an opportunity early. So someone might come in and buy 10, 20, 50 million dollars of ICP in a single day. And they'll prompt the price on purpose because they'll see if they pump the price and break it out, the rest of crypto will have to find out about it. And that will pump their investment drastically further. So you could literally have one person, say a billionaire that's involved with a government or a big company that's working on trying to have their IT more secure. It'll only take one person to tell their assistant to say, hey, I want you to buy 50 million dollars of ICP and buy it today.
Make the price spike like crazy. Buy everything you can off of all the exchanges. And then with that price spike, the rest of crypto is going to go nuts for this. The technology will come out and we're going to make a huge amount of money on this. Like it'll only take one single person to see that. And everybody else on the inside who's got their eyes and ears covered is going to be caught out of position. And the risk of being caught out of position, things could get really ugly and crazy in crypto. And I'm really excited to see this day come. And I better have this new channel monetized before then.
We're almost there with your help. Thank you. Because my channel is in position to have some serious viewership. Like we're talking, I could have hundreds of thousands of views a day pour into my channel and all the other ICP creators too. This could happen relatively violently and quickly. Now that's not guaranteed. And all the insiders would certainly like it to happen slowly. But if enough serious money wakes up at months, and that could just be 20 000 serious retail investors, collectively each having like 100 plus thousand to invest. If you do some simple math there, that's millions of dollars of buying pressure that could come from crypto retail by itself or it could come from a single buyer.
And what happens? This could get ugly because right now, I imagine some of the people who are aware of this are thinking they have time, that they can gently exit some of these positions. They can take profits. They're dragging their feet. They don't want to deal with this. But when there's a certain amount of influx coming into ICP, when the price spikes and crypto gets all over it and the secret starts to get out that this is the one real blockchain and everything else is basically vaporware, when that gets out and people see what's different with ICP, then you can have people panic and start dumping huge portfolios and you could have thousands of altcoins crash 99 all at once.
Because there's just not the liquidity there if the big positions exit. And the big positions have no intention on looking out for whether you can exit or not. This is why crypto retail is actually in the best position right now to go through all this and to make the changes without any consequences. When the capital rushes into ICP, it could get really crazy. All the narratives could collapse. We've seen things like this happen in the stock market before. So I'm not saying anything that hasn't happened in history already.
Why the Window Is Open Right Now
Thus, the opportunity is biggest before the broad understanding, before the big money commits. Because by the time the big money commits, you're out of luck. By the time the whole market agrees, like with Bitcoin, the asymmetry appears. People are like, oh, Bitcoin is just going to go up forever. Not necessarily. There's so much money in it that if Bitcoin holders see what an opportunity ICP is, like my video yesterday, there are people who might dump half their Bitcoin and put it into ICP. Big holders. And that means Bitcoin is not guaranteed to go up forever. And the more money you have, the more the Bitcoin price, that's all you have on Bitcoin is price speculation and narratives.
This market, ICP could shoot to number one relatively quickly. And the whole rest of the market could be wrecked by it. I think that'd be a really fun scenario to see. Although I'd hope I wouldn't get whacked in that scenario for helping make this happen. But, this is why it looks early to me. I don't see a market that's fully understood ICP. I see a market stuck on narrative charts and old habits. And I realize, that some of you would say, maybe the market's right and I'm wrong. Maybe ICP is more niche than I think and the tech doesn't matter. Maybe lack of big money conviction reflects something real. If you ever find yourself wondering whether your own conviction here is real understanding or just confirmation bias, that is a great thing to pull apart out loud, and you can schedule a private call with me to work through your own thinking on our call.
But 12 years ago in Bitcoin, you could have said all that stuff too and look how it's played out. Now, maybe the opportunity looks only obvious from inside the ICP community. Maybe truly I'm stuck in confirmation bias and I'm just trying to show people on my own bags. I think that's a fair question. But when I look across the rest of crypto, I see capital chasing things that are much easier to market than use. I've actually used a lot of these different blockchains. I've bought a bunch of the coins myself. I've been in the communities. I felt it all out from inside. Oh, that sounds nice.
And I found that ICP viscerally gave me a feeling. And I'm such a tech geek that I get feelings when I use stuff like the network nervous system. And my feeling when I started using it, my feeling ICP is that this is drastically advanced beyond anything I've ever used before on the internet. Like not just crypto. But when I signed in the internet identity for the first time with a pass key, I'm like, what the hell is a pass key? I'd never used one. So to me, ICP has got the feeling that I look for when I see an opportunity like Bitcoin 12 years ago, Facebook in 2005, Udemy in 2014, et cetera, et cetera.
I've consistently jumped on these opportunities before the big money and the big voices and the market was on it. So to me, I don't think the big money is not in it because opportunity is weak. I think it's that most crypto money does not move based on technology or what's best for everyone or planet Earth. It moves on psychological stuff, narratives, portfolio protection, timing, confirmation bias. A lot of crypto insiders are less informed than people assume. And a lot of people understand ICP are still trapped by their own psychology and not wanting to admit they're wrong. So to me, once ICP is broadly understood, the chance is gone.
This looks like a very rare opportunity where the technology is here, but the understanding is not. And I say thank you every day that I've found this now. And I'm really grateful to be here with you to share this because someday I may be looking back, being like, man, I am so rich because I found this before everybody else did. And I'm really happy for that. And I'm really happy this video is over. I can't believe it was 30 minutes. So thank you for spending so much time with me. To me, this is one of the big points that we need to address in depth in the ICP community.
If you want to go through this shift with people in your corner, you can schedule a one-on-one call with me.
If you've enjoyed this video, I'll just keep talking for another hour so you don't have to stop watching it. Just kidding. I film a lot of other videos. I'll read your comments. Give me ideas for new videos. Thank you. See you later.