My friends, you're not poor, you're getting robbed, and you're going to love hearing both how I believe that's happening and the best way I see to break free today with Internet Computer Protocol. The first thing we need to talk about is how exactly you are getting robbed. If you feel like you don't have enough money, my view is that the money matrix system has very much been engineered to leave you feeling broke, feeling like you don't have enough, even if you do have a lot.
While cryptocurrency is offering some potential for a way out, I believe the game is so rigged in cryptocurrency too. We've even heard Dominic Williams, the founder of Internet Computer, use the term "the matrix" in reference to crypto. In other words, the same money matrix that's extracting all the value out of humanity in everything besides crypto is also operating inside crypto. So to begin, we need to look at what is happening with money that you might not know about.
How the money matrix actually works
When we have currencies like U.S. dollars, do you know how these are inflated, how they are created, and how they are secured? The way I see it, they're essentially secured through proof of violence — that governments can go to war or put their own citizens in prison to exert their will. In these fiat-based systems, the government is the "centralized trusted third party" that issues money and gives out as much money as it decides to. In the USA, we even have a kind of pseudo-governmental organization, and interest rates get decided by that kind of body rather than by you and me.
Our currencies have become based in debt. A dollar doesn't represent any real value the way a gold coin represents something that's valuable. Take a dollar you deposit in the bank: the bank doesn't actually keep your money. What the bank does is use your money as leverage to loan out a bunch of money to other people, and they borrow that money from the Federal Reserve or from some other source — another company or another government organization. Basically, in my opinion, we are in an infinite debt spiral at this point, where our entire fiat-based currency system is a house of cards. And I think it's just a matter of time until it collapses, because the interest rates on the debt right now are absolutely not sustainable.
The U.S. government has an insane amount of debt. If you look at the debt clock, you can see it for yourself — to me it's an unreasonable amount of debt, and there's like no way to pay this back. The U.S. has $34 trillion in national debt, and that's not even to mention all the unfunded liabilities, things that supposedly are going to be paid. There are other countries that are in much worse shape than this.
Inflation is silently stealing your spending power
Here's what this means. When you make money, if you don't spend it immediately, the value of the money you have — the spending power, or what it can buy — is constantly dropping, because there's more and more money being created through debt all the time. That then means there's more money chasing the same relative amount of assets. So if you don't have some kind of an asset, something that appreciates in value, I believe you're constantly being robbed. You're being silently stolen from through inflation, through the money you have being devalued.
This hasn't been so obvious in many ways, because we've had many technologies come along — the internet, computers, mobile phones — that have actually made things cost less. They've provided deflationary pressure, where it's faster and cheaper and easier than ever to do so many of the things we need done. Technology should have produced a standard of living where everybody is wealthy and everybody has free access to food and housing and shelter. Technology has given us the ability to do that. But in my view, these fiat-based currencies, based totally on debt and not on an underlying asset, have silently stolen wealth from the masses and tricked people into using them. Many people around the world are working hard for money that's constantly dropping in value, which creates this cycle of consumerism: if you don't spend your money immediately, or invest it in an asset that will appreciate, the money you just made is dropping in spending power.
For example, somebody on my livestream mailed me a $100 Canadian bill a few years ago, before inflation had really kicked off. That $100 Canadian bill, at the time, if I'd converted it to U.S. dollars, would have been enough to buy groceries for most of the week for my family. When I was a kid, my dad could easily buy us a luxurious amount of groceries — everything we wanted — for $100 for a family of four. Today it costs about $200-plus to buy the equivalent of what we need. That's the same amount of groceries my dad bought us when we were kids, and the difference is inflation. So our existing currency system, to me, is getting out of control and becoming more unsustainable every day.
Why crypto isn't automatically the answer
A lot of us have looked to cryptocurrencies to be the answer. But the problem, in my opinion, is that some currencies are arguably much worse than the existing fiat-based debt system. At least in theory, the U.S. government is backing the U.S. dollar and giving it value, and in theory the U.S. government represents the will of the people. With a lot of these cryptocurrencies, there's nothing giving them value outside of speculation and people investing and hoping to get rich. This is why I believe so many altcoins — 99% of things besides Bitcoin — lose money compared to investing in Bitcoin. I go deeper into that idea in my post on how 99% of crypto is theft and only 1% is real.
And Bitcoin itself, to me, is becoming more and more unsustainable. The more the price pumps on Bitcoin, the more it becomes unusable for the use cases it's actually needed for. If you search the Bitcoin mempool and look at the transactions and the fees right now, the mempool is crowded. Even for a low-priority, simple transaction, you're looking at paying something like $7 or $8 just to make a transaction on Bitcoin. So basically, unless you can transact at least $100, you really can't even practically use Bitcoin right now. For those of you thinking it could go up and up a lot — imagine if it goes up 10 times and it's $70 or $100 to send just a regular old transaction. It then becomes less functional than using the existing system.
Ethereum, with gas fees, is very much the same way. Some people quote Ethereum as being "ultrasound money" and more usable because of its deflationary metrics, but if you actually look up the Ethereum gas fees, you'll see that at current levels, if you want to buy an NFT on Ethereum, you're going to have to pay around $200 just to buy it. And this is when most people aren't even aware of the existence of Bitcoin or Ethereum in the world. Tell me that's usable at scale. If you want more of my honest takes on coins like this, I keep them all in my Money playlist.
Most altcoins are just copies
If you look across crypto, you'll see all these altcoins saying they're the Ethereum killer, that they're the next generation of crypto. But really, if you look at the technology behind them, in my opinion these are just copies of Ethereum. So while Bitcoin and Ethereum have generated big market caps and offer some alternative to the fiat-based debt-control matrix, once you get outside of Bitcoin and Ethereum, most of these cryptos are just copies. They haven't really innovated technologically the way Bitcoin innovated.
Bitcoin was the first way you could transact peer-to-peer without using a "trusted third party" like a government or a bank in the middle of the transaction. That was a big technological breakthrough. Ethereum made a big breakthrough in enabling smart contracts, which let you build applications and tokens on top of the Ethereum ecosystem. But these have proven, in my view, that they don't scale well. So in terms of average people looking for an escape from the financial matrix, are these the solution?
For billionaires who want to maintain their wealth and perhaps avoid some government or dictator being able to snatch their billions, yeah, it makes sense for a billionaire to put some millions into Bitcoin as an emergency fund or a way to get out of inflation. If you're a U.S. company like MicroStrategy, it makes sense to hold some Bitcoin. But this is not something the average person can really participate in.
Why I believe Internet Computer Protocol is different
To me, the value of crypto is being able to exit us from this financial matrix. So I'm looking at: what currency can help me escape this financial matrix, or at least get some significant relief from it, and give us technology that can let us rebuild some of these systems? Because the existing matrix, the way I see it, has been built to extract as much value from you and me as possible while giving the least amount we'll accept without rebellion in return. The more you demand, the more you expect to have, and the more intelligent you are with the resources you're given, the more we can all have. If we think in terms of building a world full of wealthy people and look at the technology that can most enable that, for me it's Internet Computer Protocol.
Why Internet Computer Protocol? Because it's not just a layer one where you then try to build some tokens and track some NFTs. With all the rest of the layer ones out there, you have to build almost everything off-chain. To me, the financial matrix is defined as being very centrally controlled and manipulated by a small number of shadowy, hidden figures — some of which are out there as CEOs and presidents, but many of whom you don't even know the names of, and they're extracting a huge amount of value from you and you don't even see it happening. Then we go into crypto and we find the same thing: most of these altcoins have almost no value, and things are very, very centrally controlled.
With Internet Computer Protocol, this is the first platform you can actually build everything on, all at once. In order to really transform the matrix, I believe we need to be able to share ownership over the things we're using. To do that, we need tokens with assets that are fully on-chain, and we need a system where it all works together and is governed by a DAO. So when I'm holding ICP, I can go into the Network Nervous System and vote. By holding ICP, I can participate directly in governance, and it all is executed directly on chain. The gas fees are set up with a reverse gas fee model that, to me, is prepared for mass adoption. Holders are rewarded if you lock up — you can lock up for as long as eight years to withdraw, and you get around 15% annualized rewards paid in maturity, which can be converted pretty closely one-to-one with Internet Computer Protocol. This is the kind of escape I'm talking about when I explain why I think $1 trillion of global wealth will move into ICP.
Building a more secure version of the matrix
So this is something where we can actually use the technology to build a better version of the matrix, one that's much more secure. The existing infrastructure and a lot of these other cryptos are very vulnerable, as we've seen in the past and as I think we're going to keep seeing in the future, to being hacked and exploited. For example, with crypto games outside of anything on ICP that's fully built on-chain, the game itself isn't built on-chain, which means anyone holding the tokens doesn't have any real control over the supposed assets that are there to give value to their coin.
This system we have right now — ICP looks to me to be one of the best ways to perhaps get out of it. Because if we look at all of crypto, most people generally lose money in crypto. Unless you've just dollar-cost-averaged into Bitcoin over the years, or DCA'd into Ethereum, you more than likely lost money. And there are so many ways to lose money in crypto. At the same time, I believe it's the most promising technology to transform this matrix we're in, where you put all your time and energy into things like social media platforms you have no ownership over, where if you want to create any kind of collaboration, you have to do it through some centralized power.
Internet Computer Protocol is allowing us to create things like the recycling credits program, where you can have people from all over the world work together through on-chain technology. They don't have to know each other, they don't have to trust each other — they can all trade and exchange in one simple system. To me, ICP is one of the most promising pieces of technology that gives me hope for the future, that maybe we can have a world with more wealthy people. If you'd like to talk through this with me directly, this is exactly the kind of thing I dig into with members inside the Jerry Banfield Family.
You don't need much to start
With as little as one ICP, you can lock up one ICP and start getting the estimated rewards. Now, you have to earn at least one ICP of maturity in rewards to actually be able to withdraw the reward. So in my opinion, you really need at least 10 ICP at a bare minimum to then get something like one ICP a year, and ideally over 100.
Other people are figuring this out. In a world that seems rigged against us in so many ways, I believe there are answers. Over the past three months, we've gone from 28,000 addresses with over 100 ICP to 37,000 — that's 200% growth if it keeps up annually. And that's why I personally have over 3,000 ICP locked up indefinitely. I can't just leave my money in the bank.
How I think about diversifying
Now, yes, I'm diversified outside of ICP. Real estate is one example — a lot of people have tried to use it to break free, but there are lots of fees and you're very much tied to a location. That said, owning your house is a wonderful thing that I believe you should do if possible. To me, the ideal way to try to break free of the financial matrix is to own your own home, to have valuable skills, and yes, it makes sense to keep some money in the bank and some money in cash. But to me, ICP is one of the most effective tools out there. This is why my most significant personal investment — not including my house with my wife — is ICP. It's the one little thing that I think could have the biggest potential to change my financial future, based on the technology.
This can help get me out of the matrix: I can keep the principal locked indefinitely while earning rewards, and you can build everything directly on ICP, like a website, without needing oracles. It's the only full-stack crypto development platform in the world, the way I see it. And here's something important: most of the time in the past, when new technologies came out, you weren't able to invest in them early. Without being an accredited investor, you can only invest on the stock market, which has its own manipulations and rigs.
Why I see this as a limited-time opportunity
To me, Internet Computer Protocol is one of the most promising ways to stop getting robbed and to have some potential to find an asset that looks like it's going to have massive utility in the future. But I believe this is a very limited-time opportunity. Ten years ago was a great time to find Bitcoin. Today, I don't think Bitcoin is that great of an opportunity, because so many people already know about it — it's kind of too late, and you don't have the same opportunity as 10 years ago.
With Internet Computer, if I'm right, 10 years from now it won't be the same great opportunity either, because there will be another opportunity at that time. You have to see things like Bitcoin or Ethereum coming way ahead of time for them to truly be a life-changing opportunity. That's the whole point of getting honest about money and learning to focus on larger amounts of money instead of staying stuck feeling broke. I took a little bit of a different approach today, and if it gave you a new way to think about your money, I'd love for you to keep the conversation going with me in the Jerry Banfield Family.