Thoughts on Caffeine

General DFINITY
65

Ultimately, getting people to setup an Internet Identity is not a big deal.

Also, offering to teach people about the Internet Computer and the basic concepts while they are using Caffeine so that they can get the most out of their creations is also not a big deal. But yeah also make it super simple to begin with until they are ready to do so.

While there is a learning curve to any new tech just like there was back in the day for web1.0, modems, AOL, Shockwave, HTML, CSS, la la la PHP, etc. there will be a need to educate the masses so they get used to this new paradigm of transferring value on web3.

  1. Killer dapp = Caffeine
  2. Killer use case = useful dapps + Crypto
  3. Can I make money on web3? YES. Is it worth the time to learn? HELL YES.

Don’t assume people are so lazy they can’t learn a few new concepts and terminology and how to use an on-chain wallet with their internet identity or use an exchange.

This is not a deal breaker whatsoever imo esp. when they realize what the benefits of switching from web2 to web3 can do for them and their businesses and esp. the benefits that we all know are inherent with ICP.

Happy Bday DFINITY. Congrats on the final seed unlock today! ALL DONE! Congrats on Caffeine and on everything else that was done to improve ICP since Genesis.

Onwards and Upwards from here! Persistence pays off.

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66

It seems you know about the subject, let’s give it a check.

1- Purchase ICP and then convert to cycles:
Who are they buying ICP from? DFINITY? How aligned that would be with their founding “principles”.
+ FACT Did you know you have tons of regulations WORLDWIDE in order to sell crypto for fiat? There’s a reason why not everyone can do it, requires KYC just to begin with.
Is Caffeine/DFINITY requiring KYC? Sure, people that go anonymous would love it.

2- Web3 hosting:
So you think people would love to pay for hosting that doesn’t have its own domain?

It’s 2025 already, and we still can’t use our own domains on ICP hosting without any technical workarounds with our domain provider or personal hosting.

Do you truly believe the average internet user would even dare to open a link like this?
https://u52bf-3qaaa-aaaal-qb5wq-cai.icp0.io

+ FACT There are other free options for hosting/domain, just have to deal with the fact that you’ll get a link like this http://YOURSITE.fortunecity.com/ which in any case, it’s more legible and trustable than a Canister ID + .icp0.io

3- the more influencers peddle it, the more people will want to try it:
This is true, however these influencers/kohls are people that HAVE EXPERIENCE in their fields, that create video content like tutorials, news, have credibility (they don’t just shill one project all the time). Not without mention thousands if not hundreds of thousands of followers, that not just Like and Retweet, they engage into meaningful discussions, and they are not cheap.

+ FACT DFINITY/Caffeine will be competing with marketing budgets from Google/Gemini, Microsoft/ChatGPT/Cursor, and many others. Do you have any idea how ridiculous they are? Any idea how much big corporations pay to stay on top of everyone else?

4- It’s easy to dismiss things that ordinary people see value in!
Also true, this is why not everyone has criteria to evaluate these difficulties, only hands on experience can tell you what’s really worth it.

By the way you can use Cursor for free, host your apps and domains for free, you should go try it so you can understand what we’re talking about here.

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This is exactly what I meant by paid shilling accounts, bots/npcs, they just show their ignorance expecting someone dumber on the subject would bite the hook.

You can all agree on anything you want, as long as you get paid…

Sure it’s not decentralized, but all we enjoy talking about it’s decentralization and sovereignty and not needing the banking system. But here we are, needing to ignore these core principles in order to save ICP, right?

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  1. There’s already a BUY ICP button on the NNS. It forwards you to a third party called “BANXA” and makes it simple to fund your account using a credit card to begin with. People can utilize this service to start out and then learn more about their other options later.

  2. Yes, that is a good point regarding the domains but that can be addressed and you can indeed point regular domains at the ugly ICP links. Now that Caffeine is about to be released, that is something the smart people at DFINITY can indeed address. It is not a deal-breaker as long as people understand why the canister addresses are the way they are for web3 ICP. As long as they understand how to point their chosen domain names at the canisters with step-by-step instructions, people will do it. If “JerryBanfield.com” can do it, anyone can.

  3. When the degens start creating dapps that make money or are fun on web3 and are fully onchain and start businesses, they will help create the HYPE and excitement around the tech. DFINITY can also address the marketing issue by starting with a simple marketing campaign to get people’s attention and interest. Now they have a simple product to compete with Wix and other web2 offerings in the same space but with the benefits of web3 specifically on ICP. If Caffeine is easier to use, faster, and more powerful, gives people a competitive advantage over web2, etc, it will catch on. The marketing spend does not have to be large but consistent over time.

  4. FACT (you love to state FACTs it seems many of which are not). CURSOR IS NOT FREE. It is $20 - $40 per month. The hobby account is extremely limited. Nothing is free. ICP is dirt cheap for web3 fully on chain hosting. Also, you’re comparing apples to oranges. Web2 vs Web3. Web2 with all its problems vs a simplified, streamlined Web3 stack!

  5. FACT - Every single objection you brought up can be remedied. What cannot be remedied are chains that have not done their research, their homework, the hard work of building the underlying tech that is necessary to power our future internet of value. DFINITY is 90% of the way there. Solana, Eth, Cardano, etc are not! These are all fairly trivial problems to solve compared to not having the MOTTS!

ICP ALL THE WAY TO THE ENDZONE! I have full faith in this team. They will figure this out and will make ICP and Caffeine a huge success!

ONWARDS and UPWARDS!

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70

It’s nice to question everything, but if those questions are only problems in your head then they doing nothing but harm.

what exactly do you think stops caffeine from providing service to make your domain that looks like this:
https://u52bf-3qaaa-aaaal-qb5wq-cai.icp0.io

into something that looks like this:
http://YOURSITE.caffeine.ai

Where do you see challenge here?

Hosting on ICP do not require ICP it requires cycles that are not cryptocurrency which means Caffeine probably can provide a way to top up your canister hosting with cycles without KYC like you would do that with in game currency or whatever since you as a person do not touch ICP at all. I mean yea you will need to burn ICP to get cycles, but that can be done by Caffeine which may do it on it’s own behalf.

And Caffeine it self can be free as well like Cursor or whatever. So where is here the issue? We don’t know that, it may have same pro plans like Cursor have and so on. Technology here doesn’t stop you from that.

Now about competing with Google/Gemini and so on.
Just the fact that Web3 competes with those giants alone makes it 10 times bigger than you think. No other blockchains can come even close to competing with them and you here bragging like it’s bad thing.

Other thing is like Dominic said and i agree 100% with that for AI writing full stack app on ICP is way easier than on our web2 tech stack just because you have all in one, you have your database your code running and this whole hosting environment all in one. It’s way easier for AI to write complex applications that way than regular stack.

And this is huge benefit for implementing something like Caffeine, it has advantage than no other AI like Cursor has.

On top of that, nothing stops Cursor to eventually write full stack apps on ICP, it’s only a matter of time when they see benefits and start doing it. Even Sam from OpenAI had some talking about it.

What you here do not see is that Caffeine is only the beginning not the end. It only starts from there. While for you it’s like end game or something.

There is long term goal where everything runs decentralized but you can’t just jump from here to there, it’s too complicated, so you have to have steps on how to move to this vision and Caffeine is exactly for that, to transition from web2 to web3, to involve more people, to involve those people that would not code in web3 otherwise and even those that would not code at all.

Caffeine it’s just a step to the right direction and there will be many other steps needed.

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71

You bring up valid points and I never used Banxa however KYC is what it is therefore like Borlay mentioned, the team at DFINITY needs to examine these issues and come up with solutions similar to other offerings in web2, e.g. a Free Trial Plan, a possible way to pay for cycles directly without buying ICP first bypassing KYC all together, a way to make the URL’s more human friendly from the get go.

If DFINITY markets properly and to the correct groups who find value in having hackerproof, tamperproof, more streamlined dapps that can be updated without data loss via AI assist then they will find the audience. It may not be everyone however the simplicity alone vs. web2 all the database and firewall headaches and literally getting a link instantly to run your creation will appeal to many I believe.

What I want to know is what is your purpose on this forum if you have already decided that ICP is a losing proposition with your negative, bitter attitude? Why do you need to keep hammering it down? To make sure no one uses it or invests in it?

I’m sure there were many people who also bashed Jeff Bezos and Amazon back in the beginning. Oh they are spending so much money and losing so much money and all of this is for nothing and la la la and Amazon sucks and Bezos sucks and the whole business plan sucks…la la la

Apple also only had 6 months of capital left at one point and was pretty worthless.

Should all these companies with grand ideas just give up? Let’s never make progress towards new, futuristic ideas? Let’s just keep bashing them and never root for these people trying to move humanity forward and solve seriously pressing problems like our completely insecure web2 internet and intranets of today?

After all the hacks and problems, how is that not the most valuable selling point in this entire world? Someone comes to you and says, I have designed a HACKERPROOF internet.

The fact that ICP has been running for 4 years with little to no down time and no major hacks (except BIL which was a dev error) doesn’t mean anything to you?

I find that the more this team at DFINITY gives people, the more they complain or find reasons why this won’t work or that won’t work etc. It’s pathetic and shows that you are on some type of mission to put this project down no matter what.

Just stop. It’s time to root for this team and give them credit for what they have already accomplished. If you don’t believe it, just leave. Period.

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72

No, just hope we leverage orthogonol persistence on top of decentral backend to really gain a bigger advantage than web2 ‘self writing’ alternatives.

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73

You’re so right, such a waste of time to argue with bots.

Have fun and enjoy the cool-aid.

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An example dapp that someone recently in the alpha created with Caffeine.

https://members-6096.caffeine.site/

Take a look at the URL. Does that look like a human unreadable URL? Test drive the dapp which also has a built in screen saver! Is this not cool that this user was able to create such a dapp so quickly using Caffeine?

FYI. I am not a bot.

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75

I’m trying to be reasonable here, just don’t spam me like a religious fanboy/bot I’m sick of reading the same narrative over and over

The URL is human readable, I just wouldn’t like my page to have a caffeine.site at the end.

I tested the dapp and yes looks cool, coming out of a single prompt like in the demo it has potential, time will tell

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According to rumors Caffeine Ai use Claude sonnet 4 as its Llm. You build off chain using caffeine but the final product is deployed on chain.Unlike Opus 4, sonnet 4 is not as advance but is good enough,cheaper and more suited to large scale use.

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77

Big money wont come into ICP, they better wait for Caffeine fixed supply token. If that token has buybacks/burn, it can get lot bigger marketcap than ICP.

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If you need to be realistic let’s look at the data

1. Major Milestones = No Sustained Pumps

  • Mainnet Launch (May 2021): $700 → $50 (-90%).
  • BTC Integration (Nov 2022): $5.30 → $4.20 (-21%).
  • SNS-1 DAO (Sep 2022): $6.10 → $5.00 (-18%).
  • Chain Fusion (Dec 2023): $12.50 → $14.20 (+14%) → back to $11.

Every “big release” is a sell-the-news event.

2. Tokenomics = Constant Dumping

  • DFINITY + Node Providers sell ICP daily to fund operations.

Adoption? Ghost Chains.

Top IC apps:

    OpenChat: ~50k users (mostly inactive).

    ICP Swap DEX: $8.66M TVL (vs. Solana’s $1.5B+).

Even if you combine all ICP Dexes, the picture doesn’t look good.

No killer app, no institutional demand.

Stop expecting miracles. Trade the ranges.

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81

All this talk of ICP price is so boring, repetitive and (in my opinion) off topic. We should be focused on what will start to become more and more possible with Caffeine being publicly available. It is fact that the IC makes it possible to build things that are impossible elsewhere.

If all you can talk about is your bitter feelings for having invested in a network that is all about the long game (with a 20+ year vision for changing the world), then you’re just making yourself look niave (in my opinion).

Let’s start spitballing ideas in terms of what people want to try and build using Caffeine. I have 101 ideas - small but useful things that I could build myself but I don’t currently have the time.

Here’s one idea. Most people are familiar with the concept of a National Lottery. Why not a Global Lottery. A super simple blackedholed dapp that treats ICP transfers to the canister’s default account as lottery tickets. The transaction memo could be the chosen lottery number. There could be a weekly draw, where the cumulative funds raised go to the lucky winner(s), or rolled over to the next draw. A very small portion of the winnings (less than 1%) could go towards protecting the network and everyone’s stake by transfering ICP into D-QUORUM’s stake to help incentivise elected NNS proposal reviewers.

National Lotteries are huge. There’s no reason a Global Lottery couldn’t exist that can’t be controlled or influenced by anyone.

I think this is a very simple but powerful idea. These are the sorts of things I expect Caffeine to excel in.

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82

It is boring, but if price is dropping, less cycles from ICP, than canisters will become pointless to keep online. We did see some NFT collections leave, some seems to be given under DAO. Lets say price drops x2 and stays there, half of ecosystem is unable to top up cycles unless they pay from theyr own money.

You really think there wont be other projects that cant front run ICP. In 20 years, ICP supply will be 1.4-3.5 bil tokens, mcap at 5 usd is 7 bil-17.5bil. With fiat inflation, you will end up losing money when buying ICP all this time. This is why ICP has to have positive price action.

And how many people will make it, 100? And now how many will make lottery that cheats or is not fair, 90? And that 90 will have money for marketing. Now how many people will use your app?

Yes it can do that, but those apps need to make money, because you still spend to make and keep them online. If ICP price is normal (not dumptown), than those will be easy to keep online with staking rewards.

Building stuff will follow same goals as building on web2 and its reason to build, profit, customers.

Any idea why Jerry quit again? Did He get death threats again for trapping people into ICP?

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Again you’re peppering your comments with off topic stuff. You’re falling fowl of numerous logical fallacies. Please stop being so confidently incompetent in your evaluation of the network and its potential. You do this all over the place. It’s tiring.

I would not be surprised if you got spooked, sold at the bottom, and now need it to go lower to get back in.

Real builders don’t care about short term price action. Why would they. Cycles are super cheap. If they stop being super cheap (relative to ICP) and are instead just cheap - nevermind. If you see an exodus of devs, chances are they’re not the sort that will really benefit the IC in the long run anyway.

Most devs in the open source world commit their work for free because they believe in the project. Open source is a huge movement. Crypto makes it easier to (potentially) profit from open source projects. I think it becomes problematic though when that becomes everyone’s sole focus (particularly if their time horizon is short).

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84

I guess you will be able to login using google, and you will probably be able to have a subscription with just using web2 payment options aswell

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That should be ideal, the ICP community is very small and only a few developers left. I’ve been saying this for years but to increase adoption we must provide the users with tools that integrate with their day-to-day workflow (OAuth, Fiat payments, email) not imposing them to use Internet Identity, the NNS and buy ICP. That comes afterwards when they are already somehow invested in the new tech.

Have you tried to educate someone that even doesn’t care?

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