The Wolf Of All Streets - I Spent 15,000 Hours Trying to KILL Bitcoin. Here’s What I Learned | Jeff Booth

Episode Date: August 16, 2026

Jeff Booth argues that Bitcoin represents a fundamentally different monetary system built around scarcity, decentralization, and a free market driven by deflation. He explains why AI-driven productivity could accelerate the breakdown of the current debt-based system, why Bitcoin’s recent controversies around BIP-110, mining, and self-custody are part of its evolution, and why he believes institutional adoption is inevitable. The conversation also explores Bitcoin treasury companies, leverage, and Booth’s vision for building businesses that generate cash flow and steadily move capital into Bitcoin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What if almost everything we've been taught about money, inflation, and economic growth is built on a system that fundamentally cannot survive. I've read Jeff Booth's book The Price of Tomorrow more times than I can count. And few books have had a bigger impact on how I think about Bitcoin, money, and the system we live in. Every time Jeff and I talk, I walk away questioning something I thought I understood. Today, we dig into why our financial system is fundamentally broken. Global debt can't be repaid. It's impossible. All of the things from that system.

get worse and worse and worse, and there is no resolve. How AI could accelerate that breaking point. When measuring AI moving exponentially, the rate of centralization and manipulation in society has to be the inverse of that exponential, because the credit-based system would fail if you allowed the productivity gains. Why Bitcoin may be the foundation

of the first true free market and what the transition to that world could actually look like. The credit-based system where money is lent into existence is a zero-sum game. Somebody has to lose for you to win. The free market, the one that's backed by Bitcoin, is an infinite game. Everybody wins, and you have to create value for somebody else to win. They cannot coexist.

They can coexist for a short term. This is one of those conversations that may change the way you see money and the world. Let's go. Let's go. What do you believe today that maybe you didn't believe last time we spoke? I think it's the exact same framework I laid out seven years, six or seven years ago. And so, yeah, so I don't know if my beliefs and the overall thing have changed. By the way, thank you for sending kind of that you read my book five times and I went down to rabbit hole in your email.

Somebody sent it to me. And but I think it's just, what I've recognized is what I am talking about is so hard to grasp in us, that it's us changing. that is the change in society. And we don't wanna change. And so we wanna believe that somebody else's fault, somebody else, there's that great group of people that is against us. And we can't see it's actually us.

Is that frustrating to? Right, I mean, you're screaming from the mountaintops. I think that the lessons become claringly obvious as you see what the government does on a month to month year to year basis. Seems like it should be an easier sales pitch. at this point. But again, but if you, just really simply, if you just said if it's your actions or it's this person, people always pick somebody else. It's so trapped in our identity that we,

that we give our, give our agency and control to somebody else that we don't see it's actually us. Now, I know for, for people that don't know my thesis or what you talk about now and now and everything else, but just look at it in you, right? Think about, some of the conversations I've had quietly with you after you've read my book many times, and you were still kind of largely on the other side. And I watched you change over time. It wasn't because of me. It was because of you, right?

But you, it wasn't fighting the world and everything else. And you started to change and you started to see what this looks like from a spot. And the same thing happened to me. The same thing, I was over here. I didn't realize it was me the whole time. And that move was the thing that kind of set me free. It doesn't matter what other people do. They can do whatever they want to do.

I know that this system will create that structure and where most people get caught into that system. But I can choose differently with my own actions. Okay. So let's, I don't want to take for granted that every single person watching has watched our conversations in the past. So maybe we should at least lay the TLDR framework for exact. what we're talking about and what those actions are. So at the top level of the framework is the natural state of the free market is deflation. Now, if you've measured and been in a system that has always been the opposite,

what I just said there will you will push back again and it can't be true and it can't be true. But just ask the next question. I'm just saying first principles. you the free market rewards delivering value to somebody else on their terms period we we have a a group of things we use today in the market and entrepreneurs try to create more value against that group of things when the entrepreneur creates more value for that against that the old company dies and it's replaced by a new company because you use the new thing. So how could that process possibly not lead to more value deflation, right? More value to you

because you're the actor choosing the better value that entrepreneurs have to compete with. And if they deliver less value, you don't use it. So now if you automated that process and the ideas were not just physical things, but the ideas were intelligence. And the ideas, the ideas were intelligence. And the were super intelligence and that would create more and more value, more and more productivity, you would expect if it was a free market, to prices to fall really fast, and you'd expect a global competition of more and more people racing in to compete to provide more value, which would create faster and faster deflation or productivity gains. And you'd expect that even if you didn't do any work, that the infinite game of all of those people competing for you,

If you just stood still, your life would get better. So it sounds so outrageous, but it is true for sure in a free market. What does that mean? It means you've never lived in a free market. You've never lived in anything that resembles a free market, and you believe you have. So you will push back again. And that means the capitalism that you're experiencing, isn't anything like a free market.

And then you replace it with the other side and so capitalists against socialists and this against this. And you're fighting inside a system that's never been the free market. That's hard to take because you don't want to believe that you've never lived in a free market. You want to believe it's somebody else.

It's somebody else's a problem. But it is categorically true. You don't have a reference frame for what I just said. And so let's stop there for a second. So what would you expect from two different systems? Actually, why haven't you living in a free market? Let's just say you and I, Scott, let's say we create money out of nothing. We create money is debt to us.

And there's only you and I in the economy. And I lend you money and we're using that. And I have an interest rate against the money and I'm making money from and you decide to pay it all back. There's no money. So if money is credit or money is debt, then foundationally has to expand forever. Because if it's paid back, there's no money. And then if you allow the free market against that and prices fell, the debt blows up and it explodes. And you can't pay it back.

So no one will let the debt go explode. So they'll keep on manipulating the debt and keep manipulating the money, and that rises to centralization. And then everything centralized. Governments get bigger and bigger and bigger, and they usurp your time from the very same time that you're giving to the system that can't solve it. And you think it's somebody else. Yeah. And the reason that I'm surprised at such a hard sale at this point is because we've seen the ballooning national debt. I mean, I think we had the largest budget deficit in history in July, $432 billion in the United States, right?

People are still arguing over whether we're going to raise or cut rates. The debt service is the most expensive line item in the budget. I would just think that we had gotten to the point, you know, to what we discussed earlier, where it would become so obvious to people how fundamentally broken the system is. It is, but again, think about your own transition through this and trying to resolve this. Well, you're spending all the money. When you go to a store, you're spending in that money. When you go to, when you buy a house, you're spending in that money.

And so you're leveraging, you're measuring your life in a zero-sum game that has to get worse. And you know that the global debt is, it can't be repaid. It's impossible. So when people say we're going to do this at high interest rates, lower interest rates, all of that. What they're not saying, we're living in a free market. What they're saying is we're going to debase your currency. at a crazy rate so you can keep living in the zero-sum game and all of the things from that system get worse and worse and worse and there is no resolve that system cannot be resolved and then

if you you go further on that you go further on why do you need an asset in the first place have you ever thought about it no to think deeply about it the very necessity of an asset is because you know money loses value. And you're trying to park your money in assets tethered to the same system where money loses value, trying to hold your value of your money. So the very reason, the idea of an asset only exists because you can't store your money in money, because you know governments and other people will cheat. The very idea of an asset. And so everybody collects assets inside the same system that's that's getting worse and worse and worse, whether those assets be housing, whether those assets be gold, whether they're, and as assets gets centralized

and more and more and more the wealth accrues to the assets because the assets aren't going up, the money's going down, right? Then then those assets come under seizure of the same government. It always blew my mind that, you know, I know you saw the kind of rant that I did about Bitcoin and why and I think it addressed a lot of a lot of these topics when you think about the fact that a house appreciates in value and it arguably becomes a worse house. You know, obviously like the, you know, the plumbing is going to have to be changed. The air conditioner is eventually going to break.

The roof is going to fail, but the price is going up. But it's not. That's the point I'm making. You can't reconcile rationally why the price would be going up and it's just not. It's only because you can't, you have no measurement. devices of the dollars going down. I used to say all the time, abundance and money creates scarcity everywhere because it doesn't allow the free market to work. And now people can't be productive and misallocation of everything measuring essentially infinite units of money measuring things you

want to buy. It doesn't make any sense versus scarcity and money creates abundance because the free market works. When I asked you the question at the beginning, you know, what do you believe today that you didn't believe the last time we sat down, maybe the better question would have been, has anything changed to accelerate that view? You know, I was kind of hinting towards AI. You know, that's happened. I don't think it's happening faster than you expected,

but I think it's happening faster than many people expected, and they're starting to wrap their heads around that, because I would have thought that the insane pace of AI would also be eye-opening to people to all of the things. Yeah, and you know, I wrote two chapters of AI, and exactly where we'd be now based on that, because I'm measuring AI moving exponentially, and our brains can't comprehend the exponential.

So if you knew the AI was moving exponentially, you could see exactly where it is now, where it'll be next year, where you can see precisely what's happening, and the rate of change that our brains can't keep up with, or the rate of productivity gains that should be flowing to us so you lived in abundance, is on that same curve.

Meaning the rate of centralization and manipulation in society that you're measuring society from has to be the inverse of that exponential. Because the credit-based system would fail if you allowed the productivity gains. So it has to create bubbles everywhere. It has to create misallocation of capital. It has to create the insider game of this person gets this, this person gets this. It has to, by function of you live in a system based on theft. and you contribute to it every day.

I just don't still comprehend how within this system, and I know that means we need to exit, but with these massive productivity gains that are coming from AI and technology in general, how we get to the point that you're describing where people literally shouldn't have to work. You should be working an hour or two hours a day. Things should cost so little

that you don't obviously need the income, which is sort of the base case here, and we should be living in this glorious abundance. But transitioning from the current system to that one seems like there would be a lot of pain. So it's interesting. So inside a system where you're inside this vortex of this and it's centralizing, then that would accrue more and more power to people that you would follow that you would think would be brilliant. And you would, let's use Twitter, for example, or regs, right? Why I had exited a long time ago and I'm not there anymore.

It's just because it's dominated by bots and these belief systems that are bouncing into it. And these people are, they believe their version of reality is true for them from the same system. So now let's say, let's say Elon Musk says everybody is going to be about every, you won't need money. Everything is abundant. But if he's using that money, then that means that means he owns the means of production of AI. and everything else. And you're listening to that and going through the same thing. And it doesn't look like that in your life because you're still inside that system. It won't be abundant for you. It'll be a complete control system where everything surveilled because you used the same money

that created the power that was extracted from you. And so you have to get your head out of that mindset. You have to get your head out of that system. And this is where it touches the Bitcoin. I asked myself all the time because I didn't think this now if I go back seven years ago, even though I wrote about Bitcoin like one paragraph in my book, I wasn't to the point that I believe Bitcoin could stay decentralized and secure against this power that was coming from us that would then surveil Bitcoin and do all of these things. But as I started to do more work and I spent about 15,000 hours trying to say, how do I kill Bitcoin? What does that look like because I've realized if we've never lived in a free market, then it's not somebody else.

It's us taking this short-term choice, telling us, well, I'll just make a little bit more against the other person and everything else and consolidate it. And that would happen again and again and again and again. And it does happen again and again throughout history. And could Bitcoin actually resolve that problem? Could it actually stay decentralized and secure? And as I ran a node and I said, my vote counts. and keeping these decentralized and secure.

And as I moved more of my time into that system, and I saw the explosion of innovation of the free market, building on top of Bitcoin like a protocol and building more and more value, I saw something very different than most people see. I saw this thing emerging in a decentralized secure way, that it didn't care about what people thought of it. It just every 10 minutes,

there was a new block bounded by energy, decentralized and secure and it would emerge exactly like the internet because of that would it be attacked everywhere of course it would be because if that premise held the entire system would be repriced by it and you would live in abundance you would live in abundance because you were living in the you were at the front edge of the first free market that ever existed and you were a part of it and so i wanted to move my time and energy to be part of it and from my time and energy moving part of of it, I realize that a whole bunch of the nonsense that people think about Bitcoin is because they're measuring it from the other system. Agreed. So that said, we're obviously in a bare market,

right? I don't care to talk about price, but I think that we can agree that there's been some apathy, you know, in the last, let's call it, you know, six months to a year. And there have been some events that I think have shaken some people's belief in Bitcoin, certainly their belief in their ability to custody their own Bitcoin. Obviously, I'm talking about the cold card exploit. So, you know, I'm hearing a lot more, hey, I should just put my money in the ETF if I'm going to be here at all. Of course.

By the way, your tweets on that was just, it was fantastic. Somebody shared it with me. The BIP 110. Obviously. So, you know, I think once again, when people get bored, they start to argue about the very soul of Bitcoin. And that just happened. Maybe it's been resolved, but I would still kind of love your takes on it.

And then, of course, even BTC pay, right? The Lightning Network having exploit and drain. And all of this kind of comes in context of increasing power of AI and technology. So it's a really strange intersection I think we're at right now. Yeah. And I think it's easy to fall into like one narrative, Bitcoin's dead, Bitcoin's alive. It's just such a simple narrative. And on Twitter, where if you take something, you can create.

a whole bunch of people who in that belief system who will reinforce your relief system and other people that take the other side it's so much more nuance than that and here's the here's an example going back further many of the people who were responsible for the rise of bitcoin and so if you take cryptography back 20 years before that in the mailing list and the cypherpunks and all of the shots on net that failed because they got centralized or they didn't work properly all of those shots are net, were critical to the discovery of Bitcoin. Because the failures paved the way

to be able to solve the problem in a decentralized and secure way in a different way that any of the single ideas didn't. So that was the free market that saw something way before I saw it. And many of those people aren't even celebrated today.

But they were critical in what Bitcoin looks like today. And some of those people wouldn't take Bitcoin because they were the thing that mattered the most and their thing failed. Right. Right. So this always happens. And it happens because we make it happen and our identity is tied to the thing that we matter. So now take now we're living in a free market in Bitcoin. If you're living in Bitcoin, you're living in a free market.

I didn't say it's all good. It's all rosy. it's just better than the alternative. And the free market is harsh. You must create value for somebody else on their terms or you fail. And there's no monopoly protection. There's no government protection. There's no money.

You must. People will cheat. People will make mistakes. People, let's say this cold card incident, whether it's cheating or making mistake doesn't matter. That will happen in the free market. And those things will get exposed and they will hurried. people what will happen is because of the exposure because you haven't hit it under a rug and say no it's not the government it's this it's this other person it gets exposed violently and and the reaction

to create more value and to make sure you create more value gets exposed broadly to to a global citizen base so that in in ego death what we're seeing is the response to that in a whole bunch of different opportunities to be able to solve that in a totally different way. And so I watch every, it's dead, it's dead forever. And I watch entrepreneurs come in and go, wow, that pointed a really big vulnerability that we can't let it happen again. Some of them will make mistakes too. But the, but overall, it's solved better in the bright day of sunshine.

And it's so faster than sweeping at these things under the rug, let's say 2008 Christ. all of the same leaders of the crisis that created the crisis are still in power, right? I mean, Morse. Yeah. And more, you know, people, he's a hawk. And I'm like, you know, he was out in the Fed. Totally. So that's what it looks like.

And if you add BIP 110, it's the same thing. You had a belief system that this is Bitcoin. Bitcoin isn't one thing. It's all of us combined in this thing that is the free market that is, is, is a Some parts of it are trying to stop it. You have to say, if there was this thing that was outside central control, of course people would be trying to stop it. There's a reflexive action, make ensuring.

Every time, even these public events, I try something, the community splinters, it didn't work. Some people go off on the fork chain that didn't work. And the others that are behind this are saying, Ah, I see what's happening. It's a way deeper game. This is just a, this is a little skirmish inside the broad, in the, in the broad war for money that can't be debased. And all over the world, you have this reflexive action making sure all over, all over the protocol.

So nothing's changed. Nothing's changed. It's just, it's so outside of our understanding of our own identity within the thing right now. which has always been the case. So it's us in it. I mean, BIP 110 will be a blip, obviously. It's totally forgettable, even more so, I think, than the block size wars, you know,

BSV and BCH and all these other forks because it effectively was two blocks and gone, to my understanding. But still, it did cut to, I guess, the core of a fundamental argument about Bitcoin, which is, should it just be hard money and nothing else? Or should you be able to develop things whereas they would say, you know, spam and ordinals and BRC 20 tokens and all these other things

that I guess were allowed by Taproot. I'm assuming as a VC who's innovating, who's investing in companies that are innovating on Bitcoin, you believe that Bitcoin should be used or can be used for other things besides strictly just hard money. So it's funny. I'm actually, I'm more, I understand the side of the HIP-110ers and everything else. I don't, I wouldn't fork off. But I understand.

The momentum of everybody. So I ask Bitcoiners all the time. How many of you spend your Bitcoin? Virtually. I don't know. No. No. We all know that.

But again, you say that. In our venture portfolio, we have companies doing billions of dollars of transactions per quarter. This ecosystem is growing, spending all over the world. The spending couldn't happen unless people are spending it. But it's such a small percentage of what Bitcoiners do. So there is no one Bitcoiner. Most people see Bitcoin is an asset underneath the broken monetary system.

And in that if it was an asset underneath the broken monetary system, just like gold, it would centralize. Most people would use the derivative instrument on top of that. And it would centralize and then the rules would change of that. If it was that, it would fail. It would fail just like gold. Gold never was a bit, it never could remain outside of the financial system because the same, we took the easy choice.

So I understand, so to me, Bitcoin is money. And I understand if there's a bunch of people, because it doesn't need to be anything else. Just like TCP IP underneath the internet didn't need to be anything else. It's actually the narrower version of the base layer of the protocol that keeps it safe from everything else. And if you expanded the base layer of the protocol so it could do all these other things, you introduce vulnerabilities. Now, I say something very different, and I don't think it's, so just like TCIP, when you go back to the beginning of the internet, and that was created by Paul Barron in 1965, and DARPA took it in 1969. What was it at the base? It was communication

technology that would stay up in a nuclear holocaust. Because that was critical. And so the narrowness of the protocol was the thing. And it was open for anybody to build on. And so people built on it. And it evolved in layers. And the fourth layer that most people know is HTTP, which was the dawn of the World Wide Web. And that happened from 1969 to 1989.

And the same thing against what I'm talking about now in Bitcoin, if you move forward, is happening right now. There's a whole bunch of trying to centralize Bitcoiners trying to centralize all these other coins, new use cases, which I haven't seen one work. No, never. Nothing. Because money is superordinate to everything. It prices every other thing. So it only needs to be money.

And then the further layers of privacy, of spending, of all of the other layers happen on layers on top. And you know what it is private and you know it's decentralized and secure. That's all it has to be. just has to be money, and then the innovation happens on top. If it's more than that, you introduce risk. And so I actually understand, and some of the people that are like deep thinkers in, like, if you say Luke in BIP 110, he's actually brilliant. And so I can tell, and I agree, by the way.

Like, I would never, I would never presume to know what to do to Bitcoin. I would never presume to change it, but I do definitely. I definitely sympathize at least with the core argument. Yeah, and I do too. And I can disassociate the core argument of what they're saying and say, okay, I understand this because most people won't. They'll turn it into, and he will too, they'll turn it into an identity battle.

I'm Bitcoin against the other identity battle, I'm Bitcoin, against a whole very many people that'll think in just the very next step instead of the long-term game. So, but that would have to happen. zoom back out at a higher level, it would happen because that's who we are, not because of who they are, right? It would happen because each person is trying to, trying to matter in this thing and they have different ideas. But do I think Bitcoin's decentralized and secure right now? Yes,

I do. Do I think it's, do I think this idea was really powerful in that it opened people's to where the vulnerabilities exists and different things are going to happen now that those vulnerabilities are exposed? I think yes. I guess the next natural question is, yes, you believe it's decentralized right now. Is there any risk to that

and which direction do you think it's heading in as you see it right now? Do you think it's becoming more decentralized? There's a lot of people who argue, you know, like consolidation of Bitcoin mining makes Bitcoin more centralized. By the way, they're all becoming ADA data centers, so I think that that argument isn't dying, but you've

seen these arguments. Yeah, I'm on the board of course scientific, right, which was one of the largest Bitcoin miners. Bitcoin mining operates in the free market. So if miners try to get more fees by driving inscriptions in to protect the cost of their high-cost mining, they don't do the things to move their mining equipment to lower cost mining or the lower cost energy around the world, and they drive themselves off the cliff faster. They go broke.

The free market resolves it. You don't have to do anything. And that's what's happening underneath this. So these short-term ideas that we have to do this to the protocol to stop miners from doing this, when the natural incentives is because these ideas come out of we've never lived in a free market. In the free market, which mining absolutely lives in. your two inputs are new compute, new compute equipment and energy.

And if you're paying too much for power, you go broke. So it always incentivizes the new miner with new equipment with lower cost energy. It's driving a productivity and energy base to decentralize around the world. And you don't have to do anything about it. There's other different ideas of risk mining pools. or one implementation like core instead of a in any one of these risks you could really double tap and you could say if it remained like this forever then then where would the infiltration point to be of the government or anything that was trying to stop it and they would be through the

these these areas but the free market is also resolving all of those as those become risks So it's just an evolution of something that is, I fully believe, this is repricing the world. And you're having a new internet being built on top of Bitcoin. I find it so interesting that miners are obviously becoming AI data centers because they just happened to be well positioned to take advantage of this new trend. Right. And there's regulatory capture in certain places you can't even start building an AI data center. I wonder, you know, we can look. I think I saw the last general estimate was around 75,000.

dollars you know on average to mine a Bitcoin so obviously they're mining at a loss makes sense that they would go to greener pastures i wonder what this looks like if bitcoin skyrockets up back above a hundred again as they're all uh converting over to AI data centers if the free market in the math once again incentivizes them to flip back they that wouldn't do it they're way underwater right now so so i went to malawi was it last year or the year before in malawi the average wage per per day is, I think, a dollar, a dollar U.S. And they went through a currency revaluation.

And here's the interesting thing. Through these giant nonsense programs, they decided that Malawi needed solar energy for charging of cars. Nobody has cars, right? So there's this white elephant project all over, nobody has, let alone cars, let alone electric cars. So there's a white elephant project that goes in,

because you have to have clean energy and they do all of this stuff. What do you think happens? A whole bunch of individual people plug in mining equipment to the solar and get free energy. Right. And so if you're a data center

trying to compete with that, good luck. And an investor in a company called Gridless in Africa as well. They were doing River Run power and the River Run power is at two and a half cents. And data centers here are paying five and six, seven cents. They're going to go broke.

And then the river run power is actually being outpaced by solar in places. Prices are just collapsing. And Bitcoin mining is distributing as you'd expect it would. We're seeing a lot of opportunities right now in our fund that are that that that that driving heaters because all a heater is is a dumb Bitcoin miner. Right. Like it's just sort of it doesn't make money. It just costs you money.

But if you tied the heat into creating something, now you have more of an incentive to lower your heat bills. Some will work, some won't work. But you can see this integration of energy, heat, and everything else from the free market driving value. I mean, hash rate is down, but you would imagine that actually this conversion of Bitcoin miners to AI data centers is going to further decentralize Bitcoin mining. Exactly. If the concern was that four or five big mining pools or miners were, you know, had captured the hash rate, that's going to go away if they turned their machines off. Bingo. So actually, I guess that's the silver lining of that entire scenario.

Yeah. But it also shows you just the exposure to that on all sides. It exposes you to the deeper misunderstanding of free markets. And all of these seemingly rational ideas. where we need more fees inside this database because we can't make enough money and mining would seem rational in the moment but would get you drive yourself right off a cliff and so you don't need those fees those fees aren't required to be able to to protect mining the mining the the block subsidy is more than enough and the block somebody is being more than enough in 2080 because relative to that price, prices are falling.

I want to talk about what you're building with orange juice. I've had Nico on and we discussed it at length, but I know that, you know, I'm assuming this is something you're very passionate about with ego death. And, you know, I was, I think, relatively unpopular and outspoken a year and a half ago when the Bitcoin Treasury boom happened. You know, I had this moment. I don't know if I've told you about it, but I walked into Bitcoin Viguerreys. And I think in the first 30 minutes I was there, I was pitched investment in nine Bitcoin Treasury Company. Like no exaggeration, like seven of them by one person.

And I said, this is just a bad idea. Like this is not going to work. There's not going to be demand for this. There's no plan. We need businesses to behave like we do, which is make, inside the system, this system, make cash and save it in Bitcoin, right? The same thing you would tell an individual to do. Take 10% of your paycheck, 20% off your paycheck,

100%, whatever it is, and move it into Bitcoin after you make money. Seems that you are very heavily focused on actually building cash flow to invest in Bitcoin, which should have been the original ethos in my mind of Bitcoin treasury companies. Yeah, and again, the market makes mistakes constantly. We make mistakes constantly. So should, shouldn't. It's just a whole bunch of ideas competing in a market. And most of those ideas are inside the existing financial system.

So what would that look like if you had Bitcoin underneath a new financial system? It would look like digital credit. Where would the interest rate come from? Because if the price of prices fall in a free market, then that needs to be debased to have the interest rate. Right. And it needs to be centralized. And so digital credit, a whole bunch of people, let's just use this. example. It would make sense in that to, to, if somebody offered me 11.5 or 12% interest rate,

to sell my Bitcoin out of self-custody where I was agency where I was part of a free market to take the interest rate. And relative to all prices from that system, I was trying to keep up with my food prices going up. I was trying to keep up with, and I didn't know they were going up because the money was going down. And I just sold my freedom and part of the free market to go back to the system. I did it. Everybody knows, right? So there you go. Yeah. And so, so it would seem totally rational and I empathize against people that are doing it. And as people were doing it, if more people sold the Bitcoin for this thing that was creating a ballooning liability with no cash flow underneath it. right as more people do that it would also put a floor on the bitcoin price because on this system

people would start to short to that system and a longer sideways trade now you need more and more debt to service the interest and you don't have any and you and you don't have any any company that's paying the cash flows so it would get worse and worse and worse in the added rent in fact The underlying assumption of those companies in the IRA of Bitcoin requires Bitcoin to be money. The growth rate requires Bitcoin to be money, yet some of that goes exactly the other way. And so, and this becomes really complicated because most people aren't thinking about Bitcoin as a new system. They're thinking about it tethered to the existing system. And so most people will make that choice and be fall into that.

I was, we were all, everybody at EgoDath was the same thing. We were asked to be on all of these Treasury company boards. It didn't make sense. It didn't make sense. Not bad people, not everything else. Oh, no, I, you know, I think it was a combination of obviously driven by greed, right? You see that you buy something that goes up 30 times. Yeah.

Instantly. But I do think that people genuinely. believe these Bitcoin treasury companies would accumulate Bitcoin and then do something. Yeah. And they all just happen to buy the top all at once with no plan to do anything. Which would be normal. And if every, the AI today, everybody's buying the top. Right. Because the past, they made all this money and they buy the top and it collapses on them. So that's just kind of us inside that system that we don't understand what the underlying

things are. So we just thought if every financial system, if every financial instrument is derived today from the same system, private equity, the treasury companies, every single thing, public stock, it's all derived from that same, and we're tethered to it. How do you build a long-term capital plan that you can get out of it? And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, And from there, this is, this, it was actually emergent from the idea didn't actually come from us. It came from our LPs. And so some, some, some, some of our limited partners in our fund because we're building a different ecosystem in EcoDeath.

And so we wanted them to be close to the ecosystem and a bunch of the LPPs become close friends because every month we do what's happening in the ecosystem. Good, bad, ugly. We show some of the, some of the insights of what's coming that are so powerful that the, the majority of the world has no idea that's coming. And so you get this, and you're seeing the growth of this ecosystem all over the world. You're not fearful of Bitcoin and price anymore. And so some of these LPs started asking, how do we move more of our time to the system we want to emerge for our kids as well? Some of those LPs had really good businesses, maybe not

growth businesses, but cash flow every year. And so that insight drove us. to, wow, we could create something totally different. We could create a long-term capital management where we don't have to ever sell. We're not trading a company for somebody else to sell it inside a game. And those companies, they were saying to us, we could sell to private equity, which will leverage our company and do something else. That's the choice. We get knocked on the door all the time.

And then we could take a tax hit and then we could buy Bitcoin. But then what do we do? And I or my grandparents have run this business for 60 years or 50 years. So we started to hear the same thing. And so orange juice was a way to be able to. So you're not really, yes, you're selling to us. We're driving operations. You couldn't hire the AI person, right?

You couldn't on your small company. but we can bring this into and kind of fly into the business to make it efficient. But we want you there. We want you to stay. We want to run this business forever. We don't need to sell. And now we accumulate more and more of those businesses and we buy Bitcoin with them. And they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they.

They, I mean, private equity can obviously be extremely predatory. And this is the light side of private equity, which is that you generally want to improve a business, and then you want them to buy an underlying asset that will, you know, capture back their time and, you know, and allow them to keep doing what they're doing in a way that they want to, right? So this isn't a corporate raider, Richard Geer and Pretty Woman comes in, chops up your company and sells it for pieces, right? That's right. Like, we would only buy businesses that are resilient that we've, that the founders or, that we want to be partners with forever,

or well they want to be. And so it creates permanent capital. And generally, you know, I guess, is it a similar plan with each business to put the same percentage into Bitcoin from their cash flow each month or year? or is it depend on the businesses and their belief in Bitcoin, or is it based on construction?

No, it's, so we want to go in instead of, we want to go in cards on the table, complete card, we're partners. Here's what, here's, I'll give you an instance,

right? So we would go by, by a business. We would probably lever the cash flows to, let's say the performer of the business says we're going to make 10 million in EBITDA per year, right? And they need certain,

capax or whatever that looks like to be able to, we carve out that budget. But let's use for round numbers. Let's say they're making 10 million cash flow a year. We would lever that business to three times to buy more Bitcoin. Now even a 10% interest rate, you're, you're paying $3 million a year in interest costs and you have all the Bitcoin. Bitcoin price goes up and down. Doesn't matter. You have $10 million per, per, per, per year. And the additional 7 million we would use to buy more businesses

or buy Bitcoin if Bitcoin was the right price, but likely it would be creating the fly wheel to buy more businesses. And then now we, exactly. And then how we share that with the, we want some of these. We'll buy cash if you want. But we would rather

have you own some of the equity in orange juice because now you, it creates a win, win, win. Everybody wins from the underlying structure of permanent capital driving into permanent capital. And the next. And everybody's a line. And the next step of that is some of these businesses, we already have, through

ego death, all of the infrastructure, we know all the infrastructure and different, different players in this, to actually turn them into accept Bitcoin. Pay your vendors in Bitcoin. So you start moving essentially this thing from, instead of, a Wall Street capture to a Main Street emergence. Yeah, it's brilliant. And, you know, I'm hoping, well, I'm wondering what will happen to the existing Bitcoin Treasury space.

I'll let you're not a Bitcoin Treasury company. I mean, just to be clear for people, but, you know, it did, I think it just kind of harkens back to what it should have been. But, you know, what do you think happens to all of these existing ones that did just buy Bitcoin at the top? They're paying salaries and fees and custody and, you know, as I've even looked at some of them because people have come to me with the idea of consolidating some of them or raising capital to be a fund of funds for Bitcoin treasury companies. Some of them have such bad deals for custody and such.

You can't even really buy the Bitcoin without buy out these deals and then the discount doesn't even make sense. I mean, what do you think happens to all this Bitcoin that's sitting there, all these companies that are effectively zombies that are just sitting there waiting, you know? Yeah, the truth is some of them will probably, some of them will be okay. because the market will come back. Well, Bitcoin goes out. Exactly. Some of them will be okay and they'll be able to pivot. And strategy is likely okay.

But for, yeah, and strategy is likely, it does really well on this. But for strategy to do well long term, the yin and yang has to happen together. Bitcoin needs to be a currency. And if it's just this financial instrument, then if it's just this financial instrument, ultimately a strategy would probably be taken over by the government. Right? That's what like this, this if the underlying asset is the thing that,

maybe that happens, maybe it doesn't happen. But I don't actually think that happens. There's a way, it won't because Bitcoin's emerging as a currency. And if Bitcoin emerges as a currency, then strategy becomes one of the most valuable companies around because they went to early. So, so. When they have needed STRC and STRD and STRK and STRK and STR everything to get there. Yeah.

And these things become, I took more risk. That risk, that risk paid off because of something else. It's an orthogonal thing that was happening. So, yeah, I think that, so. It's hard to answer. What do all the companies look like? Because some will win, some will lose. And they all can't be strategy.

Right. Which is part of my initial argument. You know, anything they're going to do, strategy already owns, you know, hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin and is probably going to do better. Right. Yeah, I just didn't think they could catch up or that there was space for all of them. Yeah.

And, you know, I have a big fan of strategy and end of sailor. But, you know, some of the, I can see how people would be skeptical of what's happened when you're buying it 125 and selling it 65. But I think that a higher Bitcoin price fixes everything. Totally. Which is funny because, you know, it's not inevitable. But I've always said, you know, people I just, they misunderstand the risk for strategy. Yeah.

And I think. Down and stays down. That's their problem. A really long time well below current price. That's their problem. Yeah. But go through. that in thinking and like pressure test it from the other side if it's new system and you're not so

the leverage is the death from an existing system that requires leverage so if there's a deflationary spiral the leverage is wiped out everything's wiped out right which requires way more printing and that these up if you look at the gold chart at wymer chart and when it was a germany yimar gold chart and you saw people that back and forth and back and forth it meant people are taking leverage getting wiped out to everything everything then they went into savings and inflation went up and they lost everything and they're back and forth and that that trauma to society and what that happens that that is coming because there is no and these volatility is happening faster and faster and faster people are chasing assets inside the same system trying to do this now what does that mean from the other system from the

other system, you can just sleep really well at night knowing that that has to happen. You don't have to price your new system from that thing. But it will happen. You can just move your time into self-custody, into understanding this. And as you move your time into that, you're experiencing a different version of the world emerging. And that's funny. Because you could just look at South Korea, right? I mean, it's a different version. It's not necessarily inflation and deflation, but you had these stories over the last few months of retirees selling their insurance and their savings to chase leverage ETFs of SK Heinix and Samsung and to participate at the top. And then you have repeated circuit breakers and liquidations. And then the market pumps the minute everybody's

liquidated and they try again. I mean, it's a microcosm of the same effect. It's not Weimar Germany and it's not the gold chart and it's not because of inflationary and deflationary shocks, but it's the same phenomenon. It's exactly the same thing globally. And every time these happen. You have a whole bunch of talking heads saying, this is why it happened, this is why it won't, and a whole bunch of people listening to all of this inside the system. It happens over and over and over and over again, and it keeps them trapped. And they're taking more and more bets against something like this, thinking that the bet is right. It can't be inside of a system of broken money. And so that's the point. If everybody else is doing this and all of the media

is doing this, then wouldn't you suspect that you might be to? And this is when you first asked, has anything changed? Are you upset or anything? No, it has to look like this, but I live in a different system. It's interesting because that's where the crossover comes between Bitcoin and the existing system. Bitcoin itself can be fine,

but the leverage that builds around it is what causes our same up and down, volatile cycles and then people go, Bitcoin is broken, Bitcoin is volatile, Bitcoin's crazy, but it's actually just the people treating Bitcoin as another asset in the old system that causes that volatility and causes them to use and get flushed leverage. It's just a really strange transition. That's why it's so hard and you have to remain calm through this because you just I ask underneath, has my existing thesis changed? Has anything changed? Is it, is it lusty, is it not decentralized and secure?

Because if it remains that way, that's the only thing that matters. But you can expect people to, that they're trying to keep up with houses going up, to leverage their Bitcoin because that's what worked in the other system, and to try to apply these same leverage games to a system that can't allow it, and them to get flushed and flush and not to create all sorts. And nobody comes in. The government doesn't come in to bail you out from your bad bet. it just the next block happens and you're gone.

So, so, so, so that's why it, it's so critical. This, this is the first time you've heard what I said, it will not, it will likely not land because it's so complex, so different from this system change. What they, they, they're opposites. They can't actually, they cannot coexist. They can coexist for a short term, but they cannot coexist in, uh, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, in the long term. One system, the credit-based system where money is lent into existence, is a zero-sum game. Somebody has to win, somebody has to lose for you to win. The free market,

the one that's backed by Bitcoin, is an infinite game. Everybody wins. And you have to create value for somebody else to win. You brought up the Weimar Republic and something I've been saying for a while, you know, you look back at that time and speculation was basically at all-time highs, right, which makes sense. Anytime you see massive hyperinflation and people are wheelbarrowing cash to the store to get bread, they have nothing to lose and they speculate on everything. That's what happened then. It was a, you know, very, very famously. I have a feeling that's what's happening now. The gamble on everything all the time 24-7 with leverage on a perpetual swap to me as as fun of a story as it is that we're bringing these levels of speculation to everyone everywhere. It's one of those. signs of a very unhealthy underlying environment in my mind. I don't think that someone who's willing to gamble with leverage on tomorrow's weather is feeling particularly good about their financial situation. Maybe they can't articulate it. I think that's exactly. And now it's worse. It's way worse, because they're in a machine that's showing them that false signals of false profits that made so much

money that they just want a share of the action. And so all of your actions are like our emergent behavior comes from the system we live in. But we don't see that. We don't see the underlying cause of that. And so if the underlying system, which we both know and maybe more and more people do, is either insolvent, which it is, or based on theft, which it is, which you don't have a vote in. You don't have a vote in what. the inflation rate is.

It's implied to you. So if you don't have a vote on the where the inflation rate is, and the market should be deflation where you get more value every day, does your vote count at all? So we should really ask that question. Because most of the, you see the tip of the iceberg on taxes and what you're voting for. But the big part of the iceberg is underneath the surface.

You have no idea. And your emergent behavior is on top of. that blaming this other person, blaming the picking aside within the system. It's ludicrous. So if that's true, which it certainly is, your emergent behaviors, everything that you think about

what's happening in the world, requires theft, underlying everything, requires lying to you and stealing and centralization. It's a requirement. That means all the law is built on top of it, due to, to protect it. That's why I said this is so hard

our identity is facing that thing. And a lot of people I know will push back on what I just said because they're measuring from it. It can't be true for them. But it is true. It is true for sure. So that's one system that they're inside the feed of that system looking for validation inside that system every day. And you're getting more gambling. You're getting all of the nonsense. And relationships get thinner and thinner and thinner and thinner. And you're looking back to a time that looked different from a system where it can't that you're participating in. And the other system, one that's based on truth, because that's all it is.

It's a decentralized secure database that every 10 minutes there's a new block that bounded by energy that is just, you can't cheat. It is what it is. It is what it is. It's just whatever it is to you, it can be to you. But it's just, thou shall not cheat. And if you cheat or try to, if you do the wrong thing on it, you'll get flushed out by the, by the free market. And so what would a system emergent on truth look like?

And what would your world look like inside that? And that faces kind of a personal choice of what I want to feed. But it's easy to believe that it's not your personal choice. It's somebody else's fault that keeps you there. I mean, I know we only have a few minutes, but. Curious, then, what do you see as the path of adoption for Bitcoin, the next steps? Like, as the war time has passed, as it's become more clear, as we've seen how it, you know, defies the other system. Like, how do you actually see it going from here?

I think, you thought the institutional adoption was inevitable and part of the path, right? A lot of people have been feared the institutional adoption. I know that you thought, you know, we've got to go through this system to come out the other side. So, I mean, how do you see it evolving from here? Yeah, I think that it's going to be messy, many, many people. It has to be messy because that choice underlying that, I asked myself, the very real, like you know this, but I faced a choice in my own journey that all of my money was being made from Fiat.

And I was preaching about Bitcoin. And I was spending in Fiat every day. And I was talking about this. And I literally woke up one night and went, wow, I'm the world's greatest hypocrite. Because I know this. I wrote a book on it. I wrote exactly what would happen. And my own time couldn't see it was me.

Even though I was telling, and people were saying, oh, Jeff, you're gray. You saved me. I'm now saving a Bitcoin and everything else. But my own actions didn't align with that. So the creation of ego death was partially, it was the team that came together. but for me was to resolve that in me to move my time, my most valuable thing to the system that I wanted to. And as we did that, other things opened up. I started spending in it every day.

I started to see a different world emerge. And so I can't judge somebody else going through that process when it took me that much time. to go through that process. It took you that much time to go through that process. Most people aren't there. You're going through that process. But as you start to see it, you start to see what I just said is true. And it's in each person type of identity. And if we, if collectively, we give all of our energy to a system that steals our energy, Bitcoin will fail and, and everything will be centralized and into this really surveillance state type of world where we won't have choices, we won't actually have freedom.

If enough people move their time and energy into, which I'm sure happens because I'm watching it every day, which is really early, move their time and energy into this, then we decide it looks totally different. Do you see any real risks left for Bitcoin? I mean, you speak as if the transition is inevitable. It's just a matter of timeline. I think it's inevitable. It's just a matter of timeline.

and when the risks, of course, there's risk. Mining pools are a risk. Centralization of mining is a risk. One reference implementation like core. You have to assume these are risk, because what would you do if you were the centralized? You would go attack the vulnerability. You would exploit the vulnerability.

But why I don't see them as risk, they're maybe short-term risks. But what's happening behind the scenes to address those, those, I get to see that. And so many people would say, I can't use Bitcoin because it's not private. I'm going to use this other centralized coin. Privacy already exists on top of Bitcoin in another layer on top of it, completely exists and is growing really fast on. So not just privacy in your, in your money, privacy and your communications. And that doesn't exist in the other world you're living and your communications are being surveilled. So I watched the misunderstanding of what's happening

from the other system too, which would appear to be a greater risk if you're not inside the ecosystem, the system. So interesting. Any final thoughts before I let you go? No, this was great. It's always great to talking with you. Yeah, well, me too, because then I have to go rethink everything. You have that effect. You know, like, I mean, we always joke, but I think more than anyone, you've kind of seen it with me because of the space, the timing of our conversations and the way that I speak about things and how I participated in this industry from the beginning. But it all started for really reading the book and it really did. I think you heard that a million times, but it really did. Thanks.

Really appreciate it. Like what I'll read me again today. On the next book. I never wanted to be an author in the first place. I'm an authoriner. Okay, well, one day. Well, just have AI write it for you. There you go.

It was all your free time. What do you know about me after reading my first book? What should I write about? Totally. Five minutes. The book will be out tomorrow, guys. Well, thank you so much, Jeff. I deeply, deeply appreciate your time.

Thanks, Scott.