Jeff Booth is the Author of The Price of Tomorrow and CEO/Chairman of Ego Death Capital. In this interview, we discuss how Bitcoin fundamentals (such as its approach to the blockchain trilemma, centring on truth, and its deflationary effects) run counter to current economic theories, making Bitcoinâs signal harder for some to find.
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A common refrain whilst we live through unprecedented global economic turmoil and massive failures within DeFi is âwhy arenât people flocking to Bitcoinâ. Obviously, Bitcoinâs signal is being lost: the fundamentals that are designed to better protect people against incompetent, corrupt and fraudulent behaviour arenât readily apparent to many. Why is this?
As Jeff Booth asserted in a recent article: âprotocols create value in the form of a new foundation that emerges slowly & methodicallyâ. However, capitalist societies have been conditioned to accept and expect rapid change: âwork fast and break thingsâ has been taken as a given. Systems that run counter to this are viewed as being ripe for disruption.Â
Bitcoin has widely been seen as slow. Itâs development was famously the subject of a crisis centred on scaling arguments. The outcome was an affirmation of some core principles: Bitcoin would be predicated on decentralization and security. This spurned a tsunami of altcoins that proliferated on the pitch that they improved on Bitcoin by being able to scale. This meant many dismissed it. Bitcoin was old tech.
But, as we have seen over the past few months, speed and scale come at a cost. A real-world cost counted in billions of dollars. The blockchain trilemma means that scale means making material tradeoffs in terms of decentralization and security. The result: hacks and fraud. If there is any silver lining to the FTX collapse is that the conflation of crypto and Bitcoin now has more than a theoretical critique.Â
The importance of making the case for Bitcoin, of amplifying the signal, is that it offers a transition to a new system where we can benefit from deflation. A system that protects people. A system based on a layer of truth.
