What Bitcoin Did

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Finding Bitcoin Signal with Jeff Booth

Peter McCormack

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Finding Bitcoin Signal with Jeff Booth - WBD584 Peter McCormack

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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 Bitcoin’s 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 “why aren’t people flocking to Bitcoin”. Obviously, Bitcoin’s signal is being lost: the fundamentals that are designed to better protect people against incompetent, corrupt and fraudulent behaviour aren’t readily apparent to many. Why is this?

As Jeff Booth asserted in a recent article: “protocols create value in the form of a new foundation that emerges slowly & methodically”. However, capitalist societies have been conditioned to accept and expect rapid change: ‘work fast and break things’ has been taken as a given. Systems that run counter to this are viewed as being ripe for disruption. 

Bitcoin has widely been seen as slow. It’s 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. 

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.

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00:01:52: Introductions
00:02:53: Finding Signal in a Noisy World by Jeff Booth
00:05:27: Money is information
00:09:13: Inflation is theft
00:13:44: The history of failed centralisation
00:29:41: Bitcoin is the best alternative monetary system
00:35:46: The blockchain trilemma, and the irony of centralised blockchains
00:48:35: Driving Bitcoin adoption
00:54:53: Increasing prices in the current broken system
00:58:00: Layer 2 protocols enabling peer-to-peer transactions
01:05:30: Changing people's belief systems
01:10:32: How society coordinates in the new system
01:19:09: Bitcoin connects the world through base-layer truth
01:26:47: Final comments

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If you enjoy The What Bitcoin Did Podcast you can help support the show by doing the following:

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