Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️
“Take it from somebody who spent 15,000 hours trying to kill Bitcoin.”
Global debt now sits at roughly $350 trillion, propping up some $900 trillion of assets. By Jeff Booth’s math, it can never be repaid. Six years after The Price of Tomorrow predicted that technology-driven deflation would collide head-on with a credit system that must expand forever, Jeff says we’re simply further down the same path, with AI pouring fuel on it.
We sat with Jeff Booth, founding partner of Ego Death Capital (which just closed a $100M fund to invest in the Bitcoin ecosystem) and board member at Core Scientific, to unpack why he thinks the entire market is mispricing Bitcoin as “digital gold” when it’s actually a protocol like the internet in 1969. If he’s right, almost every allocator is holding the wrong layer of the stack.
In this conversation, we break down why the most contrarian Bitcoin thesis isn’t about price at all. It’s about what you’re measuring price in.
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About Jeff: Jeff Booth is the founding partner of Ego Death Capital, a $100M venture fund investing exclusively in companies building on the Bitcoin protocol (portfolio includes Fedi, Breez, and Ark Labs, a co-investment with Tether). He sits on the board of Core Scientific and previously co-founded and ran BuildDirect for nearly two decades, scaling a 100+ engineer organization. His 2020 book The Price of Tomorrow became the canonical text on why technology is deflationary and why credit-based money is structurally at war with the free market.
“We came to two systems colliding into each other — one the free market, and one a version of people’s reality that has to centralize everything to survive.”
🎯 Jump to the best parts
00:00 Introduction
00:51 The Price Of Tomorrow Thesis
04:24 Why Debt Creates Centralization
08:10 Can The US Become Japan
09:37 Bitcoin As A Parallel System
14:50 What Must Happen For Bitcoin To Win
20:50 Arc Labs And Bitcoin Payments
25:13 Stablecoins vs Bitcoin
27:50 Is Quantum Computing A Threat
31:48 Michael Saylor And Strategy
34:52 AI, Energy & Deflation
39:09 Bitcoin Mining Economics
45:33 Where The Biggest Bitcoin Opportunities Are
46:17 Projects To Watch
47:55 Why People Still Fear Bitcoin
49:48 What Excites Jeff Most
51:23 Lightning Round
53:37 Where To Learn More
Important Links
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffrbooth/
Ego Death Capital: https://egodeath.capital/
The Price of Tomorrow: https://www.jeffreybooth.com/
Watch or listen now: YouTube • Apple Podcasts
Our biggest takeaways from this conversation
1. The $350 trillion error in every portfolio model
Jeff’s core claim is mathematical, not ideological. The natural state of a free market is deflation: entrepreneurs compete to deliver more value, so prices fall. Credit-based money cannot tolerate that. It must expand exponentially or collapse.
“You’re talking about federal debt only. You’re not talking about the total global debt of $350 trillion... and that $350 trillion is supporting, say, $900 trillion of assets. But the $350 trillion cannot be repaid.”
The consequence for allocators: every discounted cash flow model on earth uses the long bond as the risk-free rate. Jeff says that’s the error.
“They think all of the assets on top of that debt are safe because they assume the risk-free rate of that debt is a long bond rate... There’s an error in their calculation, because they believe that credit is solvent.”
What to do with this: stress-test your models with a different question — not “what is this asset worth in dollars?” but “what is this asset worth against the monetary printing rate?” Jeff’s point on Japan applies globally: Japanification “works” only by the state buying its own markets.
Related reads:
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2. Bitcoin is 1969 internet, and almost everyone is buying the wrong layer
This is the thesis Ego Death Capital’s entire $100M fund is built on. Jeff rejects “digital gold” as a category error. Gold always centralized, got captured by the state, and was repriced. A protocol doesn’t.
“Imagine going back to 1969 and you could own a piece of the internet itself, and all of the value that came on top of it... instead of owning just the company on top of it.”
His test for any model: it should be predictive.
