Jeff Booth wants you to move more of your time into Bitcoin

Welcome to Slate Sunday, CryptoSlate’s weekly feature showcasing in-depth interviews, expert analysis, and thought-provoking op-eds that go beyond the headlines to explore the ideas and voices shaping the future of crypto.

Jeff Booth has been warning the world about how technology and debt don’t mix for over a decade. The Vancouver-born entrepreneur and author of The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is Key to an Abundant Future says the financial system we live under is one giant illusion. It’s a construct that prevents the natural process of progress and innovation from benefiting everyone equally.

“The natural state of the free market is deflation,” Booth reminds me early in our conversation.

Booth, who led the tech company BuildDirect for nearly two decades and now runs venture firm Ego Death Capital, was named among Goldman Sachs’ 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs.

He has spent the past several years speaking and investing around one central idea: the future doesn’t have to be dystopian. But to make it hopeful, we must choose different incentives.

The illusion of stability

Global economic data paints an increasingly unstable picture. The U.S. unemployment rate has ticked up to 4.1%, corporate bankruptcies are at their highest since 2020, and credit card delinquencies have surged past pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile, real wages have stagnated against a backdrop of record debt: global borrowing surpassed $337 trillion this year, according to the Institute of International Finance.

And yet, prices keep rising. The cost of living in both the U.S. and Europe has forced millions of households to rely on short-term credit. In Booth’s framework, that outcome is baked into the system itself. He says:

We’ve never lived in a true free market, Booth argues, only in various forms of controlled economies dressed in different ideologies.

Bitcoin fixes this

For Booth, Bitcoin represents the first true global free market, one that can’t be manipulated. He reasons:

In his words, Bitcoin “reprices the entire world” because it operates outside a system of debt and compounding credit. All global assets are steadily losing ground to Bitcoin’s scarcity-driven, deflationary model, and real estate is a prime example. While house prices may be rising in fiat terms, they’re becoming vastly cheaper in BTC.

That perspective shift explains why Booth tells people not just to buy Bitcoin, but to move their time into it. And what does he say to people who believe it’s too late to start stacking sats? To the contrary, “We’re insanely early,” he smiles.

It’s a worldview that’s counterintuitive in a time defined by anxiety.

Fear and systems of control

Booth believes our collective fear, whether of inflation, artificial intelligence, or geopolitical conflict, is a symptom of being trapped in a rigged game. It’s in the interest of those in power to create a cycle of constant uncertainty and fear.

In a truly competitive market, prices naturally drop until they match the cost to actually make the goods (the minimal cost of production). Anyone who wants to charge more will quickly be undercut until prices settle as low as they can go without producers losing money.

The cost of creating another line of code is zero, Booth remarks, so when AI becomes free, when its cost falls to zero, its abundance flows to all people (if governments can’t manipulate the money).

Under a Bitcoin standard, he argues, technological deflation would finally benefit society rather than a few monopolistic gatekeepers.

The paradox, of course, is that while economic anxiety grows, Booth is radiant with positivity. He laughs:

The choice to act

Booth’s core message is one of agency. He insists individuals have more power than they realize.

In a world where individual freedoms are diminishing by the day, I ask how he feels about the inevitable creep of digital IDs like the one proposed by the UK or Europe’s CBDC. He points to emerging technologies like Nostr, the decentralized social protocol, and Fedi, a privacy-preserving platform that allows anyone to launch their own digital federation.

Ego Death Capital invested in Fedi three and a half years ago, knowing that everyone would fall into a “trap of a centralized system,” and this technology had to exist before that happened.

The ego death

The name of his venture firm, Ego Death Capital, reveals much about his philosophy.

Booth’s own journey toward this understanding was not immediate. And when he realized that all of his work was in the fiat world, even after understanding the virtues of Bitcoin, he felt like a hypocrite.

He encourages others, entrepreneurs, creators, and educators, to do the same:

The abundance ahead

Booth’s thesis that technology-driven deflation should be embraced, not feared, has never felt more relevant, nor hopeful. According to the International Labour Organization, global youth unemployment is nearly 13%, and Goldman Sachs warns that automation could displace 300 million full-time jobs by 2030. Yet Booth sees abundance on the other side of that transformation.

When I ask Booth if he thinks we’ll live to see the world he envisions, if it will really happen in our lifetimes, his answer is instantaneous. He beams: