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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.
“When we compete to provide value to other people, we’re forced to keep providing more for less. And if you use technology, you’d expect the prices to fall really fast. That can’t happen through a debt-based system; they’re opposite systems. A debt-based system must expand forever.”
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:
“When you go to a bank, the bank doesn’t have the money; it’s lent into existence, and then you pay an interest rate on that debt. So it sets up a system whereby the money has to grow forever. It has to be manipulated forever… If deflation happens from a debt-based system and prices fall, then the debt resets and everything built on that debt collapses.”
We’ve never lived in a true free market, Booth argues, only in various forms of controlled economies dressed in different ideologies.
“Communism, capitalism, socialism, they’re all control constructs… We’ve never actually seen a free market.”
Bitcoin fixes this
For Booth, Bitcoin represents the first true global free market, one that can’t be manipulated. He reasons:
“If you had an open, permissionless, decentralized, secure protocol bounded by energy that couldn’t be changed by governments, then it would perfectly describe the first free market that has ever existed.”
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.
“If my house five years ago was 300 Bitcoin and today it’s 12 Bitcoin, prices are falling forever in Bitcoin terms. It’s not that my house went up in value; it’s that the currency it’s priced in went down.”
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.
“Learn Bitcoin and really understand it. Then buy it, spend in it, and move your time to it. You’ll see a reflection of the world you want to see, rather than contributing to the world you’re scared of.”
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.
“The only reason monopolies can exist is through a control system. And monopolies favor regulation. Who wins from having people scared of AI? It’s the big AI companies, because now prices can’t be allowed to fall to their minimal cost of production.”
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.
“AI, robotics, Bitcoin, they are a perfect symbiosis. They accelerate each other. In that world, you get richer and richer, even if you do nothing.”
The paradox, of course, is that while economic anxiety grows, Booth is radiant with positivity. He laughs:
“I’m crazy optimistic. I’m living in the optimism of builders who are doing this every day, and when you’re in that every day and you’re seeing it expand at the rate it’s expanding, it’s hard not to be extraordinarily optimistic.”
The choice to act
Booth’s core message is one of agency. He insists individuals have more power than they realize.
“You personally have agency. Run a node. Spend in it [Bitcoin]. You don’t have to wait for anyone or ask for permission. You can just go.”
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.
“That’s why I’m not on Twitter anymore. I’m on Nostr. It can’t be blocked. My voice cannot be turned off on Nostr… And Fedi can’t be blocked. It’s being used in many authoritarian countries because it’s a life-saving technology. And it’s already available.”
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.
“It just seemed to fit what I think Bitcoin is going to do to everybody in time… There’s one rule in Bitcoin: don’t try to cheat it, because you’ll cheat yourself.”
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.
“I realized 90% of my time was in the system I was making worse. Ego Death Capital was created to solve that paradox for me, so I could move my time into the system I said I wanted.”
He encourages others, entrepreneurs, creators, and educators, to do the same:
“Everybody’s trapped in pain and fear, scrolling on Twitter. But every problem in that system is an opportunity to solve pain for people in the new one. You can create extraordinary wealth by providing value. That’s the free market.”
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.
“The same AI that people think might destroy us will actually make life unimaginably abundant. If prices fall faster than wages, everyone gets richer. But that can only happen in a system you can’t manipulate; a free market.”
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:
“I already see it. It’s the world I live in. It’s like that William Gibson quote: “The future is already here. It’s just not widely distributed.” You can live in this world tomorrow. It’s just a choice. The more you do it, the more it will reflect back at you.”
