REPRICING THE WORLD IN BITCOIN w/ Jeff Booth

**Jeff Booth** (0:01)
I want to qualify why it's inevitable. It's inevitable because we are Bitcoin. It's inscribing the best in us for the best for us. And as you get deeper and deeper into this, you're never going back.

**Danny Knowles** (0:16)
Hello there, and welcome to the What Bitcoin Did podcast. I'm your host, Danny Knowles, and today we have the absolute legend Jeff Booth on the show. Jeff is one of our favorite people in Bitcoin. I always love talking to him. And in this episode, we got into the inevitability of Bitcoin, the importance of decentralization, nation-state adoption and whether that poses any threat to the core principles of Bitcoin, and how he sees Bitcoin scaling. So I really hope you enjoy this one. And again, the only thing I'm going to ask you to do is please subscribe to the new podcast feed. If you haven't already, you can do that wherever you get the podcast. And if you can subscribe over YouTube as well, that really helps. Thanks as ever for listening. And if you do have any feedback, you can always get me on Danny at whatbitcoindid.com. Jeff, how are you doing?

**Jeff Booth** (0:55)
I am great. Great to see you and congrats on you taking over what Bitcoin did.

**Danny Knowles** (1:00)
Thank you very much. So you're straight off a 17-hour flight directly into this interview.

**Jeff Booth** (1:06)
It's what you do. It's what you do for Bitcoin.

**Danny Knowles** (1:09)
I appreciate it. So how was Abu Dhabi?

**Jeff Booth** (1:12)
It was good. It was good. I would say generally in a lot of places we go around the world, it feels earlier in Bitcoin and broader in crypto.
But some above that noise, some really interesting meetings at the government level, at the country level, and so of things that are accelerating.

**Danny Knowles** (1:39)
Were you involved in any of those conversations?

**Jeff Booth** (1:42)
Yes, I was.

**Danny Knowles** (1:43)
Can you talk about any of them?

**Jeff Booth** (1:45)
No, not yet.

**Danny Knowles** (1:47)
Okay. Interesting. For a future show. Can we talk a little bit about Eric Trump's speech? Did you watch that?

**Jeff Booth** (1:55)
Yeah, I did.

**Danny Knowles** (1:56)
What did you think of it? Because I mean, I thought it was very impressive. It was again, a little bit sort of crypto blockchain-y, but in general, I thought it was a very impressive speech.

**Jeff Booth** (2:05)
I thought it was really impressive. I was actually surprised that it was that impressive. I thought he did an exceptional job.

**Danny Knowles** (2:13)
So the thing that I kind of took away from that was, he almost acknowledged Bitcoin, or I think he kind of did acknowledge Bitcoin as a real threat to the system that the Trumps have done so well from. I'd be really interested in your take on that.

**Jeff Booth** (2:30)
Yeah, so I don't know how you want to go through this show, because in my speech there too, I talked about Bitcoin as a protocol and kind of what's likely to come next. Obviously, in something that's the quickest speech, you can't investigate or interrogate this at that level. But what I find generally is people misunderstand the protocol, they think it's the technology. And then because of that, they misunderstand the entire crypto space and they think that there's value there, because they don't understand protocols. And due to that, too, they think, I think there's certain people that think they can co-opt Bitcoin.
And you saw an interview on Tucker recently where a whole bunch of people are talking about this, and it's because they don't understand the protocol, and neither does Roger Ver. So I don't know where you want to start here, but that would seem to me a decent spot to start.

**Danny Knowles** (3:40)
Yeah, let me frame that a little bit because the thing, I've had a question that I've asked a few people from both like the older What Bitcoin Did interviews, and then going into, I spoke to Rob Hamilton very briefly about it. One of the, and again, I just want to frame this in the sense that I may be mid-curving this because not everyone agrees, but I would be slightly concerned about what's happening in Bitcoin right now and whether that is being slightly co-opted. In the sense that Bitcoin was always this freedom money tool that has been outside of the system. And now with like ETFs and the incoming Trump administration, I feel like we're moving into a period where we're kind of like integrating with the current system. And I don't know exactly what that means for Bitcoin. Do you think there's a threat that we give up some of the sort of principles of Bitcoin by opening the doors to these people, even if it's inevitable?