‘The System Is Rigged to Collapse’ (Uncut) 02-14-2025

‘The System Is Rigged to Collapse’ – Why This Is an Escape Hatch | Jeff Booth

Hey everyone, welcome back to Kitco News, I’m Jeremy Safran. President Donald Trump has signed an executive order establishing a United States Sovereign Wealth Fund. And it’s a move that raises big questions about how the federal government will manage assets and whether Bitcoin could play a role in this new strategy.

And this also comes as the Doomsday Clock, a symbolic measure of how close humanity is to global catastrophe, has just moved one second forward. Now, sitting at 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it’s ever been. So what exactly is a Sovereign Wealth Fund? Can it help with the U.S. debt spiral? And one of the biggest questions to ask is, will the fund hold Bitcoin? Well, here to help us understand how soon we might see a strategic Bitcoin reserve and also what impact it would have is Jeff Booth.

Jeff is a visionary leader. He’s also the author of Price of Tomorrow and a founding partner at Ego Death Capital. Jeff, thanks for being in here.

Always nice to have a guest in person. It gets a little lonely in the studio. OK, you heard it off the top there.

We’re talking a little bit about this new Sovereign Wealth Fund that the U.S. is looking at maybe implementing. Obviously, for the first time, we know that they’re trying to convert, you know, six trillion dollars into something that makes cash, even though I’m not sure if it’ll wipe away their balance sheet. We know this isn’t new.

I mean, Norway has over one point three trillion in their reserves, Saudi Arabia, China. But I’m curious, you know, this new idea, and of course, before we get into the Bitcoin side of it, a bit of a game changer. Tell me about your thoughts here.

I don’t know if a game changer. I think everyone in the world is trying to increase their returns and provide against other things. And the Sovereign Wealth Fund would make a lot of sense to be able to try to place capital and in something that they think they can be returning.

Right. When you think about the assets here, I mean, obviously, we were curious as to why this is happening now. There’s been a lot of news about the Bitcoin strategic reserve.

This does bring us to the next question. I mean, crypto czar David Sachs flouted the idea the other day on CNBC talking about the possibility of this. I want to talk about what a game changer that might be.

I mean, looking at the assets, we go back, we know that Norway has about a half a billion dollars in assets in micro strategy. So indirectly touching Bitcoin. But if they start to touch it and break it away here, what are your thoughts? Yeah.

And this gets more complicated for a lot of people because they’re measuring Bitcoin from a system that’s debasing. So if you measure Bitcoin, if you think Bitcoin is a decentralized, secure protocol bounded by energy and the natural state of the free market is deflation, then the protocol bounded by energy that you couldn’t change would price the free market. So all prices relative to that would fall forever.

And the only caveat to what I just said is if Bitcoin became not decentralized or secure. So as long as it stayed decentralized and secure, prices would fall forever. But that is massive, important considerations because what that means is we’ve never lived in a global free market because we consider inflation normal.

But productivity is deflationary. Free market is deflation because we use things that give us more value. But we’ve never lived in a system that would allow that productivity to flow to us and a credit based system can’t allow that deflation.

So the credit based system has to get concentrated more and more. It has to keep on printing money. And most people are measuring the world by the manipulated money that things are getting worse and worse and worse.

But if you’re measuring Bitcoin, your life is getting better because all productivity is flowing to you in that. In fact, Bitcoin is perhaps the best AI investment because it forces the productivity from AI to you. Let’s talk a little bit about this sovereign wealth fund and the returns because, I mean, even at 10, 11 percent of these $6 trillion in federal assets to make into investable capital, I mean, the returns, it’s not really going to put a dent in 36 and a half trillion dollars in U.S. government debt.

So, I mean, talk to me a little bit about your concerns. We had new CPI numbers come out today. Obviously, they were a little bit higher than expected.

We know the Fed might be going longer for, you know, higher for longer here. There’s even some mumbling about, you know, possible rate cuts jumping up again. But where are we, in your opinion, here in terms of that fight? Sagflation? Yeah.

So, so again, it’s hard to kind of all of the things people are talking about are measuring a system problem from the system. And so all of the assets inside this, so every asset is contingent on that debt being solvent, not just 36 trillion, the personal debt, all of the global debt being solvent. And it’s insolvent and it cannot allow, it cannot allow the free market to work.

Because it has to manipulate money more and more. So all of these things, you can expect inflation to get a lot higher because the only way to to reset that debt is through massive inflation. In other words, debasement of currency.

And you can expect that a whole bunch of people fighting in that and their assets within that are trying to trade assets. If you said 11 percent, the IRR of Bitcoin is 45 percent a year. If you take the top, if you bought at the top of any cycle and held it for four years, your lowest IRR is 23 percent.

What does that mean if you’re making 11 percent? It means you’re losing that money to Bitcoin. So you can, you can, just every single person starting to realize that this is imposing a new discipline on the world, whether they care about it or not, it would make sense that people will move their time to the highest kind of risk-free asset. Because if you hold in self-custody, it’s completely risk-free and has no counterparty risks to the other system.

It’s an energy-backed system. And so they’re moving their time and it would obviously make sense that governments will move their energy to it as well. Right.

1. So if this starts to happen, I mean, is it more of a game theory plan? I mean, do you do you think that there’s already countries front running this that are buying up Bitcoin in their sovereign funds right now, but just not talking about it? Absolutely. Many are mining Bitcoin all over the world to do the same thing, to front run that and not signal that they’re doing that.

But this has happened. You don’t have to be a government to do it, though. You don’t have to wait.

It’s an open network. Any single person can move their time and get a 45 percent IRR with a non-correlated asset that’s risk-free from the existing system. Again, the only caveat I’d say is if it stays decentralized and secure, more decentralized, more secure 16 years after it started today.

And every year it gets more decentralized and secure. How hard is the actual idea to do something like this? I mean, I know that you’re friends with Vancouver mayor, Sam, and you flouted this idea. It’s got a lot of press about possibly having a Bitcoin strategic reserve in the city of Vancouver up in Canada.

I’m curious, you know, looking at implementing it, is it as easy as it sounds or is it a little bit more, you know, you got to have the votes there, too? Yeah, I’d say this is a hard thing to understand because most people measure their world from the system of debasing currency. And so let’s imagine a city, let’s use the city of Vancouver for their citizens. What they don’t know is they’re paying these taxes to the city and the city perks them in the money that’s being losing money.

And by the time they spend their taxes on services, those services cost more to be able to provide and the city can’t provide those services. And then the citizens wonder what’s going on. And what’s going on is you can’t deliver the services because the money is being debased.

And so the citizens are getting poorer and poorer and getting worse, madder and madder at the city. And there is no fix from a system that’s debasing currency. But if you put some in Bitcoin, then that cannot be debased so that you can, in other words, in the future, you can buy more services for your citizens.

And as you start to understand this and you start to understand this is not maybe true and it’ll happen one day. It is happening and it’s been happening for 16 years. And you can see anybody who is in Bitcoin and stays in Bitcoin, they can purchase more.

Their money goes further and that’ll happen forever. It makes sense that more people would see that and move their time to the thing that can’t be debased. Let’s talk a little bit about the volatility concerns that people talk about when they talk about sovereign funds.

You know, we see these price things 10, 20 percent. And now that we have some history to look back in the chart, we know it’s nothing to necessarily worry about it that day. Any legitimacy to those concerns on volatility when it comes to, hey, you know, we’re looking at these stock charts every day.

I mean, sovereign funds aren’t there to trade. So if you’re not there to trade, then you should be in this. If you’re in it to trade, if you’re trying to, then you shouldn’t be in this.

If you’re, if you’re levering into something that’s changing the world, a new structure for the world that can’t be cheated, that is repricing everything and you’re trading that, then you could get wiped out. And that’s just an early, that’s an early evolution of an understanding of this that fear and greed on both sides are trying to trade this asset. But when you really understand it, you’re constantly a buyer.

There’s never a price that’s too high. I buy in the low, I buy in the high, I constantly, because I don’t think about the piece of paper that’s being manipulated, pricing the world. How does the government safely store this, you know, securely? We’re seeing a lot of conversation right now about the lack thereof, you know, with Doge, what they’re starting to see when they start going into some of these government entities.

There’s a lot of spending of cash allegedly being sent. Do you have any mismanagement concerns when it comes to, you know, the government holding a large amount of Bitcoin? Again, it’s a, it’s an open monetary network, decentralized and secure. So you can create the way as much security as you want to be able to do that.

And it’s completely, it’s auditable by nature. Right. So if you simplify the question and you said this, if you lived in a world that was based on theft, right, where people just got to make up money at their whim, press a button, make up money, and you were living in that world, then wouldn’t the best at stealing win? Wouldn’t the, wouldn’t the look of governments and all the cheating that happens inside that, wouldn’t it be natural that it would look like that? Now ask the same thing on a, on a system based on honesty that you couldn’t cheat.

And what would the, what would that look like? So I think why this is so hard to understand is people are measuring the new system that’s being imposed on the world from the old system and they can’t break that, that, but it makes perfect sense to me why the world looks like it does today. Why it’s, it is going to get more chaotic because you wouldn’t, as a person, you wouldn’t allow a deflationary spiral. You would not vote for all prices to collapse and the debt to collapse.

What does that say? When, when we, you also know at the same time the free market is deflation and you use things that give you more value, it means you’re voting for more manipulation. Right. And so that’s a very personal thing.

And, and so we wouldn’t allow that to happen from the system. So you have to have a system outside the system that we can’t control that’s outside of our power, that’s imposing a new discipline. Do you think it’s going to help with the 36 and a half trillion dollars of debt? Like really? Yes.

Yeah. Yes. How substantially? Because it reprices that whole thing too.

So the, the debt’s already insolvent. Now, if the US, if the US wants to, or Vancouver or you, right, if you had a whole bunch of debt and then, and you said, I’m going to own some Bitcoin and Bitcoin is moves, moves up so much in price relative to that. Your debt as a percentage of your assets go way down.

This is the same thing for every single person on the planet that they can make the same choice and so can governments. But through this process, we talked a little bit there, we’ll move on from the sovereign fund, but I got to ask, cause obviously we see what’s happening in El Salvador, you know, you can still use Bitcoin as a currency there, albeit in small amounts, but you know, how much of a game changer is that to look at the entire system and say that there’s been countries front running this already for years and years and years. I mean, how far are they ahead of the US, particularly as we know how many that they’ve taken from, you know, the Silk Road.

Yeah. So, so think about what’s happened in El Salvador. I was there when they just launched this and I went after a bunch of murderers and everything else and what El Salvador looked like and I saw the hope and the dreams and I went back and I saw how far it’s changed in a period of four, four years.

Why would it change? Free markets are more productive. Why are they more productive? Because we have more ideas. It’s our ideas that create that productivity.

So when you have free markets of ideas and more productivity, those become, you don’t have to enforce, you don’t have to collude, you don’t have to, you don’t have to tell people that this is the only way, those people are bad. You don’t have to centralize. So free markets are more productive and that more productive people move to them because they’re, they’re more free.

And, and so El Salvador is early in that, but compared to where they were before, it’s like, it’s like light years and, and you can see a whole bunch of other countries going the other way, right? And so, so each person will have a choice as well, which country is treating them well and what does it, what does that look like? But free markets are more productive and so that means that people who embrace Bitcoin are going to have more free markets and are going to be more productive and their citizens are going to be wealthier as a fact. I got to talk to you about the price action. I mean, it’s been interesting to watch.

We got to that a hundred thousand dollar level, I think what back in November, December, and it took a little bit of a hit. We’ve seen massive inflows. These Bitcoin ETFs that got approved last year were supposed to really captivate the market.

I am, they have to a certain extent. Has the price action surprised you here? Or do you think that if we do see, you know, US buy billions of dollars in Bitcoin, that obviously that’s going to be a big upside because we haven’t seen the inflows do a whole ton yet. Yeah.

So, so liquidity in the world today is the, is the, is the bigger driver. And so, so, and, and we both know that, that as, as liquidity dries up in the world, that you either hit a deflationary spiral out of the existing system, which will require not 2008 type of money, not 2020 type of money, orders of magnitude, more printing of money debasing, which, which will flow into Bitcoin because it can’t be debased. So, so, but the overall liquidity in markets, when they’re really tight, what sells off is the thing you can sell.

You can’t sell your house if it’s fallen way under value. And if you had Bitcoin and you had to sell, you’d sell the thing on the weekend that you could, you could tell it’s impacted as well. But it’s, it’s, I, I tend to look at it as a, as a lag, right? So of a timing with a, with a lag that says, if this continues to happen, the lag is going to be a deflationary spiral out of the existing system.

And, and Bitcoin will also price in when the money’s before, it’ll sniff out when the money’s about to be printed and it’ll start just like it did in 2020. In March of 2020, I think it dropped to $4,000 and then it skyrocketed as the money was, as the liquidity is, it was being printed into. Yeah.

You know, you were talking a little bit before we came to camera about how the market was all about Bitcoin, but we have picks and shovels now. We have companies that touch it. We have micro strategies.

We have other companies that are, you know, front running the sovereign wealth funds, if you think about it, and buying Bitcoin in their own assets. I’m curious where you think this is going to go over the next year. I mean, you know, it seems that Trump has really moved fast on some of these calls already in the first 90 days.

Where do you think this is going to go? Yeah, I think he needs to do this. I think he needs to, to drive, he needs to inflate into something and he needs to, and that would be either gold or Bitcoin, potentially both. And he needs to inflate the dollar into something that can’t be debased to, and he needs to do it before other countries do it because it will turn into game theory.

If you see the layers on top of this, so what our fund does is we’re investing in the picks and shovels. We’re investing in all of the businesses that are being built on top of it. And so what does that look like in a fund? Bitcoin has an IRR of 45%.

I would say that that is a risk-free rate of the world right now. People think the risk-free rate is the long bond, the 10-year bond rate, but that has risk, but it has all that counterparty risk to all of the debt that is already insolvent. This doesn’t have risk because you can hold it in self-custody and be outside of the system, and it has a 45% IRR.

So if you’re investing in companies on top of that, and those companies are turning profitable and they’re adding Bitcoin to the balance sheet each month, you have venture capital returns on top of a venture capital asset that is, and why would that exist, is because the market is consolidating over here and the free market is creating all of this value to be where the market’s going. What do you think about, I mean, we talk to some of these viewers all the time when the FOMO effect started to happen, Bitcoin towards $100,000, people jumped into it, and now they’re sitting there, you know, weird, skeptical, kind of worried. There is an argument there that there’s a lot of people that buy Bitcoin that aren’t normal retail investors that just kind of chip away at it in times that they shouldn’t, right? The highs, and they’re not selling the lows.

Do you think that everyone should just kind of not look at the chart, just this long hold strategy here? So again, people will do that. People trade, people meme coins, they know it’s nonsense. They know it’s gambling.

There’s no under fundamental value, but they’ll still play games. They’ll go to the casinos. I’m just telling you, I don’t.

If I have something that’s decentralized, secure, bounded by energy, then I know for sure it’s repricing the entire world. And so why would I sell that for a piece of paper, right? And so there isn’t a price too high that I would move my piece of paper, or that I’d keep my piece of paper. That is my functional currency as I think about it as my store of value.

And again, fear, greed, the confusion of these two systems, and the confusion of how fast technology is moving, and the misunderstanding, people are going to make all sorts of bad bets on this. I’m just going to tell you how I look at it. And the deeper you are into understanding this, that it can’t be broken, that it’s really hard to break because of the consensus mechanism, then you realize, huh, this is very different.

And there isn’t, you do what Michael Saylor is doing. Right. You just keep buying.

Okay. Well then what about the argument about gold? I mean, we got over 5,000 years of monetary use with that. It’s a hard asset.

Bitcoin’s got 16. Obviously there’s this debate, gold versus Bitcoin. It seems like though, people are starting to understand that the hedges exist.

And it’s just a matter of diversifying outside of the US currency. So, you know, there is talk about Scott Besson really liking gold here. When we talk about the sovereign fund, do you think there’s an opportunity for gold back again? Like, where are we going here? So I don’t want to dismiss gold because gold has been for 5,000 years, something that has held, and I think most people in gold would say that it is a good store of value because of that it stops governments from getting over their skis and printing just in pieces of paper forever.

And I agree with that. But gold has also failed to do that because the money is manipulated and then you print more money to short, essentially the paper derivatives on gold explode to hold the gold price down or because it gets centralized, it gets repriced. So if you look throughout history, you know for sure gold doesn’t stop this.

It stops it for a time, but then it gets co-opted and it gets repriced or you’re not allowed to hold it and you can’t get on a plane with a whole bunch of ounces of gold and so because it gets centralized, it fails over time. I’m not against gold, but if you look at history in any objective way, you realize that it keeps on happening over and over again in gold and Bitcoin became something that is truly decentralized, truly that it doesn’t have the same properties there. It has additional properties that it also turns into a monetary network that you can beam money around the world and you don’t have to ask for permission.

You don’t have to move your gold to be able to do that. You’re moving it digitally. So I just think for me anyways, it’s a better representation, a far better representation of the properties of what gold wanted to be, but we couldn’t, we wouldn’t allow it to.

Right. Do you think that the U.S. could go back to that gold based system as opposed to the more of the digital reserve kind of style? So the question is by doing so, who do they empower? Because if you print it into that, who has lots of gold? Russia, China, right? And how do you audit how much gold they have? How would you build a system on that? So it creates, the same thing creates potentially you’re making your enemies stronger in this, whereas Bitcoin is the first global free market that’s ever existed, right? And so if you’re for freedom instead of control, then how would a company, how would a country with dictators survive freedom? So it seems natural that Bitcoin would be the solution. Now, in the end, it’ll be the solution on the way through all the short-term machinations of trying to negotiate or what, who knows? Well, there’s a revaluement aspect there too, right? I mean, I think you got, you got Judy Shelton talking about it, you know, maybe revaluing our gold reserves in Fort Knox.

Some would argue that there’s some there. I mean, there’s current talks about this whole, is there gold in Fort Knox? Why not an audit? Any thoughts to this? Well, it’s the same premise I said before on gold. It’s really hard to audit and you have to trust somebody else says it’s there.

My node in Bitcoin audits every transaction that ever happens in Bitcoin and I can fully audit it myself. I don’t need somebody else to do it. What are your thoughts on the US dollar as a global reserve currency here? I mean, obviously we’ve seen a lot of BRICS nation countries kind of come together, even talking about, you know, offering their own gold-backed currencies at some point.

So are you thinking that with Trump in power, he’s trying to put a stop to this? We know through his campaign, he said, no, that’ll never stop. And again, we have to go back to first principles. If the natural state of the free market is deflation, then unfortunately that means you’ve never lived in a global free market.

It means you’ve lived in a control system. And I hate saying that, but that means that control system has to centralize faster as technology is supposed to give you more abundance as it’s supposed to as AI is because prices fall to the marginal cost of production as AI moves faster and faster and merges with robots. The output of that, because we use it should be faster abundance, but that can’t flow to you from a system based on credit where the credit would collapse if you allowed the deflation to happen.

So it has to concentrate. And so all of the things trying to concentrate it are against the natural state of the free market. I’m not saying that most people don’t know what I just said.

And it’s such a big deal, right? That they will measure their prices in the piece of paper and give more energy to the system that’s consolidating against them and totally believe that this person’s going to fix it. And this person, it’s not a person problem. It’s a system problem.

And if we want to live in free markets where ideas flow generally and the productivity around the world flows to us from it, then there’s only one choice and it’s Bitcoin. Now that’s going to impose a wholly different set of rules on the establishment and all of the establishment. And I mean, in China, in Russia, in US, because they’re negotiating, they’re trying to negotiate with something that is true, that is decentralized, secure, bounded by energy.

And it’s not negotiating with what we think it is. Right. Do you think that this whole, you know, we’re going from a globalist type of world right now, as you can see by some of the trade tariffs and some of the policies being enacted, are we getting closer to that free market now, or is it even just getting worse? It’s potentially getting worse.

It’s potentially you’ve moved globalists to technocrats because the free market requires prices fall. It’s a requirement. If you can say, if anybody can disprove to me that the natural state of the free market is deflation, if they can say that there’s, then what creates inflation, right? And it’s not, it shouldn’t be measured from zero.

It should be measured from the productivity rate, which would be negative. So, so we know for sure what I just said is true, right? We know in that model, prices follow the marginal cost of production, marginal cost of production of a line of code, creating other lines of code is zero. We know, we know prices follow marginal cost of production or utility value.

We know this is for sure, yet we price everything going up means we are not in a free market. We’re contributing to a more and more centralized market. The free markets are more competitive.

They’re more productive. And so if you’re investing in the free market, if you have your time in the free market, which the only one in the world is Bitcoin, then, then you’re, you’re emerging as the first truly global free market and your returns will be so much better, your life will be better, you know, before, before coming to you and I were talking about this chaos a little bit. And I will bring a point.

I mean, the, the doomsday clock, if you’re not familiar with it, it moved to 89 seconds to midnight, citing nuclear tensions, AI weaponization, climate risks. Um, that’s the most here. I mean, it’s getting a little bit nervous.

I told you that before coming to you and you said, it’s only getting more chaotic. Talk to me about what that chaos means. So, so I wrote my book five years ago, The Price of Tomorrow, describing exactly what would happen as, as a credit based system that we had always lived in and we thought was right.

Our measurement of everything inflated and stole more of the productivity that should flow to us. I said, it would rip us apart. And how do you get elected in that? There has to be an enemy within your country.

And then you get elected by consolidating more power, but the enemy in your country, somebody has to be bad. And then how do you, how do you stay, stay elected? You have to create an enemy outside your borders and you go to, you go to war as you centralize, then you reset the currency through, or you set up all the people that get killed, you set up new institutions and say, we’ll probably, we’ll promise never to do that again. And it starts again.

That is a global history of money. Um, and us within it fighting that. So why would anything be different? Right.

What’s different here is Bitcoin has resolved that paradox by imposing a new system that we can’t, or the worst in us can’t overcome it. It can’t be cheated. So it keeps on, so it’s imposing this discipline.

Well, most people are giving their energy to the system that’s feeding off their energy. So they’re, they’re trying to work harder and harder and harder in a system that’s debasing. And I think there’s some person that can be solving it and it’s easy to fall into a that would, uh, that would, yes, those bad people, let’s go to war with those bad people.

It has to happen. Right. And so that June’s day clock is a representation of the system that most people are feeding their energy to.

If they moved their time to the system that can’t extract their energy, they would be moving their time to the system that is the first global free market. They would make making all of those things. They would be taking the money that’s stolen from them and putting it somewhere.

So where are we in the chaos loop? I mean, if it’s cyclical, are we, are we at risk of it just going too far and hitting wars and that kind of thing? Or do you think that, you know, we can essentially hedge the risk by buying Bitcoin and getting involved in that story? Is that what I’m hearing? Yeah. So, so, so what drives the timing? All right. So, so we know right now in the, in, in that, so people are thinking, when’s the light switch? They’re asking Bitcoin when the light switch is, well, it’s repricing it.

Right. So, so every moment that you move more time, and if you’re spending 2% of your time understanding Bitcoin, um, spend 4%, spend 8%. Every time you spend more time, your life will get better.

You will understand that, that you’re now not being debased and you’ll move more time. So what drives the timing of this? It’s, it’s us. It’s all of us deciding which energy, which system we’re feeding.

Are we feeding the honest system or are we feeding the dishonest system? And we’ll tell ourselves in the dishonest system, we’ll know for sure that the free market is deflationary and we’ll price everything else in the inflationary, trying to make enough money to be able to beat the other guy in the, uh, in, in that system. So it’s not, I’d like to say there is no they, it’s we. Right.

And so when it’s not, it’s when you decide, it’s not, it sounds like it’s designed to keep people in the rat race, you know, that’ll keep sustaining this whole thing. And we stay in this because even if you thought about AI, is there any danger of AI if the prices fall to zero of AI? Probably no danger at all, right? Because we all get the benefit of AI. So why would, why would the big AI companies be driving fear into AI? Because then you can regulate it and you can extract wealth from the fear.

Same thing in finance, in the system, the fear keeps people stuck and they feed off that fear and they spend, they spend more time in that system and they don’t see that there’s an alternate, a path that looks totally different. Right. So no fear that with more wall street being involved in Bitcoin or, you know, the government in DC being involved in Bitcoin, that security or any of those aspects.

Zero fear of that. We’ve seen like zero fear of that. And because, because there are so many people that now know what I know and they are the nodes and they’re keeping this decentralized and secure and they’re, they’re building all of the other tools that ensures that that happens.

Most of the people that think that if you thought you could co-opt Bitcoin by consolidating enough Bitcoin, then you don’t know, you don’t know Bitcoin. Right. Right.

Okay. Um, you know, governments often, often manage unsustainable debts by repression, you know, keeping rates artificially low, like we just saw. And obviously we saw Trump talking about keeping them low again.

Uh, where are we in this whole system there? Yeah, it’s hard to say. So a friend of mine just came out with something that would look, what if they created a Bitcoin bond? And the Bitcoin bond, they could do a low coupon, but buy a Bitcoin with it and then provide a bit better return. That way that would provide a bridge to be able to, to, to have rates low enough that you could build to transition into economy and a bridge to Bitcoin.

So there’s a whole bunch of different ways, uh, ways that the, the U S and I think they’re doing it. Cynthia Lamas is fantastic. Um, then there’s this whole bunch of people, um, that know the same thing that I know that now we’re in different senior roles in government and understand that this, and it’s the, how do we move to, to this world from this world, which is kind of a chaotic.

And so again, the government stake in the lobbyists and what have you, you don’t think that that’s going to threaten any chain splits, nothing like, you know. Um, I can say, I can say this for sure. Um, Bitcoin is an honest network that every single person in history that’s tried to cheat it has been wiped out.

FTX is a really good example. Um, the Celsius is a good example. Um, there will be many, many more examples of the 2017 block size wars was a good example, right? All of these are examples of people trying to accrue more power because they had more control at the time to be able to cheat, cheat this.

And Bitcoin is undefeated and the honest network winning. So all of those people go bankrupt, go to jail and, and, and so, so will people try to cheat this again? Of course they will. Cause that’s what the, the, that’s what people, people do.

Um, but we’ve never had a money that couldn’t be cheated. And so what would that mean? And what you just discussed on a chain split, it could mean a change for the time at some time, but I know I’m going to be on the honest network side. Right.

Right. Uh, okay. I want to talk to you a little bit about what this next year brings.

I mean, you’ve been in this a long time. Uh, we just talked about that book that you wrote. Has anything surprised you this year talking to just folks on the ground? It almost seems as though people are starting to really wake up to currency debasement.

You know, they can’t go to the grocery store, buy the same amount for their dollar, uh, and they’re starting to go to gold, Bitcoin, things like that. Any interesting discussions? Are you hopeful? I am massively hopeful because I’m living in a different world that I’m seeing expanding all over the world. Um, where would it go first? It would go for, so where people see it first is where they’ve had higher debasement, where they have a crushing debasement.

Of course they would see Bitcoin first. And so you have circular economies only spending in Bitcoin, although popping up all over the world. And people don’t realize here because we’re closer to the money, money, money monopoly that is even happening.

So it’s wildly exciting what’s happening and how fast this is moving. There’s 650 million people right now that are paying in lightning, in the payment layer on top of Bitcoin. And most of the existing world wouldn’t even know that that’s happening.

And it’s happening at a crazy speed. But that would lead to a whole bunch of, what I would say is we are still so early. Because most people don’t understand kind of even the structural change that’s happening.

And then most people are still giving most of their energy to the system that’s feeding off of it. You know, you talk about how early we are. Obviously, we don’t have a crystal ball here.

But in the next year, and let’s keep in mind how fast it’s moved since January 20th, signs of executive orders and a lot of different policies coming to fruition. Where do you see this market going this year? Anything that scares you? Talk about the risks and talk about the positives. So again, I want to first principles basis.

If you’re measuring a Bitcoin, then it’s the first global free market, all prices will fall forever. If you’re measuring Bitcoin from a piece of paper, it will appear it’s going faster than everything else. And it’ll be volatile on the way there on both things I just said.

If you’re not in Bitcoin at all, not measuring it from a piece of paper, then you’re going to be debased. All of your assets, everything that is going to be debased and your life is going to get harder and harder and harder. So it’s not Bitcoin, it’s our perception of what’s happening.

And that perception of what’s based on what I just said is each person unique. I am in Bitcoin and what I see is my house keeps falling in value. Energy prices keep falling in value.

Every price keeps falling in value on any longer term. If I said it on a week or a month, it might change. Any longer term value, all prices are falling as they should in a global free market.

If you’re measuring Bitcoin in a piece paper, it’ll appear like it’s going up faster with volatility than your other assets. What do you think that the asset mix is there? I mean, the diversification of some people’s portfolios have changed so rapidly over the years. I mean, if you’re just entering the first time, are you buying a spot Bitcoin ETF? Are you going and buying? Where do you get started? Yeah.

So I prefer people get started to where… When all of this new news and what is happening, kind of trickles out across society and then other people are trying to capitalize on different on-ramps and everything else. If the easiest thing for you to do is buy an ETF, it’s a giant funnel of understanding. But when you really understand it, you’ll want to self-custody it.

You’ll want to not… Because the only way to introduce counterparty risk is to trust somebody else with your Bitcoin. So you have a choice in this asset class to have zero counterparty risk. You can run a node, you can have… And if you learn how to achieve zero counterparty risk, you have the only non-counterparty risk asset in the world.

But you could choose to pay somebody else to hold this for you and pay a fee to introduce risk. So as you understand this more and more, you become self-sovereign, you become free, you move your time. And then you… Now, that process takes some time because we’re not used to that process.

We’re used to trusting institutions that they will protect us when the truth is the institution has been co-opted by the money and it’s not protecting you anymore. How rapid do you think that this movement will go this year, Jeff? I mean, it’s the last question for you before we let you go, because as you mentioned, it’s been going very, very quickly now. But we’ve had that halving happen last year.

We had the ETFs. Now we have a crypto czar in the White House. It’s going to happen.

It’s still so early. You’re talking a very small percentage of population understanding and at different levels of understanding. But it’s going to happen because the other lever on this, technology is not slowing down.

That means that speed up or that exponential rate of technology is driving deflation at a faster rate. That productivity is that wave. People say we can pay back the debt with higher productivity.

It’s an oxymoron. Productivity is faster deflation, meaning you need to offset it with more manipulation of money. So you have two giant waves hitting each other.

A productivity wave, a global productivity wave where we have to use the best tools, more productivity, or our business will fail to somebody who uses better tools. That means a whole bunch of jobs get, but we win because prices fall or those jobs get destroyed and it gets consolidated up into government to be able to print more money. So how fast is this happening? It’s happening in the exponential rate and each person’s understanding of it is where they’re going to play that chaotic or hopeful and it’s going to be both.

Well, I lied. This is the last question because we look at it and obviously the U.S. is front running some of these policy moves, but which country is most ahead here when it comes to the Bitcoin sign? I mean, Pierre Polyev, the opposition leader in Canada suggested this many, many years ago and it got laughed at. Obviously not a very productive country there.

So where are we here? I mean, which country is ahead of the race? So think about what Pierre is talking about. He’s talking about making Canada a free market. And so it would make sense that he would at least investigate Bitcoin and so put his head in the sand and really learn what that will look like.

I don’t know where he’ll be on the topic, but he wants freedom for Canadians and freedom for instead of a control structure that essentially tells you how you should live your life. So that would make sense that he would start to understand Bitcoin and what that would look like. And yes, he got ridiculed.

Why would he get ridiculed? Because it’s so early in people’s understanding. But what was the price when he got ridiculed? It was about 30,000 per Bitcoin and now it’s 140,000 per Bitcoin. So what if instead of being ridiculed that he was able to put some strategic reserves in Bitcoin, then every Canadian would be richer today instead of what Trudeau has done and what the Liberal government has done, which has made every Canadian poorer.

Yes. Well said. So America, obviously well ahead and positioned here.

Any Middle East countries? There are. There are. All right.

We’ll drag you more into those questions after Jeff Booth joining us in Vancouver. Thanks, my friend. Thank you.

Appreciate your time. I’m Jeremy Safran. For all of us here at Kitco News, we want to thank you for watching.

Be sure to hit the subscribe button. We’re going to have some great content coming up all week long. We’ll see you next time.