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Bitcoin skeptic Jeff Booth spent 15,000 hours t...

Reported by Pluang
Aug 17, 2026· 3 min read
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Key Takeaways
  • • Jeff Booth, founding partner of Ego Death Capital, spent 15,000 hours conducting simulated attacks on the Bitcoin network to test its resilience before becoming a prominent Bitcoin advocate and allocator.
  • • Ego Death Capital closed a $100M venture fund exclusively investing in Bitcoin protocol companies, with portfolio holdings including Fedi, Breez, and Ark Labs (co-invested with Tether).
  • • Booth argues the market fundamentally mprices Bitcoin as "digital gold" when it should be valued as a protocol comparable to the early internet, representing a contrarian thesis centered on measurement methodology rather than price targets.
  • • Global debt sits at approximately $350 trillion, underpinning roughly $900 trillion in assets, which Booth contends cannot be repaid and creates structural conditions favoring Bitcoin's fixed-supply economics.
  • • Booth's 2020 book *The Price of Tomorrow* predicted technology-driven deflation would collide with a credit system requiring perpetual expansion; he views ongoing AI development as accelerating this dynamic.
Summary
Jeff Booth, founding partner of Ego Death Capital and board member at Core Scientific, has emerged as a prominent Bitcoin advocate after spending an estimated 15,000 hours attempting to identify vulnerabilities in the Bitcoin network. Rather than discovering fatal flaws, this exhaustive technical analysis converted Booth into a committed Bitcoin investor and strategist. His extensive simulation work—modeling potential attacks from governments, competitors, and large mining operations—confirmed the network's technical resilience, a finding that fundamentally shifted his perspective on cryptocurrency's viability as a foundational financial infrastructure.

Booth's investment conviction has materialized through Ego Death Capital, which recently closed a $100M fund dedicated exclusively to companies building on the Bitcoin protocol. The fund's portfolio includes Fedi, Breez, and Ark Labs (co-invested alongside Tether), positioning Booth at the nexus of Bitcoin ecosystem development. This venture strategy reflects his belief that Bitcoin represents an emerging protocol layer comparable to the internet's early infrastructure phase, rather than a speculative asset class or alternative commodity.

Central to Booth's thesis is a macroeconomic argument rooted in debt dynamics. With global debt outstanding at approximately $350 trillion supporting roughly $900 trillion in total assets, he contends the credit system has reached structural limits. This analysis undergirds his conviction that technology-driven deflation—a thesis detailed in his 2020 book *The Price of Tomorrow*—will increasingly collide with monetary systems requiring perpetual credit expansion. Artificial intelligence, in his view, accelerates this dynamic by compressing margins and reducing nominal prices across productive sectors.

Booth's most contrarian positioning concerns not Bitcoin's price trajectory but rather the measurement framework investors apply. He argues allocators systematically underprice Bitcoin because they measure its value against depreciating fiat currencies rather than against the fixed monetary stock. This thesis suggests that conventional price-target analysis misses the fundamental revaluation occurring as market participants recognizes Bitcoin as the world's first true free-market monetary system with absolute scarcity constraints—a structural advantage that traditional commodity and equity frameworks fail to capture.

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Sources

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Pluang Bitcoin skeptic Jeff Booth spent 15,000 hours t...