The distinction between store of value and monetary protocol determines, according to Booth, the very fate of the network over the next ten years.
Jeff Booth, author of The Price of Tomorrow, offers no predictions about the world of 2036. He says so explicitly in an interview published by Bitcoin Magazine in the special issue dedicated to the coming decade. Instead, he puts a question to the reader: how many people realise they already have the tools today to change the system they live in?
Booth‘s starting point is a distinction he considers decisive. Bitcoin can be read as a store of value, as a speculative asset, or as a monetary protocol. Each reading produces different consequences. Those who treat it as a reserve asset leave it trapped inside the monetary system Bitcoin is meant to replace. Those who use it for high-risk operations on other tokens are chasing patterns that, according to Booth, produce near-certain losses over the long run. Only those who understand it as a protocol – a layered system that enables the use of bitcoin as money in everyday circular economies – grasp the function for which it was designed.
«If we continue to have a debt-based system on top of Bitcoin, bitcoin will be held by custodians who will be liquidated again and again as they take risks with their clients’ bitcoin», says Booth. «It will look like Celsius and BlockFi, forever.» The reference is to the lending platforms that collapsed in the previous cycle, Celsius and BlockFi – cases in which the custodial architecture transferred risk from managers to users, with well-known results.
The same logic applies to debates within the community. Booth cites the discussions between Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Knots as an example of a healthy mechanism: open disagreement allows every participant to understand what is at stake and choose where to stand. «If there are enough people paying attention to the problems, Bitcoin stays secure», he states. «If there are enough people building on it and they are all paying attention while they build, it stays decentralised.» The security of the network, in this reading, depends on the quality of attention from its participants more than on any other technical variable.
Booth’s reasoning converges on a point shared by the critique of sovereign debt and the reading of the current monetary system: the problem is never purely technical. It is a question of mental models. Those who bring the logic of the old system into Bitcoin – concentration, leverage, centralised custody – are not building an alternative; they are replicating the same power structures under a different label. «If you are trying to concentrate bitcoin and become a new king», says Booth, «both Bitcoin and the game you are playing will fail in the end.»
