Jeff Booth Argues Bitcoin's Value Lies in Protocol, Not Price

Jeff Booth, author of «The Price of Tomorrow», has said that Bitcoin's transformative potential is already accessible to anyone willing to engage with it today — not in 2036 or any other future date. Speaking in the context of a feature exploring what the world might look like a decade from now, Booth declined to forecast a specific Bitcoin-dominated future, instead redirecting the conversation toward individual agency and present-day adoption.

«It can exist for them right this second,» Booth said, referring to the moment people can begin benefiting from a Bitcoin-based system. «The question is 'Do people move their time and energy to this new system?'»

Booth outlined a spectrum of Bitcoin understanding that he believes defines how much value any individual will extract from the network. At one end are those who treat bitcoin as a vehicle for speculative trading, chasing rapid gains through risky bets across crypto assets. Booth noted that very few participants in this category succeed over longer time horizons, and the vast majority incur losses.

One step further along the spectrum are those who hold bitcoin primarily as a store of value. Booth cautioned that this perspective, while more grounded, keeps the asset trapped within the existing monetary and financial systems rather than replacing them. He warned that if bitcoin remains only a store of value, ownership will progressively centralize, creating what he described as a «Bitcoin elite» — a new class of financial rulers rather than a broadly distributed benefit for all people.

Booth also cited the risk this scenario poses to custodial infrastructure. «If we continue to have a debt-based system on top of bitcoin, bitcoin will continue to be held by custodians who will get liquidated time and time again as they take risks with their customers' bitcoin,» he said. «It'll look like Celsius and BlockFi over and over and over again.»

At the far end of Booth's spectrum are those who understand Bitcoin as a protocol — a layered system that enables increasingly accessible, private, and functional use as money. Booth argued that only this framing produces meaningful systemic change, both for the individual and for society at large.

«It's only if you view Bitcoin through the protocol lens that the world will change for you,» Booth said. He added that every other perspective on the spectrum places responsibility externally — on governments, on other actors, on future conditions — while the protocol view places agency squarely with the individual. «Every single other one of those perspectives relies on 'It's somebody else, not me.' But the last one says 'I create the future from my intention.'»

Booth also addressed the ongoing distractions that he believes prevent many people from arriving at the protocol-level understanding. He pointed to recurring fear narratives — including concerns about quantum computing breaking Bitcoin and claims about Jeffrey Epstein's alleged attempts to infiltrate Bitcoin Core — as examples of how individuals surrender their agency to external noise. He noted that much of the recent Core vs. Knots debate was similarly fueled by fear rather than substantive technical reasoning.

«We are the change,» Booth said. «We always have been.»

The central question Booth posed for the decade ahead was not about price targets or institutional adoption timelines, but about human awareness: «How many people realize that they have the agency to change the world?» His position is that the answer to that question — more than any macroeconomic shift or regulatory development — will determine what Bitcoin and the broader financial landscape actually look like by 2036.