Jeff Booth: Finding Signal in a Noisy World | Bitcoin 2026

My hope today in a world that's seemingly increasingly noisy is to give you the signal in that noise. And actually more importantly than that, my hope is to show you you are the signal. There's a pro problem in quantum physics that has haunted scientists for over a hundred years. And that problem is the act of observation changes the outcome of the experiment. And it's easy to think about and talk about the uh that only applying to subatomic particles. But what if it applies to us too? Which brings me to a quote I often think about. We don't see things as they are. We see things as we are. So I don't want to start with Bitcoin today. Um I want [clears throat] to start with us because if the lens that we use to to measure the world changes what the world becomes then the most important question today isn't what is Bitcoin the most important question is who is looking and so let's try something I want each of you in the audience just imagine this light as you sitting there just in this moment Now, I want you to think about all of the people that who shaped you. Your parents, your friends, the books you've read, the podcasts you've watched, the teacher who changed something in you, the people close to you that you've lost. Each one of those people is a part of you that you carry on them in you. Their words live in your thinking. Their choices shaped you. Now I want you to go back further. Your four grandparents, their hopes, their dreams, their tragedies, their failures. I want you to think of every person who impacted them. The friend who convinced your grandfather to move to a new city where you live today. How their experiences shaped them. In further back, your eight great great-grandparents, the random stranger whose act of kindness changed your grandmother's life. That one person, this one person, you in the center there, and the interconnectedness of all of everyone who's ever touched you. Now look around. Look to your right. Look at the person beside you. Their world view is different than yours. Um but the result of the same thing crafted from the stories they tell themselves, people who impacted them. Um and we are the combination of trillions of decisions across millions of people across generations bringing us right here right now in the only moment that matters because in this moment we can change. And so for me, one of the things I'm filled with, I'm filled in with awe and gratitude knowing that all these people in my life that I can't even thank shaped me to where I'm sitting here and able to potentially their positive impact on on me could bring positive impact to you. And why is that context so critical before we get started? Because the future is bent into reality by us. We shape tomorrow, but but we're trapped in yesterday's thinking, our mental models of how how things looked yesterday. And so very often we don't live in the moment. We're defending our past. We're defending our past because our past is our identity. And and changing our identity means something was wrong. And so we hang on and we we we don't measure our time in that moment with the those people that the the only thing the past doesn't exist anymore. The only thing you can change is right now in this moment which then cascades into the future. Um and really why I wanted to go here first is when you see something like this which I've talked about for years and years and years which is true. Both of these statements are true. The natural state of the free market is deflation. We compete with each other to provide more value to each other in a free market. And prices because we only use the things that give us more value. If the market was free, prices have to fall. We're we're both the producer we of the comp competitor. You have to deliver more value to society to get paid. whether you're working at a company who's delivering more value or not and then somebody has to choose it if the market was free and what you'd expect if technology was driving in an acceleration an exponential tur curve of uh technology where AI was driving faster and faster and faster you would expect that productivity to drive everything lower and lower and lower in price where the technology actually saved us so we could free our time and spend with with our families so we could do more. So each act of us working for each other helps the world and it keeps moving. But in a credit based system where credit is money and credit is lent into existence, it sets up a different scenario, different winners and different losers because the credit can't allow what I just what I just described. The credit has to grow forever. So, we listen to people tell us what how the rules of the world look like from a credit based system that can't allow the free market that can't allow deflation. And then we call it capitalism or socialism and and it's all nonsense. [snorts] It's all nonsense because these two statements are true but they're contradictory. So for the that's such a big break in our brain and in your brain you'll want to say but we can kind of live in this one or kind of live in this one. It's kind of a free market. You know you try to make them go together and they cannot go together. They're two totally different systems with different winners and losers. Um, and now just for moment, what if the world was backed by 21 million units that couldn't change, that wouldn't change, that was resistant to change, but everybody was measuring that from an infinite number of units that would keep growing forever. If those infinite number of units were were going forever, it would feel like everything was getting scarce and confusing, really confusing, versus what should be just really natural. We compete to provide each other value. We use the things that provide more value and prices fall as a result. And so what Bitcoin is doing is it's imposing the first free market that's ever existed. And and as I I specifically said imposing. It doesn't care what you think of it. It doesn't care how you want to measure it. It's imposing it. And and but but because we've never lived in that system, we don't have a mental model for what that looks like. So we've always lived in a zero- sum game where if you had a bigger army, you can invade and steal somebody else's gold or raw materials and you could put them under slavery for you. and inside the country that had the biggest army, you looked, you could win at their their loss, but it was always a zero- sum game. And then we replaced that system with a monetary theft that did the same thing. So, but we didn't have to invade them. We just did it with the currency. But the free market is an infinite game, completely infinite, because you have to choose and somebody has to deliver you more value and everybody wins. If you look at your calculator app on your phone today, um where is that in GDP? Do you gain value from it? Should it go up in price because people are making you want to tax the calculator app to make more money to pay for art arbitrarily rising prices? The point is the technology is allows us to do more with less forever. So this brings us up to a number of different observers observing what's happening in real time and observer one in credit money. This observer is the vast part of the population and this observer believes that money is systems foundationally sound that money works experts manage it and inflation is normal. They questioned what rate of inflation rather than is inflation normal. And this would be an easy lie to believe. Everything they've ever known, every history book, e economists about this over and over, all the experts, they operate within a system that's in direct opposition to the free market and and fight within that system about which side is right. And the expansion of money that has to keep happening from the credit based system because it can't stop otherwise it would all fail. The expansion of money leads to asset inflation, inequality, cost pressures. This leads to debt dependence and increasing fragility in the system. But because each person looks from that system to their hero to solve the system, the problem that the system can't resolve, they divide. They naturally divide. This person, this person's going to save me, this person's going to save me. And and that credit money keeps on expanding leading to more and more division of uh society, leading to larger interventions, leading to misallocations of capital, leading to fraud, leading to greater instability. Sound familiar? There's another observer, crypto blockchain technology. And this observer sees Bitcoin as a software version one waiting to be disrupted by something faster, better, more features. And it's true, Bitcoin at layer 1 only does uh five to seven transactions per second. It can't do smart contracts. It's not private. It's old tech. And and so it matches an observation that this observer has that fits with Facebook replaces MySpace, the iPhone replaces Blackberry. For those thinking in technology signals cycles and watching the past, those people that got rich in Bitcoin just by holding it, it makes perfect sense to them. Seeing an opportunity to for fast money, scams proliferate. Hundreds of thousands of coins get get made. Each new blockchain or or token goes through the same bump a pump and dump scheme and by investors in a new thing trying to get out of the old system. And as that happens, people the observers from one from group one look at those people and they say those people are insane. We were right all the time with our credit money. Um and because they've they've conflated Bitcoin with blockchain, crypto, everything else. It looks like one to those other observers. Observer 3 is a little further down the path and this observer sees Bitcoin as digital gold, the best asset in the world. They've done their work to understand Bitcoin, its decentralization, its security, the properties that make it the best store of value. But they're missing a higher level question. Why do we have a store of value in the first place? Why do you need it? Maybe because you've never been able to store money in money and and the so we store it in something else because money's always been broken and the thing holds that value and then the thing centralizes because we use a different money that centralizes the assets like gold. And then once the gold is centralized, the rules change and it and and that's why we've never been in the system system before. So if you kept on extending credit and money on a new asset, you would just have different rulers. Same system, different rulers, nothing changed. Not the free market. And all of these observers share one thing in common. Not bad people. This is true for them. It's real for them. Um, but all of their actions reinforce a zero- sum game, a system of extraction, because they're measuring Bitcoin from infinitely growing pieces of paper. I'm going to get rich at the expense of somebody else. And then there's observer four, and I'm firmly in this camp. >> [clears throat] >> This observer sees Bitcoin as decentralized secure infrastructure, neutral, open, permissionless. And this observer knows that protocols don't come around very often. They're rare. They know that most people measure the internet starting in 1989, but the internet didn't start in 1989. It started in 1969. And it emerged in layers. And the same thing happening in the internet is happening in Bitcoin. and and and that would be really confusing because today this we're talk most people are talking about the first layer of of Bitcoin and and and all of these things that bound Bitcoin to physical reality chasing lower cost energy all around the world. an entire free market for energy sprouting out all around the world to be able to to take advantage of the lowest cost energy, find new abundant energy all over the world. And then all of the different pieces here, the cryptography, the consensus rules, the difficulty adjustment, the nodes that you can actively take a part in and you can run a node and and make sure that it follows your rules, the things that you said. You can audit everything every 10 minutes and you can take action. You are we are a part of this. But if you knew it was this and how protocols developed, you also know that most people today thinking about the internet and the internet powering and and the same protocol stack uh powering your phone and everything else that you use today. There would be a massive misunderstanding on how that came into effect. And most people don't care about all of the grainy details on how the protocol stack gets built. And so what would happen in this? There would be a because it's a global neutral protocol, there'd be entrepreneurs from all over the world, talented, be incredibly talented trying to build the next layer on top of it without another coin just integrated right on top of it. And at first five years ago in if you ask on lightning probably half the transactions failed. I personally know some of the most brilliant developers who've been solving this problem. We've invested in some of these brilliant developers solving this problem and watching them extend the this protocol through every fight through trying all their ideas where today lightning does it's it it works all the time. We have portfolio companies in our fund that are do doing billions of of billions of transaction or billions of dollars in transactions per quarter growing like crazy in something that people don't believe is being used as a currency. and I'm watching um they would know that if everybody was giving their time to a system based on money that was being destroyed, then those people caught in that system would would feed a system of surveillance. And so people over here that knew this was a protocol stack, the entrepreneurs would be building privacy tech would be building and and that is built on top of this and it's interacted. Services and applications would explode and a bunch of this is already already there whether you use it or not. It's exploding and it's already there just like you just like what happened on the internet. You didn't know about the internet even in 1989. Most people missed what the internet was, but but a protocol grows like this. So, it leaves me with a a a question. Um, these four observers and and we're back full circle to where we started. Every one of those observers that we talked about, the person trapped on the treadmill, the one chasing features, the one handing their keys to their keys to Wall Street, every one of them believes in their reality and is creating their reality. And they're bumping into each other in a chaotic world. And there's a whole bunch of those people, right? Way more than would think it's the protocol. And so I'm left with this question. If they all believe they're right, how could I know I am? And I can't for sure. The truth is I can't for sure. But the world I live in now and watching what I would expect to happen. Our models of reality should have predictive uh predictive strength. Otherwise, our model is probably wrong. So if you're confused about what's going on in the world, when you walk up the stairs, your model in your brain, you don't keep tripping. you fix that model in your brain and the same thing. So you should it should have predictive power. So what would I expect if this protocol was coming into existence? I would expect to be pricing the free market. I would expect all prices to fall against Bitcoin. Exactly what I see. I would expect all of the layers to be building on top. Exactly what I see. I would expect anybody operating in the other systems to be more and more chaotic because they were measuring from a piece of paper and and so I understand how hard this was is because I was once observer one and I didn't know that's also gives me a whole bunch of hope because the world doesn't just happen to us. We have agency. It emerges from our actions, what we do. And so, um, I'm I'm in this new system giving all of my energy to this new system. And I'm watching as people move from this other system to the new system. Every person taking self-custody, every node, every person running a node, every developer building on this layer, every educator who helps one more person see it clearly, every person in Bitcoin circular economy is paying for this in Bitcoin. We're not just passengers. We are part of an emergent reality that transitions the world from fear, scarcity, control to a world of truth, hope, and abundance. Couldn't be more thankful to be on this journey with you. Thank you. [music] Every year, this community comes together to celebrate, to debate, [music] to build what comes next. [music] And every year the stage gets bigger. [music] Sound money center stage. So where do you go to celebrate the next chapter in Bitcoin history? You come home. [music] Nashville, July 2027.