Straight, No Chaser
Understanding Freedom through Money, Technology, Economics and Philosophy
Straight, No Chaser
Jeff Booth - Freedom Through Technology Creates a World of Abundance
Jeff Booth shares his revolutionary thesis on the deflationary force of technology and how Bitcoin enables the first global free market that can potentially transform our economic paradigm. He explains why the natural state of a free market is deflation as entrepreneurs compete to provide more value, leading to falling prices, while our current inflationary monetary system works against this natural abundance.
• The natural state of the free market is deflation - prices should fall as we get better at making things
• Current credit-based monetary systems require inflation to survive, working against natural technology-driven deflation
• Bitcoin creates the first truly global free market - open, permissionless, decentralized, secure, and bounded by energy
• Measuring value in Bitcoin reveals the true deflationary nature of technology and honest markets
• Fedi provides complete privacy for communications and money transfers on top of Bitcoin
• EgoDeath Capital is funding projects that empower people and communities through Bitcoin technology
• Communities in developing nations can create circular economies using Bitcoin that are immune from currency manipulation
• Individuals can take agency by gradually shifting more time and energy to the Bitcoin ecosystem
• The transition to a Bitcoin standard would redistribute wealth and power fairly to all participants
To learn more about Jeff Booth's work, follow him on Nostr or visit jeffbooth.ca to find his authentic social media profiles.
Links:
www.bitcoinforbusiness.io
X: @gavingre
X: @BTC_4_Biz
Primal: GavinBGreen@primal.net
NOSTR: npub12qv07tpwk8x8fy2uuqczghpappap395npuxvsx8pgksh97pezv7s8r7qta
Hello everybody and welcome back to the Straight no Chaser podcast, where we talk about human freedom through technology, money, economics and philosophy. Today's guest is Jeff Booth. Jeff was the first person to introduce me to the idea of the deflationary force of technology on prices. It was a very radical idea at the time, but when you think about it, as we get better and better at making things, the price of those things should be coming down. Unfortunately, the world we live in today, prices of pretty much everything seems to go up, whether it's a good quality product or a bad quality product. Jeff is also one of those rare individuals that not only talks about how the world could be a better place, but he is actively involved in making it so.
Speaker 1:Egodev Capital, jeff's company, is funding projects and individuals and technologies that will impact people from first world and third world countries and make their lives better in a very meaningful way. So this is a fascinating conversation and I really know you'll enjoy it. Excellent, jeff Booth. Good morning your time, good afternoon my time. Welcome to the show. It's such a pleasure to have you with us. This is amazing. Thank you for your time.
Speaker 2:No problem, gavin, it's great to be here.
Speaker 1:Jeff, you're probably most well known for your thesis on the deflationary force of technology. Now, for someone who's maybe heard that for the very first time, could you just talk a little bit about that? What does that actually mean?
Speaker 2:Sure, and it means everything. It touches absolutely every facet of your life. Yet it's hard to realize, and I mean every facet of your life, and I'll explain from the top down. So the natural state of the free market is deflation, and it has to be, because every person in the chooses to get more value with everything they choose, and entrepreneurs have to compete against people choosing more value to create more value than what was there before. So there's an industry there before and people use it, and then somebody creates something new to provide more value, and then people use the new value. And if the entrepreneur doesn't create more value not in their eyes, in the customer's eyes and the customer uses it, the customer, the entrepreneur, goes broke.
Speaker 2:So how could it be, how could that not be deflation, if we are part of the concept that drives deflation? So so that's the natural state of the free market and globally, what that means is is the more people who trade in the free market, the faster prices fall forever. And if you were living in that free market, prices fall to zero or nearly zero, because prices also fall to the marginal cost of production, and so the marginal cost of production, why the calculator app or many of the things you use on the internet are free today is because the marginal cost of production of a line of code is zero and the marginal cost of lines of code created by other lines of code.
Speaker 2:Ai is zero. And so, and why? Why do those? Why does that happen? Why do prices fall to the marginal cost of production? Because entrepreneurs, if they can make a penny, if they can make two pennies, they'll race in and then somebody will see that margin and try to provide more value until it goes to zero. So prices fall in a free market to the marginal cost of production or the utility value. Let's say, in a house it's utility value. Now people have a mistaken view of housing and everything else, because it's not acting as a utility anymore. It's acting as a store of housing and everything else, because it's not acting as a utility anymore. It's acting as a store of value against money being debased. So now let's talk about the other side of that and why it has such staggering implications for everyone's way of life today. The other side of that you have to ask then, where does inflation come from? The other side of that you have to ask then where does inflation come from?
Speaker 2:If the natural course of us trading with each other without interference is deflation and abundance, then what's stopping it? And what's stopping it is governments and manipulation of money. We live in a credit-based system and that credit-based system is money is loaned into existence and so when you take a mortgage or when you borrow money, that money didn't exist before it's loaned into existence with an interest rate that is essentially a usury interest rate, because who made it that you pay interest on forever? And that credit-based system can't allow deflation, because if it allows deflation, that credit-based system explodes, the whole thing collapses. But what would the consequences be if we all lived in a credit-based system that had to expand credit forever or, and said another way, had to manipulate money forever to steal what is rightfully yours in a free market? From that view, what would your world look like? It would look like it would rise up and the biggest people, the best people at stealing, whether they knew it or not, would be the leaders. They would control the financial aspect of everybody's lives through pressing buttons, stealing what's rightfully theirs. And most people would be so fearful of this system, as I said, of letting that collapse and listening to the media and inside that nonsense, because it was making them poorer and poorer and poorer, Because in that system it's a zero-sum game. Somebody has to lose for you to win. So everybody feeding that system inside that system. It's a zero-sum game. Somebody has to lose for you to win. So everybody feeding that system inside that system would be trying to win a zero-sum game where most of the world lost, and so that's why it touches everything.
Speaker 2:That thesis touches absolutely everything and every part of your way of life, because the natural state is something very different than we're led to believe. It means that economics is so simple to understand like radically simple. A five-year-old could understand it. We trade with people all over the world to gain more value and prices fall as a result. Period. That's all of economics.
Speaker 2:So all of what you've heard about economics is nonsense thinking, trying to make you believe. You're not smart enough to understand what that is. You can't ask a question. You need a PhD in mathematics to be able to understand a Rube Goldberg machine that the requirement of that Rube Goldberg machine is printing money to steal your energy and time. Every single person I just want to add every single person in that system. A system change can't change from the system. A system change can't change from the system. So all of your actions within the system that's stealing your time, make it stronger. You yelling at somebody else within it. You thinking that there's a solve within it, you complaining, watching all the media trying to keep you locked in, or that fear within it. All of those things within that system keep you in it.
Speaker 1:Jeff, you're right. We seem to live in an inflationary world. In fact, there's always talk about what the current CPI index is, and inflation is either going up quickly or going up not so quickly. And for some reason, when the inflation is going up not so quickly, people think that's a good thing, forgetting that this is just the not so quickly is layered on top of the quickly. That may have happened the year or two before that, so you just have this ever increasing inflation. So we've been born into this world of inflationary pricing. My parents were, my grandparents were, so we've got generations of this thinking. What is the biggest hurdle you come across? When you say to people deflation, where do they get stuck?
Speaker 2:So they've been led to believe that that's a bad thing. They've been led to believe that we couldn't operate with deflation, and that's like saying you couldn't operate with being able to trade freely with other people. That's like saying we require theft and money to be able to create a fairer society. But they haven't asked the question. It's the most simple concept. Now it is true that an inflationary currency, a credit-based system, can't allow deflation, because if the money is loaned into existence, if it didn't exist before it was loaned into existence and you allowed deflation, all the money is gone. Or, a different way, if you paid back all the money, if all the debt was repaid, there'd be no money.
Speaker 2:How does that grab you? Now? Remember even what you just asked, which is why this is so hard to believe or so hard to understand because we don't have the mental model, because we've never lived in that model. All our history books are a different model, all of the people that have told us before. And we go to war all over the world to reset currencies, to say we won't do it again, and then we start the exact same model again. And who writes the history books? The winners. So we don't have a model that describes what a world would look like with what I what I'm talking about, with what bitcoin is imposing imposing it is imposing a discipline we'll get to bitcoin in a second but it is imposing the first global free market that ever existed. And when you talk about inflation inflation from one% or 2% or 50%- and then 2% and 3% again.
Speaker 2:You're forgetting the massive part of the inflation already stolen, because you're measuring from zero, if deflation is the natural state of the free market and that should be accelerating, and so people forget that theft is way worse, way worse, because what I'm describing is if they didn't work, if they didn't work at all they would get richer every year.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%, I mean. I've heard it described that deflation is bad for producers and manufacturers but good for savers. Inflation seems to be the other way around.
Speaker 2:Sorry, I've got to drop it, yeah, but instead of kind of regurgitating some of that. Part of that's true. But deflation is good for everybody because it's just honest. It's the honest working. The only thing we've ever found in the world that we will trade with somebody that we don't like is the free market. So we will put ourselves aside, because what free market is is you have to compete to provide somebody else's value to make money, and everybody wins, even the people that don't make that trade. Everyone wins because that competition forces a fair value and more ideas and more ideas compete for more value. The entire world wins. And so if you had the most money in the world and you were the top of the control system, would you let that system work? What would you try to say about Bitcoin? That was imposing the first global free market? What would the media say? What would the leaders say about a system that was redistributing wealth and power to everyone? They had agency themselves? It would try to make you fearful of the new system that was imposing that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean we see the news. Sorry, carry on.
Speaker 2:No, no, just because it usurps the power that's gained unjustly and it redistributes it to all people 100%.
Speaker 1:Apart from the money system that is inflationary, we seem to also be distracted by political games and people in the media and that whole news cycle as well, which is keeping us focused on one thing and we have this money system on the other hand, but in terms of Bitcoin itself? You've mentioned Bitcoin a few times how does Bitcoin come in and change that without us having to deal with get a politician to resign and get the right politician in?
Speaker 2:So really important, really important question, because most people think they can sit, they can change the system from within the system. But how could you? If the system can't collapse and all of the money and time that you're spending electing the politician is coming from the, from the system that's stealing more of your money, and that new politician can't let the system collapse because he can't allow deflation from a credit-based system, how could that resolve anything? So what you see is an illusion, a grand illusion, where you think there's a choice this person's bad or this person's not as bad as the other person. And whether they're good or bad people is a structural problem that cannot be solved from within the system. Why? Because if somebody allowed deflation from the credit-based system and your housing started falling and falling, and then the banks started failing because that your housing was falling, and then then you couldn't buy food because everything was falling and the supply chains were breaking, you would beg them to print money to stop the falling because that credit-based system.
Speaker 2:So it's not them, it's you, your time contributing to that system. So now, and that's why it's such a hard thing to understand, we think it's somebody else and it's us from that system. So these are two completely radically different systems. One, the natural state of the free market is deflation. For sure, it means you've never lived in one. It means your grandparents never lived in one, your great-grandparents never lived in one. No one has an understanding of what a global free market looks like. Your grandparents never lived in one. Your great grandparents never lived in one. No one has an understanding of what a global free market looks like because there's never been one. There's been local free markets for a while, like the US founding, that then got captured by banking and exploited other nations through that same thing, but there's never been a global free market. In fact, where you are in Africa, where most people, your listeners, would be, they've been essentially modern day slavery extracted from global financial powers. Whether it was the UK doing it. Sun never sets on the British Empire or Spain or France in some areas of Africa or the US, because they're using a currency and they believe that currency has more value than their currency and of that is extractive. And those people, every three, four, five, seven years, their currency has to be reset so that they have really low labor. So the winning currency can steal more of the money and more of the resources. It's part of the system and everybody acting within that system has no choice but to act within that system. So these two systems are opposites. Natural state of the free market is deflation. A credit based system requires inflation and and if you're giving any time to the credit based system, you're helping the thing that's destroying you. Period, the. You might not know it. You might be on a higher ladder, like you in South Africa, might be in a higher, higher spot than Malawi, complaining about your spot in life, well, well, well, you don't see the pain inflicted on other people. And same thing is happening in people all over the world because they're talking about relative inflation, relative currency devaluation, rather than is it. There Is the natural state of the free market deflation. Is that true? And so any time in the other system is making it stronger. So now we'll get to what Bitcoin is. It's probably easier, if people don't really understand Bitcoin, to say these five interconnected points Open.
Speaker 2:It's open, permissionless. That means any single person on the planet, whether you live in a dictatorship, whether you're anywhere, can move their energy and time to the open system. It doesn't require permission, you can just move. If you learn how to do it, you can do mining, you can start spending, you can download a wallet, and this system can't stop you. It doesn't require approval, and so that would be like if you were in jail and screaming at the warden and the warden's outside of the room and the jail cell's door is open and you can just walk out, but people are staying in the jail cell. So open, permissionless, decentralized, secure. So the way that this works is it's completely decentralized and secure. It's never been hacked, it's decentralized.
Speaker 2:And please, for people listening the first time, do your work and ask could this be true? And if it's true, what does it mean? And how do I join it? Because if you run a node and you're part of Bitcoin network, you are part of the decentralization that somebody, to try to change the rules, has to go through you. Because these nodes are distributed all over the world and there's tens of thousands of them. They can't be found. They're behind Tor browsers. They can't be found and so it can't be found. They're behind Tor browsers. They can't be found and so it can't be hacked.
Speaker 2:The governments have tried, china's tried, to shut this down over and over and over again. This is terrible for dictatorships because it restores balance to the world. It's terrible for dictatorship. So what would money, control of money, try to do? They would try to attack it through every different way, and so we've seen all of these attacks. But it can't be stopped because these nodes are distributed all over the world and that consensus mechanism on the network, so open, decentralized, secure protocol Protocols come in layers. They're not technologies. Technologies are winner-take-most, protocols are winner-take-most Protocols are winner-take-all. The last protocol anybody would remember is the Internet, and the Internet came. The base layer of the Internet came in 1969 from DARPA and it was designed to protect communications in a nuclear holocaust. And one narrow thing so communications could happen.
Speaker 2:But because it was so sound in that one narrow thing, so communications could happen, but because it was so sound in that one narrow thing, it added more functionality and layers on top of that, until layer four I'm simplifying it a little bit which was HTTP, which is the same backbone that we're using now for this call. It didn't exist before, and if you were just measuring the base protocol in 1969, you would have never seen what was possible on top of the internet. All phones, all communications, everything is happening on top of this protocol stack that gave functionality to almost everything we do today, but you wouldn't have seen it developed because you would have missed that. The first layer only did a narrow thing. So the first layer of Bitcoin is that narrow thing that keeps it decentralized and secure. And then it adds different layers and we can talk about some of them after that add more and more scalability and trade-offs while protecting what I just described. So you could look at it as bigger than the internet, a lot bigger than the internet, because if it fuses money into the new internet, it can't be cheated and it's building a new protocol stack that everything will be on top of that in time. And so now we have open, decentralized, secure protocol bounded by energy, and and when I say bounded by energy, the way mining works is you have to invest in in um asics and you have to have low cost power to be able to to do this. So it chases low cost energy all over the world.
Speaker 2:I was at a village in Malawi where a Bitcoin miner came in because the village, the mine or, sorry, the dam was trying to sell the energy company, local company was trying to connect Malawian villagers for a dollar a kilowatt hour for energy, and no one. They made a dollar a day, so this electrical company was essentially bankrupt and nobody could do. This bitcoin miner went, went in and said we'll pay you two cents a kilowatt hour and we'll buy it 24 7. So what happened? The energy company became profitable on this because they always had a buyer and then, when the villagers wanted to villagers wanted to connect for three cents a kilowatt hour they all connected and so it entirely turned around. It electrified this village, who now has a circular economy on top of Bitcoin and enjoying the benefits of the entire thing, has the internet for the first time and to watch this happen. And that's the same thing happening all over the world. As Bitcoin chases abundant energy all over the world, it bounds it to energy.
Speaker 2:So now I ask this what would appear to us as users or participants of two systems, to us as users or participants of two systems One that's open, decentralized, secure protocol bounded by energy? So the energy-backed protocol versus the piece of paper-backed protocol, what would it appear? And the energy-backed protocol that you can't cheat is just a perfect reflection of the free market. All prices are falling in it forever, all prices. This house that I'm in right now was 300 Bitcoin five years ago. This house that I'm in right now is now 16 Bitcoin. In five years, it'll be less than one Bitcoin. All prices of everything. If I measured energy in the same thing, if I measured it in the energy-backed system, that couldn't be cheated. You see a perfect reflection of the thesis I laid out. A perfect reflection. Prices fall forever and they will fall forever as long as it stays decentralized and secure. And here's the thing it will stay decentralized and secure because people like you and me, once you know this, you participate in it and you can be a node to make sure it does.
Speaker 2:It look like to three different people One person measuring in Bitcoin. It would look like just what I described. It would be better and better and better. You would see the beautiful thing in all humans, because all people are helping trade and everything else. You'd see the unique genius. You'd see you lived in a fair society. It would get better and better and better, and that would be your perspective and it would be right to you. Now let's say you, you measured Bitcoin from the piece of paper. You would.
Speaker 2:You would think Bitcoin was going up, and, and you would probably take risks on Bitcoin instead of holding in self custody and run a node. You'd probably trust governments. You'd trust stable coins, and all the stable coin is. You trust a us coin, right? All a stable coin is is a guaranteed loss coin against bitcoin. It matches the debasement rate, um, and, and so it's a guaranteed loss coin. But you trust it because it was better than your currency and and you would by doing so, you'd still be in the inflationary monetary system, but you might be winning more than your neighbor because you were in, pegged to bitcoin and so, so, and you'd all of the same complaints.
Speaker 2:You'd see the world getting worse and worse, but you, you were, and you would. You would sell your bitcoin at some point back into the system because you thought you had enough money, so you'd still be stuck. And then what about the person that's not in Bitcoin at all? They would be getting debased at that rate. And so, when I use those three examples, all of them exist today. So it says nothing about Bitcoin, it says nothing about the free market. It says nothing about. It says about our individual choices within it and our perspective of what's happening.
Speaker 1:Jeff, thanks for that. That was a great explanation. I wanted to just go back to something that you said earlier about. You've got the inflationary world on the one side and the deflationary world, which is sort of the Bitcoin world. How do you see that the deflationary effect of Bitcoin would come in without having collapse on the other side?
Speaker 2:Do you think that's possible? So I think that's just think about and really important for you you can have agency in the new system that you're untouchable from the other system. The other system is already insolvent and it's going to hurt a lot of people and a lot of people are going to get and I wish that wasn't going to happen, but they're measuring from a corrupt system that has to get more centralized. And as AI goes faster and faster and should give you more abundance, faster and faster, this one has to coercion, control fear and it has to steal faster and faster. It's just a mirror image. It can't be the free market. It has to be in the exponentially growing debt bubble that is insolvent and the people that are measuring the world from that and thinking there's a savior within it. I wish I could do something besides tell them to get out of jail. So now let's look around the world at what's happened.
Speaker 2:I wrote an article called Finding Signal in a Noisy World years ago that describes this. I've written many articles that described what would happen and it's just happening exactly as I predicted, everywhere. But why do I know that this is going to happen? Because, let's say, let's look in Venezuela and you have a dictator. You have broken money everywhere.
Speaker 2:Why didn't people move? Why did people keep trusting it? Why did they march down the streets and nothing changes? Why do? Why does that happen? And then they march down the street, somebody else comes in and nothing changes. Um, why are so many people killed from the same thing and and their families destroyed from the same thing? Why didn't they go to Bitcoin? They could have totally, because at that time through that Bitcoin was $5, $2, and now it's $116,000 US, and remember that's just relative to the currency, but in Venezuela it's $3.3 million. It actually might be more. I think it's 33 million dollars for Bitcoin, when they could have bought it at 5 dollars. Why didn't they? Because they think there's a solve within the system and all their friends do and all the media does, and they stay stuck. So that is unfortunately going to happen all over the world and the more people.
Speaker 2:That why I come on a lot of these podcasts, why I try to spend my time to do what I can, what I can, and I know you're doing the same thing, why I try to do this is so that people can learn and take agency for themselves and understand what's happening, or at least be curious, understand what's happening so they can help themselves and their families.
Speaker 1:Yeah, in South Africa we're sitting with exactly the same situation you've just described in Venezuela. We may not have hit hyperinflation in South Africa, but our currency seems to be inflating at way over 10% per year. Of course, the CPI metric is 3% or 3.5, or that's what they tell you. And yet we, caught in this circus of politicians arguing and the public is fighting and saying well, kick this person out, let's get a new person in, and that will solve the problem. I know we did speak about that earlier, um, but that seems to be the reality for most people. They think it. They have to fix the system that's.
Speaker 2:That's actually why I said. That's why I said it's not them, it's us. We're giving our time to the system that we know is stealing our energy, right? If? If you said the natural state of the free market is deflation, if you just kept saying that, think of the implications for your way of life. It touches everything. It touches absolutely everything, because all money is what is money. It's an abstract concept for our time, so we can trade with each other. So if you manipulate an abstract concept of our time, what do you think you do? You manipulate our time and energy and everything else and you divide us and we fight with each other because we think it's somebody else and it's us giving our time to that system.
Speaker 2:And so that's why this is such a big deal. That touches everything, because it would be new. It would be so hard to understand as everything. Because it would. It would be new. It would be so hard to understand. The media, the mass media would be trying to make us not understand it or think crypto, or try to get rich quick, and all of crypto is going to go to zero. They'd be conflating what I'm saying over and over and over again, because it's so new and most people wouldn't understand the gravity of what I'm saying, so they'd stay stuck and then you'd get this, and I'll bet you a whole bunch of your listeners are thinking the same thing. Well, it's too late for me, right? And so I better just keep doing this, because I don't have any money to buy Bitcoin. I can tell you full well, in the last, since the last cycle because I know this for sure could be a get people coming to me all the time saying things like this I listened to a podcast of yours four or five years ago.
Speaker 2:Um, I realized what you were saying is true and I was living in a van with my girlfriend and we were destitute. We were mad at the world, we were fighting at the world. We were so mad we were, but we do realize we couldn't do anything. And then I listened to you and all we decided to do is not buy coffees each day and buy Bitcoin with the coffees, and our lives have completely changed, completely changed. When you give your energy to the new system that is open, truthful, abundant, you will see that reflection in no matter how much you do it. So I beg you to take a step and then learn more. If you're spending 0% of your time, spend 1%, learn. If you're spending 1%, learn 2%. Take 2%, 3%, 5% and, as you do more, your life will massively change for the better, because you're giving your energy to the honest system massively change for the better because you're giving your energy to the honor system.
Speaker 1:Jeff, you, apart from spreading the word on podcasts such as this and thank you again for that your company, ego Death Capital, has invested in Feddy. Now Bitcoin has been described as a pioneering species. I think I heard somebody describe it as that once before and I think your example earlier of the gridless mining operation down in Malawi is probably a great example of that. But I would like to talk about Feddy. That is another way that I think you are investing into developing countries. Am I correct in saying FedE is really aimed at that sort of third world developing world? Tell me about that. What drew you to that project and what is that project doing in the grassroots in Africa?
Speaker 2:Sounds good.
Speaker 2:So, Fetty, we invested in it just over three years ago and what I'm about to say is potentially a little bit more complicated, but I'll get to the punchline. We invested in it because at that time so a couple of things on Bitcoin Bitcoin wasn't private. It's open at the base layer and then Lightning is a scaling solution and Lightning can take us a long way Lightning, and so you can. Now you have something secure and decentralized at the base layer scaling and layers. And then you had Lightning, Liquid and a bunch of scaling layers that now provides massive transaction power, speed transaction power to Bitcoin natively, not with another token, directly on Bitcoin. But when we looked at that, it couldn't take us all the way to 8 billion people working on Lightning, lightning there would be blocks, um as well, lightning and and bitcoin because they were open. You could expect this centralized system, um in the worst places, um with ai, with with what they know about you to come in and hack your communications and then hack people and then try to kill Bitcoin.
Speaker 2:As one system got worse and everybody gave their energy to that system, then I saw a risk, or we saw risks, of Bitcoin, a risk of centralization at some point with most of the actions trying to regulate and stop it, and then Bitcoin being open. So privacy would be really critical and privacy would be absolutely critical. Privacy in your communications and money would be absolutely critical if you lived in a dictatorship where it was life and death, if you were in the system. Because what happens all over the world is when people rise up, their bank accounts are shut and then that control system attacks them afterwards and so now they have no freedom to operate, and that's why a lot of people don't rise up, because they can't. Everything gets shut off and then the media attacks them. They're attacked and everything else and there's pretty. It's a playbook that's been used over and over and over again. And so you, if you're stuck in that system and your bank account is stuck in that system, then you're really stuck. And then Bitcoin if it was open and you were rising up, then probably the same thing existed and you were rising up, then probably the same thing existed. So we saw this danger or this risk, and so we funded Fetty.
Speaker 2:We were the first funding round in Fetty, which is a protocol on top of Bitcoin, tethered to Bitcoin, that works on eCash, that brings complete privacy to your communications and money and a scaling layer. The way that it works is, if you, me and two friends wanted to create essentially guardians or for purposes of Bitcoin, how Bitcoin stays decentralized and secure is through nodes. Let's say the guardians insert, nodes us. We wanted to create four nodes that anyone could operate on top of our system. It was tethered to Bitcoin. Then it would replicate what we're talking about as having a Bitcoin. It provided that decentralization and security by having all of these federations that would scale and grow and grow and grow and provide complete privacy to communications and and transfer of money. And so that's been three and a half years in the making. It took longer because it's really complex to do this right, to provide that protection and privacy to anybody who's using it. But now it's out there and what's happening is exactly what we would have thought.
Speaker 2:Communities are using this and they're creating circular economies that are completely immune from everything else. And so you can download it from the app store. There's a, there's a web, but it can't be stopped already. It's impossible to stop.
Speaker 2:And further, when I said protocols come in layers, what I was talking about things like this that you couldn't see that there would be able to be used. This is what I'm talking about. It's an entirely new layer that gives the ability for you to really opt out of the existing system, and inside that system there's almost zero fees on transactions. So you can download it, your friend can download it, you can create your own federation. That could be a church federation, that could be any type of federation, it could be a community federation, it could be anything. You could set this up and now you're inside that and all your friends you invite to it have this exact same thing and as the guardians of it, and Fetty and the company. You can't see the transactions either, nor can Fetty. No one can see the transactions it's because they're completely blind or the communications it's just the people who are communicating. They can see them.
Speaker 1:That's incredible. How have you seen the uptake?
Speaker 2:That's incredible. How have you seen the uptake and has it been popular? I'm talking from a South African point away. Depending on when this launches If it launches today, four weeks away, it might be two weeks by the time your podcast launches.
Speaker 2:One of the hardest things in setting it up was most people didn't know how to essentially run a node or create a guardian, and they certainly didn't have four or five friends that, uh, that wanted to do that.
Speaker 2:And now add what if you wanted to do it in a privacy preserving way, that you didn't know your friends right, that they were all private so nobody could capture this at all. So that creates a level of onboarding friction that there's a lot of these federations already out. But that friction stopped and the federations that are already out are being used a lot. In fact, because of my risk on communications, most of my communications are on Fetty is my primary wallet and so so, so, and I know so it works extraordinarily well and other people who are using it in these communities it's working extraordinarily well. It hasn't had broad adoption yet because people that that that it's too hard to set that up, so you'd have to be um and then setting that up, let's say in a dictatorship or whatever. Then then it further, uh, further risk's, further risk, because you don't want to be found doing that.
Speaker 2:Now that's about to be solved. So, through AI, through being able to do that and through some really genius ways to be able to provide that safety, and because it'd be able to kind of, almost in a click of a button, set up these federations. It's about to be solved and there's 170 people on a waiting list to be able to to 170 federations on a waiting list waiting to do this. So really excited for what's to come. Hard build, extraordinarily hard build. Build because you had to build it with all of these in mind, knowing for sure that it would be attacked and you had to make sure that the people that were using it wouldn't be because they couldn't be found.
Speaker 1:That sounds amazing. I would love to see where this goes in a year from now, two years from now. Just that, that adoption. It would be incredible to see. Um, I mean, that sounds like a product that is really tailor-made for small communities that are unbanked, would you say. This is something to solve the unbanked problem. Bring people into the digital world 100, 100.
Speaker 2:You, you have your hundred percent. You, you have your own bank. That's what Bitcoin is Now. Now you, so you have your own. With Bitcoin, you have your own bank, you are your own bank and nobody can stop you from being your own bank. Um, and the only difference on being your own bank is the value of your money goes up forever instead of down forever, and there's no fees on it, right? So in a bank, there's fees. They tell you what is yours, it's not really your money, and your value of money loses money forever in your own bank. Just on bitcoin, you're your own bank, no fees. Your value goes up forever. That's that's the difference, just on bitcoin. Now, in this, you have have a Swiss vault. You have privacy in your bank that nobody can touch. So it's not just a bank anymore. You have a wealth manager and a private, private privacy that no one can. No one can touch, and you can by just tapping it or showing somebody a QR code, you can invite anybody to your bank and they can have it too.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. That's like, really, that is a fantastic story. I love that one story. I love that one, jeff. I think I saw recently in fact this week, I think your company, egodeath, just announced a $100 million fund for Bitcoin businesses. I'd love you to talk about that in the last few minutes of this podcast and tell us what you have in mind there.
Speaker 2:Sure, and remember when I mentioned before um, you can spend your time in whatever system. Well, every single person has that choice, including me, and I was spending most of my time in the other system prior to this. So I was, I was telling myself the same story that everyone tells I need more money. I, I don't have enough to be able to do this and I can't make enough in Bitcoin.
Speaker 2:So I'm going to buy Bitcoin, but I'm going to work over here and do this. I woke up one day and I said, wow, I'm a hypocrite. How could I expect the world to change for the better if most of my time is in the system that's extracting? And so why? I know this well and I don't blame anybody because I was too. Everybody does the same thing, and so that started ego death. That idea, said I, so I can move my time to the energy, to an energy into the system that I want to see for my, for my children in the world.
Speaker 2:Um, I moved my time, that time moving my time. You helped adopt, you helped create some of these technologies and ideas and founded these companies At that time it was really early that gave more ability for more people to see what's happening in Bitcoin and essentially in free market, deliver tons of value, and so that value those, those entrepreneurs, some of these companies, are growing so fast by creating, creating tremendous value for people, and it's it's just going faster and faster and faster, which was so. That's that first fund three years ago when we did it, which now I can't believe, because when I was in the other world, I would have never seen what was possible here, never because I wasn't in it, actively engaged and seeing, okay, what problems need to be solved. But as I moved my time to this and saw what all the problems needed to solve and then put my time on solving those problems with the best and brightest entrepreneurs all over the world, you create this and then so what's happened is it's been so successful that the next fund is now oversubscribed, and it's so we can do more, so we can help more, so we can drive this faster, and what's happening is the same as the biggest capital providers in the world are making the same choice as I made I.
Speaker 2:I'm spending all over my time over here. I some of them think they're helping donating here, donating here, helping here but they're realizing now it's all making it worse and so they're moving their time and energy to the new system and the new system is emerging, and so that's just a testament to what's happening. But I would say this Most of the people I talk to and this would be normal if you saw what I got to see every day what's happening and how fast it's happening and the change in this and what it means you'd be wildly optimistic, wildly optimistic, and and and, and.
Speaker 2:So I just encourage those. I say it again, I encourage you to just look, spend more time, because I wouldn't have known before I was spending more time. Your podcast, same thing. You've moved your time to a podcast that can hopefully help a bunch of people and your podcast is going to be successful if it helps a whole bunch of people. It's a perfect expression of the free market working and you can see, and every single person can activate into it. And there's imagine all the problems we talk about every day. Where most people talk about every day, there's tons of problems to solve.
Speaker 1:I love that. That is such a great positive note. Probably to end this on that. Don't just look and talk. Actually get involved and do something. We're only going to move the world forward by doing things. Jeff, we're coming close to time and I do know that you have a hard stop. Thank you so much for coming on to the show. I do just want to ask if people need to reach out to you, see your content, find out what you're busy with, how can they stay in touch with you?
Speaker 2:So I'm only on nostre now. Um, so, we didn't talk about it, but not. Nostre is on top of bitcoin. It's a. It's like a twitter it's, but it's far bigger than that. Uh, they're not bigger in numbers, but far more utility than that. It's a communication platform that is controlled by nobody and you your voice, so nobody can shut you off. You can use it. You can use Damas or Primal or a whole bunch of different clients on top, and they serve you. They're competing for you. So I'm there. Be careful. It's a trusted network in that you'll see who has the most followers and who's following me, and that's me. A lot of people will try to scam you from saying they're me and my name, but I'd encourage you to go look on Nostr and then my website, jeffboothca, has my Nostr address. If I'm on social media anywhere, it's listed there, and if it's not listed there, it's not me. So I'd say one of those two places.
Speaker 1:Excellent. I'll put those links in the show notes as well, so people can just find that easily and get through and stay in touch with you. Jeff, thank you so much. I really appreciate this, that you started your day off with me and us here in the southern tip of africa. Have a great friday, and I hope you have a fantastic weekend. I appreciate your time. Thanks, kevin, you too. Cheers, jeff bye. Outro Music.