Why Seeing Bitcoin as an Asset — Not a Protocol — Could Be Its Undoing

Jeff Booth, author of «The Price of Tomorrow» and one of the most philosophically grounded voices in the Bitcoin space, does not claim to know what the world will look like in 2036. That admission, counterintuitively, is precisely what makes his perspective so analytically valuable. Rather than offering a roadmap of future certainty, Booth hands investors and builders something more actionable: a framework for thinking about Bitcoin's role right now — and why the lens through which you view it will determine whether you benefit from it at all.

**The Spectrum of Bitcoin Understanding — and Why It Matters to Markets**

Booth conceptualizes Bitcoin adoption not as a binary on/off switch, but as a spectrum. This framing carries real market implications. At the lowest end sit those who treat Bitcoin as a vehicle for speculative trading — chasing short-term gains, rotating between crypto assets, seeking the next scheme. Booth is unambiguous: almost all participants in this category lose over a longer time horizon. From an analytical standpoint, this cohort represents the most volatile and least structurally significant segment of the market. Their activity generates noise, not signal.

One step higher are those who hold bitcoin as a store of value. This is where the majority of institutional narratives currently sit, and it is here that Booth identifies a systemic risk that most market participants overlook. If bitcoin remains trapped within the existing broken monetary and financial systems rather than replacing them, ownership will inevitably centralize. The result, in Booth's framing, is the emergence of a «Bitcoin elite» — a new class of financial kings rather than the broadly distributed wealth network that Bitcoin's architecture promises.

This is not merely philosophical speculation. Booth draws a direct line from the store-of-value-only paradigm to the collapse of custodians like Celsius and BlockFi. «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,» said Booth. «It'll look like Celsius and BlockFi over and over and over again.» For investors, this is a structural warning: the counterparty risk embedded in the current custody model does not disappear simply because the underlying asset is bitcoin.

**The Protocol Lens: A Different Risk Profile**

At the top of Booth's spectrum are those who view Bitcoin as a protocol — a layered system that enables money to be used more easily and privately over time, without reliance on intermediaries. This perspective carries a fundamentally different risk and opportunity profile. Those who internalize it are not waiting for external conditions to improve; they are actively building within and around the protocol stack, reducing their exposure to custodial failure and systemic debt leverage.

Booth's framing here echoes the historical pattern of technology adoption: those who understood the internet as infrastructure — not merely a distribution channel — built the institutions that defined the next era. Those who treated it as just another medium were displaced by it.

**Agency, Distraction, and the 2036 Question**

Booth's most pointed analytical insight is that the primary obstacle to Bitcoin's transformative potential is not regulatory pressure, quantum computing threats, or geopolitical friction — it is the systematic erosion of individual agency through distraction. From fear-based narratives around quantum computing breaking Bitcoin's cryptography, to the controversy over Jeffrey Epstein's alleged attempts to infiltrate Bitcoin Core, to the prolonged Core vs. Knots debate — each of these episodes, Booth argues, functions as a mechanism for siphoning attention and energy away from what actually matters.

For analysts and investors, this is a structural observation worth taking seriously. The information environment around Bitcoin is adversarial by design — not necessarily through coordinated conspiracy, but through the natural incentives of media, tribalism, and fear. Those who cannot filter signal from noise will continue to hand over their agency, whether to bad actors, to unreliable custodians, or to their own short-term instincts.

«When we think about 2036, the real question is: how many people realize that they have the agency to change the world?» said Booth. The answer to that question will determine not just the price of bitcoin in a decade, but the architecture of the financial system that surrounds it. The future is not a destination — it is being constructed now, by the choices of those who understand what they are actually building with.