They Always Planned to Centralize Bitcoin | Jeff Booth & Scott Melker
About this episode
Jeff Booth and Scott Melker discuss the challenges and future of Bitcoin amidst institutional co-opting and financial crises.
Mentor Sessions Ep. 090: Jeff Booth and Scott Melker discuss Bitcoin adoption, ETF co-opting, the AI bubble, self-custody risk after the ColdCard hack, and the debt reset. Wall Street, the ETFs, and the treasury companies are making every attempt to co-opt Bitcoin — and Jeff Booth and Scott Melker explain why that capture attempt may be exactly what Bitcoin needs to survive. The $350 trillion global debt pile is already insolvent, the AI bubble is still inflating, and self-custody just took a brutal reality check after the ColdCard fallout. In this conversation you'll learn why Booth believes the existing system and Bitcoin cannot coexist over the long run, why he feels "incredible" even as price bleeds, and how the messy financialization of Bitcoin through institutions still funnels people toward spot self-custody. You'll hear Melker's honest read on adoption — that when arguments come down to "rolling dice for entropy," we are nowhere near mainstream — and Booth's thesis on why AI CapEx can never be paid back when the marginal cost of a line of code is zero. You'll also get a candid post-mortem on hardware wallet security, why "don't trust, verify"…
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