Jeff Booth, co-founder of Ego Death Capital and a director of Core Scientific (CORZ.US), has conceded that the Bitcoin network possesses an indestructible resilience after spending roughly 15,000 hours attempting to "kill" it. The Canadian entrepreneur and author of "The Price of Tomorrow" conducted high-intensity attack simulations, ultimately discovering that the Bitcoin code itself has no fatal weaknesses. His core transformation was a shift from attempting to destroy the network to being convinced of its security. Booth identified that the true vulnerability stemmed not from the technology, but from his own preconceived bias against centralized power, marking the end of a two-decade-long technological skepticism.
Looking back to 1999, Booth co-founded BuildDirect, an online building materials supplier he ran for 18 years, an experience that shaped his deep understanding of centralized business models. However, when he published his book in January 2020, Bitcoin occupied only a single paragraph, reflecting his dismissive view of the asset at the time. The root of his skepticism was not mathematical logic but a concern about whether "state power" could preserve the network's decentralization. To test this hypothesis, Booth told Scott Melker on the "Wolf of All Streets" show that he ran his own node, simulating various attack scenarios that governments, competitors, or large miners might launch. He spent roughly 15,000 hours constantly asking: "How do I kill Bitcoin? What would that look like?" This extreme level of stress testing was designed to reveal the network's survivability under extreme power intervention, rather than simple price speculation.
Although BTC is currently trading near $63,000, with a market cap of about $1.27 trillion, down roughly 50% from its record high of $126,198 on October 6, 2025, Booth argues that price volatility and security are two separate dimensions. Data indicates that the security foundation of the Bitcoin network lies in its decentralized energy-consensus mechanism: every new block generated every 10 minutes is backed by real energy, akin to the low-barrier construction characteristics of the early internet protocol. Currently, there are approximately 24,000 accessible nodes running the same consensus rules, and the 21 million supply cap has once again withstood public debate this month, after Adam Back rejected a proposal to increase the limit.
Based on this, Booth co-founded Ego Death Capital in 2022, focusing on investing in software companies built on top of Bitcoin, rather than miners or tokens. The fund completed a $100 million second round of financing in July 2025. Meanwhile, since Core Scientific (CORZ.US) exited Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January 2024, Booth has served as a director, witnessing the industry's restructuring. Booth did not deny the risks facing the network, particularly regarding mining pool concentration and client homogeneity. Over the past month, three mining pools generated about 61% of the blocks, while roughly 80% of accessible nodes run the same client, Bitcoin Core, meaning most of the network relies on a single codebase. However, he expects market competition to naturally lower these numbers without requiring protocol changes.
Mathematical data supports this view: after accounting for depreciation last quarter, Riot Platforms (RIOT.US) had a cost per coin of $90,631, far above the current market price. Hash rate has fallen roughly 22% from its peak in October 2025, as miners either exit the network or lease their power to AI tenants. Core Scientific (CORZ.US)’s financial reports confirm this transition, with 83% of its Q2 revenue coming from hosting services and only 13% from proprietary mining. In response, venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya sees the energy transfer to AI as a structural problem for miners rather than a healthy shakeout. Meanwhile, Coinbase (COIN.US) CEO Brian Armstrong stated on July 20, 2026, that hash rate or energy entering Bitcoin mining does not determine its price, as the network difficulty adjusts automatically to maintain block production speed, suggesting that Bitcoin's price is driven by other factors in the long term.
Governance disagreements remain a key variable for future tests. A temporary soft fork proposed by a group of developers, BIP-110, required blocks to signal support or be rejected, leading to a chain split at block 961,632 on August 8. To date, this separated BIP-110 fork has found only four blocks, while the main chain Bitcoin has found over 1,100. The pool OCEAN still runs a separate endpoint for the minority chain, carrying 1.15 EH/s of hash rate, while its main endpoint carries 19.22 EH/s. Although the Coldcard wallet and BTCPay Server vulnerabilities this summer led to fund losses, these attacks did not touch the consensus layer, aligning with the security boundaries Booth emphasizes. Booth believes that the only failure case for Bitcoin is a human one: the network will only collapse when people collectively stop investing time and money. He is convinced that mass adoption is inevitable, only a matter of time. The next key milestone is September 1, when BIP-110 supporters plan to change the proof-of-work and launch a separate token, an event that will test Bitcoin's governance resilience even more thoroughly than the 15,000 hours of theoretical simulation.
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