Jeff Booth Turned 15,000 Hours Into a Bitcoin Bet

Jeff Booth told Scott Melker on August 16, 2026 that he spent about 15,000 hours trying to kill Bitcoin, and that the chain kept printing blocks. Booth is a founding partner at Ego Death Capital and a director at Core Scientific, and those hours describe the path that took him there, not a lab report with a methods section.

The clip now moves as if a 20-year operator ran a siege and the protocol won. What he describes is narrower: he ran a node, war-gamed governments, rivals, and big miners, then moved his time, a venture fund, and a board seat onto the network he could not break.

He Tried to Kill It From a Node, Not a Mine

Booth did not start as a promoter. He co-founded the building-materials marketplace BuildDirect in 1999 and ran it for 18 years. His 2020 book, The Price of Tomorrow, treated Bitcoin as a side note while he still doubted a decentralized system could hold against a determined state.

On Melker’s show, The Wolf of All Streets, he put a clock on that doubt.

I spent about 15,000 hours trying to say, ‘How do I kill Bitcoin? What does that look like?’

Jeff Booth, on The Wolf of All Streets

The episode is on Melker’s channel, and the kill question sits inside a longer talk on debt, AI, and why he treats Bitcoin as a protocol rather than a trade.

He says he ran a node and modeled the moves a government, a rival network, or a large miner would use. Every scenario, in his telling, still produced a block on the familiar cadence, each one paid for in energy.

WHAT HE SAYS HE MODELED

• State pressure: Whether a government could coerce or surveil the network until it stopped being open.
• A rival chain: Whether a better-funded competitor could knock Bitcoin off its block schedule.
• A large miner: Whether concentrated hash could halt or rewrite the ledger from the inside.

A home node can enforce rules and refuse invalid blocks. It cannot mint a majority of proof of work. That gap is why “blocks kept arriving” is a real observation and a weak pentest. He was watching consensus from the cheap seats, not buying the stadium.

He is blunt about the verdict anyway. “Do I think Bitcoin is decentralized and secure right now? Yes, I do.” He also says mining pools and centralized mining remain risks, which is the part the highlight reels leave on the floor.

15,000 Hours Maps Onto a Career Change

Fifteen thousand hours is about 7.2 years at a 40-hour week. That span fits a conversion, not a locked-room audit. It runs from the book through the fund and the mining-company seat and into the Melker taping.

Booth has said the same turn in plainer words. He was on the other side, and he did not see that he was the one who had to move. “I didn’t realize it was me the whole time.” The hours are how he tells that move.

HOW THE WAGER STACKED UP

1. January 2020: Publishes The Price of Tomorrow and still treats Bitcoin as a question, not a career.
2. 2022: Helps found Ego Death Capital as a Bitcoin-only software fund.
3. January 23, 2024: Joins the Core Scientific board after the miner leaves Chapter 11.
4. July 2025: Ego Death Capital closes a $100 million second fund.
5. August 16, 2026: Tells Melker the 15,000-hour kill test failed and the blocks never stopped.

The 15,000-hour figure is his estimate. He has not published a tool list, a code-review log, or a peer-reviewed paper. Treat it as a diary of attention. That is still a useful document of how a skeptic became a professional bull. It is not a substitute for the attack-cost math miners actually run.

Ego Death Capital Took the Other Side

Once Booth decided the base layer would keep printing blocks, he stopped treating Bitcoin as a hedge he might abandon and started treating it as a place to put other people’s money to work. Ego Death Capital, founded in 2022, backs software firms built on Bitcoin rather than miners or tokens.

The second fund closed at $100 million in July 2025. Partners have described the mandate as leading Series A rounds for companies that already have product and early revenue, with Lightning, Fedimint, and related layers in scope. Early names tied to that fund include Relai, LN Markets, Roxom, and Breez.

Lyn Alden, a general partner, has put the posture in one line: the firm wants businesses that treat Bitcoin as infrastructure to build on, not a chip to bet. Booth’s own site lists Fedi and Breez among his own list of board seats, alongside Terramera and Core Scientific. The through-line is consistent. After he could not kill the base layer, he funded the software that assumes it will still be there.

That is the bet the security headline buries. A failed private kill-test is a reason for personal conviction. A $100 million fund is the conviction turned into a portfolio.

Core Scientific Now Bills for Racks, Not Just Blocks

The board seat is the other half of the wager, and it has a kink. Core Scientific is still a listed Bitcoin miner, but its latest quarter is no longer a mining story first. In the quarter ended June 30, 2026, the company reported $164.2 million in revenue, more than double the $78.6 million it booked a year earlier.

CORE SCIENTIFIC Q2 REVENUE MIX

Colocation already made up 83 percent of quarterly revenue in that 10-Q. Self-mining fell to $21.5 million from $62.4 million a year earlier as machines came off and halls were retasked. Management has been open that it is winding down self-mining and billing high-density racks instead, including a large AMD booking on top of the CoreWeave ramp.

So the director who spent 15,000 hours asking how a large miner could kill Bitcoin now sits on a miner that earns most of its keep renting power and cooling to someone else. The fund he helps run says it does not invest in miners. The board seat is personal. Both can be true, and together they make the hours look less like a white paper and more like an origin story for a man who went long the network, then watched the mining company itself pivot toward contracted watts.

Three Pools Still Mine More Than Half the Blocks

Booth does not pretend the job is finished. “Mining pools are a risk. Centralization mining is a risk.” That sentence is doing more work than the 15,000-hour boast, because pool share is public and current.

Simple Mining’s seven-day average, drawn from mempool.space, put Foundry USA at 25.4% of hashrate, AntPool at 19.2%, and F2Pool at 13.5%. Those three add to 58.1%. ViaBTC and SpiderPool followed at 9.6% and 8.6%.

SEVEN-DAY POOL SHARES

Wait.