Florian Bruce Boye – Bitcoin Is Signal, Crypto Is Noise | BTC Prague 2025 Keynote

Standing on the BTC Prague stage, I made the case that Bitcoin is not just another asset — it is the first engineered solution to a 5,000-year-old problem: how do we store value? Here is the argument I laid out, starting with a high school classroom.

A Classroom, a Porsche, and a Broken Promise

A few months ago, a teacher invited me back to my old high school. She had heard about a book I published on Bitcoin and wanted me to talk to 12th graders about money. Before we touched Bitcoin, I wanted to lay the foundations. So I asked the students: what are the three main things we use money for?

They got it quickly. You can spend it — that’s consumption. You can invest it — that’s betting on the future of something else. And you can save it — that’s transporting your purchasing power into the future.

Then I asked what we actually use for saving. One girl said the euro. And she was right — that’s what most people intuitively reach for. So I pushed further: how well does the euro actually serve that purpose?

I used a Porsche as an example. Imagine in 1970, when the first Porsche 911 came out, you had two choices: buy the car then for roughly €10,000, or save that money to buy it later. The person who bought it in 1970 would still be driving a Porsche today. The person who saved the €10,000 — even with interest — would walk into a dealership today and be told they can barely afford the color of a car. Saving in euro means you delay consumption today to get less consumption in the future. That is a broken promise.

Why Gold Is Not the Answer Either

The students then suggested gold. And they were onto something — gold is a store of value, not an investment. The difference matters: when you invest, you speculate on a company’s future. When you save, you want to park value in something that already has the right properties.

But why gold and not steel? Steel has far more industrial demand. The answer one student landed on was exactly right: steel can be produced in unlimited quantities. It is prone to inflation. Gold, by contrast, is scarce and durable. Those properties justify putting your wealth into it.

But gold was never designed to store value. It is a byproduct of exploding stars that happened — by chance — to have a few useful properties. It is not truly limited, not easily divisible, not portable enough. I brought one gram of gold with me. Nobody in the room could verify it was real. These are not minor flaws. They are structural.

Bitcoin Is the Engineered Solution

My background is physics. So I approached this as an engineering problem: what would the ideal store of value look like? It would need to be scarce, ideally with a hard cap. Durable. Liquid. Global. Censorship resistant. It should have zero cost of carry — storing $5 or $5 billion should cost the same proportionally. And it must be easily verifiable.

Bitcoin has every single one of these properties, built into a decentralized protocol where they are guaranteed. This is the first time in human history we have a store of value that was designed with the right properties in mind. Before Bitcoin, we improvised with sea shells, glass beads, gold, and stocks. None of them were created for this purpose.

The Pattern That Repeats Through History

This is not a new pattern. Humanity has always improvised in the absence of an ideal engineered solution, and then an engineer arrives and solves the problem permanently. We used fire for light — torches, candles, fire pits — until Edison and Tesla gave us electrical light. Now nobody lights a conference with fire. We used pigeons and smoke signals to communicate across distances, until someone built the internet. Now 99%