What is the connection between entrepreneurship, collaboration, and Bitcoin? How can you build a new business that grows the Bitcoin network while also creating profit and success for yourself?

This article is a critique of short but prescient piece by an earlier Bitcoin writer that posits a radical model of thinking about business and entrepreneurship in the Bitcoin world.

I don’t agree with the entire piece as it is, but given that it has been over a decade since it was written I think with a bit of reframing we can find some good points in the deeper themes of the piece.

The author, Daniel Krawisz, is an example of the kind of prodigious early writing that was taking place as Bitcoin emerged on the scene in the early 2010s at the confluence of libertarian and cypherpunk thought.

On internet forums and mailing lists this rag tag group seemed to be taking on the behemoth of the state and the banking system at the same time, and they produced some very interesting literature exploring what the outcomes of all of this might be.

Read the original article: The Correct Strategy of Bitcoin Entrepreneurship by Daniel Krawisz, May 16, 2014

Reflecting on "The Correct Strategy of Bitcoin Entrepreneurship" in 2025

What do you think about this? From my vantage point in early 2025 I see that despite the value of bitcoin, it is still a relatively small group of people and it is somewhat undercapitalised.

It seems that any given blockchain or AI project is able to much more easily secure funding and investment than almost any Bitcoin business. VCs seem to throw money at anything with the word AI in it but they are reluctant when it comes to investing in the new form of money itself.

Perhaps because Bitcoin by design is resistance money, it is ideological to a degree, it doesn't have the profile which generates yield, which can be IPOd or acquired, it does not have any function other than being better money.

As a capital allocator or business person if you don’t understand this then you probably don’t understand Bitcoin and are quite likely to dismiss it entirely because it doesn’t fit into your world view.

For those who do understand how Bitcoin changes everything, we know that every sat is valuable, and every bitcoiner is part of this project. There is definitely Bitcoin capital out there investing in Bitcoin projects but we don’t have unlimited resources yet we face the most well funded institutions in the world: nation state governments.

So how does this relate to business then?

Krawisz talks about the idea of consensus-based entrepreneurship and of “open business”. His concern seems to be that there is not enough time or resource to waste on things that are not going to work out. It's understandable. From his perspective in 2014, the Mt Gox exchange collapse must have seemed like huge setbacks at that time.

The underlying sentiment of Entrepreneurship as a Collaborative Scientific Enterprise seems to say that we should share absolutely everything we are working on, nip bad ideas in the bud early so that we can talk through great ideas and make them happen.

This is interesting but I wonder if it ignores the reality of the way businesses come about: to solve problems and respond to situations through the use of labour and capital.

Ultimately any business is about Time, Place, and Opportunity, and in identifying and successfully responding to an opportunity you should be rewarded with profit.

Plenty of business people today will freely share their knowledge as mentors if you just ask them, because the idea and the knowledge is not enough on its own. You have to put in the proof of work and give things a go, risk your capital, and more than likely pivot.

Planning and discussion about what should be a good business idea can often become a good excuse for not actually doing anything. Simulating reality or talking about it, is inferior to engaging with the world and actually building something.

Ask any business owner: It’s about execution and trying things out. People often don’t know what they want until you build it for them, and in doing so you test the market and you test boundaries. There are winners and losers.

With any business there will be unique knowledge or intelligence that you likely do not want to share with others, there will be things that are special to your situation or are otherwise not able to be reproduced even if someone else were to try and do it - a lot of business is non-fungible.

I don’t think this is a criticism of what Krawisz has written though, I think it is important to share knowledge and be collaborative, to be helpful to others generally.

Instead I think we need to look closer at the relationship between entrepreneurial business and Bitcoin.

Fundamentally the Bitcoin network is open-source. There is no moat or privileged relationship that can be leveraged within Bitcoin because there is no anointed territory or central authority to start with.

It is only when you start interacting with the legacy system that you encounter gatekeepers: regulators, trusted authorities - all of these lead to corporate empires and monopolies forming.

One of the classic Bitcoin business models is the Bitcoin exchange. Since the early days Bitcoin exchanges have existed at the demarcation point between the old world and the new world.

Certainly Bitcoin exchanges are a good thing, they help bring more people onto the network, they can innovate the onboarding and service, and ideally get people’s bitcoin into self custody. But the businesses itself is dictated not by Bitcoin, but by fiat.

Not everyone can start a Bitcoin exchange. Its a highly regulated area and there are often chosen winners in a jurisdiction. Sharing best practices and knowledge can be useful to others, but when it comes to the specifics of getting bank account access, navigating local laws, negotiating with regulators, and other factors, there is a whole lot of stuff

If we go closer to Bitcoin ethos, something like a P2P exchange in an open source way, things becoming interesting. You can build a project without any permission, but you probably can't talk about it publicly and it maybe becomes difficult to build relationships or partnerships locally as the project exists in a legal gray zone.

The service is closer to Bitcoin and further from fiat, but maybe there is less of a business edge here. You can still charge a fee for this service but to me it feels more like a Bitcoin utility than a Bitcoin business.

Even when it comes to Bitcoin mining where there is a lot of investment happening, you are faced with a global free market and competition from every corner of the earth with tight margins.

Maybe the more apt framing is that a lot of miners are not so much Bitcoin businesses and more like energy companies. There is maybe even less incentive to share what you know and where you are getting your cheap power from and how you are operating.

So I wonder if there is a spectrum where the closer to a pure Bitcoin utility you become, that is things that are related to sending and receiving Bitcoin, the tighter the profit margins become, with the very best Bitcoin stuff being free and open source.

Within Bitcoin there are of course some physical products that have become business lines and cannot be completely free: specifically mining equipment, wallets, and nodes. These things can be commercialised as commodities, but then again they can also be built and operated yourself.

They are functional parts of the network and so are also Bitcoin utilities. Some of these products have strong brands and successful businesses behind them. Many of them are open source too which is awesome.

But it is still a pretty tough business to be in. The market for all of these things is always going to be in proportion to the the total Bitcoin market. Someone only needs a hardware wallet once they have Bitcoin.

Anything software based is of course going to trend towards being free.

This leaves perhaps only the exchanges and maybe some financial service products which are able to bring in totally new participants to the network and charge a fee, but again a lot these services rely on business confidentiality, regulation, and all of the fiat world stuff that stop it being open source and collaborative in the way the article discusses.

I wonder if really what Krawisz is getting at is that if we are to build anything that is a Bitcoin utility, the best approach is to be collaborative and open source - So that others can improve it and add to the project and so that can we verify the product for ourselves.

If its a physical product maybe you can even sell it for a profit but your market will likely be limited to the existing Bitcoiners.

But what about trying to build new businesses and new markets?

How can you build a business that helps bring new people into Bitcoin?

Perhaps another way we can frame this whole idea is that instead of thinking about bitcoin businesses, maybe we can instead think about businesses that are owned by Bitcoiners.

Let’s flip it: What does a US Dollar business look like? What does a British pound business look like?

They are called banks and trusted financial institutions, right? But in the open ocean of Bitcoin there is no regulatory niche to hide in because it is a global permissionless network.

Anyone can be there own bank.

The dis-intermediation of money by Bitcoin is perhaps the key piece here. Maybe there isn’t a moat to be built at all. If we think of the Bitcoin network as a utility that simply helps people send value to each other better than before, it seems logical that perhaps that same dis-intermediation means there isn’t much surface area to build a business there in the first place.

When you use Bitcoin the overhead of the legacy financial system is gone. You just send value now.

For business owners and entrepreneurs out there who are solving problem for other people in whatever field or industry they specialise in, they can just use and accept Bitcoin. They can save in Bitcoin.

For Businesses owned by bitcoiners there is a time, place, and occasion for their product or service, either local or global, with some combination of factors that gives them a unique selling proposition. There is a profit motive and the chance to be enterprising.

Maybe they even have a moat or regulatory capture which they want to defend and they don't want to share everything with their competition.

They can be helpful and give advice if they want, but they don't share all the details.

Just by using and accepting Bitcoin they are helping to increase the network effect of Bitcoin and its adoption.

Maybe the “speculative philanthropy” that Krawisz speaks of can be reimagined as such businesses, who having made their own success in their own field, share Bitcoin with others, maybe they donate to Bitcoin open source projects and support the network as a whole and contribute to the Bitcoin commons as they see fit.

Perhaps at a high level we can consider ourselves all part of the startup that is Bitcoin? We spend a bit of our free time working on it, but our main job is still what is putting food on the table.

Our equity is the Bitcoin that we have, and our dividends are the increase in the purchasing power we get over time as Bitcoin monetises into the world’s future money.

Now of course the work of open source collaborative projects is incredibly important and the question of open source business model and entrepreneurial strategies is a ongoing one that people have different thoughts on.

In terms of “bitcoin businesses” though maybe in the long run there are just businesses run by bitcoiners. Delivering good products and services and solving problems for people.

But one of the problems they wont have to solve is money, because Bitcoin fixes this.

What do you think?

I am keen to hear what you think. Maybe there is others ways of looking at this or nuance that I might of missed. I am always keen to hear new thoughts and perspectives.

Send me a message and I will get back to you.