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What we're learning.
What makes Bitcoin different from the rest of crypto — and notes from building Bitcoin-native companies: validation, regulation, unit economics, and the occasional dead end.
- Utility isn't a monetary premium: smart contracts, XRP, and what money needs Smart-contract platforms are genuinely useful — but useful and 'good money' are different things. Utility is measured in volume and speed; a monetary premium rests on predictable supply, low governance risk, and a small attack surface. XRP is the sharpest illustration of the gap.
- How proof-of-work secures Bitcoin (and what it would cost to break it) Bitcoin's security comes from energy: rewriting its history means out-spending the entire honest mining network on hardware and electricity, every block, forever. Here's how proof-of-work works, what a 51% attack would actually cost, and why the energy is the point.
- Proof-of-stake vs proof-of-work for money: why Bitcoiners won't switch Proof-of-stake is far more energy-efficient — so why does Bitcoin keep proof-of-work? Because for money, the energy is the security. Weak subjectivity, staking concentration, and a yield that looks like interest are why the trade-off doesn't hold for a monetary base.
- Who controls Bitcoin? Governance, the Knots–Core debate, and forks No one controls Bitcoin. Changes happen through rough consensus among node operators, not a committee vote — and Bitcoin has only ever reversed transactions to fix bugs, never to undo theft or enforce policy. Here's how that works, and how it differs from Ethereum.
- Fixed supply vs flexible monetary policy: why Bitcoin's cap holds Bitcoin's 21 million cap is real — but the deeper point is that it has never been changed and effectively can't be. Most other crypto can adjust issuance through governance. For savers and builders, that difference is everything.
- Bitcoin is quietly becoming a settlement network Bitcoin's base layer is slow by design — but Lightning, Spark, and Ark turn it into a settlement network that clears payments in seconds without trusting any single company.
- What makes Bitcoin different from other crypto Bitcoin vs other crypto isn't about technology — it's about trust architecture. A builder's framework for telling sound digital money apart, plus an 8-question evaluation toolkit.
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