Bitcoin is hard. Hard money, yes, but also hard to find consensus and the people in your corner.

I often hear people refer to Bitcoiners as being tribal. While I’m proud to count myself a member of that tribe, they don’t mean a fun club; they mean a difficult and provocative group of people who won’t bend on an argument that threatens their core beliefs. (Any altcoin shiller can attest!)

Store-of-value believers don’t care about other protocols because there is nothing to learn about not moving. While hodlers may not need other chains, Bitcoin itself is still competing for attention against the AI trade, debasement trade and paper bitcoin.

Newcomers are dismissing Bitcoin as being ‘expensive’ while filling their wallets with the tenth or one-hundredth coin on the crypto market cap table. Paper altcoins, ETFs/ETPs and perps continue to turn the prospective Bitcoiner into a casino junkie.

Medium-of-exchange rails are out in the wild competing for speed, cost and position. As I explored in recent articles, these are not global solutions, but driven by local use cases and subject to compromises.

Capital providers (to borrowers) and allocators (for investors) are emerging participants where products often become commoditized and product fit hangs on reputation, margins and UX.

‘What type of Bitcoiner are you?’ is a question I get a lot – directly and indirectly – and trying to please every faction of the tribe leads to paralysis and the risk of nothing being built.

To answer the question: I am store-of-value by conviction, medium-of-exchange by trade, and thinking hard about the capital layer.

The playing field today is different to the early days: the OGs still set the rules, but the newcomers – whether retail, family office or institutional buyers – bring the volume.

Bitcoiners are great and the most rigorous checkers I know. Consider BIP-110 and the divisions it created between many public OGs. A fight three years in the making yet miner support peaked at 2.53% against a 55% threshold, every signalling block came from a single pool and the enforcing chain managed two blocks before stopping.

Bitcoiners will scrutinize whatever is named and contested, which is why BIP-110 died while an unnamed flaw sat in Coinkite’s code for five years.

Don’t expect grace and do expect things to get tribal.

It may not be what you expected, or even wanted, but ignoring the results of builders going a different direction – inside Bitcoin and in other ecosystems – is a decision with a nonzero cost of ignorance.

Visa, Mastercard and BlackRock are inaugural validators on Circle’s Arc, and Nasdaq, Goldman and BNP Paribas are lining up behind Canton – permissioned chains with real money attached¹.

Despite all these headwinds, I’m more optimistic than ever. The groundwork is being laid for the future financial system and I see my duty as ensuring that Bitcoin captures as much of that as possible.

Find the people whose redlines match yours and build with them, because the tribe will argue either way.

So, where are my builders?

1. https://fortune.com/2026/09/21/corporate-blockchain-wars-circle-arc-launch-canton-tempo-avalanche-robinhood-base-chain-wall-street/ ↩︎

I wrote recently about getting Bitcoin (and Bitcoin products) into the hands of as many people as possible. I was talking through a product lens – the slow orange pill still has its place! – as there is too much at stake with tradfi players increasingly gaining market share with Bitcoin being offered alongside ‘comparable’ yet centralized alternatives.

How then should we build products that gain traction and appeal to local users, whilst staying true to first principles as Bitcoin companies?

Everyone claims purity, everyone ships compromises. And the dangerous ones are the ones we cannot see.

Take the recent Coldcard debacle as an example. 

Whilst other hardware wallet makers made visible trade-off decisions between security, privacy and usability, many Bitcoiners evangelized Coinkite (the maker of Coldcard) as a pure Bitcoin hardware wallet.

Yet, ultimately a Coinkite flaw led to the largest hardware wallet exploit in history¹. Coldcard ultimately became untrustworthy in a space where nobody was paying attention; the seeds were weak from the moment of creation while everyone admired the story.

So, if trust is going to enter the equation anyway, what rules can we bend and where should we not compromise in building a ‘pure’ Bitcoin product? It’s easy to find examples where this went wrong and user trust – tenuous at the best of times – dissolved overnight, but companies that are doing it right double down on their verifiable decision-making.

One such company, Strike, has evolved from a revolutionary payment app to a serious multi-faceted Bitcoin-only company. They want users to buy, hold, spend and borrow against their stack so their redline is no rehypothecation.

When ambiguous language in their T&Cs surfaced on X, Strike’s CEO, Jack Mallers, responded within hours that the team was on it, and within days, the fuzzy language was gone². Ownership for the mistake. Fixed immediately.

Strike has subsequently continued to pioneer institutional transparency with segregated collateral addresses that large clients can verify on-chain, a first lending proof-of-reserves and quarterly external attestations³.

Lightspark has also expanded at a rapid pace. Lightning by name and lightning by nature! In order to elevate itself above the known challenges of scaling Lightning, it compromised by establishing its own statechain-inspired Bitcoin L2 protocol, Spark. Users take some counterparty risk on a small operator set, but gain access to a simplified UX that most tradfi operators and neobanks are willing to adopt.

The key ingredient here is the non-negotiable feature that Lightspark engineered into the protocol from the outset: the user always holds a key and can exit without interacting with other parties⁴. Unilateral exit. No strings attached.

Lightspark has partnered with major players including Coinbase, Nubank and SoFi since inception.

Both companies are scaling globally and being crystal clear about their values, and their compromises are named and verifiable, giving users, partners and investors confidence they do what they say.

That’s the test I keep coming back to: a compromise is survivable when it’s named – so the community knows what to verify – and you as a user can walk away from it. Coldcard failed both. The flaw sat in open-source code for five years, verifiable the whole time yet verified by no one. Open source is permission to verify, not proof that anyone has.

I feel for Coinkite. I wanted their product to work so bad. But their error highlights that compromising on the value that underpins their entire selling point will eventually ruin you.

1. A firmware flaw from a March 2021 commit routed seed generation through a weak software RNG instead of the hardware entropy source, and attackers drained roughly 1,816 BTC (~$116M+) from over 5,200 addresses. ↩︎
2. Jack Mallers on X: x.com/jackmallers/status/1922036776631177244 ↩︎
3. Strike’s proof-of-reserve FAQ: strike.me/en/faq/where-is-my-bitcoin-collateral-held/ ↩︎
4. Spark’s unilateral exit announcement: lightspark.com/news/spark/unilateral-exit ↩︎

Bitcoin promised decentralization and global reach. With 17+ years of history and its long-term survival no longer in doubt, what does on the ground adoption look like and can anyone truly offer a global Bitcoin product?

For self-custody wallet builders the answer is probably yes, but most Bitcoiners are looking for broader utility – and that depends a lot more on where the end user is located.

In short, the ideal customer profile looks very different for someone living in New York City compared to Buenos Aires.

Consider the use case of someone in both those locations looking to borrow against their bitcoin (a use case I think about a lot given my background). The New York borrower is more likely to draw against their stack to buy more bitcoin or fund a venture; the Buenos Aires borrower draws to pay rent in a collapsing currency.

The same product (ie. a Bitcoin loan) will land very differently in those two locations. I would argue that you get to a similar outcome for payments and ‘yield’ use cases.

Layer on top local regulation (hello KYC and AML compliance for US/EU lenders) and switching costs (how difficult is it to send money using tradfi rails or earn a few percent on your balance today) in those jurisdictions, and the question of where funds are flowing inevitably leads to where the end user is located.

Returning to Bitcoin lending specifically (I will explore the payments and yield use cases in another article) it is therefore prudent to address TAM, SAM and SOM on a continental and country level.

This is especially important for a startup with early signs of product-market fit looking to raise funds with a cohesive expansion plan, but even the big established operators have had to consider this carefully.

Ledn is currently migrating its US customers to a new US-compliant entity¹. Strike’s lending product – on the other hand – was built for US borrowers and is ahead of Ledn in that market, but arguably the roles are reversed in Europe. (And both companies release features at the state level in the US – geography shapes the product even within one country.)

I recognize that getting your product into the hands of as many people as quickly as possible is a must-win race. Winning it always hangs on a solid GTM strategy that is location-specific.

I speak with companies and founders about exactly this, and the first question is always where the customers are. Because a great product with poor GTM will always underperform a worse product with a better localized strategy.

Bitcoin gave us the opportunity to build products with truly global reach. But to beat the tradfi incumbents, remember: while capital may be borderless, the product strategy never is.

^1. https://help.ledn.io/hc/en-us/articles/42963758834711-Ledn-US-What-Clients-Need-to-Know

AI is quietly dissolving the walls between company functions. Sales can write product specs. Developers speak fluent “commercial-ese.” Everyone’s more empowered, more informed, more capable. So who’s actually steering the ship?

A thought piece by a product peer¹ fueled my thinking here. They describe scenarios where the decision owner is fuzzy and product debt quietly builds up, often without anyone realizing it.

Winding back a notch, my interpretation of coherence is how you get a company aligned behind a mission, with everyone pulling in the same direction.

Pre-AI, the product function was key to leading that coherence – specifically owning product-market fit and managing the interactions between the business and engineering functions. In the AI era – certainly in tech-driven companies – those functions are no longer as siloed as they used to be.

The sales function is no longer purely commercial. They’re increasingly proficient at shaping their ideas, creating business requirement documents and doing a lot of the work (at least on the face of it) that a product manager or CPO used to. I’m no longer getting one-sentence ideas and a screenshot, but thought-out requirements and case studies as a starting point.

The same is happening on the engineering side. Developers are more capable of understanding how the business operates and speaking in a way that’s coherent to the commercial side. AI is powering this mutual understanding the same way real-time translation broke down language barriers.

Probably – in both cases – new hires will be increasingly geared towards those personality types as well, accelerating the trend. So, we have less siloed functions and people much closer together in the stories they’re telling. Everyone feels more informed, better educated, and more empowered to contribute to overall strategy.

But, if everyone’s a peer, two questions emerge: Who drives the unified mission? And what does the product function do in that world?

In my current role, this broader shift met a specific moment. We had moved through earlier phases – getting the tech stack scalable, then nailing product-market fit – and were beginning to scale toward enterprise partnerships. That scaling exposed something our existing model couldn’t absorb: end-to-end accountability for the customer and partner experience was diffused across teams, and what worked at current scale would break at enterprise volumes.

A product leader has always been a bridge between functions, but in advisory or facilitating modes. What changed was the shift from coordinating decisions to owning them – from consensus to single-threaded accountability. Nearly a decade of leading product had given me context across commercial, engineering, risk and finance, so I moved to work directly with our CRO on customer experience and partnership readiness as our core operating priority.

My new mandate: optimize every decision for quality revenue and customer experience.

To accelerate that goal, I embedded myself across the full customer journey – the operational UX, the internal metrics, the competitive landscape. Not curated summaries passed up from customer-facing leads, but direct exposure to every friction and dropoff, so the trade-offs land with someone who can actually resolve them.

That’s the real shift. Those tough trade-off decisions that sat unresolved – or even unspoken – in middle management layers are now surfaced and can be acted on by someone with the cross-functional reach, time and CEO sponsorship to move quickly.

The early returns are tangible: wins in UI and GTM strategy (incorporating AI to attract attention and respond faster), plus longer-term projects to overhaul our onboarding UX and rewire how we pitch and win embedded partnerships.

So, how does this address fuzzy ownership? My hypothesis is that the CPO – and the broader product function – needs to evolve and take the lead in driving coherence.

Conversations with product peers show me we’re all feeling this pull (or push, if you’re not leaning into it). The smarter ones are concluding that the product function isn’t dead; it’s becoming the coherence function.

It’s still early days, and I’m learning as I go. But if I’m right, the best product leaders won’t be managing roadmaps – they’ll be the connective tissue holding the whole mission together. Let’s see if it holds.

^1. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-product-economics-engin-erdogan-txwje

I’m experimenting with short form articles here and on socials. Check out https://linktr.ee/davidrolls

The DAT premium party is mostly over. Since the November 2024 peak, over $60B has been wiped from DAT market caps. Nakamoto’s stock price crashed ~98%, now trading at a double digit discount below net asset value – the biggest failure to date. The market learned the hard way that holding someone else’s BTC isn’t worth a premium unless they’re doing something exceptional.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. Strategy’s (MSTR) capital innovation and XXI’s ecosystem investments still justify their valuations IMO. MSTR gives retail and institutional investors an “easy” path to discover Bitcoin, offering a range of instruments including yield. XXI has a worthy mission to be a full-fledged Bitcoin ecosystem. They’re worth a dabble with speculative capital, but don’t bet they’ll outperform just hodling BTC.

Beyond DATs, there’s a deeper problem: companies have failed to demonstrate that value flows back to L1s predictably. Lightning infrastructure is winning, but does routing revenue accrue to BTC holders? DeFi protocols move billions, yet LINK – the backbone oracle – has a chart that looks terrible despite obvious utility. At ETHDenver a few years ago I heard founders openly ask “Why do I need to pay Vitalik!?” They’re capturing value at their layer, not the base.

I’ve made these mistakes myself. Chased SUI (selling my SOL stack) thinking I was early on a better L1. Rotated my ETH bag into Bored Apes thinking blue-chip NFTs were the play. Still holding both – what I thought were quick wins turned into multi-year bags. Lost not just in dollars, but in BTC terms. The opportunity cost of not just stacking kills you twice.

So here’s where I’ve landed: My core holdings stay in BTC. Accept I’ll never have enough. Try to buy the dips. We’re still early.

But I’m not sitting out entirely. My speculative capital goes to the handful of companies I believe are genuinely strengthening Bitcoin’s L1 – not just building on it, but making Bitcoin itself more valuable and inevitable.

Bitwise is building the on-ramp infrastructure. Millions of retail investors get exposure through their funds. BTC remains their biggest AUM for a reason. Long game, but essential as adoption accelerates.

Voltage is tackling Lightning GTM better than anyone. If anyone can deliver a true Bitcoin L2 that works, it’s them. The ambition is there, and getting it right means BTC becomes a more usable medium of exchange.

Fold took a beating but made smart long-term choices – strengthened their cap structure, kept shipping their credit card, has multiple irons in the fire. They’re thinking in years, not quarters, and bring daily BTC utility to the masses.

The bar is higher now. We’re still building the plane while flying it, but I’ve never been more optimistic about Bitcoin’s future. There are no guarantees, of course. But, if you’re going to invest beyond pure HODLing, back the companies that make Bitcoin better, not just their own treasuries fatter.

I’m experimenting with short form articles here and on socials. Check out https://linktr.ee/davidrolls

This has been in my drafts for months and – somewhat depressingly – the topic is still around today. The thinking is that the economy moves in four year cycles and, perhaps more relevantly, Bitcoin price does too. We got our Q4 crash and bitcoin dipped ~50% with fear levels having been close to historic lows, and now we’re grinding or ranging depending on your viewpoint.

For four year cycle veterans this represents the “proof” that the cycle has ended and we are now in bear territory for months to come. For non four year cycle enthusiasts – aka “this time it’s different” bros – there are a dozen reasons for this blip and bitcoin is about to moon on a wave of liquidity the likes of which the developed world has never seen before.

So, who is correct, and does it really matter?

There is a real possibility both camps will be “right”. And, as the saying goes, everyone will get their bitcoin at the price they deserve.

Here’s what matters: from degen traders to Wall St, everyone’s trying to time the perfect entry. An investing framework might work for stocks or bonds, but bitcoin doesn’t care about your cycle theory. The opportunity isn’t in timing – it’s in not missing the accumulation window entirely.

The best time to buy the scarcest and hardest money ever invented was yesterday; the next best time is today. DCA if you need to smooth the entry, but don’t paper hand the opportunity to be early by waiting for a dip that may never come.

I’m experimenting with short form articles here and on socials. Check out https://linktr.ee/davidrolls

I used to think optionality (the ability to keep as many options available as possible) was a unique strength of mine.

This made me aloof and evasive on my position on many topics. The fear of offending somebody (and burning bridges) was real, and to some extent made sense when I was the least knowledgeable person in the room.

Once I had knowledge, however, an optionality preference meant that I was never convicted in my beliefs or actions. This made it easy to change my mind, but also eroded trust with people (professionally and personally) looking for decisiveness and reassurance.

The ability to change your mind is sacrosanct. The inability to make up your mind is cancerous.

Once I recognized this pattern in myself, I started seeing it everywhere. In leaders who hedge every decision through endless internal debate. In people (myself included) who stay quiet about their personal goals for fear of commitment or judgment. Preserving optionality feels safe, but it’s a slow leak of momentum and trust.

These days, I strive to lead with conviction and have confidence in my beliefs and actions until such time as new evidence presents itself. 

This has created a snowball effect with my career, personal interests (focus on Bitcoin-led projects) and fitness goals (shredding and lifting my own body weight) where conviction builds on conviction and accelerates growth.

Being convicted also means saying no a lot of the time. A quick no – with a rational explanation – is way more effective most of the time than a long deliberation to preserve optionality.

Less time making decisions means more time working and building on what matters most.

Still a work in progress. I will change my mind a lot!

I’m experimenting with short form articles here and on socials. Check out https://linktr.ee/davidrolls

• Bitcoin gave us a unique opportunity to think about things on a truly global, decentralized scale.
• Most humans have some form of bias based on their geography and direct use case. Americans and Europeans (on the whole) are not bothered enough about debasement and payment frictions to care about crypto.
• Bitcoin has found a more captive audience as a store of value and medium of exchange in countries with rampant inflation and capital controls. Think Venezuela, Turkey, etc. It is the ultimate form of currency that is independent of governments and institutions.
• Emerging markets set the trend and developed markets follow. This is the reverse adoption curve for almost all existing products. As someone with experience developing global products it is still counterintuitive to establish PMF in small developing markets.
• Stablecoins (I hope running on Bitcoin rails) are the first large (yet boring) use case that could be truly global in adoption. Most users care about being 24/7, fast and inexpensive more than they do about immutability, decentralization and security.
• The more developed a market the more this is true.
• Product builders need to make the case for the real benefits of blockchain technology (or not).

Personally, I care about the philosophy of Bitcoin, but there will be periods where getting a product into as many hands as possible is more important 📈

I’m experimenting with short form articles here and on socials. Check out https://linktr.ee/davidrolls

• Current quantum tech can’t even crack factor-15 problems, let alone SHA-256. We’re talking orders of magnitude away.
• The “secret quantum computer” theory doesn’t hold up. Given the public $Bs in quantum R&D, a similar shadow program would be nearly impossible to hide.
• Here’s the kicker: Bitcoin devs aren’t quantum experts. BIPs are in progress, but nobody knows the real timeline or threat level.
• Game theory matters too: even IF quantum breaks crypto, why target Bitcoin first? There are bigger fish (banking, military, etc). You’d get one shot before defenses mobilize.

The takeaway: Quantum concerns are real but years away. Bitdevs are moving deliberately, not panicking. Most current “quantum will kill Bitcoin” takes are FUD.

Nobody knows for certain. Stay informed, not anxious.