Why Bitcoin-only, still
After a decade in the industry, why I keep narrowing rather than broadening.
Periodically someone asks me, usually politely, why I haven't broadened. The crypto industry is bigger than it has ever been. There is genuine, durable work to be done across many assets and many use cases. Why stay so narrow?
The honest answer is that I find Bitcoin more interesting the longer I spend with it, not less. And that the parts of the broader industry that have stayed interesting to me are mostly the parts that look most like Bitcoin: open, durable, indifferent to fashion.
The case for narrowing
There is a particular shape of expertise that only comes from depth. A lawyer who has reviewed two hundred crypto custody arrangements develops an intuition that a generalist cannot replicate. Not because the generalist is less capable, but because intuition is the residue of repetition.
I have made my career around the assumption that Bitcoin specifically, and the businesses that touch it, will continue to produce enough work for that kind of depth to be useful. So far that has held.
What "Bitcoin-only" actually means in practice
In advisory practice, "Bitcoin-only" doesn't mean ignoring everything else. It means:
- I work with operators whose business is Bitcoin-native: exchanges, custodians, payment processors, treasury operations.
- I will read multi-asset paperwork when a client needs me to, but I don't claim to be the deepest expert outside Bitcoin's frame.
- I refuse work that requires me to advocate for things I don't believe (token launches I think are unsound, structures designed to evade meaningful regulation, business models that depend on customer naïveté).
That last filter narrows the addressable market considerably. It also makes the remaining work better, and easier to take seriously over a career rather than a cycle.
The longer view
I think the Bitcoin industry, ten years from now, will look less like the broader crypto industry of today and more like a parallel financial sector: smaller in headcount than it sometimes claims to be, denser in talent than people realise, and structurally important to the system whether the system likes it or not.
That's the bet. If it's right, depth pays. If it's wrong, I'll have spent my career in good company anyway.