Based on a talk I gave to the Bitcoin Beach Grants network this week.
After five years working on Blink (formerly Bitcoin Beach Wallet), organizing Adopting Bitcoin, and now leading OpenMMLN, I've watched dozens of circular economies launch. The ones that stalled almost always imposed a rigid ideological template on a community that didn't fit it.
The article covers five spectrums that every circular economy builder has to navigate:
- Custodial <> Self-Custodial -- start with the bus, graduate to the car
- Spending <> Saving -- savings may be more revolutionary than spending (contrarian, I know)
- Open Source <> Closed Source -- if you can't read the code, it's malware
- Technical <> Non-Technical -- design for the least technical, empower the most technical
- Push <> Pull -- be a beacon, not a lecturer
Plus: why AI means every community builder should be writing their own software now.
So much practical wisdom here! Thank you!
This should be required reading for anyone starting a Bitcoin circular economy.
If it were only that easy
The ideological-template point resonates. From the LN operator side I'd add a hidden spectrum: settlement node topology.
Communities that onboard via custodial (Blink, Wallet of Satoshi) skip the cliff — but eventual self-custody migration is where churn spikes. Communities that start non-custodial face channel-management as the retention killer; merchants don't rage-quit because of UX, they quit when liquidity goes unidirectional and rebalancing costs eat margin.
The teams that survived seem to run a hybrid: custodial wallet for end-users + one community-run LSP handling inbound liquidity via splicing. OpenMMLN's direction aligned?