What Five Years of Crypto Taught Me About Bitcoin

I work in the crypto self-custody space. I came into crypto in 2021 not as a Bitcoiner but as a builder. Three different chains were solving the same problem with three different architectures, and I wanted to know why. UTXO vs account model. Native vs contract-based assets. Proof-of-work vs proof-of-stake. From first principles. So I built things on all three.

This is the arc from that starting point to a 19-chapter Bitcoin book written for Swiss readers.

TL;DR

I founded Bicatalyst GmbH in March 2021 and went straight into multi-chain crypto as a builder. I worked on Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Cardano in parallel. I ran two Cardano stake pools that earned Cardano Foundation delegation totalling 14 million ADA. I wrote Solidity smart contracts. I shipped production tools, including an on-chain analysis platform and a 25-agent AI orchestration system. In May 2024 I joined a Swiss FINMA-regulated crypto firm as Product Owner. By 2026 five years of notes, code, and operator experience had become Bitcoin: Zero to Hero, a 19-chapter book written for Swiss readers.

Why I started in crypto not in Bitcoin

I founded Bicatalyst GmbH in March 2021 as an independent software engineering company. I had been building software since 2010 across enterprise and product roles. Price action did not pull me into crypto. A technical question did: why were three networks solving digital value transfer with such different models?

Bitcoin's UTXO model treats every coin as a discrete object with a spending condition attached. Ethereum's account model treats the chain as a global state machine. Cardano extended the UTXO model with programmability while keeping the unspent-output primitive intact. These are not cosmetic differences. They shape what you can build, how you reason about transaction privacy, how fees work, and what a validator does.

I could not answer those questions by reading summaries. I had to build.

What Bitcoin Ethereum and Cardano taught me side by side

I spent 2021 and 2022 reading whitepapers, running nodes, and writing code across all three chains at once. Read the Bitcoin whitepaper, then the Ethereum whitepaper back to back. The dissonance is productive. Satoshi's design is almost aggressively minimal. Vitalik's is almost aggressively expressive. Neither is wrong. They optimise for different things.

Writing Solidity on Ethereum taught me what smart-contract expressiveness costs: complexity, surface area for bugs, and a dependency on the contract layer for any asset behaviour. Cardano's native asset model puts fungible tokens at the protocol level with no contract needed to transfer them. That felt closer to Bitcoin's philosophy than Ethereum's, even though Cardano is a PoS chain with programmable UTXOs.

Running Bitcoin nodes alongside Cardano nodes while writing Solidity contracts gave me the context I most needed when I sat down to write a Bitcoin book. I was not converting from another chain. I was comparing three live systems from inside all three at once.

That comparison made Bitcoin's deliberate conservatism legible as a feature, not a limitation. Each chain's design decisions optimise for different properties. Bitcoin's protocol minimalism, fixed supply, and proof-of-work settlement deserve a clear explanation for a Swiss reader. The book is that explanation.

Running a Cardano stake pool

In July 2022 the Cardano Foundation selected my stake pool CCYT for delegation. In April 2023 my second pool PRO was also selected. Across both pools the cumulative Foundation delegation reached 14 million ADA.

Running a stake pool is the closest non-mining equivalent to being a Bitcoin miner in terms of what you learn. You set up nodes, manage keys, monitor epoch boundaries, track slot leadership, handle upgrades, and watch reward equations in real time. You learn proof-of-stake by operating inside it, not by reading about it.

The lesson from pool operation: consensus mechanisms are about incentive structures and validator economics, not just cryptographic primitives. Bitcoin's proof-of-work is expensive by design. Cardano's Ouroboros is cheap by design. Both choices have second-order effects you only see when you are close enough to the system.

That operator experience shaped the technical deep-dive chapter, which covers Bitcoin mining and consensus from first principles rather than from analogy.

What I built along the way

The three years from 2021 to 2024 produced production tools, not toy projects.

Profiler was a Cardano on-chain analysis platform. Stack: Next.js, Hasura, Postgres, Prisma. It consumed on-chain transaction data and exposed it in a queryable format for pool analytics. Building it forced a deep grasp of the extended UTXO model at the data layer: every unspent output a row, every spending transaction a graph edge.

Smart Flow was a WordPress plugin for Solidity smart contract operations. Stack: Hardhat, OpenZeppelin. It let non-developer users interact with deployed contracts through a familiar CMS interface. Building it meant writing production Solidity, debugging Hardhat deployments, and learning how contract ABI encoding works at the byte level.

Foreman is a 25-agent AI orchestration platform. Stack: CrewAI, Celery, Redis, Postgres, Kubernetes, MCP servers, RAG with pgvector and OpenSearch. It coordinates specialised agents across long-running research and analysis tasks. I was building Foreman while writing the Bitcoin book, which meant I used AI as a research tool while I built AI infrastructure. That gave me a clear view of where LLMs help and where they need verification against primary sources.

BTC2H is this site, the book's online home. Stack: Next.js, Zustand, Tailwind. Building the delivery platform for the book closed the loop from builder to author.

The Swiss regulated crypto firm I joined in May 2024

In May 2024 I joined a Swiss FINMA-regulated crypto firm as Product Owner. I will not name the firm here.

That role added something independent research could not provide: direct exposure to what Swiss clients ask about Bitcoin when they work with a regulated institution. These are not the questions Bitcoin Twitter debates. Swiss professionals ask about tax reporting obligations, what happens to their holdings if an exchange fails, whether a Bitcoin ETP on SIX carries counterparty risk, how inheritance planning works when the asset sits on a hardware wallet.

Those questions are why the Swiss Bitcoin tax chapter goes as deep as it does, and why the inheritance chapter treats the legal context head-on instead of gesturing at it.

I am not attributing industry expertise to my employer. The book reflects five years of independent research, building, and operator experience that came before the role. The role added Swiss-client context. The content is mine.

What I got wrong about Bitcoin specifically

Building across three chains did not protect me from Bitcoin-specific conceptual errors. These took real time to correct.

UTXOs. I modelled Bitcoin like a bank account for months. You have a balance, you send some, the balance drops. The actual model is nothing like that. Bitcoin tracks unspent transaction outputs. When you spend, you consume one or more UTXOs in full and create new ones, including change back to yourself. Once that clicked, fee calculation, coin selection, and privacy analysis all became legible.

Privacy risk. I assumed pseudonymous addresses meant reasonable privacy. They do not. Once a KYC exchange links even one address to your identity, chain analysis can trace the transaction graph forward and backward from that anchor. The privacy chapter exists because I learned this by working through real transaction graphs, not by reading a warning.

Address types. P2PKH, P2SH, P2WPKH, P2TR looked like alphabet soup until I traced through how each script locks and unlocks coins. The differences matter for wallet compatibility, fee calculation, and Taproot's privacy model. That breakdown sits in the technical deep dive.

Seed-phrase discipline. I underestimated what a single point of failure means in practice. A seed phrase is not a password you can reset. It is the only recovery path. Lose it or expose it and you have no recourse. The wallets and security chapter goes into backup strategies because this is where carelessness costs most.

Why Swiss readers need Swiss Bitcoin material

Most Bitcoin books target American readers. Tax guidance assumes IRS rules. Exchange recommendations point at US platforms. Regulatory context references the SEC. None of that helps a Swiss holder filing a Steuererklärung.

Switzerland's Bitcoin environment is specific and unusually favourable in places:

Zero capital-gains tax for private investors. Switzerland taxes Bitcoin gains for private holders at 0%. Most jurisdictions do not. But the professional-trader test can reclassify gains as income, with a rate up to 40%. The line matters. The tax guide covers the test in detail.

FINMA-regulated platforms. Swiss residents have access to FINMA-supervised crypto firms and CHF-native exchanges like Relai and Pocket. What FINMA supervision actually means for counterparty risk and deposit protection does not show up in books written for other markets.

CARF 2027 reporting. The Crypto Asset Reporting Framework hits Switzerland in 2027. Swiss holders who have not tracked their transaction history will hit problems that do not exist for most of them today.

Inheritance law. Swiss compulsory heirship rules give your heirs legal rights to your estate. Those rights are meaningless if your Bitcoin sits on a hardware wallet and nobody knows the seed phrase. The inheritance chapter treats this as a Swiss legal problem, not a generic security tip.

For readers curious about how Bitcoin meets newer territory, the Ordinals and inscriptions post and the Bitcoin ETF chapter cover ground that generic books from two years ago miss.

Where to start your own journey

If I could go back to 2021 and give myself one piece of advice: start with how transactions work, not with why Bitcoin matters. The "why" gets much clearer once you understand the "how" at a mechanical level.

Read one chapter. If something clicks that did not click before, read the next one. If it does not land, this book is not for you, and that is fine.

The whole book takes about 90 minutes. One train ride from Zurich to Bern.

The best starting point is the basics chapter, which covers what Bitcoin is at the protocol level before touching any investment or custody question. From there the self-custody guide and the BIP39 security post give you the practical layer on top of the conceptual foundation.

Ready to start? Read Chapter 1, it takes 8 minutes. Or download the free PDF.