Bednar makes a neat comparison between the way that entrepreneurs achieve success and Bitcoin:

most successful entrepreneurs don’t escape competition by getting better at competing. They escape it by stepping sideways into territory where the competitive frame doesn’t apply at all.

He references an author who calls the new territories "Free Zones" and suggests that Bitcoin was exactly such a maneuver. Bitcoin isn't trying to be a better bank than the banks or better credit card than visa, it's doing something new that JP Morgan and Visa didn't even recognize as competition.

However, it doesn't stay that way:

every Free Zone has an expiry date. “A newly discovered, uncontested area, a Free Zone, only stays new for so long before it becomes the new normal and fills up with numerous people.” The moment the zone is recognized, rules get written, competitors pour in, and the freedom decreases. This is already happening. Bitcoin is being absorbed. MiCA exists. Exchange KYC is universal. The zone that was free in 2009 is not free in 2026.

And so Bednar suggests that Bitcoin finds most success when we are always in this gray area.

The parallel polis is not one zone. It is the discipline of always creating the next one, faster than regulators can close the last one.

His final point is that such creativity often requires collaboration with other groups. Bitcoiners need to be a weird group of people with lots of odd interests and goals:

Homogeneous communities produce incremental improvements. Heterogeneous collaborations across different 10x capabilities produce things that don’t fit any box.

It's interesting to think about which industries/interest groups would make the best targets for collaboration.