> The only problem here is that coffee is a commodity, not a startup. Anyone can grow it and sell it. The better comparison is to oil. Oil is a commodity, in

> The only problem here is that coffee is a commodity, not a startup. Anyone can grow it and sell it. The better comparison is to oil. Oil is a commodity, in that anyone can buy it and sell it: but there is a fixed amount of it, and one can only acquire oil by taking oil from the fixed supply. Further, the earlier you got into oil, the more money you made, and the same is true of Bitcoin: the authors have made out to the tune of [100M or more](http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/ http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fo...) simply by being the first miners. So I don't know exactly what kind of definition you want to use for "startup", but bitcoin is certainly software, that was written by a small team of people, that solves a problem, that has made the authors wealthy in a very short amount of time. If someone like Rockefeller started out today, I think we would probably characterize his operation as a "startup", and the founders of Bitcoin are doing much the same thing that he did.