A MIXED BLESSING: RESILIENCE IN THE ENTREPRENEURIAL SOCIO-TECHNICAL SYSTEM OF BITCOIN

ABSTRACT Studies of resilience highlight the tension between actions that allow a firm — and a system — to be robust and those that allows it to be flexible. Studies suggest that an entrepreneurial firm will prioritize flexibility, given resource constraints. However, what occurs when a number of firms are embedded in a common socio-technical system and an extreme event affects them collectively? This paper tests whether existing theory about resilience predicts the responses of entrepreneurs in such a system, with reference to an extreme event in the Bitcoin socio-technical system: the mu...