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- [00:00]
Podcast Host / Narrator
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Samson Mao
I can't stop scratching my downtown. Yeah, but I'm not itching to go downtown and tell a receptionist I'm here to talk about my downtown. Some things you'd rather type than say out loud.
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Samson Mao
He's at the edge of the box.
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Samson Mao
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Jake (Interviewer)
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Samson Mao
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- [02:06]
Samson Mao
My stance is I should not have to worry about your thing. Like you can go do whatever you want. I'm not forking off with you guys. I largely agree with 110 ideas to limit data. I disagree with the execution and tactics used to push it.
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Jake (Interviewer)
Is it the right frame to call it a change? If they're saying we want to go back to what we were doing before,
- [02:28]
Samson Mao
but it's not the 110 fork changes a lot of other things, too. Control from all sides, core included. The core camp is not without fault here. It takes two hands to clap.
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Jake (Interviewer)
You feel like bip110 is doomed to fail, basically, or like you don't think it's going to actually work. Why is that?
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Samson Mao
Emotions are running high right now, but this is not consensus. It can't fly otherwise. The barrier to attack bitcoin is so low.
- [02:55]
Jake (Interviewer)
Samson Mao, welcome to the show.
- [02:57]
Samson Mao
Thanks, Jake. Great to be on.
- [02:59]
Jake (Interviewer)
Yeah. Great to have you today. I'm excited for this conversation. For those who don't know you, you are the founder and CEO of Jan3, whose flagship product is the Aqua Wallet. You're also working with Jimmy Song on a nonprofit called Production Ready, which is a really interesting development to me. In the bitcoin space right now, you guys are working to fund the creation of a third bitcoin node software implementation, and you're looking to provide an alternative to Core and Knots, and you're sort of focused on maintaining a conservative node implementation. Not focused on, let's add all this new functionality to bitcoin, more leaning towards let's keep things conservative, essentially, which makes a lot of sense to me. Your career background includes serving as Chief Strategy Officer of blockstream, which was interesting. I learned that doing research for this. When was that? That you were working there?
- [04:00]
Samson Mao
Well, that's a while ago. I think it was 2017 to 2022 or 21, something like that. It was a while.
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Jake (Interviewer)
Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [04:09]
Podcast Host / Narrator
Cool.
- [04:10]
Jake (Interviewer)
Before that, COO of btcc. So you were working on a bitcoin exchange and mining pool and you had a video game development studio before that as well, that you founded?
- [04:21]
Samson Mao
Yep, I still have it. Pixelmatic, still running.
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Jake (Interviewer)
Okay, Very cool. Very cool. Yeah, maybe we'll get to that at the end of the conversation. First things first. I thought since the core versus knots bip110 conversation is so spicy, we could start there. You're working on this third node implementation with Jimmy, and I wonder first if you could start by summarizing bip110. Like, what is going on there with the core versus not side of things? And do you have a specific take on the matter? Would you like to remain neutral as a. As a third party in this? Yeah, I wonder where you stand on. On all of that right now.
- [05:00]
Samson Mao
Yeah, well, there's no end to spicy things these days. There's a lot of spiciness going around all over both sides, everywhere, up and down, left, right. But yeah, I. Where to start? I mean, the. The thing is, like, I I don't think 110 is a viable solution and I've kind of tried to ignore it a lot and people kind of ping me and say, well, you should state your position and say something. And you know, Jimmy tried to take a neutral stance and he was sort of crucified on that stance by both sides. So the core people said, you know, how can you be neutral? You know it's going to fail. And then the Nazi people said, you know, you're weak and you know, unwilling to pick a side. But I think neutrality or ambivalence is a viable stance in this case. Right. So I was planning to write a blog post about this or X article or something, but I haven't had time. Maybe I'll do it this weekend. It depends on when you publish, but maybe I'll get ahead of you. But my stance is bip110 is largely unviable and it should be ignored. And this largely ties into the principles of my thinking behind Production Ready, which is is we need a stable ossification leaning implementation. Because Bitcoin is first and foremost money and you don't want to play with the system and software and network that enables the first sound money that we've really ever had in the world that is better than gold, better than anything because it's information and it's bearer. So there are obviously technical arguments against 110 and reduced data and everything like that. But I think the biggest thing is you should be able to not need to care about the current thing in Bitcoin. You should be able to be in a coma for three years, wake up and run your node on Core 29 and still be able to transact. Right? Like having to rally behind and push for something that is an emergency is the anti, antithesis of Bitcoin. Right. It's, it's supposed to run perfectly without intervention and the need to campaign and convince people that this is important and you need to do something. The whole point of Bitcoin is that you can do nothing and just sit there with your bitcoin in cold storage. So can I ask you a question
- [07:50]
Jake (Interviewer)
about that real quick?
- [07:51]
Samson Mao
Sure.
- [07:51]
Jake (Interviewer)
Because that, that seems to me to be, and I'm still trying to wrap my head around like getting deeper and deeper into the technicalities of this conversation. But it seems to me that the knots bip110 side of the conversation is sort of saying we had a functioning idea thing that we were aiming at here and then when Core 30 released, we blew open the filters that maybe weren't perfect, maybe didn't fully do the thing that they intended, but it wasn't saying, okay, now we're going to make this change where we're going to completely open this and allow all of these larger sized pieces of arbitrary data onto the bitcoin network. So it seemed to me from my understanding of it that these were the guys that were saying, hey, how about we don't try to change it and increase the functionality and add data storage as a feature of bitcoin, yet we preserve it as focusing on it only being money. Does that seem right to you?
- [08:53]
Samson Mao
There's a lot to unpack there. We'll start with the latter part. Yes, I agree bitcoin is money. And there was a few months ago, or I forgot six months ago, there was a lot of a vitriol tossed at core developers for not saying bitcoin is money. And then some of them said, yes, bitcoin is money. But it's not about whether you want bitcoin to be money or not money. Money is an emergent property. Bitcoin first and foremost is software. So I, I see the really aggressive 110 people coming out saying, you know, bitcoin is money. If it's not money, it's not anything else. But bitcoin is an emergent. Money is an emergent property of bitcoin. If you look at rise stones, you can say, if rice stones aren't money, they're nothing. Like what is a rhinestone, It's a rock, right? If gold isn't money, it's nothing else. Like what is gold. It's a rock too. Shiny gold rock, but it's still nonetheless a rock. But you wanting bitcoin to be money does not make bitcoin money. It is a network effect. It is an emergent property. And it is emergent, a property stemming from its innate properties that it is bearer, it is information, it is permissionless. And you can zap it around the world with no intermediary or a third party or any gatekeeper. So you can't really say we want bitcoin me money, we need to make it money harder. And I see that a lot. Like even I think in your notes before you're talking about strategy and digital credit. But this is also a prevailing theme amongst the people that don't like strategy. They're saying wrapping bitcoin up in this instrument STRC or Strive with SATA or Meta Planet with Mars, it degrades the property of bitcoin as money. But it really doesn't it's not that because they did something. Bitcoin is less of it. Less of, less like money. It really has nothing to do with it on top.
- [11:01]
Jake (Interviewer)
Yeah. It doesn't change the base. Yeah.
- [11:03]
Samson Mao
And it is, it is viable for people to use Bitcoin in any way they choose. Right. Like they can put it in an etf, they can have it as a base asset, digital capital, building digital credit on top of it. That's the nature of Bitcoin. And if Bitcoin can't do that, then there's something wrong with it. If it has to fit within a narrow definition of a small group of people that know it is money. If you do these five things with it, then it doesn't really work as money. So you can see it's kind of like a, it's kind of a conflicting thing there in and of itself the argument. But going back to your other point too, it's. Bitcoin is a very interesting thing. It's almost counterintuitive to a fault. And we saw this with the bcash the bitcoin block size civil war, right? It's a well meaning thing where you say, well we need to increase the block size because otherwise people can't transact for cheap. Right. It's a very well intentioned goal that sounds good on the surface but has deeper implications. Like, well, before we figured out that you could have a block size increase through a soft fork, the thing that was looming on the horizon was a hard fork. And that basically is a totally new thing, a new coin, a new blockchain. And that's not immediately understood. That your well meaning intentions over here has deep repercussions over here. But not just that it's a hard fork. You're basically changing the rules for some goal and that's a slippery slope. Like okay, well what if the new thing is, well, there's not enough coins. Not everyone can be a whole coiner. We need to increase the supply so you can see where it goes. Right. Once you start tinkering to optimize for some perceived emergency situation, then you just become a fiat currency and they're subject to the whims of a centralized organization or mob rule. And I think it's similar with BIP 110, which is, you know, it's an emergency, we need to stop bad data, csam, whatever, everything from getting on the chain. And while yes, it sounds like a good ideological stance and it certainly doesn't help that Luke calls everyone a pedo that disagrees with him, but the thing is, it doesn't change anything that the core remove the limit. They shouldn't have done that because it, it obviously impacted a lot of people and it fragmented the, the Bitcoin user base. But you could do that even before Core 30, right? And this is me saying that as someone that vehemently disagreed with what they did and thought that they should have left the policy intact, even if it was simply a detriment or a deterrent. But it still doesn't change that you could have done that before, right? Like even without Core 30, you could still embed data. There are easy ways around it.
- [14:20]
Jake (Interviewer)
Like why did they say that they did do it? Right? Like we agree that it seems to me to be a terrible idea. Like why allow make, why make it easier for, you know, this non monetary data to get onto the blockchain? But what, what's the case for doing it? Is it just like we want to be able to sell NFTs? And why did they say they were doing it?
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Samson Mao
It's because for them as a developer it's really easy, right? You can easily bypass the limit and get the data in. I think this is the divide. You have very technical, very sharp people that are not that empathetic or high in eq and you have the rest of the users of the network which largely just download the software and run it. And if you just download the software and run it, then there is no real opportunity to, to embed data, right? You're just sending a bitcoin transaction with the bitcoin client. Either it's you're running Bitcoin core itself or using it as a node and something on top of it. But it's pretty straightforward. But if you are technical and you're in the command line, you can easily do all sorts of things very easily. And I think that is probably the biggest gap in understanding here that core developers think they did nothing wrong because you could have done that anyways. It's like, you know, the, the image of a, a park and there's like a, a path where people are cutting across the grass. And I guess the city put up like a little gate there, right? And it didn't do anything because people just walk around the gate. From a developer standpoint, that's exactly what the case is. From the less technical user base, it looks like they removed something that was stopping people from doing something that they view as bad for the network.
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- [16:20]
Jake (Interviewer)
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- [16:20]
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- [17:06]
Jake (Interviewer)
I don't want to put words in your mouth, but you said something along the lines of like you feel like bip110 is doomed to fail basically, or like you don't think it's going to actually work. Why is that?
- [17:15]
Samson Mao
Well, it doesn't have consensus, so there are a lot of comparisons to the block size wars and activation of Segwit. But there was major consensus that SEGWIT was the path forward for the network to fix the malleability bug and to enable lightning. And it was just a few people blocking it for financial gain, personal gain, asic boost. And it was really more about the activation mechanism and activation timeline over the change itself. Whereas 110 and everything, it does not have consensus, especially amongst technical development experts, you know, people that actually work on the software. And even outside of that, there are a lot of ordinary people using Bitcoin that don't agree with it either. So it's a very small group of people that really want to push this forward and they can be very aggressive and nasty. So it's not a good combination for building consensus and that is exactly what you need to do to get change in Bitcoin. But all of the technical arguments aside, I go back to you should not be forced to need to worry about something urgently for Bitcoin. Like that's just not the case right now. 110 is popular it's fashionable. People are rallying. A small group of people are rallying behind it. And I'll get blasted for everything I've said here because you know, if you're not on their side, you're their enemy. But I don't view it that way. Like I empathize with them and why they're upset with bitcoin development in general, but that's not really the path forward. But my point is if you take away, if you replaced all the figureheads of the 110 movement and you pick something else, like who in your view are the main major ringleaders for 110? Luke.
- [19:16]
Jake (Interviewer)
I think Luke, Matt, Matthew Crater and probably bitcoin mechanic are the people I've heard the most from on it.
- [19:25]
Samson Mao
So people agree with them, they like them. And you have to kind of take a higher level view of this and think from a more macro perspective. So let's replace those three people with, I don't know, three other people for something like what was the last thing that was urgent for bitcoin? Making bitcoin quantum resistant. So you replace that with Nick Carter, who invested in the Project 11 thing to help blockchain secure themselves against quantum attacks. You put a podcaster in there to replace Matt, like, I don't know, Mark Moss. Right. And then I don't know, pick someone else that goes in there and is
- [20:12]
Jake (Interviewer)
a bitcoin mechanic equivalent.
- [20:14]
Samson Mao
I don't know, someone, whatever. But you get the idea, right?
- [20:17]
Jake (Interviewer)
Sure.
- [20:18]
Samson Mao
Just because they make a big fuss. There are some nodes running it. There's like 1% of hash rate signaling. That's not consensus. And you as a 110 supporter would absolutely be against that, right?
- [20:34]
Jake (Interviewer)
I would think so. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the argument that they're saying is that there's like there would be reason for miners to wait to the last minute to signal or something like that. Like from this game theory perspective, I
- [20:48]
Samson Mao
mean you can say that, but I don't see that as the case at all.
- [20:52]
Jake (Interviewer)
If you look at what do you think of knots? Like the fact that, you know, I think knots has gone from 0 to to 20%.
- [20:59]
Samson Mao
You can't just look at node signaling. That's a easy sybil attack. Right. Anybody can spin up a node. I'm not saying that they're fake. There are definitely real people running knots. Nodes, I know them.
- [21:08]
Jake (Interviewer)
Right.
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Samson Mao
But if you look at some of the, like I read my feed, like I see people, like they're saying I'm running knots, but I'm switching Back to core. Because now Knots is saying I have to signal for 110. Right. So now you're being forced to do a change. And I don't believe that's how Bitcoin should work.
- [21:28]
Jake (Interviewer)
Is that the right frame though? Is it the right frame to call it a change? If they're saying we want to go back to what we were doing before, right before Core 29, that was the procedure. Because it seems to me in my view that Core 30 was the change. So then I guess it would be a change.
- [21:45]
Samson Mao
That change didn't matter. So if you want to undo that change, just edit your config file. The 110 fork changes a lot of other things too. Yeah, yeah. So let's pause for a second. I largely agree with 110 ideas to limit data. I disagree with the execution and tactics used to push it. Okay, so back in 2025 in Lugano, I actually organized a meeting to see if we could talk things through. And a lot of the players in the space that are fighting with each other now were at a table discussing things and there was some tentative agreement that, you know, things can be hashed out and maybe there can be a way to limit data to make everyone happy because, you know, nobody wants data to be stuffed into Bitcoin. I think the camps are really divided on should we do something because it is futile and should we should minimize harm to the network by discouraging. So I think it's a very thin line where the disagreement is actually over.
- [23:03]
Jake (Interviewer)
But what about like the David Bailey side of the crew that, that has, you know, what's it called? UTXO management and you know, like Bitcoin magazine in 2023. I think they were like, you can buy special sets. These sets are like, you know, special sat sort of thing. So it seems, you know, they have, we have a photo attached to this set or we have whatever. So it seems like at least that group would have a financial incentive in being sure there's not a restriction of non monetary data.
- [23:32]
Samson Mao
Well, the thing is you can never stop all data, Right. Bitcoin is data itself, right? Yeah, we can define spam and that's another whole topic and can of worms. But you can't stop it forever. Like there is always going to be a way you can smuggle some data in, right? It might be more convoluted, it might cost more money, but there is always a way. And I think that is what the point the core side is making, that you really can't stop it. But then There is a happy medium where I think you can say, well, something should be done to limit this extraneous data, right, because it's ultimately fees are the filter, but obviously you also don't want spam. So there's a happy medium to tread here. And there was a discussion to try to find a path forward, but then the 110 camp decided just to go it on their own and push for this thing really aggressively. But, you know, going back to my example, you can replace everything with quantum. And I think a lot of 110 supporters would say no. Like, that's obviously not good for the network. And we don't agree. There's no consensus. You could.
- [24:40]
Jake (Interviewer)
Don't rush. You know, just let's slow it down a little bit.
- [24:43]
Samson Mao
I hate the rush. There are so many cases of this. Like, there is covenants. Remember Jeremy Rubin was pushing hard for covenants. I don't disagree that covenants are good, but you cannot go and campaign and try to make it happen. It doesn't work. Consensus is organic. It has to emerge and we should agree. If you don't agree, you'll fork off. And that is the destiny for 110, because there is no consensus. But you can go on and on. There are all these examples in bitcoin history where some group of people thought, this is really important and we need to do this. And you just have to step back from the current situation, maybe take a breath and calm your emotions down. Emotions are running high right now. But if you replace the situation with any other situation, you'll see, like, this is not consensus. And this is not going to fly. It can't fly. Otherwise the barrier to attack bitcoin is so low. You and I and Mark can, you know, can launch an attack on Bitcoin and disrupt the whole network. That's not bitcoin. It doesn't work. Bitcoin will shrug it off.
- [25:46]
Jake (Interviewer)
What do you think of mechanics? Take that. Like I've heard him say in response to this that bitcoin was designed to be partial to a minority that wants to have more restrictive rules. So if you have, I think. Does that make sense? I don't know that I can explain it as well as I've heard him explain it. But he said, like, it was designed in a way where it was to be more conservative, would be partial to a minority of users who wanted to be more restrictive in terms of the rules than expanding them.
- [26:18]
Samson Mao
That's just not true because Luke wanted a decrease in block size and we didn't get that. Like that didn't happen and I don't think that would happen. Right. So if that is true, would that
- [26:29]
Jake (Interviewer)
be a more restrictive rules? I guess, yeah, I don't know, it might be over my head. Talk to the mechanic about it.
- [26:34]
Samson Mao
You can soft fork and make the block size smaller and I think that's probably what was the right step. But that ship has sailed. But you see, you can, you can think something and have an opinion and not go against consensus. You know, it's not that you have to flush the whole thing away. That's how altcoins are made. That's how bcash was made. That it has to be this way. Bitcoin has to be used in a certain way or else it's failed. Like again, we've heard that time and time again in the past, right. Over and over, either authentically or inauthentically as a reason to create a fork and profit from that too. But your other point about the ordinals people, like I've said it publicly, like ordinals are a joke. They were always going to die. And yeah, of course they have an incentive, but I don't know if restricting data would stop that incentive. It would make it more difficult for them. But they can always work around it. And the benefit of scamming is far higher than whatever fees would be prohibitive to prevent you from putting data into bitcoin.
- [27:48]
Jake (Interviewer)
Okay.
- [27:48]
Samson Mao
I mean that's their whole economic model, right? They made more scamming people into ordinals than they paid in fees. But they still made money scamming people.
- [27:56]
Jake (Interviewer)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think that's something that can be solved with Bitcoin software. The fact that people are going to try to scam other people, you know that I don't think we can program that one out of humanity with. With software. Exactly. But that's interesting. I guess my last question is, so why related to bip110, it's rdts, right? So reduced data, temporary soft fork. So why is it temporary? And if it is temporary and there is a chain split, what happens after the temporary, you know, soft fork ends?
- [28:32]
Samson Mao
Well, it's going to just create a fork, a minority fork with low hash rate and then, I don't know, I haven't thought that far ahead because it's not a priority to me and it should not be a priority to me. Like who are you to tell me that something is happening in what, I don't even know the day, what day is it that they're fork off?
- [28:49]
Jake (Interviewer)
It'll be, I think it's like 28 days from now, so like 25 days from when this releases or something.
- [28:54]
Samson Mao
Yeah. So who are you to tell me that there's going to be a fork in 28 days? Like you don't get to say that we're all self sovereign nodes on the network and you can think that you can do whatever you want, but that has nothing to do with me.
- [29:10]
Jake (Interviewer)
Yeah, well, yeah, it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. I, it's. I wasn't around really for the last, I mean in 2017 I was, I was way out on the fringes, so I wasn't really around for the conflict, you know, but, but I'm interested to see how this plays out. Is there anything that you feel like your average bitcoiner should do or be aware of going into this?
- [29:33]
Samson Mao
I mean, if you're just running a node that is consensus compatible, you have nothing to worry about. So what you have to figure out is, are you consensus compatible? And I'll leave it at that.
- [29:47]
Jake (Interviewer)
Okay. Yeah. So moving on from BIP110 specifically, but still node implementation conversation, why did you start production ready and what do you think success for it would look like?
- [30:03]
Samson Mao
Well, the goal was that there will be another client that is focused on security and stability instead of adding new features because adding more things increases attack surface. And there is a disposition in bitcoin core development to keep on adding new things and changing things. And as we've seen that's not necessarily the best thing for the software. There are bugs introduced and there was like a bug where funds could be lost too, which was I think two, three months ago. But it just seems like the priority is not on stability and moving towards ossification, but adding new things. And I think that's not ideal. But again, like this is a point that is lost on a lot of people. I can't stop core from doing anything. I can't tell them what to do. It's a collection of individuals that have funding or work on their own funding. So the best I can do, and I think Jimmy and others agree that when we started productionready is that we have to fund our own client and you have to have economic skin in the game. We have to raise money like all the other orgs like OpenSat, Sprink, whatever, and we have to fund development because if you're not funding development, then you really don't have a say in what happens in any given software client. So our solution is to build our own and Then, you know, people like it, they might run it. But we think it definitely is an option that should exist out there. And we're trying to take it slow, not rush things out the door. We want to find good developers that want to work on this for the long term and are aligned with the vision of safety, security, eventual ossification. And one of the most misunderstood things is so we get attacked on all sides because we're kind of in the middle. But Production Ready is not the client. It is a funding organization. But a lot of the people that are staunch core supporters like to go after us and say, well, how dare you launch this thing and raise money? Because you don't have the software yet. But we're raising the money to build the software and to put the team together. And this. The client is not Production Ready. Production Ready is the nonprofit that is raising money to fund developers to build the thing.
- [32:25]
Jake (Interviewer)
Mm. I really like the idea of a third client. Specific. I mean, hopefully we have 4 or 5, 6, 10 at some point in time. You know, I think it seems to me that the more the merrier would be good. But I really like the idea of a third client because, you know, like, in, let's say, politics, you have, like, right and left, or even look at core versus knots, you know, and you have, like, the two sides, and it becomes this, like, character attack. You guys are evil, you know, like, because they want their side to win so bad, it's so focused on tearing down the other side. And I think a third implementation allows for people, you know, allows for a more nuanced conversation versus, like, you guys are evil if you're not doing this or you. You know, that sort of thing that. That is really promising to me. So I was really happy to see you guys were doing that. I talked to Jimmy at the last conference, kind of, and that was the first time where I really understood what you guys were up to. And I was like, that seems really important to me. This is kind of a funny question, but I've heard people make the case for dropping Opreturn to zero, or, like, getting rid of it, essentially, and saying that we should retard Max the approach to the Bitcoin software, that we need to stop trying to say, oh, we want to increase functionality, add covenants, add whatever things on top of that. Do you think about that in creating a node implementation that just stops trying to do new stuff or maybe even goes in the other direction in terms of functionality, like reducing functionality?
- [34:00]
Samson Mao
We don't know yet. That will be up to the devs that we recruit and hire to work on it. But the vision is ossification and stability. But if you ask me personally, I don't really think that does anything. The whole point of adding the operturn was that you could prune it because if people want to stick data and they can do so in a number of ways. So you're going back to trying to reinvent the wheel. OPERN was put there so you could put arbitrary data, a little bit of arbitrary data and not bloat the UTXO set or whatever weird thing people figure out to do later. But there is something I think that should be done. Like right now, if you run a prune node, you're, you're pruning everything. It'd be nice to be able to just prune the OPERA turn and still have all the, the data itself, not the OPERA turns. But that is probably a bigger lift and a longer term project that. I don't know. No one's looking into it or funding it right now. But I think that would be worth funding because right now the rallying cry from core is that you just run a prune node, but then you don't have a full node at that point or archival node that has all the blockchain data because by pruning it, you pruned everything.
- [35:18]
Jake (Interviewer)
And for those who are concerned about the CSAM side of things, I think the argument there is, well, I have to download it first before I prune it.
- [35:27]
Samson Mao
Right.
- [35:27]
Jake (Interviewer)
So then still you have to like your computer needs to scan or, you know, some, something you have to gather the data and then have something that does the pruning. If I understand that. So.
- [35:37]
Samson Mao
Yeah, but there is no, like, I really don't want to get into it. But there is no, there is no, there are no pictures on the blockchain. So you can.
- [35:45]
Jake (Interviewer)
Yeah, right. Additional software to try and. Yeah, yeah. Piece things together. I don't, yeah.
- [35:51]
Samson Mao
Contiguous. Not contiguous. I don't want to get into it because the more I get into it, the more I'm going to get attacked. So I'll just say like I, my, my stance, I should not have to worry about your thing. Like you can go do whatever you want. I'm not forking off with you guys.
- [36:06]
Jake (Interviewer)
Yeah, I mean, I'm glad, I'm glad to have people like you who have done the painstaking job of being like, I'm going to remain neutral and everyone's going to be pissed at me and I'm just going to eat it because like you Know, you know, that's. I know it's not fun. So, you know, I've kind of. It's, it's. I have. It seems I've kind of been in the knots bip 110 camp more from an ideological perspective. But I try to hold on to these things loosely primarily because I'm in the point. I recognize that I'm in the point. I come to Bitcoin from more of a cultural, Austrian economics sort of perspective and not like, you know, kind of what fiat currency. The problems of fiat currency and what it's doing to our world and not from the technical perspective. And so because of that, I sort of have to trust me, bro, with what the developers tell me. I didn't review the code myself for knots core 30, whatever. And so I kind of have to be like, yeah. And I think in doing that you have to look at what people are saying, what their values and morals are. I don't know. It's a difficult thing to navigate. I've tried to maintain an open mind as I've tried to learn more and more about it.
- [37:20]
Samson Mao
Yeah, as I said, I agree with the, the key principles that there should be efforts taken to reduce spam and if there is something like ordinals, we should try to filter them out. But that's not a fight you take to the consensus level. You can do that in policy. The issue I think is they're trying to shortcut fighting for policy, because policy, you could just talk to the miners and convince them all to follow the policy, but that's hard to do. It's easier to just say, well, we're going to bring this to consensus level changes. Right. And soft fork, hard fork, doesn't matter. You're still affecting consensus rules at that point and you're pushing something onto the network that you should not be pushing on the network because that's not how it works. Right. Like, I think Satoshi had an alert key or something where he could send a message to everyone upgrade. And that was removed because you don't want that. Actually in a decentralized network, nobody should be saying, hey, upgrade your thing. It's not like, you know, I don't know, pick your software. It's not like Spotify or, or your Claude code, you know, where you have to install the last update blindly. Right.
- [38:26]
Jake (Interviewer)
And yeah, we don't want that.
- [38:28]
Samson Mao
Yeah, you don't want that. And you don't want to be forced to worry about something on some timeline that someone arbitrarily picked. Right. Why in 28 days? Why not in 37 days? Why not in 378 days? Right.
- [38:46]
Jake (Interviewer)
Well, yeah, I'm glad you're working on a third option, Samson, so thanks for doing that. And I'm sure there's a lot of other people who feel that way. I'm sure you get lots of the vitriol, but I'm sure there's a lot of people who are really appreciative of what you're doing that are just not on X posting all day.
- [39:03]
Samson Mao
Well, I get vitriol from all sides, Cora included. And I want to add one thing too.
- [39:10]
Commercial Voice
The.
- [39:10]
Samson Mao
The core camp is not without fault here. It takes two hands to clap. You know, the. A lot of developers, yeah, they said a lot of stupid things and they gave the ammunition to the knots side to use.
- [39:23]
Jake (Interviewer)
I was pissed off at some of that stuff that, you know, there's a few things that they're saying where it makes me want to be like, all right, well, whatever this guy's doing, I'm out. I want the other side, you know, because this guy, like, yeah, and you
- [39:34]
Samson Mao
have to, like, you just have to understand people in general. Like, bitcoin is money to people. People put their savings in money if they feel you're mucking around with it. Of course there are going to be emotions running hot and a lot of those core white knights, you know, you know who they are, they will just leap to defense and attack too. Right. And it doesn't help the case in either way. So it's not like, you know, the Nazi people are at fault. Coresight obviously did something right, even if they're technically right. You know, you can be technically right and still incite a riot, which is what's going on right now. So my hope is that everyone stands down because no one's really going anywhere. Right? Everyone's going to be around unless people decide to fork off and go with an altcoin. You know, in five, ten years, everyone's still going to be here, hopefully, you know, but yeah, you can't really kick someone out of bitcoin, right? You can't force someone away and make them leave. Even the altcoin projects have bitcoin and they're still holding their bitcoin tightly.
- [40:42]
Jake (Interviewer)
Well, we'll leave that there. Yeah. Well, it'll be interesting to see how it plays out and how everybody reacts. And yeah, hopefully it is just not that important. However it plays out, hopefully it's just not that big of a deal either way. Let's talk about January. How would you describe what you do to the company, to somebody who is or do for the company, to somebody who is hearing about it, like what's your guys mission?
- [41:10]
Samson Mao
The mission is to accelerate hyper bitcoinization. So everything we do is to get bitcoin adoption worldwide as money. That's why we build the Aqua wallet and that's why we engage governments. It might sound like a conflict because we do get people criticizing us, like, why are you trying to help governments get bitcoin? You know, it should be the other way, separation of money and state. But the thing is a government adopting bitcoin is separating money and state. Like the, it's not that you bankrupt a government, it's that they don't print money anymore. Right? So it's a very subtle point that you have to really think about to understand. But getting them to use bitcoin is a good thing for people because governments are made up of people and they determine a lot of the laws and regulations that you know, can impact ordinary people. So the more people in the government that understand the bitcoin ethos, understand how bitcoin works, is better for a nation state and for the people that live in that nation state. And Aqua is just, it's a bitcoin wallet. We're trying to bank the unbanked onboard billions of new people into bitcoin. So we, we focus on stablecoins because a lot of the global south, our market, our biggest market is Latam. They're using stablecoins so we give that to them, but we also give them bitcoin. And we've since branched out a bit. We've built agentic Aqua, which is MCP and cli that lets any agent, like your Hermes openclaw agent, get their own bitcoin wallet and do everything that you can do in Aqua. So we're doing a lot of stuff. We're doing a lot of stuff that's very interesting.
- [42:53]
Jake (Interviewer)
There's got to be a point in time where these AI agents just start, they figure out ways to be insanely productive and just start siphoning off bitcoin supply, you know, taking supply out of circulation. Jeff Booth's commentary on that seems really interesting to me where he's like, I think that he said something along the lines of like, I think that AI is basically going to become like electricity, where it's like a combination commodity, where it's like something that is, it's not like the AI bubble is going to pop. Basically there's a bunch of money going into AI and that at some Point in time. Yeah, it's like it's all going to be demonetized. A lot of that value is going to come out and it's going to be more like the applications using AI rather than like the models themselves because the models are replaced by something else every month. Every. There's a new best model, a new best model and then that model becomes open source two months later. And then. Yeah, it doesn't make sense to me. Like there'd be a lot of long term value stored in something that has like no moat. Like a moat of 30 days somebody else makes something new. Yeah, that's really interesting. You also go ahead.
- [44:04]
Samson Mao
Sorry. I think the future is largely going to be agentic commerce. You can see where it's going already. People spinning up their own agents and yeah, like the language models are just a part of it. It's the agent with context and tooling that really makes a difference. And as it becomes easier to create these agents and as the agents get better, smarter and more capable, then it's just going to be a lot of agents doing commerce with one another and using services and paying with Bitcoin. Because if you think of it from a macro level, agents are unbanked. Right. They can't really get a credit card or debit card so they have to use either Bitcoin or USDT or something. Right. That is permissionless.
- [44:47]
Jake (Interviewer)
What are the most interesting developments you've seen at the nation state level with Jan3?
- [44:51]
Samson Mao
Well, it hasn't been that interesting lately. So it's a direct parallel of the real world. A nation state and head of state. If you imagine you're trying to orange kill your neighbor, it's just a random person that has maybe little understanding to no understanding of bitcoin and you need to try to get them to want to buy bitcoin. It's just as challenging. So what we find is when bitcoin price is low like now, there's very little interest to talk with us. When it's up, then there's interest. So the meme where it's like the two tables.
- [45:22]
Jake (Interviewer)
Heard that before.
- [45:23]
Samson Mao
You know, Bitcoin is 63, whatever. 63, 64. There's no one lining up there. Bitcoin at 150 or 250,000 long line. So we're just kind of focusing on building right now rather than engaging. Of course we still do have some engagements here and there, but it's not, we're not aggressively going out to do meetings because we know it's not going to work. And it's also harder to get the meetings at this time.
- [45:50]
Jake (Interviewer)
You said recently that you think the bottom is in already, which is sort of a contrarian take. I feel like most people I, I think are expecting the cycles. Most people in my circles at least are expecting the cycles to just continue to play out because they've been on this like shockingly programmatic, you know, they've played out the same way. The pattern has been very, very similar. We would see this bear market year around October. November is when we've typically seen pretty on schedule. We've seen bottoms in that time. Yet you recently said that you think the bottom's in already. What's, why do you think that that's the case?
- [46:31]
Samson Mao
First, I'm a permeable, so I'm always bullish on bitcoin. There we go. Second, it's just, it doesn't make sense. Like why would it follow perfectly the schedule? I mean a lot of people expect it to and I think it's a self fulfilling bear market in that sense where people are expecting the bottom in October and they've sold, right, they're preparing. But you know, bitcoin has a habit of doing what you least expect it will do and I think people are going to be surprised very soon. But third, we're already at the 200 week moving average and we've never broken below that for any significant amount of time. And that there's also the power law that's showing, you know, time is not on your side. As time progresses, bitcoin does tend to follow a power law model. So it should keep going up over time. So every month past now I think is moving into recovery territory, if not, you know, straight vertical to the moon movements. But the other reason I think this time is different is because this time is different. If you look at the bitcoin treasury companies, if you look at the ETFs, they've largely added additional shock absorbers to the system. If they didn't exist, maybe we would have crashed much lower. With this last crash, which if you think about it, there was really no reason like what was the trigger event. Nothing really blew up. We just kind of went down and then down again and then like why are we here at 63? Nobody blew up. There's been no tragedy, no bankruptcy, nothing. So we're just sort of, it seems
- [48:19]
Jake (Interviewer)
to me to just be an over leverage pattern. Right? Like it looks to me where it's, we get to a point every four years where bitcoin's, everyone thinks bitcoin's going up forever. Everybody levers up to the top and then we just see that deleveraging. I mean, the day where we did hit that final bottom, there was just like a massive liquidation cascade that hit crypto broadly.
- [48:41]
Samson Mao
Yeah, it's definitely possible. But if you look at it, the supply of bitcoin is limited and all of these entities have been buying nonstop. And it's not just them. There are many more entities buying bitcoin than the publicly listed companies. Right. But I see it as sort of shock absorption. Like the ETFs, they, they can, they will only go so low because people won't, won't sell below their cost because a lot of that money is long term capital. And the treasury companies are also shock absorbing too. Right. And they're also holding still. So I see it as a very different structure these days than in the past where you might have had bitcoin slide 80% because nothing else existed to shock absorb. But we have a lot of shock absorption right now, which I think stops it. So we'll see. Like, nobody knows for sure. But I would honestly be very surprised if we went lower now because that would break, you know, that would break the 200 week moving average standard and it would probably push the power law out of its comfort zone.
- [49:54]
Jake (Interviewer)
I am kind of expecting us to go lower. Like when you look back in 2022, I believe it was, we were under the 200 week moving average for a little while around this time in the cycle. But I also tell people it's like, I'm not sitting capital on the side waiting for it, you know, that's for sure. Like I, that would freak me out. I'm, I'm, you know, I pay my bills and put my excess economic energy into bitcoin. I don't overthink it really. I do think we'll probably, when people ask me like, where do I think the price is going? It's like, I think we probably go a little bit lower just because it seems like we're in a simulation, you know, and it just seems like it all goes according to this, this predetermined. Not predetermined, but it just, you know, I expect the pattern to repeat until I see it not repeat. But. Yeah, but also you might see it
- [50:43]
Samson Mao
not repeat this year.
- [50:44]
Jake (Interviewer)
Yeah, yeah, certainly. Yeah. I'm not, I'm not setting aside any capital waiting, that's for sure. Especially now. Right. You hit the 200 week moving average, it's like, don't, don't overthink this. You Know, like just, just get in there.
- [50:57]
Samson Mao
But the way I look at it is those massive drops, it's usually because the players in the market are not ready to, to, to take action. Right. Like if you look at some of the past drops, it's just because of cascading liquidations and whatnot. But time is really not on your side if you're a bitcoin bear. Because if you'll get strategies, as one example, they've largely repositioned, so they've taken a hit too. Right. Like their share price is down, their preferreds are down, but they've adjusted. So if you think of it as, you know, the bitcoin price is moving down, is some attack. All the battleships have kind of reoriented, pulled back a little bit and they're ready to defend against the next wave. So you know, Metaplanet, they've, they've acquired sibo, a securities firm and that will allow them to do more things. Like everyone is ramping up against the, the potential next onslaught of a dip. So everyone is in a good position now and I think the market as well, those big scary dips are usually because they're just cascading and there's nothing to catch it. But when you have the mechanisms in place, then it cannot dip that far. Those really only happen as a shock, like it's just within a day or something like that. But as time goes on, everyone repositions and prepares and it makes the likelihood of dropping a lot lower, a lot less.
- [52:32]
Jake (Interviewer)
And you know, you just have the classic the, the coins move from lower conviction hands to higher conviction hands throughout the bear market. So as we go lower, the probability that we go lower decreases.
- [52:44]
Samson Mao
Yeah. I view it as rotation of short term capital out and long term capital in. And that's really how money is made in not just bitcoin, but every market. Right. If you look at Warren Buffett, that's the game. The long term capital wins, short term capital panics and exits.
- [53:02]
Jake (Interviewer)
Yeah, I think we're going to be having an exciting epoch, an exciting few years moving forward. You get through the slog, the bear market and everything's boring and everyone's fighting and nobody's getting along. But we'll get, get back to the glory days not too long from here.
- [53:18]
Samson Mao
I don't think I agree.
- [53:21]
Jake (Interviewer)
So I'm with you there. Yeah. This is kind of, I wonder if you've ever considered presenting an argument like this to the nation states when you're talking to him. So I'm going to string together a few Ideas here, but you. In another podcast, we're talking about how gold can be created in fusion reactors, essentially. And if bitcoin monetizes energy by requiring energy pumped through computers, that's how new bitcoin is created. So you put place this monetary premium on the energy, and when a commodity is monetized over time, it typically becomes cheap and abundant. You had like glass beads in Africa where that was the money that they used. And then as soon as that happens, you have people who figure out how to make new glass beads and not discover them naturally. And then, you know, glass beads become cheap and abundant. We've seen that take place on copper or whatever commodities. You'll see that take place when they're used in that way. So if this process continues to play out and the cost of energy drops closer to zero over time from solar and nuclear, we may end up in a position where the downstream implications of bitcoin mining driving energy near zero makes gold, makes the ability to create gold come around. Right, because you can create it in fusion reactors. So if you have a bunch of energy, you could create gold. And that the downstream implications of bitcoin mining would destroy the scarcity that makes gold valuable. And it seems like that would be not too far out of a possibility for us as we have more and more creative ways of generating massive amounts of energy. And so I wonder if that's something that you've ever considered presenting to nation states who are relying increasingly on gold. They're decreasing their USD reserves and increasing their gold reserves. And if energy continues to drop, we'll come to a place where you can make gold and then it's not scarce. And then the monetary premium we attach to it could be destroyed quite rapidly. Just like glass beads in Africa when somebody figured out how to create those. Have you. Have you ever considered that? I'm just, you know, I had that thought when I was listening to you talk about the gold fusion reactor thing.
- [55:35]
Samson Mao
You make sense in theory, and it is a compelling argument, obviously. I agree, but I don't think it matters. Money is really. It is your ingrained beliefs. I think for gold to suffer some existential crisis, it has to just be. It probably won't happen. It just. The way to cycle out of gold is time. The people grew up with gold and believe in gold. Not understanding Bitcoin, they will eventually, you know, move on and retire and pass on. And eventually it'll be people that understand bitcoin, understand technology, understand the dynamic we have between energy, information and money. With Bitcoin and They just replace those people in those positions where they can make decisions to adopt Bitcoin. Because you know, technically, if you compared that finding where you could manufacture gold in a fusion reactor, that concern is just unexpected inflation. Right. And that's the same concern with quantum computing. That, you know, it will do something and increase the supply somehow or bring old coins back into circulation. But if you look at the market, there is no reaction at all because they don't care. They've already decided that gold is. The older generation has already decided gold is safe and nothing will convince them of anything counter to that point.
- [57:04]
Jake (Interviewer)
So until we figure out cheap alchemy, basically. Yeah, because that will be because gold
- [57:11]
Samson Mao
is far more centralized. Right. It's really central banks buying at this point. And bitcoin is bought by everyone. And because bitcoin is bought by so many more people, sentiment is much more powerful because there's more sentiment to go around. But how much sentiment is there for gold when the decision is made by, I don't know, probably count them on your fingers and toes. That many people at the central banks making a decision and they're not reading the news or anything. So they're kind of immune to sentiment because they're so disconnected from reality. So in theory, yes. In practice, we just wait and let bitcoin take over.
- [57:53]
Jake (Interviewer)
It seems probable that it would first come to pass where people would. Where the consensus would just shift. Right. Where the consensus would shift from using gold as money to using bitcoin as money without any major variables changing. But I do Wonder if like 12 years from now it's like, oh, fusion reactors are much more popular and now we're pumping out a bunch of gold that we're creating or the asteroid minings or whatever it is, whatever technological advancement that allow us to rapidly increase the supply of gold and then we'd see some shifts take place at that point in time.
- [58:23]
Samson Mao
Yeah. But if you think about it a bit more, it's also a demographics issue. Right. The central banks, who is their customer? It is the people. They have to provide stability to the people of that nation state. And demographics are all skewing to the older side right now. So they need to have the valuable thing that the older people think is valuable. So It's a catch 22. Really. Yeah.
- [58:48]
Jake (Interviewer)
That's interesting because everybody running the governments is 70. You know, they're not. And there's the percentage of 70 year olds that are bitcoiners is pretty low. It's like RFK and four other guys or something. Yeah.
- [59:00]
Samson Mao
But those 70 year olds are catering to the bulk of the population, which is the aging population.
- [59:09]
Jake (Interviewer)
Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah, just, you know, 15 years passing would. Would change a lot it seems. They say technology progresses at every one death at a time or whatever. Science progresses. Something like that. You got time for maybe one or two more quick questions? How you looking?
- [59:27]
Samson Mao
Maybe one more.
- [59:28]
Jake (Interviewer)
One more. Yes, sir. All right, I'll squip my. I had a couple questions about the great PEPE War meme that you reposted a while back, but maybe we'll talk about that another day. You had on. On Aqua Wallet. You guys provide stablecoins, which I hate the. I hate the term stablecoin because it's not stable. But whatever, I'll let it go for now. You support liquid and lightning and I'm curious about why you decided to support both liquid and lightning and how I understand how lightning operates at a technical level more. But maybe if you could tell me how both of those operate and then. Yeah, why you guys made the decision to support both of those.
- [60:05]
Samson Mao
Right. So lightning is. Has evolved, I think from the initial design where you would run your own lightning node and that's it. Like the, the substrate and the interoperability, it would be one in the same. But right now lightning is more of just an interop layer connecting many different substrates. So base layers or base systems. If you look at wallet of Satoshi as one of the first lightning wallets, it's like connecting a database substrate to the lightning network. Right. And then you have other things like Fediments, Federated mints, you have E cash, you have arc, you have spark and you have liquid. So liquid is just another substrate and I think it's the best substrate of all the ones available. It's the most battle tested, longest running, with the best properties like privacy, confidential transactions and reliability. So yeah, basically the challenge is what is the substrate? Because if you remember, there was a moon wallet back in the day and it was very popular because they were doing submarine swaps to lightning from a main chain. But as soon as main chain fees went up, then that substrate, the main chain substrate stopped working.
- [61:29]
Jake (Interviewer)
You lost me there a tiny bit. Submarine swaps to main chain. What does that mean?
- [61:34]
Samson Mao
So basically you're swapping an on chain transaction to get lightning capacity. Okay, yeah, so we're doing the same thing, but on liquid. So we're immune to fee spikes on main chain, but Aqua is a liquid wallet at the base. So the base of everything is Bitcoin and liquid and lightning transactions. In Aqua are just swaps out of liquid into a lightning transaction atomically. And USDT is natively issued on liquid as well. So when we interface with other USDT blockchains, we're swapping as well. Like you can pay in liquid USDT and the receiver will get tron USDT or polygon USDT or all the different USDTs. So at the base it's a liquid wallet and then everything is a swap out from that liquid wallet.
- [62:31]
Jake (Interviewer)
Okay, so basically you're saying like, so these are a bunch of different applications. I'm going to try to reduce it to average Joe terms because I almost had to ask you to speak slower for me so I could keep up. So essentially these are alternative versions where you have your on chain bitcoin. You'll take that on chain bitcoin, pull it onto this network, lightning network, or let's say liquid network. You're going to operate, you have then the trade off there is you kind of need to trust at this level a little bit whoever you're operating in that ecosystem with, so that you can have that rapid transactability of that bitcoin. And then at some point in time, if you want, you could take that liquid bitcoin and pull it back off onto the on chain where you have no requirement of trust of that person essentially or entity or whatever it is.
- [63:18]
Samson Mao
So it's like a, a middle layer, layer two, whatever you want to call it that you want to use to interface with lightning. And you can do that to aggregate small UTXOs like Ben BTC sessions, he likes to take payments in liquid and then when he gets a big enough liquid utxo, he'll swap out to mainchain. But there's, you know, everyone's promoting their own substrate and they're all different trade offs. And I think liquidy offers the best set of trade offs because a lot of other things are just a server or three servers and you know, if they go offline, yeah, you can exit. But does it make sense economically to exit? And does it even. Does the economic use warrant that level of stringent trust minimization? Because you know, a lot of people that are using Aqua are just paying small bills, like you know, 10 bucks, 20 bucks, 30 bucks, who knows. But it's not like it's end of the world if you know, if liquid went down, which it won't, but you should be, you know, never keeping that much money in a hot wallet anyway. So amongst all of these wallets, they're all hot wallets. So you should not be keeping a ton of money in your hot wallet no matter what. So it's really a moot discussion. The key here is really who offers the best user experience. And yeah, we think Aqua Liquid offers the best of every option out there. We're bullish.
- [64:50]
Jake (Interviewer)
Awesome. Heck, yeah. Well, I think it's. I think it's a great thing. I think you guys are. I like the design of the product. I just downloaded it recently and since I knew we were going to chat and I was just poking around, I like how it feels, you know, and I think that that's super important. That's something that a lot of the bitcoin developer crowd doesn't get very well. Is like, it needs to feel good, you know, it needs to look beautiful and that sort of thing. And so I, yeah, I could see those design choices in there. And I think that it's, you know, banking the unbanked is. I've lived in countries for periods of time where people there, they. All they have is access. They don't really understand all the big crazy geopolitics of what's going on in the world and they just have their paper currency that they transact with and stick away in a box and they don't have bank accounts and, and they don't realize that they're being stolen from year after year. And so to get people into something where they have optionality, where it's like, okay, here you can use your stable coins, you can use your US Dollars. Stable coins, you can use, you know, you have the optionality for bitcoin there and everything. I think, yeah, for the people who have no access to that, it's such a massive step just in giving them the opportunity to play on the same playing field that people in developed countries have. And that will, I really believe that will be a rising tide that is good for everybody. You know, all the boats will be lifted as more and more people get to play a more fair game. So I think that's great. I think what you're doing. Go ahead, go ahead.
- [66:15]
Samson Mao
I fully agree. Well said.
- [66:17]
Jake (Interviewer)
Yeah, yeah, thanks. Thanks. Yeah, I think what you're in at Jan.3 is great too because there's, there's that, you know, there's a Trojan horse element of that. I, for a while I mentioned you at the beginning of conversation that, you know, I was doing some political consulting work and I had that conviction of like, wait, I'm talking to all these people at this high level about bitcoin and I want to, you know, it should be plebs first but but also too I can see what you're saying of like, yeah, this is how we increase the adoption and you know, there's certainly a Trojan horse element to that and getting them to stop printing money would be lovely. So yeah, I think you're, I think you're on the right track, man. Thanks for the work you do. Yeah, it's great to have this chat. How can people support you? How can they connect with you? Where can they find you anything you want to plug?
- [67:02]
Samson Mao
Sure. We're on x.gen3.com is our X handle and in Aqua is Aqua Bitcoin and my handle is Excelion E X, C, E L, L, I, O N. And yeah, I'm mostly on X over other platforms.
- [67:17]
Jake (Interviewer)
Awesome. Well, thank you sir. It was great chatting. Hopefully we'll talk.
- [67:19]
Samson Mao
Thanks Jake. Great chat.
- [67:26]
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