If you're talking about $1 million Omega candles?
It's all happening. It's just a matter of time.
It's impossible that Michael Saylor gets 10% of the supply at
these levels. He's going to get 10%.
Like, that's just ridiculous. Bitcoins become like a stable
coin. The volatility has really
decreased tremendously. What's the deal with that?
I think the alternative to fixing it is a debt jubilee, a
reset, a great Fiat reset. We're so.
Early, I know. You always tell me.
You told me that earlier this year.
Funding mechanisms I think for Bitcoin Core are kind of a bit
off. Developers get grants to work on
whatever they feel like working on.
Oh, wait. Wait, are we going down this
rabbit hole? Where are the grants coming
from? Samsung Yeah, welcome to another
episode of Simply Bitcoin IRL. We're here in the beautiful
Lugano, Lugano, Switzerland, during the Plan B Forum, and I'm
here with a dear friend, Sam Swinow.
How you? Doing you, Nico.
Good to see you. Great to be here.
So, Samson, I want to tell you, I want to talk to you about Jan
3 because you know, that's your thing.
But I recently found out that I'm having another daughter and
her due date is Jan three. Wow.
Yeah. Congrats, it's a coincidence.
Happenstance maybe, You know, Destiny.
That's a good way of putting it.
So yeah, man, that's what I wanted to start it off.
With. Nice.
Just RIP off the bandit news, right?
But anyways, so you guys have developed a fantastic wallet,
which I'm a big fan of. I've been using it downloaded
immediately when you guys released it, the Aqua Wallet.
And can you describe it to everybody?
What's it you? Why is it unique?
There's so many Bitcoin wallets out there.
What differentiates the Aqua wallet with the rest of the
Bitcoin wallets? I think there's a few different
differentiating factors. 1 is that we're our base is a liquid
wallet. So liquid as you know it's a
Bitcoin side chain launched by Blockstream originally.
Doctor Adam backsing his idea largely and we use liquid as the
foundation. So I think there are many cool
things in Aqua, but the main practical thing is you can use
lightning very easily with Aqua because the base is swapping
from liquid Bitcoin to lightning.
So we kind of use Lightning is an interoperability layer, but
the basis of it is liquid Bitcoin.
And I think this solves some of the problems from non custodial
Lightning wallets where you have to do channel management and
what not or you outsource it to LSP.
But this gives you the best combination of privacy and ease
of use because you have a strong foundation.
You're not subject to fee spikes on the base Bitcoin network as
if you're running if you were running your own Lightning node.
So that's a big improvement in usability of Lightning, I think,
or either you go to full custodial model of some sorts.
The other differentiating factor I think is we are the only
Bitcoin wallet that is really focused on stable coins as well.
And I like to say that as a whole, Bitcoin wallets have lost
market share to all coin wallets because they've embraced stable
coins. You look at any Ethereum Tron
wallet or whatever, they always have Tether in there and we have
it front and center. You have Tether, you can swap
from liquid Tether into other chains.
And I think this, it's just an underserved market that people
don't really seem to care about. But I believe if you want mass
adoption, you cannot ignore stable coins.
By and large, people are building wallets just for
Bitcoiners that are already orange filled and they already
have Bitcoin, and they're not addressing people that want a
stable currency like a dollar value token but don't yet
understand Bitcoin. So I think we're kind of
bridging that gap and so far, I think we're proving out that the
model, the mission is right because our biggest user, two of
our biggest user bases are in Argentina and Brazil.
Yeah. And I, I, I want to focus on
that, right? Because again, I think you guys
built a wallet based on what the market is signaling because I
think bitcoiners had this initial interpretation of
Bitcoin where they believed. And in a way, they're, they're
correct because I, I, I ultimately believe that that
stable coins are a bridge to Bitcoin, right?
But in the developing worlds, you know, people are not so
concerned about, you know, saving.
They're really concerned about just getting by, living
day-to-day. They don't have the financial
privilege that we have in the West.
And that is a big reason as to why stable coins are so popular,
right? And not having, you know, a
stablecoin implementation in a Bitcoin wallet actually pushes
people away from Bitcoin and into all coins instead.
This is, you know, you should. The way that I see it, and
perhaps, you know, I'll get heat about this from Bitcoiners, is,
you know, stable coins or you're spending money and Bitcoin is
your saving money that you're never supposed to spend, Right.
And I think that's what you guys tapped into.
And I think that's why you guys are experiencing the success
that you're experiencing. Yeah.
It's also a utility, like you can just do a lot of things in
Aqua, just downloading it and putting Bitcoin in.
You can swap from Bitcoin to liquid Bitcoin, then swap to
liquid Tether and then on both rails, there are two Bitcoin and
stable coins. You can swap out to other things
like Lightning and maybe we'll do to RGB on there too as well.
But we're just focused on giving utility.
And we also recently opened up the beta for the Dolphin card,
which is a prepaid Visa card that you can load with all those
assets. And because Liquid has
confidential transactions, I think it's the most private
solution. So you can register with an
e-mail, load it with Liquid USCT or Liquid Bitcoin and you have
the best privacy on the market. Yeah, and and you come from a
gaming background, right Samsung, it has any of those
experiences what you picked up back then?
I think we just saw a wild Bevan dolphin, those pretty crazy, but
you come from like a wild, you come from a gaming background.
Has any of that influenced the UI of Aqua?
I think so. So I've done a lot of mass
market games. So there is a Smurfs game I
built at Ubisoft, which was that's so cool.
It was like one of the biggest Facebook games.
You remember Social gaming kind of took off in 2910, so we built
this, The Smurfs game and we launched it alongside The Smurfs
movie and we got to 10 million users.
So my background is making games, but not just games, but
consumer level games that people can use and play average people,
your your mom, your dad, your grandpa, grandma.
And I think I try to bring some of those accessibility lessons
to the Bitcoin space because our goal is not to make a really
great wallet that I don't Adam Back will use because he can,
you know, run his own note, set up his own lightning note and do
everything by command line. Our goal is to get the next
billion people into Bitcoin. And again, like stable coins
have opened up the market. Tether has 500 million users now
and we should be leveraging that to bring them all to Bitcoin.
So we want to make something that anyone can use, like you
can just send Bitcoin. It works, very simple,
minimalist UI, not too cluttered and focusing on the core things,
Bitcoin and stable coins. Yeah, I think that's something
that, you know, Bitcoiners forgot, right?
Because I'm, you know, I come from the air, I'm an I'm an
electrum junkie, right? I love it.
But like that UI is I love them, I love those guys.
And for me it makes perfect sense and I understand it
inherently, but it's not something that I think people,
someone could just pick up and use, right?
So I think the key for mass adoption, which is one of your
missions, right? And your team's missions is
making the the user experience easy enough that you can just
pick up and say, oh, this, I'm just, you know, you just
pressing a couple buttons and I get to use money.
Yeah, and also structuring it in a certain way.
So we have a Bitcoin price at the top.
We show Bitcoin labeled as your savings account.
Like we talked about, you know, we want people to understand
that Bitcoin as your savings account and then your spending
accounts are, you know, layer 2 and Tether.
So we think people understand that stable coins are for
spending, but having Bitcoin at the top is a really big
differentiator from a lot of the altcoin wallets.
And they're they're going to put like every single altcoin and
people are largely using it for Tether.
So maybe they're going to start to get into altcoins that way.
But for us, it's pushing people to swap up the stack to liquid
Bitcoin and then to Bitcoin. Another thing that Van BDC
Sessions did is he's using it to aggregate too.
So there's so much cool things you can do with this very
minimal product. So he just gets payments in
liquid Bitcoin, and when he gets in a big enough UTXO, he'll swap
it all to Bitcoin. So he uses Aqua kind of as an
aggregator. No, it makes perfect sense.
And I think again that you're hiding a lot of the complexities
behind a UI. So the user, they're just
looking at it like a regular Smegular Bitcoin wallet.
But in reality, you know, it has a lot of function.
They're very complex functionality that's working
behind the scenes. But I think that's the key to to
technology, right? Making it seem like magic,
making it seem flawless. Yeah.
One goal is that we have sort of a non custodial Venmo like we
want to deliver that Venmo like clean UI and experience, but
it's all self custodial. It's all your own funds and the
swaps are large. The atomic swaps, I think some
of the the USTT swaps are not trustless or trust minimize, but
you know a lot of the liquid swaps are.
Yeah. And where do you think we are in
the adoption curve, in the mass adoption curve?
We're so. Early, I know you always tell me
you told me that earlier this year, but it's it's, you know,
it's hard. I guess it's hard.
It's not hard to believe. Like the logical part of my
brain is saying, yeah, we're super early.
And then the emotional side, my brain is saying, no, we're not
early. Well, I see.
Different people understand things differently.
So I think Sailor also knows we're early, but I believe he
understands it's ending soon. That's why he is buying, you
know, like I'll buy the tops. Yeah, when he has the capital,
he'll deploy it. Yeah, it's not about OK, I'll
wait a bit because he sees that urgency.
But another good indicator is why are we early?
Because we have Dats or digital asset treasury companies that
are buying Ethereum. Like why would any rational
person or investment committee authorized something like that
where you're buying something that has 70% pre?
Mine is largely controlled by the guys that launched the ICO
and one of the dats is owned by one of the guys that launched
the token. It's just it's a sign that we
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today. Let's talk about where you know
Bitcoin is and it's its current history, right?
The ETF approval happened last year, January of 2024.
You know you had the embracement of Bitcoin by the.