Kirill Solovev, GoMining: Why Bitcoin’s Future Depends On Holders Starting To Spend
In Brief
GoMining founder Kirill Solovev on Bitcoin as money, GoBTC Pay, mining’s evolution, and why usability—not just belief—will drive global adoption.
Bitcoin has survived multiple market cycles, regulatory crackdowns, and waves of institutional skepticism — yet the question of what it actually is remains contested. Is it digital gold, a speculative asset, collateral, or money?
For Kirill Solovev, Founder and Chairman of the Board of GoMining, the answer has always been the last one — and he has spent years building infrastructure to make that conviction operational.
In this conversation, Kirill Solovev moves fluidly between the philosophical and the technical: from Hegelian readings of monetary history to the engineering trade-offs of 2-of-3 multisig, from the structural pressures of public pension systems to the mechanics of a private mining pool that bypasses Layer 2 entirely. His argument is not that Bitcoin will inevitably become a global currency, but that the conditions for it are assembling — and that the missing piece is not belief, but usability.
With GoBTC Pay, GoMining has built what Kirill Solovev describes as the rails for retail Bitcoin payments on the original network, free and near-instant for users. What comes next, in his view, involves AI agents, institutional lending, and a marketplace that starts where Amazon did — modestly, with a specific product — before expanding outward.
The conversation begins where any reckoning with Bitcoin must: not with technology or price, but with the question of what kind of investor the asset selects for.
How does the psychology of a long-term Bitcoin HODLer differ from that of a short-term speculator?
Honestly, I don’t think Bitcoin has truly become a dominant asset yet. It’s developing fast, and we all see that, but real, widespread recognition hasn’t happened yet. Bitcoin’s main strength is that it’s finite: it has a hard limit. And beyond that, it splits people into two camps – those who believe in the asset and those who don’t. In a sense, it’s a matter of faith.
If you separate holders, the believers, from speculators, the comparison turns out to be fairly transparent. Look at the strategies of American hedge funds compared with a simple global “buy and hold” strategy: very few hedge funds have beaten simply holding the asset. That’s precisely why, in the end, it’s mostly the holders who win – because the finiteness of Bitcoin’s supply works in their favor. If you believe in Bitcoin’s story, if you believe it will keep growing, if you believe in the mission, in Bitcoin as new money and a new asset class, then of course you should hold it. It’s the most transparent strategy there is.
And here we arrive at a bigger question: what do you actually believe Bitcoin is? Everyone has to answer that for themselves. We’ve answered it for ourselves. If you believe the asset will grow over the long term, then the best thing you can do is hold it and pay in Bitcoin, rather than speculate with it.
How have spot Bitcoin ETFs changed the way society experiences “Bitcoin fever” cycles?
This integration of TradFi and Bitcoin is also only at the very beginning. All the ETFs together own roughly 4% of the supply – the trend is good, but there’s room to grow. More than 130 public companies hold Bitcoin on their balance sheets, and if Bitcoin becomes part of a new financial order, they will benefit from it. When BlackRock launched its Bitcoin ETF, that was a calculated move, not an accident.
But the way I look at it: institutionalization through ETFs is an attempt to embed Bitcoin without touching the foundations of the current system. And to understand those foundations, it helps to take a broader view. The modern financial system in its current form took shape after the abandonment of the Bretton Woods system. If you look at it dialectically, in a Hegelian way — through the law of the negation of the negation – monetary regimes succeed one another: first money was printed freely, then it was pegged to gold, and after Bretton Woods the pendulum swung back toward issuance. Today the system rests on constant issuance, and one of the structural problems here is obligations like public pension funds with high guaranteed returns. The longer people live and the more there is to pay out, the stronger the pressure toward emission. I’m not claiming this will resolve itself tomorrow through hyperinflation and a complete debasement of fiat money – payouts can be cut, the retirement age raised, obligations restructured. But the pressure is real, and the probability of such a scenario grows with every dollar printed. Against this backdrop, Bitcoin looks like an attractive collateral asset, because it is non-inflationary, even rather deflationary: coins are lost over time. Large institutions are already issuing loans in Bitcoin at a rate lower than the cost of dollar funding. This is the beginning of Bitcoin as a credit instrument.
I want to be precise: the collateral function is today’s transitional stage. It’s important, but it’s not the end point. Bitcoin’s real potential is revealed only when it becomes a means of payment, and not just good collateral on someone else’s balance sheet. I’ll come back to this.
What shifts must occur for consumers to willingly spend Bitcoin on everyday purchases instead of just holding it?
This is probably the most important question – where Bitcoin is heading. My conviction is: Bitcoin is money. Not collateral, not digital gold on a shelf, but money.
The logic here is as follows. The world is becoming ever more connected, and the main accelerator of this today is artificial intelligence. AI is leveling access to information, to markets, to labor on a planetary scale, and acts as a catalyst for a technological, social, and possibly political transition – comparable in force to the largest shifts in history. In such an increasingly connected world, the fragmentation into two hundred national currencies becomes an ever greater source of friction: conversion costs, currency barriers, the politicization of settlements. The demand for a neutral settlement layer is growing, and AI only accelerates that demand.
And here is an important step that I don’t want to skip: from “the world needs fewer currencies” it does not by itself follow that “therefore, Bitcoin.” Bitcoin wins this role for a specific reason – it has no issuer, no country that can devalue it or use it as leverage, and it has hard finiteness. Stablecoins inherit the weaknesses of the currency they’re pegged to; state digital currencies inherit the policy of their issuer. Bitcoin is the only candidate that is neutral by design. That’s why the bet is specifically on it.
From the very start of GoMining, we thought exactly this way. For Bitcoin to become money, two things are needed. The first is rails: so that any person has a wallet and their own share of Bitcoin, so that it’s money and not a tool for a narrow circle. The second is a payment system on Bitcoin itself. The main problem was always transactions: the variable fee that the user pays, which at peak moments could turn out to be comparable to the cost of the purchase itself, as well as the confirmation speed: to consider a transaction reliably confirmed, you need to wait for at least two blocks to close – that is, on average around twenty minutes. We worked on this from the very beginning and, it seems, we’ve solved this problem — we built a scheme that allows you to pay with real Bitcoin, on the original network, for free and effectively instantly on the user’s side.
What’s needed for people to start paying en masse? A critical mass of Bitcoin holders is needed – here the GoMining base helps. And a shift in the behavior of the Bitcoin Maxi’s themselves is needed. It sounds counterproductive: for Bitcoin to succeed as money, holders need to start paying with it, not just accumulating it. But without this step, the asset remains collateral, not currency. I think it’s worth starting now, while this is happening calmly and of one’s own free will.
Beyond low fees, what critical tools must a Bitcoin payment network offer to convince traditional offline merchants to accept BTC?
The complexity is real, and it isn’t closed off by reducing fees. First – a business needs the ability to accept clean, verifiable Bitcoin without legal risks regarding the origin of funds; in our protocol this is ensured at the architecture level. Second – clear accounting is needed, along with a convenient way to cash out into fiat for those expenses that are still denominated in fiat: rent, taxes, salaries. Without this a merchant won’t come on board, no matter how low the fee.
But behind the tools lies the question of motivation: who is the main beneficiary of the transition and who subsidizes it. Any phase transition in payments has faced exactly the same problems at the start. When the world moved from cash to cards, businesses had the same objections — complexity, costs, distrust of the new. That transition didn’t happen on its own: it was subsidized by banks and payment systems like Visa and Mastercard — they took on the costs of promotion, built acquiring infrastructure, and operated at a loss in this direction for years, because they stood to gain the most: every cashless transaction brought them a fee, and the network itself became more valuable the more people and merchants joined it. Governments, for their part, supported this shift because cashless payments meant transparency and tax collectability. In other words, the transition had a side that was vitally interested in paying for it. With Bitcoin, the role of such a subsidizing party shifts: the state here is more of a neutral or restrained observer, whereas the greatest interest lies with large corporations operating cross-border. For them, fragmentation across dozens of jurisdictions, currency controls, and compliance are a serious constraint, while a neutral settlement layer offers real simplification. And unlike past transitions, these corporations have everything they need to carry it out quickly: customers, resources, channels, and the financial power to subsidize the first steps.
I wouldn’t pretend that this is already happening – it isn’t yet, and the reason isn’t the absence of a “spark” but sober barriers: regulatory uncertainty, volatility, immature accounting practice. That’s exactly why infrastructure comes first. From the very start of GoMining we thought about this transition, and with GoBTC Pay we made it so that a merchant can be connected in minutes and people can be allowed to pay with real Bitcoin. In essence, we laid the rails and raised the flag – and now we’re waiting for it to be picked up by those for whom it’s most advantageous. In our view, it’s precisely the large corporations that will move the situation first, not the narrow crypto community, because they have both the interest and the tools. I’m saying this as a direction, not as an accomplished fact, but it seems to me an obvious next step.
How does GoBTC Pay’s use of a private mining pool to bypass Layer 2 solutions redefine scaling Bitcoin for everyday payments?
For everyone who believes in Bitcoin, our protocol lets you pay for a purchase with real Bitcoin in one tap – free for the user and effectively instant on the UX side. For the merchant it provides a convenient way to accept and accumulate Bitcoin. In essence, we’re solving the central problem of Bitcoin as a means of payment – convenience.
The protocol can be connected to not only by end users, but by any third-party banking apps, wallets, and financial services that allow Bitcoin to be stored. As soon as they connect, their users can pay with Bitcoin. We charge money only from merchants – 0.2% — and redistribute it among the owners of connected wallets and the miners of our pool, creating an additional income stream for them. At the start we distribute this share among our miners; over time it may expand to a wider circle of miners.
Unlike Lightning, we don’t move Bitcoin into external wrapped structures and don’t confirm it through third-party nodes – everything happens on the original network. I consider this the cleanest approach available today. At the same time, I’m not claiming this is the final form: it’s quite likely that over time even more elegant ways to move value on top will emerge. But as a step forward for payments on the original network, it’s significant.
And I’d put this in a broader frame. This isn’t just a convenient payment product – it’s the first practical step toward the world I spoke about: a world with a single, neutral, decentralized currency, where the friction between two hundred currencies goes away, and along with it the systemic risks that today’s monetary system has accumulated also decline. A world where people start thinking in satoshis rather than in dollars, euros, or yen, and where exchange-rate biases gradually lose their meaning. I’m not claiming this will happen quickly or inevitably – it’s a probability we believe in and build for. But the first step toward it is to give people a real opportunity to pay with real Bitcoin. And that’s exactly what we’ve done.
Does GoBTC Pay’s 2-of-3 multisig and 12-hour settlement compromise Bitcoin’s core philosophy of trustless decentralization?
This is a fair and precise question, and I won’t dodge it with a formula about “full decentralization.” More precisely: our solution is non-custodial, but it’s a deliberate engineering compromise. To make transactions instant and cheap, we really do need one key out of three as a co-signer. But we touch the funds only at the moment of the transaction itself, when it goes into the mempool; at the base level we don’t hold the user’s funds, and the user can always withdraw them themselves. Any two signatures out of three authorize a transaction – GoMining cannot spend the funds single-handedly.
I won’t claim this is equivalent to pure single-key self-custody, it isn’t, and the audience knows that. But “non-custodial” here means exactly what it should mean: neither we nor anyone else can dispose of your satoshis without you. It’s a compromise for the sake of speed and convenience on Layer-1, and I consider it justified for the task of retail payments.
And unlike Lightning, we don’t wrap Bitcoin and don’t move it into third-party layers, everything is on the original network. We’ve also partly solved the privacy problem: a transaction in our mempool is visible only at the moment of execution, and that moment doesn’t coincide with the moment of payment, so it’s easier for users with large balances when it comes to deanonymization, there was big demand from the community for this.
Any notable step forward draws criticism, and that’s normal. But I prefer to describe our compromise honestly rather than oversell it.
What is your advice to Bitcoin mining participants trying to survive amid halvings and the AI resource drain?
Look at the scale: Bitcoin’s market capitalization today is smaller than the capitalization of Nvidia alone. In my view, this suggests that both Bitcoin and, all the more so, mining are undervalued relative to the role they can play, though I present this as a thesis, not a guarantee.
The mining business is infrastructure that facilitates payments; without it there are simply no Bitcoin payments, because it’s the miners who determine what goes into a block. If Bitcoin develops as a means of payment, facilitating those payments turns into a full-fledged business, not just mining. Right now mining trades at a large discount even to the price of Bitcoin itself. If the transition to a payment function takes place, this gap will logically narrow. So in my opinion miners should not wind down but keep building infrastructure and learning to service+ the payment flow, that’s exactly where the new economy appears, beyond the block subsidy.
How will the global mining industry’s geography and physical structure evolve to survive on transaction fees alone?
Mining has shifted toward the United States and is now largely concentrated there; there is a large cluster in the UAE. China lost its position by abandoning mining in 2021, and it will be hard for them to catch up. I think geographic centers will form around this infrastructure, and North America has the advantage here.
As Bitcoin moves toward being money, space in a block itself becomes an increasingly valuable resource, and the infrastructure that produces it becomes strategic. The logical next stage is when large corporations begin building their own data centers, including to ensure their own payment flow. I won’t venture to name timelines, the dynamics are greatly accelerated by the growth in demand for computing overall but the direction seems stable to me.
And here I’ll allow myself a step to the side, to explain why this transition, for me, isn’t only about infrastructure. At the start of the 20th century, before the First World War, international tribunals were being created, and many at the time sincerely believed that humanity had outgrown large wars and that an era of progress was setting in. History showed that this was premature, and I keep that lesson in mind, which is why I try to speak cautiously: not “this is how it will be,” but “such a scenario is possible.” It seems to me that technology, and above all AI, is capable of gradually shifting the balance from a logic of confrontation to a logic of economic interaction and competition. If this happens, a neutral monetary layer like Bitcoin will turn out to be a natural part of such a world. But I present this precisely as a possibility we believe in and build for, not as a predetermined outcome.
Our position as a team that believes in Bitcoin is simple: we believe that Bitcoin’s future is to become a global currency, and that for Bitcoin to have this future, people need to start paying with it, however unorthodox that may sound in the moment. We’re doing our part of the work, building the rails and the product. So the advice is short: accumulate Bitcoin, but also start paying with it, and retrain yourself to think in Bitcoin. We expect this transition to happen calmly and evolutionarily.
How does Stratum V2 reshape the relationship between miners, pools, and the Bitcoin network? Why will miner-controlled block construction matter as subsidies fade?
That’s a great question. I believe the industry is moving toward private mining pools. As Bitcoin becomes a real payment network, the main competition will shift to block space, meaning who gets to include transactions in a block. Miners will effectively own the transaction infrastructure because they decide which transactions are processed.
I also think we’ll eventually see sovereign, country-level mining pools, where countries prioritize their own transaction flow. But the more likely outcome is private pools backed by financial institutions, private funds, and major companies. As block rewards continue to decline, competition will increasingly focus on transaction fees and control over block space.
GoMining was the first company to mine a block using Stratum V2. Beyond giving miners more control, it also improves transaction privacy. When a pool operates a private mempool instead of a public one, transactions become much harder to trace. I believe this model will become the industry standard, and GoMining is building products around that future.
Which areas of the Bitcoin ecosystem still lack critical infrastructure? Where will GoMining focus its next wave of innovation?
Another great question. First and foremost, our task is to build out payments. That’s the core piece of infrastructure Bitcoin still needs.
Alongside that, there’s the “compound Bitcoin” story: earning yield on held Bitcoin. It exists today, but there’s still enormous room to grow, especially on the institutional side. We plan to develop lending as a separate business line and capture that compound effect.
The next big story, and the direction where I see GoMining growing, is AI agents on Bitcoin. Because we can process payments without transaction fees, we can enable a huge volume of payments to AI agents operating on Bitcoin. This is a truly decentralized story. AI computation runs on electricity, and the Bitcoin network runs on electricity. To my mind, it’s the only genuinely honest pairing. AI agents transacting on Bitcoin represent the next stage in the ecosystem’s development.
In parallel, we’re planning to launch a Bitcoin-centric marketplace. Beyond our core product, GoBTCPay, we want to let merchants simply tick a box to list their goods and services and sell them through our marketplace. We even have a descending-price auction mechanism. We think it’s a very compelling value proposition. Today, our marketplace only handles the secondary market for miners. It’s a large, liquid market with many thousands of users. But just as Amazon started by selling books, we can start selling other goods for Bitcoin beyond miners.
So overall, we’ll keep pushing for Bitcoin to become a true means of payment, build the lending and yield story, develop AI agents powered by Bitcoin payments, and roll out the marketplace. Those are the big priorities for us over the next few years.
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About The Author
Alisa, a dedicated journalist at the MPost, specializes in crypto, AI, investments, and the expansive realm of Web3. With a keen eye for emerging trends and technologies, she delivers comprehensive coverage to inform and engage readers in the ever-evolving landscape of digital finance.
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Alisa, a dedicated journalist at the MPost, specializes in crypto, AI, investments, and the expansive realm of Web3. With a keen eye for emerging trends and technologies, she delivers comprehensive coverage to inform and engage readers in the ever-evolving landscape of digital finance.
