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May 2, 2025 - Blood Money
41:02
The New Economic System to Liberate We The People (pt 4) with Craig Everrett
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Alright guys, welcome to the latest episode of Blood Money.
Today we have a very special guest, Craig Everett.
How are you doing, sir?
Pretty good.
Awesome.
Great to have you on our podcast.
So this last few episodes, we've been doing a series on QPQ and the new cryptocurrency.
I believe it's called the Gaju coin.
Is that correct?
Yeah, Gaju.
That's correct.
Gaju.
Excellent.
So for people that have seen the last few episodes, we've been following this new...
Cryptocurrency new economy that these gentlemen here are building.
Craig, first tell us what QPQ is, tell us what Gazoo is, and take us into your role within this company.
Okay, so what QPQ is, I'll give you the really short version.
It's had a few incarnations.
It's basically an organization that was started to...
Figure out how to let people transact outside of the captured markets.
Internally, we have a phrase that everything is fake economy.
And just the phrase itself might give you some sense of things that people have intuited, but maybe can't put their finger on what's wrong with.
QBQ's overall mission is to kind of correct that and get back to motivating real economic activity, not just, you know, oh, we're going to have some...
Financial astronautics with devices built on top of devices, built on other financial devices so nobody works and there's just money all the time.
Somebody has to make things somewhere.
Somebody's got to produce food.
Someone's got to actually get work done.
And people, surprisingly, love doing real work as long as they can be rewarded for it.
The economy is structured in such a way that it disincentivizes actual motivated work.
So we're trying to motivate economic activity and correct the kinks in the system that have gotten everything all screwed up.
Anyway, that's QPQ's general mission.
The Gajimaru blockchain system, it's a meta-chain.
It's sort of a chain of chains.
It is the tail end of a very long journey to correct things that have been technically deficient in blockchain to the point that it's been around for over a decade, but nobody's doing...
I can't...
I could buy a car with Bitcoin, but I can't buy my groceries.
Stuff like that.
Those problems and just basic consumer economics that you just can't do with a crypto coin.
So even the narratives changed from, oh, this is a currency, to no, it's a store of value.
That kind of narrative shift has happened as a consequence of it not being practically useful because of technical deficiencies.
And we believe those technical...
Well, we don't just believe we know for a fact, because this is what we do.
There's technical deficiencies that still existed.
Fixing those was disincentivized at some point.
And then the number go up.
Crazy land that started and we are where we are.
So we've been isolated from that mostly within the core development team.
We've been isolated from the everything, you know, the big number go up side of crypto.
And we weren't aware how bad that had gotten.
The core offering now is good enough to actually use in consumer economics.
And so my role, I'm the chief product officer.
We are, I mean, my whole thing is pushing product, like actual product based on blockchain.
So markets based on blockchain.
Can we give an example of like, because you've given me the eBay example of what didn't work, what they're trying to do.
Could you give that example and then lead us into how that is going to be fixed?
Oh yeah, sure.
So one of our first things coming out the gate is called Gaju Market.
And it's a simple concept, just like, it's almost like classifieds.
You post a thing, I want to sell a thing, I go to Gaju Market, I click post item, put the details of the item in, pictures of it or whatever, and then I post it.
The way that it works in the back end...
Is that when I post that product, there's a governing contract, there's a master contract, it's called the base contract, that's on chain.
When I click post, I'm sending a transaction through the back end of that site that I have to sign, of course, because it's a blockchain, right?
So you can't just...
Do it.
It asks you for a signature.
So you sign the transaction.
It goes through the back end and that actually posts a smart contract on chain that's for the item that you're selling.
Now a buyer comes along and they want to buy the thing.
They click buy and the contract goes into a negotiation state and it remains in that negotiation state until both parties agree on the exact price because there might be some variance like you're going to ship it from Alaska to Hawaii.
That's going to cost money so they might change the price a little for that.
But we leave that up to the humans.
The site is just a facilitator to connect because it's hard to talk to a blockchain directly, right?
So the site, the whole point of the site is to let people know what's up for sale and connect them A to B. It is, however, because there is like the Silk Road problem.
You don't want people selling babies and rockets and stuff online.
So there's, you know, the site can be, there's a moderation function if you're trying to sell, you know, something crazy there.
We can pull that down, but only from the site.
Nobody has control of the blockchain, and the actual trades only happen on the blockchain.
So the site is purely a connector.
What that does, though, is from the perspective of writing the site backend, the site doesn't have to have any private information.
The conversation between the buyer and seller just goes away because it's not important.
The only thing that remains is the artifact on chain that says, A, bought something from B at whatever price.
And then the revenue model for that is that 2% of the sale goes to the marketplace.
So as opposed to eBay, where they could take up to 40%, or Amazon, they could take up to 60%, Gajumarket takes 2%.
2% is the total overhead for the seller, which is awesome.
That's cheaper than a Visa transaction.
And the chain transaction is very cheap as well.
So it's a great deal for the buyer and the seller.
We're just trying to facilitate trade, and the site doesn't have to do all this creepy spying on people's stuff that happens in markets right now.
The way that, like, so when eBay was doing this, part of it, the issue was that the current cryptocurrency, the way it works, it takes a lot of time.
It does, it's not in...
Actional amounts enough to do regular transactions, like you were saying, cars and that sort of thing.
Now, how is the speed issue solved?
How is the efficiency issue solved with QPQ and Gaju?
That's a fun question.
Okay, so when you click sell or buy or whatever and you sign a transaction and post it to the chain, you will get a reaction back.
Usually immediately, sometimes it takes about three seconds.
So we have about a three-second latency across the chain.
The reason that there's a three-second latency is that we have separated the generation of key blocks, which determines who the leader is.
This is a proof-of-work chain, by the way.
So it's Bitcoin-style.
Nobody can control the actual chain.
We have a separation between key blocks, which declare who the leader is.
And the inclusion of transactions onto the chain.
So those transactions come out in micro blocks and those are pushed out every three seconds.
That's why you might have up to a three second delay.
And key blocks come out every two minutes.
So miners are working to try to, you know, they're competing to try to become the leader and that changes every two minutes.
But the micro blocks that have the transactions come out every three seconds.
So when you click the thing.
The longest you're going to wait is a couple seconds.
So tell me about the marketplace.
When it works, from what I understand from prior interviews is that this is something that's basically open to anybody to set up their own marketplace, set up a system where you could actually buy and sell based upon this cryptocurrency.
Can you tell us a little bit about that process?
Let's say I want to set up a t-shirt store.
I want to both manufacture.
Coins, but I also want to use the coins to conduct trade.
Right.
So, well, the path, okay, so for individual sellers, which is the first version of this, we're going to be doing, you know, multitude of shops later.
But the login, I mean, setting up an account is you have a public key, and when you go to the site, there's just a login option, and you...
Click that, and that gives you a QR code or a URL.
Most sellers are using desktop wallet stuff, so you just copy the URL in to your wallet, and that pulls the login transaction, or there's a login message, and your wallet will sign that and give it back, and that verifies who you are.
The first time that your public key is seen by the site, It generates a blank account for you, and then you just populate that with whatever you want, like your name and kind of your branding.
But that's the extent of the setup process.
The first time that the site sees a key, it creates a registration for you, and that's it.
So there's no username, password.
You don't have to give us emails.
There's not like, give us your phone number.
You know, a bunch of personal details and we're going to track you around the world.
There's none of that stuff.
You just sign a message once and you have an account.
I mean, in setting up a store, is it like, you know, imagining something Shopify-like where you could set up a store to, is that the way it is?
Where you could basically set up a store to sell anything?
Yeah, that's actually where we're going.
So the individual seller is the initial offering just to get like a minimum viable product to prove the case to people.
But yeah, exactly.
Going on with like Shopify or sort of an Etsy type model where you make your own, you decide how you want your shop to be presented and that's up to you to guide that.
The market exists to connect A to B. So if you just go out, if you just start emailing people, I have things for sale, they're not going to listen to you.
You need a marketplace for people to go and find things and ultimately the ultimate Service provided by the site is search function and navigation so that people that want to buy a thing can figure out how to find it.
Because that's the hardest part, is finding the thing that you want.
So the site's ultimately focused on that.
So like, okay, because I'm just trying to wrap my head and visualize this whole thing.
So I'm imagining something Shopify meets Amazon, like where you could set up your own store for your own products.
And now you're basically trading in gas use, more or less?
Yeah, that's it.
We don't have a Visa overhead.
We don't have the compliance overhead with that.
All the security issues that come around with that are totally deferred to the chain, because that's the one thing we can trust without having to trust anybody, is that the chain's just protected by proof of work the same way Bitcoin is, and we can trade in something with that same power.
It works fast.
And we have smart contracts.
And the smart contract governs the stages of a transaction.
So instead of having to give QPQ or give the Gaju Market all your money and trust that it's going to be a good custodian of it, the way that you would do with a normal fraud prevention service, instead you send your money to the smart contract.
The site just facilitates that connection to make it easy for you.
But the negotiation occurs on-chain and at the end if the seller Doesn't like the deal, or if the buyer doesn't like the deal, or if they both like the deal, then it goes through.
But there's nobody in the back end that can mess that up.
This is truly peer-to-peer in terms of sales.
The site's just connecting A to B. Got you, got you.
Now, in terms of the couple of questions, the value of what the gaju is.
So, like, you could potentially be manufacturing the gajus on your laptop while you're at work, while you're running around.
But what dictates the value?
How do you know, okay, I'm selling a t-shirt and it's going to cost, like, 10 gajus or whatever?
What is dictating the value of that?
Well, the initial value of gajus is based on the Swiss franc.
But ultimately, the value of anything that we do in markets.
So the value of money is similar to the value of anything in a market.
The magic function that a market actually provides is not just a place for people to trade, but it performs the function of price discovery.
So the value of the gaju is initially marked at 1 to 1 Swiss franc.
QBQ maintains a reserve fund to try to combat price spikes and price speculation, but at some point that will be exhausted.
And we're kind of going to be on our own.
So speculators could try to run the price up and do their speculative game.
Price speculation, we're hoping that we can get a broad enough distribution of the ganju across lots of people.
To prevent things like a, you know, single-holdership price spike or market manipulations that are too severe.
But anyway, as far as the core price of the Gaju itself, it will be, again, it's initially, we're initially offering it, like, against the Swiss franc, but that's, at some point, we're going to run out of Gaju to keep price spikes down.
And the theory is that...
By the point that that's exhausted, there will be enough cushion in the system with normal trades to determine a running value.
The problem with rating values in fiat currency is that fiat currency is crashing right now.
So the sort of backstop against what's the price of a gaju, instead of trying to think of it in fiat terms, while fiat's going crazy, it's easier to think of it in terms of like bags of rice.
The original incarnation of the market actually had 10 kilo bags of rice because it started in Japan originally out here.
Originally, there were 10 kilo bag of rice offerings that everybody could index price against directly to try to figure out like, okay, if I'm offering shoes, how much would that be if I were to convert that to bags of rice?
And then, okay, that makes sense for...
For this, and then you rate that, you know, the metered price winds up coming out in the cryptocurrency.
And then over time, it develops its own value.
But that's the history of money itself.
The market winds up dictating that price based on what the going values are.
We're picking a kind of easy peg for people to index against, which is the Swiss franc.
That's like the least crazy fiat right now is that.
So that's sort of the easy one for us to peg.
QBQ is also...
It's more stable.
You're saying it's the most stable currency?
Well, it's one of the...
Nothing's perfectly stable right now.
Everything's nuts.
I mean, we are...
Again, this is the problem that we're ultimately trying to fix is that the everything is fake economy is bonkers.
But if you...
And it's controlled by an elite.
It's not like...
This sounds like this is more in the hands of the people, but as long as this is widespread enough...
That's it, yeah.
To...
Okay.
So a currency has to be common.
And common means widespread, right?
So the value of a currency, if we get into the monetary theory of this, like the bottom line is that the value of the currency is dictated by the current belief in its value and, and that's a shared belief, and the belief,
this is the hard one, the shared belief in its future value.
So if you inflate, so let me distinguish two terms here.
There's price increases and decreases.
So there's price changes.
That's this one phenomenon over here.
And then there's inflation or deflation.
And the media has conflated this on purpose because they're playing their little word game.
But what inflation and deflation actually mean is the increase or decrease of the money supply.
So if you inject a lot of new fiat into the system, you have inflated.
The way this gets tangled up with elites is that they have access to that money first before the public has become aware or felt those changes.
Just because you print a bunch of dollars doesn't immediately change prices.
Price changes are an orthogonal concern that's based on the future belief in the value of the money.
So when you print a bunch of money, everyone close to the bank gets access to that money first and it starts trickling down into the economy.
That has a later effect.
After people have received the money at a value they believed in at point A, in the future at point B, everyone's gotten lots of money from this trickle-out.
Now they don't have the same faith.
And they've learned about this.
They found out, oh, hey, there's this huge money printing that happened.
The money supply has been increased.
Well, I don't trust the future value of the currency anymore.
And so later, you get price increases.
And people say the price increase is inflation.
That's a little bit of a misnomer.
Price increases are an orthogonal concern.
The inflation happened months or maybe even years prior.
The people at the top benefited from it.
And now it's hitting the consumer economy and prices are skyrocketing.
So the important thing to remember is that it's the belief in a future value that impacts price changes right now.
And that belief is a trailing effect on inflation that may have occurred if that inflation occurs in the absence of any new economic activity to kind of consume whatever the value that should have been.
With Degaju, nobody has control over the money supply.
We have an algorithmic production curve for mining, similar to Bitcoin.
The curve is different from Bitcoin, but it's similar.
We found out with Bitcoin how hard that can be.
You need a pretty harsh curve or else you get price spikes.
So we've adjusted that a little bit.
But the total supply of the gaju is fixed.
Nobody can control that.
We can't control that.
Across all the associate chains, all the child chain systems, none of them have the authority to mint any gajus.
They can transact in it, but nobody can mint it.
The only thing that can mint it is the mint itself.
The gajumoto root is the only chain.
That's the proof of work location.
The reason that has to be proof of work is that proof of stake is gameable.
And the reason we can't be in charge of it is that no matter how trustworthy we individually are in the core team, at some point, it's a business, right?
So at some point, there's going to be board of director changes and crazy stuff's going to happen, and there's a perverse incentive to control the money supply.
So the one thing we can never do, ever, ever, ever, is have control of the money supply.
Because that would wind up corrupting.
Well, it corrupts the system early where it's hidden.
And then later you get a degradation in the future belief in the value of the gadget because people stop trusting it.
So you can't control the money supply.
Nobody can.
It's too powerful of a weapon to wield.
And that's what we're seeing with fiat currencies.
For decades, almost a century, fiat currencies have been...
Stewarded to a level that they've at least worked for people.
People were willing to work for dollars and work for euros and whatever.
And ultimately, though, no fiat currency has ever survived in history.
None of them have survived.
And even metal-based currencies, they wind up getting debased.
That's where we get the term debased.
The base of even a metal currency winds up becoming fiat at some point when debasement occurs.
So we have to keep that off-limits, period.
Anyway, that distinction between the inflation of the money base and the future degradation of belief in that currency, that's the really important dynamic to understand.
I believe that it's a deliberate choice to be very obtuse and obscure about that because they'll just say, oh, there's inflation.
Look, the prices went up.
That's not what inflation really means.
You could have a declining money base.
At the same time that you have a drop in faith in a currency.
Like if a country is getting invaded and they're getting wiped out, their currency is going to fall to the floor.
That doesn't mean their money base increased.
That's not the same thing.
You're losing faith in the fact that that government may no longer have the ability to defend itself at all.
So what are the promises of a central bank going to be worth in the future?
So it's not exactly the same thing.
Money supply equals price increases or decreases.
It's the faith in the money.
Because everything is just a common faith.
It turns out that gold has been the ultimate currency base throughout history.
It could have been, like in the modern era, it could be bullets, but it just isn't.
It's gold, because that's what we have faith in.
Because we have a very good demonstration of the enduring power, you know, the enduring value of gold against real things versus the enduring value of gold against the dollar.
Because that's gone crazy.
It seems like this is solving a lot of problems.
One, you know, the centralization of currency where you have powerful people being able to manipulate it, make money off of your loss, of your pain and suffering.
Kind of A and B, how you guys constructed this in order to address all those issues.
Bitcoin was a proof of concept.
It wasn't really meant to be the final stage of cryptocurrency.
They were trying to prove a point that you could do this.
You could have a shared ledger.
And if you had a shared ledger, then belief in that ledger, if that ledger was based on something nobody could control, which is proof of work to solve the leader election problem.
That's the core of decentralization in blockchain, is that the proof of work concept ensures that you don't have centralized control.
And that's the tricky thing about proof of stake if it's anonymous.
Anonymous proof of stake is a gameable system, and it always gets captured eventually.
But proof of work, you can't really game a proof of work system the same way.
So the proof of concept that Bitcoin provided Yes, you actually can make a shared ledger based on proof of work.
And that does give you a trustless basis for the formation of a currency.
The production of that currency can be algorithmic.
Therefore, nobody can control it.
It's protected by proof of work and it's algorithmic within that system.
And every different node in that system is proof checking all the things that have happened in that system to verify that they're true.
That is a super powerful system, and that's kind of the underpinning.
That concept is the underpinning of crypto working correctly.
That has since gone totally off the rails.
Not Bitcoin itself, but that concept has gotten kind of muddled on purpose, which is very unfortunate.
Anyway, the way that we've looked at the history of crypto and look at Bitcoin as a proof of concept, that was...
They established that, yeah, you could make a currency value base this way, and people do believe it inherently because the proof of work is a very powerful proof.
The Ethereum project came along and they're like, hey, if we have a shared state system where we know transaction A leads to B, leads to C, and we have a provable order, if we have a provable order that's global, we can then make a state machine.
Based on this and use the state of the chain as the basis for a state machine, which means that you could program that.
And then you could have programmable money.
Wouldn't that be cool?
That case was proven.
It was proven in a very bad way.
Unfortunately, the EVM is not built for purpose.
It's not even fit for purpose, but it proved the concept.
If you're into automata and systems design and language design, then...
You immediately identify there's a lot of trouble inside the EVM and inside of even the language solidity is a very dangerous language to use for this.
It's not fit for that purpose, but it was a great proof of concept.
So moving forward from that, you want to pick apart the problems with why is blockchain so high latency?
Well, the problem is you're waiting for a block to come out because the block has the proof of work and all the transactions in it.
Well, the work of including transactions and the work of producing a leader proof can be separated.
So that's what's happened.
That's the Bitcoin next generation protocol.
It literally just splits.
That's the whole point of it is that it splits the work of leader selection, which is the proof of work puzzle solving part, from the work of including transactions on the chain, which once you've chosen a leader, there's no reason for that to be slow.
You can do that as fast as you want.
And so that's the protocol that's been chosen.
Moving beyond that, later in history, the Eternity Project came along and they assembled an insane team of amazing people who solved some of the best language designers in the world,
some of the best automata theorists in the world, some of the best runtime designers in the world got together and they made this thing called the Fate Runtime.
And that was in the context of the Eternity Project, in the SOFIA language, which is, it's so much of a better language that if you're a programmer, almost the moment you mess with it, you start realizing, like, wow, this came out the right way.
And it eliminates all the holes and pitfalls that you get in Solidity that were sort of holdovers from other language concepts, because they didn't know what they were doing quite yet when they made that.
By the time Fate was designed and Sophia were designed, they knew exactly what they were doing.
They had limited the scope from we're doing general anything programming to specifically what do you need to be able to program a blockchain for financial transactions.
Not general programming, but specifically how can we safely program financial transactions in a way that's understandable and doesn't have hidden pitfalls.
So that was fantastic.
Unfortunately, that project was very...
I don't know, almost anti-business.
There were a lot of issues there that kind of collapsed, prevented that from taking off, in addition to some technical choices that were still hamstringing that.
So we've taken the best parts of that and moved on.
So this is kind of the next and we think final generation of needing to establish a mint with a core.
A core definition that includes all the good things that have been learned, starting from Bitcoin all the way down to here, putting that in the core definition of the Mint where we establish the money base in a trustless way.
And our big extensions to that are a series of chain trees that can actually operate in a multi-currency fashion as well, but where the currency authority graphs exist.
That define tree structures.
And the top of any financial authority graph is the only node in that tree that's permitted to define what the money base is.
So mint currency or destroy currency.
When it comes to the Gaju, which is a pure cryptocurrency, it works just like Bitcoin.
There is an algorithmic production curve.
It's a proof of work system.
Nobody can mess with its value.
We can't control it at all.
So the root chain itself in the Gajumaru follows exactly the Bitcoin principle, but it facilitates everything that you need technically to be able to actually do retail transactions so you can pay.
So we have another product, Gajupay, and actually we're straight through spends, not even smart contracts, where you go to the cash register.
There's a QR code, you put your phone on it, and boom, that happened, and you can check it on chain immediately.
There's no delay.
Spin transactions are super fast on Gajimata.
Again, I'm the product officer, so I keep talking about products, but that's where we're going.
If cryptocurrency is supposed to be this great thing, how come I can't pay at the pump with that?
That's a good question.
If you look at the systems where they say, "Well, you can pay with Bitcoin."
You know, use Lightning or whatever.
All those systems wind up having these weird problems because they're trying to patch over technical deficiencies that occurred earlier.
And they never got fixed because there's vested interest locking them up.
So that's the whole point of the Gajamata is to kind of clear that technical debt, get the base done correctly, you know, finally get a solid base established, and now, you know, establish this web of different chains that can use a common currency.
But are aware of each other, instead of it being an external system, like the Layer 2 systems, they don't really know about, like the parent chain doesn't know what's going on.
So there's always a security gap that winds up becoming custodial in some way or manipulable in some way.
And that's a very dangerous thing.
So you have to define a system where the parent chains are aware of whatever their children are so that they can be defined in a regular way and you can have proof forward and backwards.
Once you do that, though, Any future innovations that we need, any new amazing ideas that come out, can occur on child chains without affecting the core definition where the money base exists because we've got this awareness of what the children are built into the system.
So that's a long story.
Unfortunately, this is kind of a complicated technology, so it's not like a simple way to just give bullets, like a bullet point of like, well, we did A and then B and then C and so we're done.
It's kind of a complicated...
Complicated world.
In terms of the QR code, being able to walk up to the gas pump, being able to walk into the store with the QR code and buy stuff, what does the timeline of that look like?
Out here, I live in Japan, so a little bit different from other places.
We're waiting to run a pilot project out here.
I don't live in a big city.
I live in a village.
Our Village Business Development Office is eager to do a pilot project out here with local shops to test the system out and exercise it and see what uptake looks like for us to get feedback and also for the community here to get familiar with this newfangled thing and try to iron out the kinks in the system.
So how hard is it for your average You know, just shopkeeper to interact with the system because they've dealt with Visa and so on, which is quite complex.
It's not simple to get set up with Stripe or Square or whatever.
But they're used to that, right?
So what's the path, what's the shortcut for business owners to get familiar with our system well enough to be able to take advantage of it quickly?
So we have a few pilot projects to run on that.
We would hope to be able to do the local pilot project here this year.
So 2025, we're trying to get a rollout to get a good test.
Probably 2026, which is where...
So 2026 is when ultimately the parking blocks get pulled off the system entirely.
We completely lose control.
There's no governance after a certain point next year of the root chain.
Hopefully by that point, we will be able to do pilot projects a few other places.
We'd like to try to do a pilot in the U.S. as well.
Again, kind of locally to make sure that we're getting the kinks worked out of the system and then do a full product rollout in 2026 for the basics.
No crazy financial products yet.
We're just trying to cover the basics.
Our principle is if you can't buy a t-shirt online yet, it's not money.
Hold off on the astronautics.
We're not going to do derivative stuff and like, oh, we're going to do options trades with...
No, no, no, no.
Can I buy a t-shirt?
Let me buy a t-shirt.
Make sure I can buy a t-shirt or gas or something first.
So that's this year and next year that we're hoping to roll that out.
Awesome, awesome.
Is there anything we didn't touch upon in terms of your sphere within the company that's important to discuss?
Man, there's so much going on.
It is a proof-of-work system so ultimately we're going to need miners and that means mining power and there's a whole thing there going on.
That being opened up is a special bootstrapping a proof-of-work blockchain in the context of people that know that they can try to attack early chains when they're early before everyone's heard about them.
That's a special problem we're trying to solve over the next year.
The whole point of establishing the currency base is to get as broad a distribution of the currency as possible and have products out that prove the point.
So I think we've talked around that fairly well.
There's a lot of esoteric that we could get into with monetary theory itself and what's going on in terms of crazy attempts to try to control I'm a veteran.
I'm a big believer in the Constitution, and yet, because I'm an American citizen working overseas, I get hit all the time with the anti-money laundering stuff and FATCA and bank reporting.
So the bottom line is, if you're an American citizen and you live Outside of the United States, you basically are forbidden from doing business in a practical sense because you can't open a bank account most places.
Most banks will just look at the compliance rules for dealing with an United States citizen and they go, it's just too much trouble.
So we just won't open bank accounts for you.
If you do manage to open a bank account, they will regularly call you in for in-person interviews that are mandated by the U.S. system.
So compared to that, if you want to be able to do business, Being able to do it on-chain is, like, way easier and much less error-prone than doing bank-to-bank fiat currency transfers through the Swift system, which is...
I've had transfers lost in Swift for up to eight months.
And that sucks if you're trying to make payroll.
Like, if you're running a small business somewhere, you've got people that depend on you, you've got a contract overseas, you know, you're doing software development work overseas or something, and they can't pay you.
Because they've sent the payment.
So they've already been charged.
They've already sent the payment, but it's lost in the system for eight months because some route changed or because, you know, at the beginning of the Ukraine war, it was crazy.
Like, all kinds of financial routes were getting screwed up because the U.S. dollar was getting weaponized.
That doesn't have anything to do with us or our customers, but it did affect payments.
And, you know, we've had to, like, let people go over that.
And that's my own experience, not inside QPQ.
But that kind of thing happens all the time.
So it's very, very hard.
It's very risky to try to run a business as an American citizen overseas because of these crazy reporting rules that are very onerous and they scare banks.
So banks are scared out of doing business with American citizens.
What that does is it reduces America's influence across the world.
Because the best version of influence that we ever had was not USAID and doing sneaky stuff and trying to coerce people into join the Rainbow Brigade and be all crazy.
The best version of American Influence that existed before was that Americans were well-known for being very forward-thinking, very entrepreneurial, very interested in getting cool stuff done, very aggressive in business, and going after things that they thought were going to be cool.
And that energy sort of shakes the system up, and it makes people happy.
They're like, yeah, let's go try to do the things with this American guy.
He came over here.
He wants to start a business.
That is a subtle influence.
It's partially a cultural influence.
That's incredibly powerful.
Why the U.S. would go and shut that down everywhere by attacking American citizens overseas, trying to have tax laws follow them around the world, try to dig into their stuff, try to get into the bank system and force banks to do reporting, and if they don't, they're going to sanction the whole country because this bank is misbehaving according to a foreign law.
I don't know.
That's not a win.
It's such a big fail that most American entrepreneurs who are expats have ditched their U.S. citizenship.
So that's the effect of this, ultimately, is that people ditch their citizenship.
And I'm pressured to do the same, actually.
Because if anything that I do takes off, I'm going to have to...
I mean, there's no way that you can function overseas as an American if you're successful, which is...
Incredibly stupid.
Unfortunately, Gajimono can't fix that, but it can fix the debanking problem.
And that's the biggest problem.
That's the biggest immediate problem that people have is debanking.
Where you walk into a bank and they say, oh, you're American.
Well, we can't do anything with you.
That's crazy.
Wow.
Wow, wow.
Man, it sounds very interesting.
You know, for the viewers, definitely you need to watch this entire series.
We did a couple of interviews with Greg Chu, subsequent to that, Peter, which I believe is your marketing guy, right?
Peter's a marketing guy?
Yeah, and now we're hearing about, you know, the marketplace, you know, setting up stores.
This has been really good, Craig.
Anything else that needs to be mentioned before we wrap it up?
No, this has been fun.
It was nice talking to you.
Awesome.
Awesome.
Well, Craig, thank you so much for the viewers out there.
Make sure you check out AmericaHappens.com where we have all of our episodes posted.
Also, our Rumble channel, our Roku channel, and follow me on X at NotThemMiller and also AmericaHappens1.
I will see you all on the next episode of Blood Money.
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