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May 8, 2025 - Blood Money

33:57

The New Economic System to Liberate We The People with Ulf Wiger - BM eps 291

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	Alright guys, welcome to the latest episode of Blood Money.
	Today we have a very special guest, Ulf Wiger.
	Did I say that right?
	Pretty close, yeah.
	How do you say it?
	Ulf Wiger.
	Wiger.
	Okay, cool, cool.
	Awesome.
	So we've been doing a series on this new financial system.
	As we all know, we have things like Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, meme coins.
	And while that's...
	We've helped in decentralizing our currency systems in many ways.
	Some of the issues with those coins and methods are that it really takes...
	People with a lot of money to buy these supercomputers, to mine these coins, to have the accessibility to actually create these coins, right?
	So, you know, while it has been decentralized, it is still, the current system is still a little bit elitist.
	And then we hear about meme coins and some of these meme coins that come out, you know, valued really high and then they plummet.
	They're back by nothing.
	And sometimes, again, we see that.
	A few elite are making a whole bunch of money while we, the people, are getting screwed.
	But this QPQ system, as well as Gadjucoin, seems to be reinventing how that's all done.
	One of the people we interviewed said that it's like Bitcoin perfected.
	And so we have Ulf here, who works with QPQ and Gadjucoin, who's going to tell us a little bit about what he does.
	And also why this is a much better system than what currently exists.
	So, Oof, why don't you just get right into it, man?
	Tell us, you know, what you do in the company and what you guys are up to.
	Okay, so we're small enough still to practically all of us be in the C-suite.
	So I'm the CTO.
	I'm also part of the core development team.
	And I've been developing core blockchain technology since 2017.
	And interestingly, back then, we still saw a lot of big actors trying to come in and looking at using blockchain for commercial applications, but then they pretty much faded away.
	And so I've had a lot of time to think about why that is.
	One of the things that I think we do very differently is we've figured out how to maintain the best aspects, the revolutionary aspects of blockchain, that is the decentralization and the permissionless nature, with regulation-compatible chains.
	So Gajumaru is really a blockchain system where we have A core chain that is fully decentralized, fully permissionless, and then what we call associate chains that can be private,
	public, fully permissioned, or something in between, but that are designed to sit inside a certain jurisdiction and abide by the regulations there, but still have access to the currency, the gaju.
	And so we feel that this is a way to unlock crypto for real value, real transactions, and real commercial activities.
	Because the people who we need to get to use blockchain are going to be bound by some jurisdiction.
	If you're in the US, you're going to be bound by US law.
	If you're looking, I actually had this problem when I was in Sweden, or I am in Sweden, but sitting in Sweden and having a bunch of sexy blockchain technology that I could potentially use for some commercial activity, I had to accept the fact that if I had tried, the banks would have kicked me out.
	Because laws do accept using, you can, for example, mine.
	Crypto in Sweden, you can use it as an asset that you invest in, but you cannot use it as money.
	So we feel that we have actually addressed that.
	We have figured out ways to adapt enough to legislation that it could actually be money, and you could actually use it as money within your company, within your business.
	And I think that's the key thing.
	And part of that, I mean, I'm just going to throw out a few things I've learned.
	So part of it is crypto mining usually is reserved to people that can get, you know, supercomputers and, you know, spend a lot of money on electricity to be able to mine.
	This is more than on your cheap old laptop, you could be mining while you're, you know, running around.
	And not only could you mine, you're able to set up marketplaces, stores, very much Shopify-like, where you could buy and sell using the gadget.
	Which I believe is equivalent of one Swiss franc, if I'm not mistaken.
	But tell me a little bit more about that.
	It's what we're aiming for.
	Ultimately, the market will set the value for the coin.
	But since we're hoping that it will actually...
	What we're aiming for is that it will be a retail coin.
	Then it makes sense to aim at...
	That sort of level.
	Now, in terms of mining and be able to mine cheaply, we are using a different mining algorithm than Bitcoin, which bottlenecks on memory speed, which makes it more reasonable to mine on actual commodity hardware.
	now it's still going to be a bit once Once mining competition starts ramping up, I think you're going to have to probably mine on graphics cards at least.
	But one of the things that we are going to do differently is when you start thinking about using blockchain for real business, real commercial activity, then it makes sense to do what we call defensive mining.
	One reason to mine is that it stabilizes the network.
	The more mining power is invested in the network, the harder it's going to be to attack the chain, to brute force the chain.
	For example, if you look at Bitcoin and Ethereum and practically all the blockchains, the people who mine do it for profit.
	There is basically no other reason to mine.
	We basically say that miners are motivated by greed alone, more or less.
	And this is why we hope that they won't mess around with censoring the content that goes on the chain.
	They don't care.
	They just include whatever pays the most.
	But if your business depends on actually trading on the blockchain, Then why wouldn't you invest in doing defensive mining?
	Which is essentially, you can even do break-even mining because it's an investment in the stability of the chain.
	So this is one reason why we want to get as many people to mine as possible.
	There are a couple of other things in there that sort of follow from the question, what if...
	Your crypto coin was actual money, actually usable as money.
	It changes the game.
	It changes how you think and what factors are important.
	We're going to be launching marketplaces, invoicing systems, a bunch of products that we intend to use as actual business cases, commercial business cases for us on the chain.
	Is it like, I mean, is this Shopify comparison accurate that on one hand you have this mining thing, which is obviously a completely separate system, but then you have this almost like a Shopify type situation where anybody could set up a marketplace, store, trade what they want to do?
	Yeah.
	And yeah, to be clear also with the mining, we are coming out with what we call community mining, that we want to get as many to mine as possible.
	We've actually capped rewards, but the benefit of that is that you don't really have to come to the game with Super Asics or be involved in a fierce competition for mining rewards.
	But this is because we want to get Gajus in the hands of as many as possible in a way that still positions it as Same as with Bitcoin, a properly mined currency, which is, you know, no airdrops.
	It is actually proper money.
	So, yeah, the marketplace we have developed that is going to come out is also, you could see it as like an eBay marketplace, pure peer-to-peer.
	No, you don't have to...
	There are no...
	Intermediaries that will shave off like 10-20% of the purchase price.
	There will be a small percentage to keep the system running, but it will be more like 2% or something, which is tremendously cheaper than, for example, Amazon or eBay.
	Wow, wow.
	So, it brings the price down.
	So, now people are buying, you know, once you, you know, I heard Amazon's like 30% or something.
	So, once you bring the price down, it'll be cheaper for people.
	It's more accessible to people.
	Now, in terms of, you know, the cost, so it's, what I understand, it's about $100 to get the software going.
	There's no other cost involved in terms of actually starting to mine?
	Well, you're gonna, you're gonna have to bring a computer to, So initially, if you have a laptop PC that you can just fire up and run the software on...
	How about Mac?
	Is it just PC?
	In the background, I have actually a Mac Mini.
	The Mac Mini M4 is reasonably nice, actually.
	It's also very...
	It's not that expensive.
	It's very low power consumption as well.
	It works, so you can actually use a Mac.
	It's not just for people, because I'm in the Mac world, obviously, as a creative.
	Yeah, me too.
	PC's a little cumbersome to me.
	And the way it's going to be is, initially, we're going to be pretty lenient about what the hardware requirement is.
	As we come to the end of the community mining phase and we're approaching the point where it's going to be free-for-all mining, we're going to need to step up the capacity of the mining pools.
	And then I think we're going to slowly increase the hardware requirements.
	I think you're still going to be able to...
	Participate quite well with a standard graphics card.
	Or potentially just move over to pay someone to do the mining for you, which is perfectly in line with the business.
	If you don't want to mess around with having your own mining hardware, just go to some mining provider.
	And pay for mining capacity.
	And another thing, obviously, besides the low overhead, because you can cut out a lot of intermediaries with blockchain,
	is that you also then Are not dependent on a bunch of middlemen that can actually cut you out or block you from even transacting, which is something that we have seen increasingly and very disturbingly, I think, in the last couple of years, where people start thinking about the payment rails as actually more or less political weapons.
	If people are being too inconvenient, then Suddenly, they can't use PayPal.
	They can't use Visa.
	They're not just blocked from social media.
	Some people have even suffered being blocked from using credit cards or banking, essentially.
	And this is, I think, pretty horrible and a severe threat to the free economy.
	This is like censorship proof, huh?
	Yeah.
	This is one of the revolutionary aspects of blockchain, but also one of the things that make it really hard to use if you're in a regulated space, which pretty much we all are, at least in the developed world.
	Part of the convenience is that we're bound by a lot of laws, and if those laws are not adapted to blockchain, It doesn't really work, and you're risking a lot by engaging with blockchain.
	If somebody steals your funds from your account, who do you go to?
	You go to the police?
	What is the crime?
	What's the jurisdiction?
	In order for something to be well-regulated, you have to be able to at least be compatible with common-sense laws.
	And for laws to be effective, they have to be able to be enforceable.
	And so in their purest form, blockchains are almost impossible to regulate, which is the cool thing about them, but also why they don't fit in to the way we're doing business.
	And if you're a hardcore libertarian, you may think that This is absolutely super until you try to start a company and run a commercial business on it and then run into all kinds of problems because you're basically operating outside what is strictly legal or you're operating in a grey area and
	it's really hard to get people to come and play with you then.
	This is going to be a balance, of course.
	The Trump administration has definitely been supportive of crypto, but it seems as though, again, it's a centralized system.
	It's like the big companies, the Black Rocks, the so-called elite that really get to benefit from that at the end of the day.
	But this seems to be much more democratized, much more about we the people.
	And I mean, you have to start wondering when BlackRock is one of the most dominant holders of Bitcoin and the various crypto mailing lists are closely following what BlackRock does.
	Then it's not so much disruptive technology anymore, is it?
	You've been pretty institutionalized at that point.
	And then the question is, what is it actually?
	And I guess nowadays, if you look at blocks being mined on Bitcoin, I think over half of them, the block rewards are ultimately funneled to a single entity.
	So there is essentially a company that owns at least half of all the mining power on Bitcoin.
	And I think this is not so much a technical problem.
	But a problem that Bitcoin, due to its technical limitations, it can't really go anywhere.
	I mean, you can invest in Bitcoin and you can sit there and hold on to your Bitcoin until the price goes up and then hopefully make some money on it.
	I think what we see happening now is that a lot of the major holders of Bitcoin are trying to construct some exits so that they can actually start selling Bitcoin and converting it to fiat and becoming truly rich without crashing the price.
	The problem if you're a whale On some cryptocurrency, if you start selling all your holdings, then the price will go down.
	Now, you can use that for market making, but it becomes a problem if you actually want to use your holdings.
	So this spreads the wealth across a much greater amount of people.
	So nobody's holding really a ridiculous amount of money.
	I guess theoretically it could happen, but because of almost the crowdsourcing aspect, the networking aspect of being able for anybody to do it, it seems as though you're giving a little bit more pole position to the regular people.
	So, I mean, if we assume that we get to the point where this is a universal...
	Currency that is usable all over the world and excellent for commercial activities, yeah, we're going to end up with some people holding a whole lot of value from the profits from their extremely successful businesses.
	but that pay, that's free market for you.
	But the...
	I think this is not so much a problem.
	If you can buy stuff for your gaju, and it's actually usable on markets where you live, you can actually buy a cup of coffee for it.
	You can buy shoes.
	You can go out.
	You can buy services.
	And one thing that we're going to be...
	Moving towards also is what I would call nano payments, where we could call it essentially the conversational Internet of Economics.
	Like if you want to be interacting on social media at the speed of social media, then we need payment instruments that are much cheaper, much faster, where you can...
	Where you can basically widgetize a payment so that you can, say, pay for the next page of text when you're reading an article.
	And I think this is also going to be pretty amazing.
	And, well, I've prototyped it already.
	We pretty much have the technology.
	It's going to come.
	We're going to launch that further down the stream.
	Nice, nice.
	Very cool.
	Ulf, is there anything we didn't talk about that's worth going over in terms of your lane in this business?
	It's funny because these interviews are becoming so much easier.
	The first one was three and a half hours long.
	Now I truly feel like I understand the concept.
	The concepts that we've come up with are really powerful and we keep discovering new great things about them.
	It's like, oh.
	Man, this is so much better than we initially thought.
	And it's like we keep getting accustomed to how powerful a concept it is.
	This is in discovering new things about it.
	And I think this is when you feel that you're actually in the right place.
	One thing I would like to perhaps point out is that We also feel that we're not necessarily in competition with other blockchains because the associate chains that I mentioned before, the thing is really that that could be anything.
	It wouldn't necessarily have to be a blockchain.
	It could be a banking system that's adapted to the protocol we use to connecting to the main chain.
	Where it just essentially behaves like a blockchain in the interface.
	So this would be an opportunity for other blockchain technologies to look at adapting to the connection protocol or implementing the connection protocol, adapting to the Gaju and actually being able to operate in the Gaju Maru ecosystem with their technology.
	Might in some cases be more suitable than our platform is.
	I mean, you always have to make design trade-offs for various types of behavior.
	And some blockchain technologies out there are further along for specific use or more specialized for specific uses than our technology is.
	And we're hoping that they would actually connect to us or start talking to us.
	And the other thing is just ask us questions, challenge our assumptions, try to poke holes in them.
	We like to say that we're ready to go as deep as you want in talking about how far this can go and whether we can actually do the things we say.
	We feel extremely confident, but we'd enjoy people coming, joining the discussion and talking about where, seeing if there is some area we haven't covered yet or things that we haven't thought about.
	Wow.
	This needs to happen, I think.
	And we feel right now that we're pretty much the only ones doing it.
	I mean, conceptually, it's absolutely brilliant because, you know, that's why the idea of this is Bitcoin perfected makes sense.
	Because why, like I said, Bitcoin's decentralized, but you still need to spend...
	You know, I've looked in these computers.
	I mean, you could spend like $5,000 on a computer and then you got to get cooling systems because those, you know, those computers will get hot as hell, right?
	And they, you know, they suck up so much electricity that unless Bitcoin's at a really high, you know, number, it's like it could potentially cost you more money to produce one Bitcoin than actually what the value is.
	You know, right now the value is really high.
	In some place where the electricity is really cheap.
	Like Lapland, Sweden, or maybe some areas in the US where you have lots of natural gas and cheap electricity.
	But yeah, I mean, Bitcoin has been amazing as a concept.
	I mean, there are a lot of...
	Technical challenges, it's extremely hard to build blockchains, and it's pretty much impossible to build one blockchain that can just fit all purposes.
	Like, for example, I was saying that a properly decentralized blockchain is not compatible with typical legislation.
	but the way we like to describe it is that the core the root of The Gajumaru chain, we call it Groot, of course, for Gajumaru root, sits in the negotiable space between jurisdictions, where essentially there are no laws.
	I mean, international law is really a misnomer.
	It's not really law.
	It's just uncomfortable agreements between Different powers.
	And their blockchain actually adds value because it provides some algorithmic guarantees that you don't normally get.
	And I think that's the proper place for a Bitcoin-like chain.
	But it needs to be faster than Bitcoin is.
	I mean, three to five.
	Transactions per second is ridiculous when you're trying to approach global finance.
	But then you need to be able to break out of the root chain and adapt to legislation.
	Maybe you, for example, with public banking, another misnomer, public banking is very selectively public.
	Most of the data is private, so you couldn't run that on a public blockchain, but this is where our associate chain concept would actually help, because you could run a fully private chain where you don't have to show the world what you're doing,
	and maybe by law you're not even allowed to, but you could still actually operate a system like that and be connected to our ecosystems.
	We're trying to be pragmatic.
	We're trying to support what people actually need to do in a way that is censorship-free and at least free from crazy inflation.
	This is another advantage of blockchains.
	One purpose of the mining is that it actually puts a limit on how fast you can create money.
	I mean, essentially, when you're mining, you are creating money, but at a very slow pace.
	So you may have a built-in 2% inflation, and you can't speed that up.
	You can't just run the printing presses and try to print your way out of financial difficulty.
	But that's one really interesting phenomenon.
	And one of the really wonderful things about the Bitcoin paper initially, showing that you could actually have something like money, which is protected from runaway inflation.
	Brilliant, man.
	Brilliant.
	Really cool concept.
	Tell me about the schedule for launch.
	Obviously, there's a lot of stuff that's going to be dropping this year.
	Could you tell us what this immediate future looks like for QPQ?
	Right.
	So what we're doing now is we're preparing for launch of the mining, community mining, on the 24th of this month.
	It's where we're planning to go online with the mining pools.
	And this hopefully will also free us up in the core team.
	It's a very small team to start pushing the other technologies that we have in the pipeline.
	And so the idea is to...
	Towards the summer, right now we're essentially mining and creating.
	We want to get gadgets in the hands of people.
	And then eventually, towards the summer, we're going to field services where you can actually use your money.
	So it's a little bit of a staged release here.
	Come 2026, we're going to be moving away from the permissioned mining.
	Right now, we are controlling who gets to mine.
	And it's essentially whitelisted mining.
	This is going to drop eventually, but we want this to be an orderly rollout over the next year and a half.
	Partly also because we feel that if we would just open the gates to miners right away, we would get the people who are, you know, maybe they could dust off their Ethereum mining rigs, which are perhaps not used so much right now.
	And they would just roll in and they would get all the mining rewards and start running the same thing.
	And we don't want to build another casino.
	Although, if you want to run casino business, you could do it on the Gajomaru too, but it's not what it's for.
	But it's, hey, free market.
	If that's what you want to do, you can do that too.
	It shouldn't be the only thing you can do, which is essentially where blockchains are today.
	So basically, you could build a store for anything, more or less.
	I mean, sounds like anything you want, you could do on there.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And the idea is we shouldn't be the only ones doing it.
	And of course, we have ideas, a bunch of ideas, that we needed a blockchain to field.
	Essentially, we ended up building the blockchain we need for our own business ideas.
	And so we're going to present a bunch of stuff that have to do with, well, a bunch of ideas.
	Let's talk about them later.
	Awesome, awesome, Wolf.
	Is there anything else worth mentioning before we wrap up this episode?
	Nothing.
	Can't think of anything right now.
	Yeah, I appreciate it, brother.
	You know, if anything, this is testament to the fact that I'm getting it.
	Our episode is down to 30 minutes and not four hours, so I learned a couple of things this last week from you guys.
	For the viewers out there, thank you very much for joining us for this episode.
	We're going to have links right below to the GajuCoin page where people can sign up with their email address so they're notified as this is released.
	I thank you all for joining us.
	I will see you all on the next episode of Blood Money.

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