Slashdot Mirror

e-gold http://www.e-gold.com/
Pecunix http://www.pecunix.com/
E-Bullion http://www.e-bullion.com/
1MDC http://www.1mdc.com/

to name a few. I think all are lower in fees. I think all are free to open account. I think they
have no extra fees for merchants to use.

This announcement puts PayPal fees for sub USD2 payments at 5% + USD0.05. Here is a comparison of fees in USD for various "micropayments" vs. e-gold http://www.e-gold.com/ fees.

0.25 PayPal 0.0625 e-gold 0.0154
0.75 PayPal 0.0875 e-gold 0.0404
1.00 PayPal 0.1000 e-gold 0.0529
1.50 PayPal 0.1250 e-gold 0.0724
2.00 PayPal 0.1500 e-gold 0.0786

There is a page that shows how many of these
payments e-gold is processing here http://stats.e-gold.com/. Looks like in the
last 24 hours it was somewhere between 10,000
and 20,000.

Other similar alternatives include Pecunix http://www.pecunix.com/, 1MDC http://www.1mdc.com/, and E-Bullion http://www.e-bullion.com/.

But http://e-gold.com/, http://goldmoney.com/, http://e-bullion.com/ and http://pecunix.com/ have not flopped.

Several companies already have made inroads into micropayments, without even intentionally targeting that market. Digital gold currencies such as E-Bullion, e-gold and Pecunix enable users to make payments easily, quickly, inexpensively and irrevocably online ... these companies represent several tens of millions of dollars per month in volume. I don't know how much they have to do before someone considers the micropayment sector to have officially "taken off" but there is certainly volume already being done by these three companies and several other competitors.

E-Bullion has a credit card sized CryptoCard available to protect one's gold backed ecurrency account. Another advantage to E-Bullion is opening an account is much easier than opening an account with most banks who want details like your cat's date of birth, etc.

There is a universe of no-chargeback payment systems out there. Many of them also seem to have the property of being based around precious metals. The first online was e-gold in 1996. Others have arrived since then of somewhat similar flavour: e-bullion.com, pecunix.com, libertydollar.org, goldmoney.com.
A good comparison chart is here.
BTW, I see that magnatune.com supports one of these now, but ebay is still PayPal only - no surprise.

by systems like e-gold.com, e-bullion.com, pecunix.com etc.

These payment systems are worldwide, do not suffer the chargeback problem, and seem to be fine with gambling and adult sites. They are also not linked to any particular national currency so should appeal to more libertarian among us.

Example: Wanna gamble now with them?

The idea of completly electronic money seems to me is every bit as flawed as the fiat we use in day to day transactions, in the sense that there are no direct limits on how much money is generated.

When there are entities generating money out of nothing like the Fed, and engaging in fractional reserve banking, like regular banks, it forces normal people to speculate in order to preserve the value of their savings. When gold was used as money, money preserve its value and there had been little net inflation over the thousands of years that gold and silver were used as money.

Therefore it's better to migrate to some more stable alternatives that are 100% backed by gold. These currencies exist and can be used to buy anything that can be paid with a credit card.

Such as:
ebullion
egold

• e-gold The first and biggest
• GoldMoney More offshore
• E-BullionWe try harder because we're smaller