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What you describe is not a pyramid scheme, it is a run on the bank. That is precisely what Bitcoin is going through.

No, that's what Mt. Gox will go through when they come back on line, and there's a scramble to get money out. We're about to find out if Mt. Gox really has all the funds on deposit with them.

Mt. Gox customers are screaming on forums about getting a message from Mt. Gox that says "The password for this account is invalid, or this account is not currently under claim process."

e-Gold was shut down in 2009, and the claims process still hasn't released funds.

>Btw, what alternatives are there to paypal?

http://gunpal.com/ (I kid you not.)
http://alertpay.com/
wire transfers
http://moneybookers.com/
https://www.neteller.com/
https://www.epassporte.com/
http://www.e-gold.com/
http://www.libertyreserve.com/

>You know, companies that atleast pretend to support democracy.

I don't vouch for any of the above.

Oh, you're so right. From now on, I'll just totally go to sleep whenever I see the little lock, and I'll ignore stuff like this or this

These guys might disagree with you.

http://www.e-gold.com/

http://www.e-gold.com/currentexchange.html

Hah.. I promise I wont try to nitpick comments again :)

People use PayPal because Ebay demand that they do. Crucially paypal means that you don't have to give bank details to customers/suppliers.

There's e-gold, GoldMoney etc. They're basically banks, can do instant payments. The difference being you can actually get your hands on the gold.

http://www.e-gold.com/currentexchange.html What I get here is that paladium is a little more than half the price of gold per ounce. That's expensive, yes, but not extremely expensive. You probably pay more than that for valentine's-day flowers, the spice saffron, or Hall-Mark Cards.

http://www.e-gold.com/currentexchange.html What I get here is that paladium is a little more than half the price of gold per ounce. That's expensive, yes, but not extremely expensive. You probably pay more than that for valentine's-day flowers, the spice saffron, or Hall-Mark Cards.

To what degree? I can understand converting every piece of income into gold (probably using something like http://www.e-gold.com/) instead of depositing your money into a bank account. If some gold-based micropayment system supported Visa/MC checkcards, it would actually be very little different than a bank account to me. No problem there. I've never thought or heard of it, but now that you mention it, it seems like an interesting gambit: it can't be worse than putting money into zero-interest checking accounts (FDIC insurance not withstanding)... As an aside, care to share what service you're using?

But what about investments such as stocks, bonds or mutal funds? Do you use such vehicles for storing and growing your wealth? If not, how do you grow your money? Gold is a great hedge against inflation: 300 years ago, an ounce of gold bought a good suit. Today, an ounce of gold buys a good suit. But what about investing for retirement?

For example, in every 5 year period over its history, both the S&P 500 (and other broad-based indexes of the market) have grown a minimum of 10% APR for that 5 year period. At that rate, money doubles every 7 years. You're certainly not going to get that level of growth from gold--or any other commodity. While you can certainly leverage them and make huge profits, you can wipe yourself out just as fast!

As for the incredible benefits of anarcho-capitalism: ever read The History of the Standard Oil Company by Ida Tarbell? How would anarcho-capitalism prevent the consolidation of a segment of the marketplace into a monopoly, preventing other competitors from existing and allowing the monopoly to then set prices at whatever level they choose without impunity?

It seems to me that the petroleum market in the middle 1800's was much like the IT market of the last 25 years: very little capital required to start, a brand new business segment without much in existing competition, etc. However, in both cases, within 25 years (or less) you saw the rise of a single company capable of creating a monopoly in a key segment of the business, with the ability to leverage that monopoly to dominate *every* aspect of the business. How do you see anarcho-capitalism preventing this? Particularly in the oil business: while you can make copies of Windows XP for near $0, you can't exactly make copies of oil barrels the same way...

The biggest weakness, IMO, of these services is that they are entirely dependent on the security of the user password, and therefore the client machine, to keep the stored value safe. So don't even think of accessing your account through a Windows machine. Transactions are non-repudiable.

They are a working implementation of micro-payments. I can send 5 cents on e-gold and the fee is about a fifth of a cent. The fact that they haven't cought on as such seems to me to be an indication that nobody really wants micropayments.

Personally, i'm saving up real gold for when we return to the Gold Standard (tm).

You might be interested in e-gold (referral link; remove the last bit of the URL if you want). It's a digital currency (i.e. bits stored in a database), but it's 100% backed by actual gold stored in a vault. The idea is to combine the convenience and flexibility of Internet payment systems with the principles of the Gold Standard.

Golden Hacker Defender does exist, can be purchased, and no it is NOT GPL..

http://www.hxdef.org/antidetection.php

They even have a license..

Paid versions are not released under GPL licence.
Every customer who buys antidetection service agrees with this licence.
Customer is not allowed to spread the product or its parts in neither binary nor source code form.
Violating of this licence will issue in loss of any support
and also in impossibility of buying new updates and other products and services.
Customer can do whatever he/she wants with his/her product except
all activities that are forbidden in this licence.
Customer can even modify the source code or the binary form of the product.
Customer is fully responsible for the application of boughten product.
Provider of antidetection service reserves the right to refuse any customers order.
If customers order is accepted customer pledges to pay the full sum before he/she gets the product.
Provider pledges to assemble the product and send it to the customer in 5 working days.
If provider is not able to fulfil the order the customer will get all his/her money back.
All payments are provided by e-gold (http://www.e-gold.com/ rarely by prior arrangement
payments via Moneybookers (http://www.moneybookers.com/ can be accepted too.
Customer will receive relevant payment information after provider accepts the order.

Still amazing that in 2005 nobody has figured out a way to make it simple to charge a penny on-line.

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/.

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/.

Except, of course, that e-gold already did, in 1996, but the mediots haven't noticed. Funny how http://stats.e-gold.com/ customers lead the news-media. Again...
JMR

NOT speaking for e-gold, just being annoying...And no -- e-gold isn't perfect and I'm sure some people have gripes, but it EXISTS, and e-gold has quietly-kept the promises others so-loudly made about the 'net for a long time with little fanfare...

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

I think they should explore a cheaper - MUCH cheaper - option. viz., charging $0.05 per historic article. This would attract people since it only costs a ridiculously low amount of money to get an old article and people will very soon be spending more than they otherwise would with an annual subscription of 50 bucks.

Think about it - isn't this how Google has managed to serve up advertising and other stuff? Make the prices low enough so that it doesn't hurt to pay it once - but every drop adds up pretty quickly!

This begs the question - how does NYimes collect the low amounts? Answer is - why not legitimise some existing system like http://www.e-gold.com/ or http://www.paypal.com/?

Of course - I am sure NYTimes won't do any such revolutionary thing. They are so old and fuddy duddy, that they will plough through with a 50 bucks per annum - or a 5 bucks per extract charge (increase from their current rate).

It sold again monday, i got paid, shipped it later that monday. yesterday i notice the payment is gone and paypal emailed me saying it might have been paid with stolen funds

Don't use PayPal!

"We're sorry. You're money is gone because it, uh... might have been paid with stolen funds. Yeah, that's it - paid with stolen funds. Good day."

For some light reading try PayPal Fraud Warning.

How a system that had true irrepudiable payments - i.e. once you have the money, it cannot be taken back. e-gold

Exactly which revenue collection source enables me to collect the $0.002 that the current advertising market has indicated that my content is worth (a price that is viable and workable under the current system)?

e-gold

Able to spend & receive microspends (less than US$0.01). The spend fee at that level is 5%.

Complete automation readily available - shopping cart, secure payment reciept & confirmation, automated spends. All spends are irrepudiable; as in, cannot be chargebacked or bounced.

Take a look at the alternatives to PayPal. There is also e-gold.

Take a look at the alternatives to PayPal. There is also e-gold.

How about Egold. They've been around about as long as paypal.

http://www.e-gold.com/

e-gold

DMT Rand

Better for these sorts of transactions is E-Gold, or one of the similar internet gold currencies.
Pro: Low fees (about 0.5 cents minimum), inflation-proof, more private than credit cards or checks, trivially easy to set up accounts, truly international.
Con: Hard to get gold in your account, and don't even dare use IE if you have a significant amount of gold in your account; transactions are irrevocable, so password-stealing worms can steal your gold!

I think you meant e-gold. The name without the hyphen goes to some other site that (currently) redirects to the real e-gold site with a referral code attached to the URL.

actually it seems the e-gold creators have already thought of this possiblity and provided for it in their User Agreement:
...
4.8. The Fusion Codicil

Issuer reserves the right to stop issuing additional e-gold by ceasing to accept bailment of additional bullion. This extraordinary provision will be triggered only in the event that lower cost or more efficient physical methods of extraction or transmuting the metals that comprise the reserves of the e-gold system result in subsequent non-scarcity of those elements.
...

Wasn't there one also called e-gold that purchases actual gold to back its electronic currency? Of course, if you had a lot of money in it and somebody discovered how to turn lead into gold, well then you'd be ruined. So its kind of a risky holding.

No, criminals use webmoney or e-gold

The automated worms buzzing about the net can't do that (not yet anyhow) so having a separate root account reduces the number of attackers by a factor of about a bazillion. Also, that procedure gives the defender a period of time to detect the break-in. So really critical sites (like e-gold.com) who doubtless have a full time staff scanning & patching have time to defeat the attack before its privelege can escalate.

Try http://www.e-gold.com/. This does not resize my browser or pop up any windows.

The URL you gave, http://www.egold.com/, is to a site that pops up ads and then forwards you to the real site. The real e-gold site is at http://www.e-gold.com/.

I am pretty sure that happened cause he link the URL wrong he needs www.E-gold.com

I believe the parent forgot the dash from the address. e-gold.

For those who are not familiar with these... they allow anybody in the world to pay anybody else in the world a certain amount of gold. The actual gold sits in a vault (or actually several vaults across several locations on earth) and basically what gets exchanged is the rights to a fraction of that gold held in trust.

There are several well established digital gold currencies now, with E-Gold being the oldest, running since 1996 I believe.

One of the important distinctions between using E-gold as a payment system, and (say) credit cards, is that there are no chargebacks. That means that when a merchant receives payment, he is SURE that he has received REAL VALUE and not something that can be revoked.

Because of this, digital gold has really been catching on for online commerce in a lot of locations worldwide where credit cards have not been traditionally used. Places such as India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Africa are prime markets for digital currency. And personally, I think that western nations will really benefit from the birth of digital gold currencies as well.

Lets face it: the whole western world banking system is terribly outdated, and as evidenced by the high incidence of online fraud, credit cards are not really a great solution for e-commerce.

(Heck, even the Mozilla Foundation accepts E-Gold donations!)

And I haven't even begun to mention the privacy benefits, and the fact that gold retains its value much better than government issued fiat currency. This page has a bunch of great links about the digital currency revolution...

Why can't I get paid in Microcredits to fold Protien Molecules for some Research Lab...

That's a real missed opportunity by the micropayment promoters. By offering a downloadable compute server that paid you money when you ran it, that could bring back the days of give-people-stuff-to-promote-a-new-business of the tech-boom. But this time around, it won't be investor money being gvien away, but an actual business. Larger payouts can be a check or whatever, but smaller amounts can be barcoded cents-off coupons, e-stamps, credit to e-gold (whose minimum fee is $0.002), or donations to a charity. A pioneering micropayment provider can then go to merchants touting thousands of consumers with money in their accounts ready to spend, enticing merchants to sign up. With more places to spend more consumers will sign up, and so on up the path to critical mass.

All this assumes, of course, that compute serving is worth more than $1 a month, or no one would bother.

When you start having to audit the transactions, you can't do them for less than about $.06 each

Sure you can. If you had an e-gold acount, I could send you 5 cents and the fee would be less then half a cent. They can do that because e-gold payments are non-repudiable so they don't have to worry about following paper trails to resolve disputes.

But that same feature (non-repudiable) slows acceptance of the e-gold system. Anyone who takes credit cards to sell e-gold will quickly go out of business from fraudulent cards. The card network will chargeback but the e-gold is long gone.

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.

EFF's solution has been to quietly accept e-gold since 1999. Freenet takes e-gold, too.
http://102948-USD10.e-gold.com would give a gram to EFF (they had it working before, and now they've somehow managed to bust it! Sigh...).

http://767764-USD20.e-gold.com
donates $20 worth to Freenet (or you can use their page at donate )

We may not have the hype or marketing-budget of other systems, but we've been around since 1996 (and, frankly, Slashdot should have taken e-gold since at least a year ago, it's not like sci.e-gold.com is all that hard to use!). (And yes, I'll still click anyone from Slashdot a bit of e-gold to play with if you send me an account number!)
JMR

Speaking ONLY for Jim Ray, the Barbarous Relic of the e-gold system!

EFF's solution has been to quietly accept e-gold since 1999. Freenet takes e-gold, too.
http://102948-USD10.e-gold.com would give a gram to EFF (they had it working before, and now they've somehow managed to bust it! Sigh...).

http://767764-USD20.e-gold.com
donates $20 worth to Freenet (or you can use their page at donate )

We may not have the hype or marketing-budget of other systems, but we've been around since 1996 (and, frankly, Slashdot should have taken e-gold since at least a year ago, it's not like sci.e-gold.com is all that hard to use!). (And yes, I'll still click anyone from Slashdot a bit of e-gold to play with if you send me an account number!)
JMR

Speaking ONLY for Jim Ray, the Barbarous Relic of the e-gold system!

EFF's solution has been to quietly accept e-gold since 1999. Freenet takes e-gold, too.
http://102948-USD10.e-gold.com would give a gram to EFF (they had it working before, and now they've somehow managed to bust it! Sigh...).

http://767764-USD20.e-gold.com
donates $20 worth to Freenet (or you can use their page at donate )

We may not have the hype or marketing-budget of other systems, but we've been around since 1996 (and, frankly, Slashdot should have taken e-gold since at least a year ago, it's not like sci.e-gold.com is all that hard to use!). (And yes, I'll still click anyone from Slashdot a bit of e-gold to play with if you send me an account number!)
JMR

Speaking ONLY for Jim Ray, the Barbarous Relic of the e-gold system!

there are two well known ones that are up and running and viable. One is the Liberty Dollar, the other all electronic one is e-gold. Both are also tied to precious metals, and PM has been doing *quite* well the past little while and all indications show they will continue to do well.

Mod parent up!
That is exactly correct, I trust self-signed certs more than I trust the ones from the CA vendors. Many people here don't trust Verisign, I don't see a reason to even use them since they don't provide what they were supposed to - a chain of trust. The distributed, self signing and peer, circle of trust seems more reasonable and useful

And I know it is not relevant here but the article is about the lock is "turned on" without any cert pop up on the client asking if you trust so-and-so. It seems to be a minor part of the overall phishing schemes and I thought I read sometime ago about a method to install non-plain text certs (possibly using javascript?) without generating a pop up when I was research some cert issues for a Java Web Start project I was working on.

People have been using pretty persistent, varied and sophisticated methods to try to spoof the e-gold site for sometime which used turing numbers and explicit warnings to check for the proper URL _and_ the lock before entering your passphrase (which has a good minimum number of characters), etc, etc and what do you know? people still get taken.

Part of the problem is that https combines the cert trust functions with the network encryption functions - there is no reason we couldn't have a connection oriented dynamic encryption standard for http that doesn't use certs.

Mod parent up!
That is exactly correct, I trust self-signed certs more than I trust the ones from the CA vendors. Many people here don't trust Verisign, I don't see a reason to even use them since they don't provide what they were supposed to - a chain of trust. The distributed, self signing and peer, circle of trust seems more reasonable and useful

And I know it is not relevant here but the article is about the lock is "turned on" without any cert pop up on the client asking if you trust so-and-so. It seems to be a minor part of the overall phishing schemes and I thought I read sometime ago about a method to install non-plain text certs (possibly using javascript?) without generating a pop up when I was research some cert issues for a Java Web Start project I was working on.

People have been using pretty persistent, varied and sophisticated methods to try to spoof the e-gold site for sometime which used turing numbers and explicit warnings to check for the proper URL _and_ the lock before entering your passphrase (which has a good minimum number of characters), etc, etc and what do you know? people still get taken.

Part of the problem is that https combines the cert trust functions with the network encryption functions - there is no reason we couldn't have a connection oriented dynamic encryption standard for http that doesn't use certs.

• zero overhead to use their payment api/web interface
• extrememly low cost per transaction
• no extra crap to become a seller

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.