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E-gold Owners Plead Guilty To Money Laundering
Ian Lamont writes "The three owners of Internet currency service e-gold have pled guilty to money laundering in the U.S. District Court for D.C.. The service is based in the West Indies, but the directors apparently live in Florida. They haven't been sentenced yet, but potentially face decades in prison and millions in fines. In addition, the principal director posted a blog entry yesterday saying that 'criminal activity will not be tolerated,' and pledging to eliminate the loopholes that allowed money laundering to thrive on the service. He also claims that e-gold has more transaction volume in a single quarter than all of the first-generation Web currency services like Cybercash, Beenz, and Flooz completed over their lifetimes. Ironically, one of the reasons that contributed to Flooz's demise in 2001 was rampant money laundering."
Here I am, looking up "Money Laundering" in the dictionary trying to figure it out.
We get caught laundering money, we're not going to white-collar resort prison. No, no, no. We're going to federal POUND ME IN THE ASS prison.
This royally sucks because e-gold was actually a very simple and easy way to purchase gold with very few and simple fees, and none of the tax burden.
The police found out when their gold maxed to 2147483647. Everyone knows glitchers get caught.
Nw if the federal authorities could get the same concession from PayPal......
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
They go after these egold folks and the liberty dollar folks because they don't want market forces to be able to leave the growing worthless dollar.
Also bet that Iran will be attacked not for WMDs but because they refuse to trade oil in dollars. These dollar monopolies are one of the few things propping up the dollar and allowing the warfare and welfare state to over-promise.
I bet the vast majority of these gold trades were not for child exploitation and laundering. They want to be able to run the printing presses 24/7 and they don't want anyone to be able to leave the US dollar.
I heard a rattling in my dryer, opened it up and a quarter fell out. Does this mean I'll be doing a nickel upstate? I knew a guy doing a Susan B. Anthony for movie piracy.
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Recently, in the last year and a half, bank are making you cough up a lot of ID just to get a simple GIC. I was pulling ID out of my ears to get a GIC at the CIBC, but they wouldn't let me until I had people I know and two pieces of government issued photo ID. The goal is to prevent money laundering. Not a bad idea for the owners of CIBC.
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"Ironically, one of the reasons that contributed to Flooz's demise in 2001 was rampant money laundering."
That's really just coincidental.
Some of us really don't care about money laundering. Punish people for the crime or don't, money laundering is just one of a million charges they either get to pile on top, or slap on anyone didn't feel it was any of their concern how someone makes their money.
I am far more concerned about having a service for my finances that is not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States or any government
I wonder if Douglas Jackson, Barry Downey and Reid Jackson will be able to buy a golden salve off the prison commissary that will help soothe their inflamed rectums after Bubba PENalizes them during their first night in the can? Kinda brings a new meaning to the phrase "Substantial penalty for early withdrawal"
No mod points, no meta-moderating/Firehose/all the other free work Slashdot wants me to do.
But they have conjugal visits right?...
So then, you've been reposting a post originally written nearly four years ago, just because it irks you that Roland is capitalizing on his /. submissions? You know, there are much more serious things to get worked up about, why don't you choose a few and make yourself useful? And FYI, you can aways go to your /. prefs page and opt out of RP's stories, and then you won't have to see them anymore.
Caveat Utilitor
Remember kids, buying gold funds terrorism!
Or have they been the only ones to slip under the fed's radar - operating like a bank but without the regulations (and security) of a bank?
Last year Ron Paul introduced the Free Competition in Currency Act of 2007 which would make alternate currencies legal, though not change other aspects of what you can do with currencies (e.g. money laundering would still be illegal).
Few young people realize that until the 1964-1968 time period it was possible to bring your dollars to the government and get precious metal on demand. This gave the dollar real worth. Since that time, the government has found that it can simply make more money out of thin air and spend it on government programs to generate votes. As with any supply and demand equation, when they start running the printing presses to make more dollars, the dollars you have in you bank account become worth less. You're losing money value and the government is gaining money value, but your 'taxes' are low. One can see this in inflation charts which start to skyrocket in the 1970's, relative to decades previous. Interesting note: if we measured inflation today the way we used to back then, our inflation rate would be 11%.
The Wall Street Journal recently ran a graph showing the value of the dollar vs. gold vs. oil. If we look at the start of the decade until now, if we were holding euros instead of dollars, gas would only be about $2.70 at the pump - that extra $1.30 can be viewed as lost power of the dollar. But, the euro is no panacea either - if you compare the price of gas to the price of gold, it's nearly flat. How about $1.20 gas? I actually saw $5 diesel in CT last weekend.
Not surprisingly, the government decided to stop keeping track of 'M3', or the money supply of the dollar recently. Private economists have continued the calculations and it's easy to see why the government doesn't want to talk about it.
So, back to the beginning, the government has taken irresponsible action with the way it manages the value of its currency, and they have laws preventing people from opting out of their mismanagement. Afraid of a little competition, are they? Experience shows that the most likely effect of competing currencies, even ones that mimic the way the government operated in your parents' generation, would be to pressure the government to exercise some restraint. Of course, if this competition is illegal, they'll continue with their outrageous devaluation.
Folks who think a little competition helps to keep markets fair, and monopolies hurt them, would do well to contact their representatives in government about the aforementioned bill.
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Ironically, the author doesn't know what irony is.
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I am guessing that you are part of the "no child left behind".
E-gold is an online currency service that is backed up by gold. You cannot buy directly from them though, you have to buy through a redistributor, some of which are questionable and only takes certain forms of payment. The nature of the having a third party buy from egold and then sell to another person creates a web of denial effect for money launderes. One of the largest schemes e-gold is used for is in the credit card theft hacker rings, where it is easy to get credit card info, it is harder to "cash out". This is where "cashiers" come in, usually charging a 50 point take on cashing out for someone else. Egold, since it was in a different country, denies US Government requests for transaction records for accounts. E-gold may be in trouble, but for every e-gold there is another replacement, e-platinum, webmoney, and large handful of others. Oh yeah, btw, I didnt RTFA either, I just thought Id share what I know about e-gold, and I might be wrong about some of it.
"It's ok, I'm completely secure as long as my iron is off"
I occasionally leave my wallet in my pants when I do washing... does this count as "money laundering"? That's why I'm posting as AC...the gov't might come after me.
Does Slashdot add more value than $647 per month?
e-gold has tried spam as a marketing tool. When they stopped that, other spammers started following suit, phishing for account info--and e-gold's response was always "it's not our problem."
They've been actively aiding money laundering, and claiming they can't control what their customers do. Even now, Douglas Jackson is talking about fixing the flaws in an otherwise good system--despite the fact that he's likely going to jail for a few years.
e-gold is a dirty operation run by dirty crooks. It should be buried deep underground, and the gold reserves (if they really exist) used for something constructive.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
For whatever reason, there are times when people pay cash and have no desire to reveal who they are to the folks with whom they are doing business. (I used to relish, back in the day, going to Radio Shack and refusing to give them my zip or other information as long as I was paying cash. They thought I was weird. I thought being forced to identify myself to buy batteries was just too stupid to put up with.)
So is there any way to anonymously pay for things online? I can think of only one: buy a pre-paid credit card for cash and use it online. Non-reloadable gift cards can be purchased for cash and activated for use online under any name you can think up; there's no verification.
However, that method is inconvenient. Do the slashdot hordes know of a better, easier way that remains anonymous?
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." -- Mayer Amschel Rothschild, 1790
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who gives a fxxk?
and in much of the EU. Did I hear whining over 5USD/gallon? Over 4 USD also?
Yes, most of it is government tax. We don't like it either.
People never abandoned the gold standard. The government did. They find it more convenient to print money out of thin air for the guns and butter.
The fact that gold trading services have to be pounded into submission proves the people still have some love for currencies that have real value.
Those that had the biggest problems with the gold standard were the very same ones that benefit from a warfare-welfare state. Johnny Paycheck and those with most of their assets back accounts get the big screwover from inflation.
The main reason for commodity-backing of currency is to take the cost-free ability to print money out of thin air from governments that will always have an incentive to print more.
" but potentially face decades in prison and millions in fines"
you mean 10 years, out by 4, $50 million fine, and a slap on the wrist....
What do you mean, eGold works with bogus money?
Let's see:
Sounds pretty much like monopoly money to me.
How is US currency "real money" any more than using gold as money?
Gold is a form of representative money whereas the present US dollar is a form of fiat currency. Both have their advantages and disadvantages but there are good reasons why virtually every government on the planet uses some form of fiat currency these days. It's not that either is more "real" but rather that there are practical reasons to prefer one over the other.
Man, I wish Slashdot allowed editing:
Brain fart. This should be "the rate at which wealth is created". This, historically-speaking, averages about 2% per year, which means a 1.5% annual increase in the gold supply would lead to 0.5% deflation on average every year.
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How pathetic have the GNAA trolls become when they can't even spell their own acronym correctly?
It used to be that I would trade a chicken for a few gallons of milk. I would take one of my chickens over to the rancher who would give me my milk, and I'd be on my way.
Well, essentially the same thing is happening now. I make widgets, and I am given a "barter paper" worth, say, one chicken. Now I go to the grocery store. He accepts my barter paper and gives me a gallon of milk. The grocer then trades that barter paper for the chicken to the rancher to get more milk.
Money has no value until it is spent; it is a placeholder only. Ultimately until it is used to consumer durable goods at the final user it simply exists to represent potential.
Gold, paper, whatever. Doesn't matter.
Zimbabwe, you say? The issue there is that the Government, via insane regulations, destroyed the economy. Suddenly you could NOT afford that gallon of milk, and the population was getting pissed.
So the Government decided to just start printing a bunch of barter papers without any real ground in what they represented. Pretty quickly the ranchers bumped the price of milk, and as they say we were off to the races.
As long as a currency system is tied to fundamental economic generation of durable goods (and services required to produce those goods), you can avoid the Zimbabwe meltdown.
The second you decouple from economic activity, though, is the second the barter paper becomes worthless - which are real, which are, effectively, counterfeit?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
e-gold was a bastion of criminality. Numerous people were convicted of selling drugs, child porn, and other black market commodities through the service. The founders were in on it, too, with their money laundering. The whole enterprise was destined for failure. The only question is, what happens now to all the assets?
US dollars are backed by nothing but the whims of the federal reserve...
Wrong. US dollars (like any fiat currency) is backed by people's belief that they have value. The fed can influence the money supply but they can't give dollars value. Confidence in a currency is the ONLY thing that gives any currency actual value.
...and it's this very fact that has brought about America's current financial predicament.
Of course! It's all the Fed's fault. Thank you for clearing that up. Here I thought the economy was a complex thing with lots of players but it's much easier if you can just pin everything on the Fed. I'm sure Ben Bernake will eagerly turn over his job as Fed chairman to you because clearly you understand the issues better than he does.
E-Gold holds audited stocks of gold to the value of its deposits, which is a far safer store of wealth than the US dollar.
Really? Ignoring the idiotic idea that gold is some magical source of value, you trust a private company with no taxing authority issuing a private currency accepted by almost no one? Wow. You are NEVER going to have a job in the financial world because you have a very dangerous concept of risk. Gold is not some magical insurance against risk. It's a commodity like any other mined metal. No more and no less. If you trust a private company's audits (think Enron) more than the US government's taxing authority, ...well, you're just an idiot who is likely to lose a lot of money in a money laundering scheme like eGold.
Then how do you deal with the intentionally ignorant? (Ie, those who might be able to tell that they're being used to launder money, but refuse to look?)
You could start by reading about recklessness, or criminal willful ignorance.
I and many many others will take gold any day as it is more likely to keep its value than most anything else you can name.
I could say the same thing about any element on the periodic table. Point to any metal on the periodic table and you would have exactly as compelling an argument. We're not making any new platinum or copper either and both are equally useful in a practical sense as gold. Personally I find oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen to be FAR more valuable than gold. Perhaps you don't like breathing or food?
Gold is a fine asset to own but thinking of it primarily as money belies a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between money and value. I suspect that gold will remain a desirable asset well into the future but I don't expect it to be a better source of value than any number of other metals.
That is, the creation and destruction of credit by banks. Banks lent fractionally on top of gold in exactly the way they do now on top of paper. Whether the currency is based on gold or paper is irrelevant with respect to business cycles, it's the debt based nature of credit and in particular fractional lending practices which are the problem there. Gold on the other hand is naturally scarce and so would restrict inflation whereas paper is not, and does not.
HTH
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There are 2 major reasons to use cash instead of other means.
Anonymity.
Convenience.
Cheaper/lower transaction cost.
For large amounts, and even small ones, credit cards and wire transactions are more convenient.
For some businesses, checks or electronic money is cheaper than cash.
This leaves anonymity.
In a world where the government thinks anonymity + large transactions = you have something to hide, the government will discourage the use of any cash or other anonymous method.
If you take anonymity away from e-Gold, then it's just another method of electronic payment. Why should I bother with it when I can use Visa, MasterCard, Paypal, or wire transfer? Well, maybe if it is cheaper or more convenient, or that's all my vendor accepts, but that's about it.
I'm sure the money-launderers will figure out a way to clean ill-gotten funds without getting caught. In the meantime, privacy for the rest of us will take a big hit.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I thought the Federal Reserve controls the currency (hence why dollars are legal "tender" now) and it's a corporation unrelated to the government.
You need to clarify what you mean by "controls". The Fed indirectly controls the money supply but their influence is typically highly overrated and frequently reactionary. Dollars are legal tender because acts of Congress have made them so. The Federal Reserve is actually a quasi-public entity consisting of several parts including a number of private entities.
The service is based in the West Indies, but the directors apparently live in Florida.
The price of gasoline has doubled in 2 years. The price of food is going up, although I do have to admit it's not at the same rate. Why is food more expensive? They're putting it in the gas tank. Energy is becoming more expensive, and we just have to learn to live with it.
If our currency is not backed by oil, why are we fighting over it in some country on the other side of the globe?
If our currency is not backed by oil, why do we have an oil baron's son for president?
If our currency is inflation-proof, why is everything suddenly so expensive?
Here's a thought... why don't *we* convert to the Euro, too? Let someone else be the lead dog for a while, I'm tired of having my ankles bitten.
That trust you mention is bleeding away, and quickly. I'm sick of being on the low end of this 99/1 split (It is said that 99% of the world's wealth is owned by 1% of the population).
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its like talking to someone from some weird parallel universe without any foundation in reality and historical lessons. you're economics stinks of some guy in his armchair trying to figure out how his economy works without any foundation in the simple basics of economics 101. and so all of your economic prescriptives will actually only make things worse, not better
forget the tax objectives, i won't even touch that issue, lets look at this pure insanity of going back to the gold or silver standard. for whatever reason this is attractive to you, i can't figure out
dude: basing your currency on a previous metal leads to bank panics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1893
the value of the metal fluctuates, and this is amplified through the value of the currency, causing much destabilization of financial systems and society. study the bank panics of the 1800s. LEARN from history. getting OFF the gold and silver standard was the wisest economic development of the last 200 years
the best i reason why i can think that armchair crackpots believe a currency backed by silver or gold is somehow superior is that you think it lends the currency some sort of intrinsic value. which is lunacy: gold and silver have no intrinsic value. the only reason they have "value", is because everyone else thinks they do! well, this same value-from-social-convention also lends currency itself value. except it is far better to attach your notion of what is valuable to manmade currency, as this can be controlled. but if someone finds a bunch of silver in the ground, the value of the silver in your pocket goes down
which is kind of funny, because i think you armchair economics crackpots believe that just printing more money is a source of your currency being devalued... and so you find your supposed protection from this printing of more currency in the form of placing value in something which has much more exposure to fluctuation in value due to forces beyond your control. your willing to give up the stability of a currency, enforced by a careful central bank, to the whims of commodities markets and mining concerns. insane!
but that reveals the REAL reason why you economic crackpots love the gold and silver standard: you detest centralized government. individualism, federalism, etc.: these are all noble concepts. but embracing the gold and silver standard takes a healthy instinct and turns into a pathological fear of government, good or bad
this is the truth, whether you like it or not: you are part of a human society. a currency is something that is only valued in the convention of human society. in other words, attempting to ensure value in something out of the only context in which it has value, is a mixture of stupidity and insanity, and reveals your blind spot in life: YOU are part of a society, and you don't understand it, or pathologically attmept to deny it
any money you have is nothing more than an abstract representation of your relationship with the society you live in. as such, there is no way you get to keep that value in such a way that means you are invulernable to the ups and downs of that same society's relative richness or poorness. you cannot divorce the value of currency from the government and soceity you distrust, fear, or despise, because currency is and always will be (even when it is gold and silver) merely nothing more than an abstract representation that you live in a human group, not on an island, and are subject to its government
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
That was one of the first few things someone told me when I moved here.
Another one was, "I'll take your picture for you, folks."
Never did get that camera back.
The service is based in the West Indies, but the directors apparently live in Florida.
Incorporate in a jurisdiction that protects the identities of corporate officers.
Have gnu, will travel.
so much that anyone could save money for bad times by simply storing it in their houses, rather than at some bank, as is required now.
You can't store your money in a bank without losing a great deal of value. You have to put it into markets to maintain your wealth.
It's almost as if the head of an investment bank were the head of the Treasury. Wait...
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As others have said, the gold standard is just an arbitrary value system. Yet, it serves a valuable purpose: preventing government from blindly printing money... thus devaluing your savings.
Gold is physical and needs to be mined. This puts a natural cap on 'printing' money. Yes, as more gold is dugg out of the ground, technically, your currency is devalued. Yet, that rate is controlled by the fact that it takes time and investment to digg up the gold. Now there's nothing special about gold... a basket of real goods would do just as well.
I'd be fine of course with a completely fiat currency as long as the government was small... but you know that's not going to happen. SO they only way to control government is to limit the money it has to squander...aka... gold standard.
With completely fiat money... there is nothing stopping a government or reserve bank from completely devaluing the currency.. aka... Zimbabwe... aka United States. You know who gets hit the hardest when they do these things? The middle class. The poor don't have savings. The rich have enough and can hide and pay top dollar for good accountants and traders to minimize their risk.
From the article:
A systemic flaw in the e-gold design, present from the very beginning, made it vexingly difficult for e-gold to expel a User, in a truly effective way, for criminal abuse of the system. e-gold investigative staff might detect suspicious activity, block or freeze the offending account, and later discover the same perpetrator had created additional accounts.
One element was logic that allowed an e-gold account full privileges from the moment of creation and only revoked those privileges in the event of suspicion that the account holder was seeking to mask their identity or actually engage in illicit activity.
Um, systemic flaw? How about important feature? Really charming exercise in doublethink there. "We're crippling the anonymity features that made this product worth a damn in the first place, but we're going to *call* it correcting a 'flaw'".
This is a bloody show trial, that's what it is. It's not good enough to just prosecute their victims, the Almighty State has to ensure they repent publicly, presumably on pain of being fucked over a lot harder during sentencing. "A systemic flaw in the e-gold design...". We have always been at war with Eastasia.
This is the way I did it the last time I did it. Another poster says this is no longer possible; I'm going to test and see for myself. But the way I used to do this was:
Go to an Ace Cash Express store and plunk down cash for an All-Access Visa Gift card. (See the bottom of the linked page.) No questions, no ID, no nothing - you just slide $255 under the bullet-resistant glass and they slide back under the glass to you a Visa card with $250 preloaded. You can take it to any store and use it immediately. However, if you want to use it online, you then go to the All-Access card site, plug in the codes on the card, and activate the card for online use. The activation process asks for identifying information but does not verify. Obviously, if you want something delivered to your home, you'll have to plug in the correct information. However, if you're using the card to pay for something like downloadable software, you can make up anything for a name, address, phone, etc.
Additional info: You can get the card for any amount up to $250. The cost of the card used to be $5. The card is not reloadable. Ace Cash Express sells lots of different kinds of cards and most of them are reloadable so if you're trying to buy one of these gift cards and they start asking you for identifying information, it means they're making a mistake and trying to sell you the wrong product, some sort of reloadable card. Getting the last little bit of cash out of it is difficult; I used to check the credit balance online then go buy exactly that much gas. And if you don't use it, you lose the money because the company charges a small monthly fee against the balance. I don't remember exactly how much (I think it was $5) but it's enough to eat up the balance and kill off the card, eventually.
Note that this info is old. The fees are probably higher and the allowable balances may be lower nowadays. Due to the fees and other hassles, the card is really only worthwhile for the occasional single online purchase that you want to keep anonymous. Still, I know that it *used* to be possible to buy online, anonymously, if you were willing to put up with the hassle.
This actually brings me 'round to my original question. Since the method described above is a bit of a hassle, does anybody have a better way to buy online and anonymously?
A woman poisoned her husband and he died horribly and she didn't get "decades". A man stabbed a woman to death after sexually assaulting her - he didn't get "decades". Our sentencing priorities are fucking disgusting.
Unlike the paper dollar, if the entire economy built on "IOUs" collapsed, a metallic based currency is still a given amount of metal, metal which can be put to a variety of uses.
You are confusing value with money. They are not the same thing. Money is not an IOU, it is a commonly accepted medium of exchange. As you rightly pointed out barter is difficult and money makes it easier to work out a mutually agreeable trade. Money in no way, shape or form requires a metal (gold or otherwise) to be involved. The metal is simply another form of asset. It's *possible* to use gold as a currency but that does not make it the best option. There is a good reason why NO country in the world uses gold as the basis for their currency anymore.
Metals on the otherhand, have some great properties for usage as currency
True and it has some terrible ones. It's heavy and difficult to move in any significant quantity, it's difficult to tailor to the fluctuating needs of a money supply, it susceptible to inflation as more is mined, and it requires a great deal of inspection and oversight to ensure one piece of gold is exactly like another. There are other problems besides. 100 years ago, gold was a usable basis for a currency. Not anymore.
Also, to use e-gold you must fund it through one of the many transfer agents. As I know from personal experience, there is no recourse or security to make sure they are not scams which will immediately use your account information to take all your e-gold out. AVOID E-GOLD.
every banker in the world understands zimbabwe. everyone in economics 101 understands zimbabwe
the only only person who doesn't seem to understand what printing more currency does to zimbabwe is mugabe
there are no lessons for zimbabwe to teach us, as most anyone with the slightest understanding of economics would never do what zimbabwe is doing
in fact, what zimbabwe is attempting to do is the same stupidity that the gold and ilver standard idjits are trying to do: make zimbabwe an island. make its currency something walled off from the rest of the world
this desire to divorce yourself form the world, from teh larger osciet,y is in fact the source of zimbabwe's troubles, and is in fact the reaosn why the gold and silver standard doesn't work
to become rich is to trust more in society, not less. because all currency, all money is, is an abstract notion of the value of the trust in society. such that investing in that trust infates the vlaue of the currency, divesting yourself of that society's currency devalues it
meanwhile, bac king currency with gold or silver exposes you to MORE capricious whims and ups and downs, not LESS: mining, commodities, industrial demands, social fads, trading whims, etc.
do. you. understand. that?
do you farking understand that gold and silver standard makes a currency LESS stable?
or do you continue with your pathological distrust of government (rather than a healthy distrust of government) that you would actually like to see yourself and the value of your money impoverished?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
No, you can't point to any metal on the periodic table.
Sure I can. Doesn't mean it's a good idea but the point is how absurd it is to base your monetary system on a specific metal. There is NOTHING special about gold as a basis for a money supply. Gold is an asset - it is NOT money. Don't confuse the two.
It needs to be rare (high value per weight/volume), not corrode and you need to be able to easily tell it apart from other metals and alloys. Only a few metals fit that bill and gold is one of them.
It's not hard to tell elements apart these days. The element does NOT need to be rare to be used as a currency basis - it just needs to be tangible, inaccessible (can't pick it up on the beach), and in known and relatively stable quantities. It also does not need to be a metal - merely a commodity. Oil could be used as a currency basis in theory. I'm not saying it's ideal for one or a good idea but it could be done. Remember that even under the gold standard the gold itself wasn't exchanged regularly.
Gold has a history of use as money.
True but that is not a good argument for continuing to use it.
Iron is a lot more common, so you'd have to have an awful lot of it to buy anything.
Under the gold standard we didn't actually exchange gold most of the time anyway. It would be absurd but we could have an iron repository at Fort Knox and issue notes based on a particular amount of iron. The point I'm making is that one should never confuse an asset (gold or iron) with money (a medium of exchange). Money is an abstraction layer. You *can* use tangible commodities (gold) as an form of money but that's a very crude medium of exchange. Countries issue fiat currency now precisely because of the limitations of gold.
And to think that all it would take to bust these people for laundering is put a resume up on Monster.
Maybe it is time for them to change their spam engine to not send these sort of exciting job offers to people who are looking for computer security positions.... or list the FBI, as previous job experience.
Today, IMHO, debasement mainly arises when bad loans are made and not declared. Where the rate of expansion of a fiat currency exceeds the rate of interest, it becomes very difficult to identify bad loans - since debtors can expand their debts rather than default.
You need to ask yourself where money comes from, how it is created... In America, 95% of money is credit, while in the UK, 97% is credit. The debts which are the corollary of this credit cannot ever be paid off; debt demands interest external to the reality of the economy.
There is always more debt than there is money to pay it off. In fact, the only way to pay current debt off isto incur larger debts and pay the current debt from the future, which is what we've been doing for 300 years. With the consequent booms and busts.
Fractional reserve banking, now there's a thing. All banks... Every single one except a country's central bank are technically bankrupt. They are all, every one of them, physically unable to pay all their customers back their deposits should they request them. This is why there are runs on banks, the people at the end of the queue lose everything.
The real question is, who are the fools who give their life savings to these institutions?
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It predates the HTTP 1.1 standard and therefore is done with printed (paper) payment tokens rather than electronically, but the US government also has a transport network for moving physical objects around, analogously with how the Internet moves data. While the physical tokens are more cumbersome than data packets they do use the space on them to convey educational artwork about historical US personages. For example, the one dollar token has a picture of George Washington (the first US president) and the five dollar token has a picture of Abraham Lincoln. They also have tokens for 10 and 20 dollars but I can't afford those so I'm not sure whose pictures are on them.
The physical transport system uses data packets called "envelopes" and a pay-for-bandwidth system called "stamps". You have to write a destination address on each envelope so the ESP (Envelope Service Provider) knows where to deliver it. However, while it's customary to also write a source address on the envelope, the ESP only uses that in case of delivery failure at the destination address, which is fairly rare. If you are using the UDP (unreliably delivered postage) protocol you can omit the source address from the envelope and get anonymous delivery that way.
By putting US Treasury payment tokens with pictures of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln into envelopes bearing postage stamps and a destination address but no source address, you can make anonymous payments.
Fixed that for you.
If you want to hide behind your "jaded suburbanite" facade, feel free. "Chances are", you've never lost anything in a display of nature's wrath, and "chances are" that you're projecting your own sense of self-worth onto your perceptions of me.
Yes, I live in the US. I make a "decent" wage as a hardware/network tech for a small local software company. I am purchasing my own home (it's a trailer, think of that what you will) and purchasing my own car (a 2003 PT Cruiser that I'm still paying for, if you're interested. It also happens to be the closest thing to a "new" car I've ever owned, and the first one I've ever driven off of a lot) and can barely manage to make ends meet for me and my wife. I've been in the computer field for over two decades, so it's not a lack of experience or expertise, just a lack of money.
We don't throw outrageous parties. We don't own a television, and we wouldn't have time to watch one if we did. I only drive to work and back (7.6 miles, roughly, via the interstate) or to the grocery store (only 2 miles, but you can't carry a week's worth of food on a bicycle), and "eating out" for my family means we hit the dollar menu at McDonald's *maybe* once every two weeks (typically more like once every six), when my wife and I can afford to "splurge" and waste $3 on a meal that we didn't have to prepare ourselves. Two burgers, we split a fries, and drinks are at home in the fridge. I haven't set foot in the mall in 4 years. I haven't been to Walmart in 3 years. I haven't purchased new clothing in two years or more, unless you count socks, underwear, and T-shirts.
I'm in debt to the tune of a year's salary (before taxes), just because I have the audacity to want to own my own roof and my own transportation. It's another year's salary if I want to own the dirt my roof rests on, and I'm hoping to have that before I die. Don't shout "aha!" and point your finger at me about being in debt, dammit. I own one credit card, with a limit of $500.00, and it's for emergencies because I can't afford to open a savings account. My debt is solely my home and my (only) vehicle, not some credit-induced buying frenzy. We live hand-to-mouth, paycheck to paycheck, and so does everyone I know.
I don't know if you live here in the US, but if you don't, you may have this misconception that the streets are paved with gold. Allow me to burst that bubble. The streets are barely paved at all down here in southwest Louisiana, where we still haven't recovered from the hurricane Katrina refugees, much less the damage from hurricane Rita. We still have "blue roofs" (tarps instead of shingles) all over the place, and entire towns are still disaster areas. Just last month, I drove through what used to be a neighborhood down in Cameron (about an hour south of my home), and there are maybe 5 intact structures in 2 square miles. Most places have just a few cinder blocks on a concrete pad, or a pile of rubble where someone's home used to be. It has been 3 years since the storm. Does this sound like rich people living it up?
I'm paying twice as much for gasoline as I was just two or three years ago, and it's become a serious dent in my budget. I'm paying more for my car (due to gas prices, insurance premiums, and maintenance) than I am paying for my home, my family's food, and our electricity usage combined. Admittedly, I buy in bulk when I can, but this is still absurd, when the perception of America is "A car in every garage". Hell, I don't even have a carport, or even a front porch; nevermind a garage. If I didn't need the hauling capacity, I'd cheerfully "downgrade" to a compact car - assuming I could find one for sale. Prices are skyrocketing on anything with even remotely decent gas mileage. Unfortunately, it's kinda hard to put a Dell server (still in the box) and a laser printer in an '81 Celica (my preferred method of transport, and I'm still kicking myself for selling it 5 years ago).
As for that dig against Americans, stop watching so much of our TV. None of us looks like that, n
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The real story is that the U.S. government is so interventionist that people are desperately seeking a means to live their lives and do business without being regulated and taxed to death - and bureaucrats will destroy any successful attempt at doing so.
In We We Trust, The Prospect of Local Currencies
I remember back when I was in 10th grade and I was on those crazy #ccpower IRC channels, all anyone would use is E-Gold because it was so easy to move money and not be traced. E-gold deserves whats coming to it, as they overly promoted fraud.
You have in your left hand, the world and everything in it.
You have in your right hand, all of the money in existence; 1 penny.
You mint a second penny.
What is the rate of "growth"? What has actually changed about the world? Our definitions of growth are complete bollocks, utterly meaningless.
The best idea isn't to abandon the idea of fiat currency, which is much better able to maintain liquidity in a growing economy, but rather to use sane monetary policy that manages money supply to increase at approximately the same rate of growth as the economy and thus avoids as much inflation and deflation as possible.
While I agree in principle, I don't believe it is remotely possible in reality. Politics, greed, incompetence etc mean that those with the power to print money will always be untrustworthy. Hence money is also untrustworthy. Inflation in Zimbabwe just hit 2 million percent I hear. Incompetence? Greed? Malice?
You can't be using Japan as a positive economic example, can you? Their economy has just barely begun recovering from two decades of crippling stagnation.
No, I'm using Japan as an example of non catastrophic deflation. During their "crippling stagnation" the unemployment rate hit a whopping 5.5%, or, in other words, generally lower than the normal UK, German and US unemployment rates etc.
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The only reason gold has any value is that we assign it value
Reminds me of this true factoid: in Napoleon's day, aluminum was rare and more valuable than gold. He proudly displayed a set of aluminum cutlery... the ultimate status symbol in the mid-1800s.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
The "food is more expensive 'cos people are growing biofuel" actually *is* true. For one thing, biofuels are more expensive to produce than petroleum-based fuels. For another, the farmers are being told "grow corn, we need more ethanol", instead of "grow food, we like to not starve". And finally, here's a link that may give you some food for thought. The gist of it appears to be "biofuels are not sustainable, and require more than a third again as much energy to produce as an equivalent amount of gasoline".
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