On Dec 11, 2003, at 11:54 AM, James A. Donald wrote:
-- On 10 Dec 2003 at 19:31, Tim May wrote:
I receive several messages a month saying I need to re-verify information with an E-gold account (which I never recall establishing, by the way).
These are messagers from scammers. e-gold never sends out email.
E-gold was never even slightly interesting to me for reasons I talked about a few years ago--the notion that a bar of gold moving between shelves in someone's hotel room in Barbados or Guyana or wherever is equivalent to untraceability is silly Randroid idol-worship raised to the fourth power.
Every atom of gold is identical to every other atom of gold. There is only one stable isotope.
E-gold does not provide untraceability -- but gold does.
Where tax authorities get people is in the transfer _in to_ and _out of_ certain kinds of accounts, be they Cayman Island or Swiss bank accounts, whatever. The issue with opening a Swiss bank account and wiring money into it, or depositing Federal Reserve Notes into it has NOTHING to do with FRNs having serial numbers and hence being traceable. The issue is with their own reporting to the IRS (these days) and to stops in place to stop the wiring of said money or the transport of said FRNs. What *form* the "item of value" is inside the bank, be it gold bars or Spanish doubloons or stacks of $20 bills or diamonds, is unimportant. In fact, for all intents and purposes the "item of value" inside the bank can be marks in a ledger book, which is effectively the situation today. (It is true that what is stored inside a bank, be it gold coins or Federal Reserve Notes, becomes important if and when enough depositors ask for their money in that particular form. But this is an issue of believing the bank does in fact store gold dust or doubloons or FRNs, not anything about the intrinsic untraceability of such things!) In other words, any bank except for "U-Stor-It-Yourself" safe deposit systems, is basically a black box with beliefs by I/O users about how likely it is to behave according to its specifications. That some of the gold fetishists here keep perpetuating this deep misunderstanding of the issues is...unsurprising. --Tim May