More Convenient Use of Electronic Gold Payments

Bill Stewart bill.stewart at pobox.com
Wed Sep 29 11:40:40 PDT 2004


I've used E-Gold in the past, and found that the hardest part
of the process is buying the stuff to put in your account -
setting up an account and paying people with it are both easy,
but to buy the gold, you need to find some way to give somebody
some other kind of money so they'll give you electronic gold.
If you want $10000 worth, or want to transfer physical gold,
it's not hard, but if you just want small quantities it was annoying.

Jim Davidson's article talked about E-Gold and other currencies,
and almost all of them operate under a model in which
the gold service transfers gold credits between accounts,
but buying the gold credits with other types of money
is handled by third-party retailers, and almost none of the retailers
will accept credit cards or Paypal without long delays,
though they'll happily accept other gold currencies.

There's now a much more convenient way to buy online gold - goldage.net.
To pay them cash, you do an online form, then go to a bank they use,
and fill out a deposit slip with their account number from the form,
and hand the bank your cash, and then do another form to say you did it.
They use banks in USA, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines,
Singapore and South Africa.  Their US banks include
Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and three or four others.
You don't need to set up an account with them - they mostly do
transactional business, though their fees are a bit lower
if you're a large frequent customer.
The gold currency payment isn't instant - it can take a couple
of days for Goldage to see that the deposit was made.
They seem to be a small operation, so they're very responsive to email.

A couple of months ago, I wanted to pay for some services
using an online gold currency, and the merchant
accepts E-gold, Pecunix, and several other gold currencies.
I didn't want to use E-Gold itself, because there are too many
spammers phishing for people's e-gold account information
the way they do for credit cards, and I didn't want to have
to miss any _real_ email from them mixed in with the spam.
Pecunix was one of the gold currencies that my merchant's
online payment system Goldcart accepted, and they were easy to use.
So I did the online form at Goldage, deposited the cash at the bank,
checked Pecunix a couple of days later, and paid the merchant.
I think the total fees were about $6-7 between the different
service providers, mostly the $5 minimum fee at Goldage,
and I may have a buck or two of round-off-error money sitting in Pecunix,
but the percentage costs would be lower if I were using it more frequently
rather than a one-shot transaction.

It worked very well, and was much simpler than a few years ago. 





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