Several of these subsequent posts, in my biased opinion of course, have made the case quite eloquently for offering an alternative payment mechanism for those benighted souls worldwide that lack plastic.
One comment was to the effect that people without credit cards probably lack Internet access or the wherewithal to make charitable donations. The German sub-thread is an interesting counter-argument. Do Germans use e-gold? Sample data for one week (admittedly our best recorded week), in terms of number of visits broken down by country of origin:
top 20 (out of 165 countries total that visited the e-gold site that week):
United States 243,408 China 63,390 Canada 34,565 Australia 31,826 Indonesia 27,994 Netherlands 20,272 United Kingdom 19,022 Germany 17,595 Poland 17,496 Hong Kong 16,308 Russia 15,531 India 9,005 Sweden 5,633 Japan 4,853 Singapore 4,753 Taiwan 4,508 Italy 4,249 Uruguay 3,877 Ukraine 3,287 France 3,235
In most Asian countries, and to a lesser extent Africa and South America, there are many more Internet users than credit cards. The stats for China, for example are 87 million Internet users, vs. perhaps as many as 52 million cards (not credit card users - the typical user has several and uses them rarely - they are more of an urban status symbol).
Are people external to the formal economy all lacking in wealth? Not according to Hernando de Soto, who estimates the composite wealth of this majority of humankind to exceed $9 trillion.
The bottom line, though is the insightful comment by Mav. It is true that simply adding e-gold with the intent of garnering donations from existing e-gold users wouldn't lead to much additional income for the Foundation any time soon. The only way it might ignite something phenomenal would be if combined with actual soft promotion, on the order of an endorsement and some explanation/interpretation. My theory is that many of the people who find the various Wiki resources compelling and valuable are the same type of people who are intrigued by the possibility of a privately issued alternative global currency. My guess, and I have no data to support this (since Mozilla and EFF barely expose their e-gold option, let alone help to explain it), is that some subset of them would be grateful to the foundation for bringing e-gold to their attention in a favorable light and would go out of their way to assure that the Foundation was the beneficiary of their incentive-related revenues, similar to affinity card programs.
It is quite possible that the Wiki community is more of an OECD country demographic and you simply don't have many users from third world countries. I guess I'm just having trouble seeing the downside of offering this non-correlated alternative. It doesn't cost anything. Its instant. Its the only payment option that is truly global and does not require the payer to be credit-worthy. In less time than it takes to discuss, the e-gold interface could have been implemented and tested (literally in minutes - you can paste a button for instance that does the whole shebang in simplified form).
Andre Engels wrote:
On Fri, 17 Dec 2004 12:28:00 +0100, Jens Ropers ropers@ropersonline.com wrote:
And worst of all, German banks treat requests for credit cards as if you were asking for a complimentary limo ride. They are really selective about who gets a credit card, because even they suffer from the above delusion (all the worse for their business) and try to let you feel that to be granted a credit card is a massive privilege which should inspire your perpetual loyalty.
Well, I think that's logical. Granting you a credit card means giving you a credit. I don't know about American and British banks, but European banks tend to give credit only to those who are expected to be able to pay it back.
Andre Engels _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l