[Foundation-l] e-gold proposal

[Douglas Jackson]

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 at 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
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>  
>