E-gold
 

Anyone have an opinion on this? Trustworthy? Scam? Seems like it would be the next logical step if V/MC gets more aggressive against porn... http://www.e-gold.com

its really no different than any other token system.. call it gold, call it "credits", call it "flooz"...

it definitely has value though.

I've been following e-gold from early days (account number 100098 if you want to drop me a gram) and these guys are very serious and very reliable. It's not just a token system -- if you have e-gold in your account, there's a matching amount of REAL gold in a bonded vault somewhere guaranteeing that your online gram really is worth a gram of gold.

The egold people have a sort of love-hate relationship with the alternative economy -- they were big on user privacy, even anonymity, until they started getting burned by folks who were using e-gold to run complex online Ponzi schemes. Then for awhile they got very user-unfriendly, the same way PayPal did, freezing "suspicious" accounts and refusing to discuss the rules or reasons for doing so.

I believe they have much of that sort of problem worked out now, but it's still a bit complicated and expensive to get money in and out of the system. If there's a third party adult website biller that accepts it, it would be a decent solution for this business -- but it would suck as a a sole payment method. The folks who use egold tend to be privacy fanatics, but it's hard enough to use that there aren't so many such folks.

Aren't they in the middle of either and FTC or a state attorney general investigation at the moment?

It sounds like a good idea, but I'd wait til they get a clean bill of health to give them a dime...

i've used e-gold before, no problems :) if you get paid using e-gold you can get the money home using http://www.omnipay.net

They may very well be -- I heard something about that in connection with all the Ponzi artists that were using their system. Some of those folks doing "online stock market games" were among their biggest customers at one point. Arguably not their fault, but it caused them no end of headaches. Basically, they discovered that, in this country, you can't be in the payments industry and get away with not caring about the financial activities of your customers.

Some folks were telling them way back in 1996 that they ought to operate 100% offshore -- but it took the Ponzi people to show them why. :(