How Doug took on the US Dollar
Saturday, January 13, 2007 at 8:51AM In 1995 Douglas Jackson an oncologist from Florida thought that there was something wrong with the way money works. In particular in the way it works online.
In 1996 he launched E-Gold and introduced the world to one of the first real tangible electronic currencies. Unlike all the others that were launched around that time Doug focused on the basic economics and contracts that form the basis of successful national currencies.
E-Gold was based on a simple and very old idea, the gold standard. For each gram of E-Gold in circulation, there was a physical gram of gold in secure storage. As no national currencies are 100% gold backed anymore, Doug figured there was a real opportunity for someone to take on and compete directly with the US dollar which he felt was a fraud.
E-Gold grew - albeit slowly. E-Gold was and is a hard sell. Most people don’t understand something that isn’t in their national currency. Secondly it was never quite as easy to get started in the system. E-Gold is fundamentally incompatible with the banking system due to their fundamental rule, that all transfers are final. This makes it very difficult for people to fund their E-Gold accounts.
E-Gold has implemented a fair amount of innovation in both it’s user agreement, corporate structure and realtime transparency. Check out the Examiner and user statistics which are all done in realtime. The e-gold mailing list and user created tools such as Craig Spencer’s Fee calculator has done a lot to keep the system solid.
They have stuck to their basic principles of gold standard, separation of control and transparency. This even though Doug and the management have done more than their fair share of things that might cause people to lose trust in the system.
So however unpopular Doug might be at times, Doug is definitely an Extra Eagle.
Extra Eagle
Reader Comments (2)
[...] I’ve been reading the last weeks on what Pelle is up to and I want to meet him in Copenhagen or Brussels when he’s back from Boraca. I have a legal representation (read: a company) of myself in 4 countries, credit cards and bank accounts in each of those countries. Don’t try this at home, since our current world is made to pinpoint people and their finances to one place and every effort to break through that system is a bureaucratic nightmare most people probably will prefer avoiding. And next to that you’ll start realising how absurd it is seeing your Reals plunge when the dollar falls. But once you’re crossing those boundaries, you realise there must be thousands, if not millions of people who are challenging our current legal and financial concepts which lost track with the day to day realities of an ever growing crowd of people who live beyond nationalities; quoting Pelle: The problem is the ideas of what property, business, employment and contracts are changing. Not the concepts themselves, but the day to day realities of them. Try using your domain name that you and everyone else knows is worth at least $50,000 as collateral for a loan in a bank. Try getting credit in most countries, if you freelance for someone at the other side of the world. Just try to get the electricity connected in most countries without a local salaried job. [...]
How e-gold was brought down...
I had noticed that the GDCA (Global Digital Currency Association) website has been inaccessible for several weeks now. I was searching for blog posts about GDCA that might give me an insight into why it is down when I came across a blog post by Pelle...