WHAT IS EGOLD?? e-gold is a digital gold currency. It is issued by e-gold Ltd., a Nevis Corporation. It was established way back in 1996. This electronic currency is backed ounce for ounce by actual gold bullion. This system of online payment allows the transfer of money between e-gold account holders. Acco4rding to recent estimates, there are approximately 2.4 million e-gold account holders at present.
You will find that e-gold Ltd. offers a variety of e-metals. So, there is e-silver, 100% backed by silver, e-platinum, 100% backed by platinum, and e-palladium, 100% backed by palladium. But without doubt e-gold beats all these metal currencies hands down. e-gold is has been integrated into an account based payment system. What this means is that an e-gold account holder can use gold as money. To be more precise, with e-gold system, you can transfer desired weights of gold to other e-gold accounts. What is more interesting to note is that in reality only the ownership changes.
The gold in the treasury vaults remains there itself. What should be understood though, is that e-gold is in no way connected to banking. When you use an online system that utilizes a currency based online exchange system, you are considered to be engaged into banking transactions and as such you come under the jurisdiction of federal laws regarding banking. But when you exchange e-gold, you are just exchanging the actual ownership of the gold and nothing else and that is why you are in no way engaged in banking and consequently don’t come under the purview of such federal laws like “Know your customers."
Now, for the part that e-gold is one hundred percent backed by gold. This means that when you are engaged in transactions through your e-gold account (if you buy something or if someone spends to your account) you are in reality receiving a weight of gold. The best thing about this type of transaction is that the amount of gold that you have is not going to change until you spend or redeem it for a currency or take delivery of it. But with currencies, the actual purchasing capacity of the currencies is sure to fluctuate. You would be at the mercy of economic policies of the government and the inflation that there wrong policies could bring. But with e-gold you are completely safe. e-gold is considered a pioneer in the field of alternative currencies.
It is considered the best alternative to traditional forms of payments. Most of the times, traditional forms of payment and that too in online transactions prove to be more costly and quite inefficient. When you deal in e-gold, you are provided with a system of transaction which clears instantly. And you must have dealt with cheques or credit card where a typical transaction takes days to process. Similarly, with most of the online payment systems like paypal, they make a distinction between merchant and non-merchant accounts. There is no such thing as merchant and non-merchant e-gold accounts and consequently all the e-gold accounts carry the same fees besides they also have the same capacity to receive and transfer e-gold account holdings. Thus, we find that e-gold account is one of the finest ways of managing an online account and it has become a benchmark in online transactions.
HOW TO FUND YOUR E-GOLD ACCOUNT? Creating an e-gold account is a child’s play. Anyone can do it. And what’s more there is no fee to open an e-gold account and there is no minimum balance also. There are absolutely no restrictions on opening an e-gold account. No restrictions based on geographic locality, age, status or for that matter anything.
To open a new e-gold account you just need to open the “new account page" on the e-gold site and then you just need to fill the simple form provided on it. The whole process won’t take you more than five minutes or so. But what use would be your e-gold account, if you won’t have any e-gold in it. And you will find that funding your account would prove to be more difficult than the process of creation of the account. It is quite surprising (and I have not come across reason for this!) that e-gold does not offer any way to buy or sell e-gold themselves.
You will have to make use of a third party called a Market Maker. A market maker is someone who exchanges national currencies for e-currencies. And when you send him the request, this merchant places the e-gold in your online currency account. The whole process can be reversed also. If you wish to exchange your e-gold, they would buy your e-currency and would pay you in your national currency. Funding an e-gold account is being made more and more convenient. So, you can fund your e-gold with PayPal. You can also buy e-gold with a credit card. This option should generally be avoided because the market maker would charge you anything from 15% to 20% for it. This high cost is most probably because of cost to him of fraudulent charge backs. You can also use debit card, bank wire, bank draft, cash, electronic banking, and many more. As the time is passing the options are also being broadened.
You will find that e-gold provides a page that lists several market makers and you will find that there exist some differences in the fees charged by different market makers. On an average the fee varies from 4.5% to 10% for small transactions. You will also find that there are some market makers who don’t bother about small transactions at all. Most of the market makers tend to prefer bank wire transfers and money orders to fund an e-gold account. As we have already discussed, one can also use PayPal or credit cards (avoidable because of high transaction fees).
There are also some market makers who give you the option of going to a bank branch to deposit the funds directly and we think that in case you are situated near one of those banks, nothing can be better than that. You will also find that the transaction fee is lower for this kind of transaction. What’s more, there is less delay and inconvenience than a wire transfer or money order. There is one drawback with funding your e-gold account. This funding is never instantaneous.
It always takes some time. If you are funding your account with a credit card, it will take time so that your card may be verified first and the whole process may take a few hours to a day. You may also be required to respond to their verification phone call. Yes, the next time would be quite fast because your credit card would be already verified. So, happy funding.
tweet this!
