At 4:45 PM +0000 on 3/12/02, major bosco wrote:
> Well this is interesting news! > > I thought James Turk at Goldmoney said all the fraud was at E-Gold? > > He railed on and on about this issue awhile back -- I guess his admin team > better get in there and police their own Glass House before throwing stones! Frankly, the whole issue of fraud, or, as I framed it longer ago than I like to think, the "Mrs. Grundy on the Bank Board" problem, should be *orthogonal* to the payment scheme. Think, for instance, if the Fed were to be required to repudiate all transactions done for drugs, or made with stolen cash. Obviously, that's impossible, because cash is a bearer transaction. Systems like e-gold, and GoldMoney are, of course, book-entry systems, requiring latency in settlement, which in turn requires knowing your customer so you can send him to jail, or freeze his assets, if he lies about a debit or credit. Unfortunately, once you've mastered this "syntactic" hurdle, so the trades don't break and you have no settlement fraud, you are almost required to enforce "semantic" fraud, like GoldMoney is doing now. The solution is bearer transactions, someday. Hopefully sooner than you think. <shameless-plug> See the attached announcement if you'd like to learn more </shameless-plug>. One should note, however, that since the Mssrs. Turk didn't offer a sign-up bounty to people who brought in new customers, GoldMoney's initial fraud rate, and it's popularity with HYIPs and other scamsters, is not nearly the one that e-gold had, which might be the origin of James' original claim. Nonetheless. If you do book-entries, you end up playing fraud-cop, and, as we know, that way danger lies, especially for anyone who cares about individual freedom -- or, more to the point, economic efficiency... Cheers, RHA -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' --- You are currently subscribed to e-gold-list as: archive@jab.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Use e-gold's Secure Randomized Keyboard (SRK) when accessing your e-gold account(s) via the web and shopping cart interfaces to help thwart keystroke loggers and common viruses.
