Once upon a time, e-gold was the undisputed leader among digital gold currencies and still is, but is fast loosing the leadership to its haphazard account blocking exercise, proxy blocking as well as a reversal of its anonymity clause. Although e-gold retains the right to adjust its policies and terms of services, the changes are exactly what many find unacceptable and thus stay away from e-gold.
I have also considered e-gold quite risky and too hot to handle especially because of their random account blocking despite the fact that I have used e-gold exclusively for about 5 years now.
Liberty Reserve seems to be the best alternative to e-gold. I signed-up for Liberty Reserve recently. It has many good qualities: located outside the USA, backed in part by gold, dual currency (US Dollars and Euro), aesthetically-pleasing website, timely customer-friendly support system, very secure login system etc. The biggest weakness I have seen so far with Liberty Reserve is their consistent downtime. Apparently, they’re been constantly hit by DDOS attacks by criminals who don’t want them to survive. As I type this, Liberty Reserve has been offline for 3 straight days now. The following is the latest post on their blog:
Dear members!
Out site is currently subjected to a massive ddos attack. We are taking measures to rectify the situation and will be back as soon as we are ready. We apologize for any inconvenience during this unplanned outage.
All best.
Now, how do I trust Liberty Reserve with deposits if I can’t access my account when it matters most?
I know about the other digital gold currencies like e-bullion, c-gold, Crowne Gold, e-dinar, GoldMoney, and Pecunix but I don’t think any of them is viable enough to deserve my patronage. This brings me back to the question: Are Digital Gold Currencies still viable?
Share your thoughts by posting your comments here and now.
2 responses so far ↓
1 uzoma // May 3, 2008 at 8:11 am
with time Liberty reserve will be king better than e-gold thats for sure
the ddos thing is only temporary
2 Mark Herpel // May 4, 2008 at 10:59 am
David,
Great post as usual. DGCs are very viable for business and personal use now and will continue to be so. I think what we are seeing is a move away from the ponzi and scam crowd and this will shut down and drop a lot of unhappy customers but in the long run, a year or two from now, DGC will emerge twice as strong. A vehicle for global business that is not damaged by a rotting US dollar or high gas prices. Beware though, it seems that just at the time everyone and their neighbor is recommending digital gold as ‘The’ place to keep your funds…that might be a time to take some out! That crazy crowd mentality and all…. but this is far off. Liberty Reserve is now the biggest with the Ponzi crowd so you can expect the usual problems with DOS attacks, that should be no surprise to anyone.
Mark
DGCmagazine
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