Eric,
Thank you for your comments.
> I hope I did not appear "harsh" or "conceited" as I do
> appreciate your offering suggestions.
No, I wasn't bothered a bit.
> Sometimes I reply a "little to quickly" and my replies are
> often mistaken for criticisms or insult.
Same here. I was worried about the same thing.
> You are sooo right about things not working in their
> current state. I personally have been hit for close
> to $18 K in bad checks (not counting the ones I never
> even bothered to deposit) this MONTH alone.
Ouchhh!!!
> These were from people in the US, all the details panned
> out (banks verified funds available, addresses, so on) but
> they turned out to be counterfeits of legitimates.
So much for the effectiveness of the statist approach.
> My point being for every method we come up with to verify a
> payment or endorser, scammers then sidestep and move on.
I can't even imagine what what they must be doing! But clearly
you are not determining what you really need to know. You are
trying to determine something else and use it as a proxy for what
you really need. Determined and resourceful people will probably
always be able to exploit the fact that there is a difference
between the proxy and the reality.
> It is currently impossible to know all of our endorsers.
Don't dismiss the idea so fast! You don't need to know them all
personally. I'm sure that you have heard the old saw that you can
make contact with anyone in the world thru 3 or 4 intermediary
acquanitances. The point is that it only takes a few levels
of endorsement to connect you with anyone on earth. That sounds
practical to me. Another poster on the board has suggested he
has something imminent in this regard. Perhaps he will solve
your problem. For a more specifc proposal of my own see the end
for a more concretes.
> We must rely on "fresh blood" coming into the system to grow
> the Gold Economy.
I don't think that is true either. What it needs is not a continual
flow of new entrants but for present e-gold users to engage in
genuine productive activity and trade using gold. Then the gold
economy will be self-sustaining even if small and will have a
sound basis on which to base healthy growth.
> If you think about it, I believe there are currently less than
> 100,000 funded active e-gold accounts.
Closer to 50,000.
> That is a drop in the bucket compared to the global economy with
> fiat currency, yes? Now, the trick is to convert the rest of
> "old economy" (fiat users) into converting into the Gold
> Economy (bullion users).
It is not so simple or direct. There has to be genuine productive
activity first. I think you have things a bit backward.
> To do so, we must accept their currency (checks, money orders,
> credit cards, etc.) to issue them gold currency. Since no one
> has a method to verify these masses in a *cost effective*
> manner, we have to engage in a huge amount of trust/risk.
I think you are too eager and that is making you a ripe
target. And as long as they can rip you off for $18K a month
and you keep doing it you will keep attracting the crooks!
I understand and sympathize with all your points about using ID
verification as a makeshift, however.
> If we create a method to verify all endorsers *cost effectively* and
> quickly, that means we can id someone, anyone, anywhere,
> rather quickly. Imagine the fear such technology would spread.
You are still thinking like a statist. And, yes, it is scary!
> I guess what is needed is the best of both worlds. A method to
> verify someone is "trustworthy" when making payment without
> needing to know *who they are* in a sense.
Exactly.
> However, e-gold is now rampant with thieves, counterfeiters, and
> hackers who have obtained their gold stores illegally. The trust
> is then gone. Sure the payment is "good" at the moment, but it
> ultimately cost someone (Market Makers, G&SR, fellow e-gold
> users) a great deal because the gold was stolen from them.
That is one of my great concerns and a problem that needs as solution
if the gold economy is ever to amount to anything or freedom is to
become practical again.
Thinking about the problem the following occured to me. Zimmerman
build into PGP an idea for a "web of trust" which he clearly set
great store on. It always seemed like a good idea to me but I have
never personally found a real need for it in key management. However,
as a result of Zimmerman's original design there is an existing global
infrastructure of key-servers that supports it. It implements a
hierarchical "web of trust" based on proximity of trusted endorsers.
Suppose you ask your most trusted customers to generate and send a
public key to the key-servers. You can sign and endorse their
keys. And other people, including your trusted customers, can
sign and endorse the keys of people they know and trust. Then you
can adopt as a criterion for doing business with someone that they
demonstrate that they possess the private key corresponding to a
public key on the keyservers that has been signed and endorsed at
most, say, four levels from your own.
It seems to me unlikely that the crooks would find that so easy to
do but all legitimate customers should have little trouble after a
period for the web of trust to spread which should not be very long.
CCS
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