Jim Davidson dixit: > Run, he says, don't walk, to your nearest newsstand. > > Buy _Wired_ for January 2002. Turn to page 60. > > Read the stuff by Julian Dibbell.
Thanks for the plug, Jim. Those of you who don't care much for running, walking, or the smell of ink on paper need only wait a week for the online version to go up on Wired's site. I'll post the URL as soon as it's ready. Meanwhile, here's a little chunk of flamebait to tide you over. It's a review of Sperandeo and Almeida's goldbuggish epic thriller _Crashmaker_, which I wrote recently for the books section of the Village Voice: http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0201/dibbell.php Now on to Jim's objections. I'll skip the arguments about Keynes and crashes and so forth. (Like I've got time to fight a religious war, sheesh. (Though actually, I am curious to know how Argentina fits in on the goldbug side of the argument. Isn't a dollar-pegged currency as close as modern finance gets to a national gold standard? And isn't that what did the poor bastards in? (Oh cripes, now I've done it -- onward, Christian soldiers!))) > So. What about high yield investment programs? If I were > Steve Foerster, I'd ask for a correction. His statement, > "Frankly, without online games right now there would > be no gold economy," does not, in my view, refer to=20 > HYIPs. Julian Dibbell takes the liberty of defining > HYIPs as games, without considering online casino > gaming, such as The Gold Casino. Then again, maybe I'm > misunderstanding Steve. Thanks for bringing this up, Jim. I was hoping for the chance to clarify that Steve indeed was NOT talking about casino gaming. He made that statement in a context where it was clear we were both talking about Ponzi schemes. To be fair, though, it may be that he wasn't referring to ALL Ponzi schemes. Here's the thing: my article doesn't in fact "take the liberty of defining HYIPs as games." What it says is that Ponzis are "sometimes euphemistically" referred to as "HYIPs" or "games," and in an earlier, longer draft of the piece, it was clearer what I meant by this -- namely, that some online Ponzi schemes do indeed masquerade as "high-yield investment programs" while others plainly advertise themselves as investment "games" structured like Ponzis. True, the latter aren't as reprehensible as the former, but they're certainly no better than chain letters, and those are shady enough for me. If Steve Foerster wants to claim that's all he meant, he might get a correction, but it wouldn't change the substance of the paragraph's assertions. If he wants to claim he only meant casino gaming -- well, I don't think he will, because the tape would prove otherwise. Besides, why would he want to make himself look stupid? Steve knows as well as the rest of us that the only significant use of e-gold for casino gaming happens at The Gold Casino, and that the gold economy would do just fine without it. The fact is, e-gold has a Ponzi problem. Witness the latest SEC publicity bust -- of that 17-year-old out in California who supposedly racked up a million dollars guaranteeing high-yield returns on (get this) sports betting. The newspapers don't say, but the court papers do, that this kid took four kinds of payment: OSgold, Evocash, PayPal, and e-gold. Now, why is this an issue for e-gold? Well, Evocash is so half-assed and sketchy it really doesn't matter what anyone thinks of them. OSgold is all-but-admittedly in business to profit from HYIPs. And PayPal, whatever morally questionable uses its system gets put to, can at least point to its huge adoption by auctioneers as evidence that its users are mostly on the up and up. But e-gold, which Doug Jackson basically claims is going to transform the world economy and cure male pattern baldness, so far shows no real evidence of broad adoption by anybody but Ponzi players. Folks, this is a problem. It makes e-gold look shady, and it's no use protesting that far more "FRNs" (for Christ's sake) are used in off-color dealings. The amount of dollars spent illegally is simply dwarfed by the amount that's legit (and I mean spent, not just moved around among banks and currency markets). With e-gold, the proposition seems to be reversed (the huge amounts passed between MMs notwithstanding). Indeed, the evidence that Ponzi's are e-gold's killer app has at this point grown so strong that it was only my fondness for the currency -- and the far greater interest of my editors in money-mad Muslims -- that kept me from making it the central point of my article. (Well, plus, Doug Jackson did warn me that if I stressed the HYIP angle, e-gold would fail, the world economy would crash, parents would be forced to eat their own children to survive, and it would all be my fault. He literally said this.) The dilemma being: How can digital gold currencies grow any further while the HYIPs still dominate their market? And, on the other hand, how could they ever have gotten this big without them? The first question is Doug Jackson's horn of the dilemma. The second would appear to be James Turk's. > It is, as Julian Dibbell meritoriously notes, a > very heavy material. He notes it has one of the=20 > highest specific gravities of any material known prior=20 > to the discovery of platinum (1735), though I take=20 > exception to the value Dibbell offers of 19.3. The=20 > 62nd Edition of the Chemical Rubber Company handbook > offers a specific gravity for gold of 18.88 at > 20 degrees Celsius, and I don't think much has > changed since 1982 with respect to the density of > gold. Dang, this is weird. Every single reference I can find on the Web -- and I've found a lot of them -- gives 19.3 or 19.29 as the specific gravity of gold. None gives 18.88. Is 19.3 maybe gold's specific gravity at absolute zero or something? Odd that that would become the standard figure. > (Again, with the figures. I have a hard time with > Dibbell's 400 ounce bar weighing 27.5 pounds. <snip> > Only if we use > pounds avoirdupois against ounces troy do we get > 27.4 which is substantially different -- more > than US$400 different at today's price -- and I > have no idea why anyone would want to use pounds > avoirdupois to measure what has always been measured > in ounces troy and pounds troy. Here's why, Jim: I wanted to tell people what a standard gold bar feels like in your hand, not how much you could sell it for. Believe it or not, normal people have no idea what a pound troy feels like. They also basically have no idea what 400 ounces troy *or* avoirdupois feels like. However, any parent of a child two years or older knows what it feels like to hold 27 pounds avoirdupois, and everybody else probably has a good idea too. As for 27.5 versus 27.4, yeah, that is sloppy. I think I originally wrote "27 and a half," intentionally approximating, but then some editor or another thought 27.5 would look better, and I was too witless to object. Anyway, thanks again for the plug, and even more for the attentive read. Julian Dibbell _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? 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