Do as the banks do. People who need to enter account numbers to spend make mistakes. This happens more times than is acceptable. The merchant interface prevents this by filling in the account number for you. But this doesn't help people who have to fill in their account number to buy e-gold. Also in other cases people enter an e-gold account number manually.
In Belgium any bank allows you to easily transfer money to another bank at the self-bank terminals or using a simple form. How does this work? In Belgium all bank account have a standard format xxx-yyyyyyy-cc. The first part (xxx) is a reference to the bank. The cc part is a checksum which is the previous digits modulo 97. Recently banks have created such an international account format, called IBAN. This also contains a checksum number, you can find the specs somewhere on the web. These checksum parts in their number prevent manual data-entry errors. All forms with fields for e-gold account should - optionally - have this. It could work like this: instead of number 123456, we would write 123456/25. If someone would enter an account without a slash we just accept the number. Otherwise we only accept the entry if the checksum is correct. The last part is [97 - (e-gold account number) mod 97] and gives a number between 01 and 97. The minus 97 helps against obvious numbers like 06/06 on which humans are likely to err twice. This doesn't add any extra security against abuse, and probably has no use for machine generated spends but it does cut down on human typo errors. If exchange providers now fund two wrong accounts a month, due to client-errors, it would drop to less than once every four years. Please implement a scheme like this. Banks have learned that it is necessary. This feature is worth the longer account numbers. Every site dealing with e-gold account numbers can implement this themselves but it would only work if a substantial number of sites would use this in a consistent manner. This is more effective than asking people to enter their e-gold number twice. Of course this will only work if e-gold were to show the number with the checksum, e.g.. after login. Thank you for your attention, George Bonhuer http://568773.clicktwocents.com --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Get your free email at http://quickmail.quickhosts.com --- You are currently subscribed to e-gold-list as: [email protected] 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.
