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This spot price discussion is important:

E-gold wish to give their customers the perception that they have
real gold in their accounts (gold itself, circulated electronically),
but then Omnipay tell you they are not willing to honour that fact,
and offer to buy it back from you at less than what they themselves
have told you it is worth!

Robert says we should buy gold currency at spot, but only be able to
sell it at spot -4% (or so), but this means that the currency is no
longer worth the spot value, it is worth spot -4%... there is no way
to look past this, the value of a thing is set by it's buying power,
as John explained. IOW the price paid by the exchange-of-last-resort
(in e-gold's case Omnipay) sets the value of the currency, not the
published spot price... In e-gold's case, the spot price published by
e-gold is a lie, because they do not honour that value.

What I see is a gross misunderstanding here (where's JP May when you
need him?). Some time ago JP had a rant on this list about spot
prices... in short, he insisted there is no "spot price"... so what
is spot price?

We have markets, where people buy and sell gold... they offer to buy
at a certain price (bid) and offer to sell at another (usually
higher) price (ask). So again, where's the "spot" price? As far as I
can see, "e-gold spot" is some arbitrary figure that e-gold
periodically simply "choose", based (perhaps) on the movement of the
international markets. It really has no meaning whatsoever except
that users of the e-gold system "agree" to accept this "spot" as the
value of the e-gold when they trade.

Obviously to set a value on the e-gold currency like this, then not
to honour that value simply does not make sense, and is misleading...
this whole fiasco really illustrates the confusion at e-gold on some
things (note: they also list the gold stored in the e-gold gold xxx
trust as an asset of e-gold :-)).

In short is seems e-gold arbitrarily choose a value for e-gold, then
their own exchanger dishonours that price. It would be far more
sensible (and honest) to simply set their spot price at 2% lower, and
buy back for spot and charge the spread above that spot price.

Goldmoney, do an equally silly thing... they use the rates from
Kitco.com... Kitco publish a bid and an ask price
(http://dgcsc.org/goldprices.htm) and goldmoney use the bid price as
the "spot" price in their system... Note that the bid price is the
"buy" price, that is the price that kitco will pay for gold, so it is
correct to value your goldmoney at this level. BUT then when you try
to sell your Goldmoney, they offer you 2% BELOW BID! How silly is
that?

The whole point is that SPOT IS AN ARBITRARY FIGURE, so to treat it
as if it were some finite "ordained" value and then to base your buy
and sell either side of that because "that's how everyone does it" is
just silly. That is NOT how everyone does it, they have a bid and an
ask rate, and at any time, the bid rate is the likely rate you will
settle at if you sell... that is the true value of the currency and
is what should be reflected in the account value.

Note Pecunix bases it's price on the bid and it appears that
e-bullion also understand this (I wonder why... experience?). Thus we
at open2exchange still buy all Pecunix and e-bullion at the quoted
Pecunix/e-bullion price, as do e-bullion's in house exchange.

In order to help reduce the barriers to entry, Pecunix subsidises the
exchangers for all larger purchases and they get their Pecunix at the
Pecunix published price (spot). That is why you can still sell your
Pecunix at spot and buy it for less than 3% above "spot".
Ultimately I hope all will see the non-sense in doing things the way
e-gold/goldmoney does, and we will again have sanity...

Sidd.

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