What is e-gold and how to fund your e-gold account?
WHAT IS EGOLD??
e-gold is a digital gold currency. It is issued by e-gold Ltd.,
a Nevis Corporation. It was established way back in 1996. This
electronic currency is backed ounce for ounce by actual gold
bullion. This system of online payment allows the transfer of
money between e-gold account holders. Acco4rding to recent
estimates, there are approximately 2.4 million e-gold account
holders at present.
You will find that e-gold Ltd. offers a variety of e-metals. So,
there is e-silver, 100% backed by silver, e-platinum, 100%
backed by platinum, and e-palladium, 100% backed by palladium.
But without doubt e-gold beats all these metal currencies hands
down. e-gold is has been integrated into an account based
payment system. What this means is that an e-gold account holder
can use gold as money. To be more precise, with e-gold system,
you can transfer desired weights of gold to other e-gold
accounts. What is more interesting to note is that in reality
only the ownership changes. The gold in the treasury vaults
remains there itself.
What should be understood though, is that e-gold is in no way
connected to banking. When you use an online system that
utilizes a currency based online exchange system, you are
considered to be engaged into banking transactions and as such
you come under the jurisdiction of federal laws regarding
banking. But when you exchange e-gold, you are just exchanging
the actual ownership of the gold and nothing else and that is
why you are in no way engaged in banking and consequently don't
come under the purview of such federal laws like "Know your
customers."
Now, for the part that e-gold is one hundred percent backed by
gold. This means that when you are engaged in transactions
through your e-gold account (if you buy something or if someone
spends to your account) you are in reality receiving a weight of
gold. The best thing about this type of transaction is that the
amount of gold that you have is not going to change until you
spend or redeem it for a currency or take delivery of it. But
with currencies, the actual purchasing capacity of the
currencies is sure to fluctuate. You would be at the mercy of
economic policies of the government and the inflation that there
wrong policies could bring. But with e-gold you are completely
safe.
e-gold is considered a pioneer in the field of alternative
currencies. It is considered the best alternative to traditional
forms of payments. Most of the times, traditional forms of
payment and that too in online transactions prove to be more
costly and quite inefficient. When you deal in e-gold, you are
provided with a system of transaction which clears instantly.
And you must have dealt with cheques or credit card where a
typical transaction takes days to process. Similarly, with most
of the online payment systems like paypal, they make a
distinction between merchant and non-merchant accounts. There is
no such thing as merchant and non-merchant e-gold accounts and
consequently all the e-gold accounts carry the same fees besides
they also have the same capacity to receive and transfer e-gold
account holdings.
Thus, we find that e-gold account is one of the finest ways of
managing an online account and it has become a benchmark in
online transactions.
HOW TO FUND YOUR E-GOLD ACCOUNT?
Creating an e-gold account is a child's play. Anyone can do it.
And what's more there is no fee to open an e-gold account and
there is no minimum balance also. There are absolutely no
restrictions on opening an e-gold account. No restrictions based
on geographic locality, age, status or for that matter anything.
To open a new e-gold account you just need to open the "new
account page" on the e-gold site and then you just need to fill
the simple form provided on it. The whole process won't take you
more than five minutes or so. But what use would be your e-gold
account, if you won't have any e-gold in it. And you will find
that funding your account would prove to be more difficult than
the process of creation of the account. It is quite surprising
(and I have not come across reason for this!) that e-gold does
not offer any way to buy or sell e-gold themselves. You will
have to make use of a third party called a Market Maker. A
market maker is someone who exchanges national currencies for
e-currencies. And when you send him the request, this merchant
places the e-gold in your online currency account. The whole
process can be reversed also. If you wish to exchange your
e-gold, they would buy your e-currency and would pay you in your
national currency. Funding an e-gold account is being made more
and more convenient. So, you can fund your e-gold with PayPal.
You can also buy e-gold with a credit card. This option should
generally be avoided because the market maker would charge you
anything from 15% to 20% for it. This high cost is most probably
because of cost to him of fraudulent charge backs. You can also
use debit card, bank wire, bank draft, cash, electronic banking,
and many more. As the time is passing the options are also being
broadened. You will find that e-gold provides a page that lists
several market makers and you will find that there exist some
differences in the fees charged by different market makers. On
an average the fee varies from 4.5% to 10% for small
transactions. You will also find that there are some market
makers who don't bother about small transactions at all. Most of
the market makers tend to prefer bank wire transfers and money
orders to fund an e-gold account. As we have already discussed,
one can also use PayPal or credit cards (avoidable because of
high transaction fees). There are also some market makers who
give you the option of going to a bank branch to deposit the
funds directly and we think that in case you are situated near
one of those banks, nothing can be better than that. You will
also find that the transaction fee is lower for this kind of
transaction. What's more, there is less delay and inconvenience
than a wire transfer or money order. There is one drawback with
funding your e-gold account. This funding is never
instantaneous. It always takes some time. If you are funding
your account with a credit card, it will take time so that your
card may be verified first and the whole process may take a few
hours to a day. You may also be required to respond to their
verification phone call. Yes, the next time would be quite fast
because your credit card would be already verified.
So, happy funding.