Several of these subsequent posts, in my biased opinion of course, have
made the case quite eloquently for offering an alternative payment
mechanism for those benighted souls worldwide that lack plastic.
One comment was to the effect that people without credit cards probably
lack Internet access or the wherewithal to make charitable donations.
The German sub-thread is an interesting counter-argument. Do Germans
use e-gold? Sample data for one week (admittedly our best recorded
week), in terms of number of visits broken down by country of origin:
top 20 (out of 165 countries total that visited the e-gold site that week):
United States 243,408
China 63,390
Canada 34,565
Australia 31,826
Indonesia 27,994
Netherlands 20,272
United Kingdom 19,022
Germany 17,595
Poland 17,496
Hong Kong 16,308
Russia 15,531
India 9,005
Sweden 5,633
Japan 4,853
Singapore 4,753
Taiwan 4,508
Italy 4,249
Uruguay 3,877
Ukraine 3,287
France 3,235
In most Asian countries, and to a lesser extent Africa and South
America, there are many more Internet users than credit cards. The stats
for China, for example are 87 million Internet users, vs. perhaps as
many as 52 million cards (not credit card users - the typical user has
several and uses them rarely - they are more of an urban status symbol).
Are people external to the formal economy all lacking in wealth? Not
according to Hernando de Soto, who estimates the composite wealth of
this majority of humankind to exceed $9 trillion.
The bottom line, though is the insightful comment by Mav. It is true
that simply adding e-gold with the intent of garnering donations from
existing e-gold users wouldn't lead to much additional income for the
Foundation any time soon. The only way it might ignite something
phenomenal would be if combined with actual soft promotion, on the order
of an endorsement and some explanation/interpretation. My theory is that
many of the people who find the various Wiki resources compelling and
valuable are the same type of people who are intrigued by the
possibility of a privately issued alternative global currency. My guess,
and I have no data to support this (since Mozilla and EFF barely expose
their e-gold option, let alone help to explain it), is that some subset
of them would be grateful to the foundation for bringing e-gold to their
attention in a favorable light and would go out of their way to assure
that the Foundation was the beneficiary of their incentive-related
revenues, similar to affinity card programs.
It is quite possible that the Wiki community is more of an OECD country
demographic and you simply don't have many users from third world
countries. I guess I'm just having trouble seeing the downside of
offering this non-correlated alternative. It doesn't cost anything. Its
instant. Its the only payment option that is truly global and does not
require the payer to be credit-worthy. In less time than it takes to
discuss, the e-gold interface could have been implemented and tested
(literally in minutes - you can paste a button for instance that does
the whole shebang in simplified form).
Andre Engels wrote:
On Fri, 17 Dec 2004 12:28:00 +0100, Jens Ropers
<ropers(a)ropersonline.com> wrote:
And worst of all, German banks treat requests for
credit cards as
if you were asking for a complimentary limo ride. They are really
selective about who gets a credit card, because even they suffer
from the above delusion (all the worse for their business) and try
to let you feel that to be granted a credit card is a massive
privilege which should inspire your perpetual loyalty.
Well, I think that's logical. Granting you a credit card means giving
you a credit. I don't know about American and British banks, but
European banks tend to give credit only to those who are expected to
be able to pay it back.
Andre Engels
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