[Foundation-l] e-gold proposal

Mon Dec 13 16:49:33 UTC 2004

--- Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
> ...
> I will say that I agree that PayPal is horrible, and it would be nice to 
> have an effective micropayment system, but all that I've seen so far are 
> thinly disguised scams.

PayPal helps us pay the bills. Yes it is not perfect, but it is very popular
and widely trusted, thus is used by a great many people. They are trying to
internationalize, but it has been a painfully slow process. 

> E-gold has been around for several years, so this isn't just a 
> fly-by-night scam in itself, and should be evaluated on its merits. 

Nod - although IMO we should not be concerning ourselves with evaluating every
different alternative since we just need a way to accept payments. So far we
have PayPal handling the the great bulk of our donations and MoneyBookers
acting as the multi-national/lingual catch-all that hardly anybody ever uses. 

>  Unfortunately, I haven't done nearly the amount of research into it as 
> I perhaps should have myself, so my opinion of e-gold as a service 
> provider for cash transactions is not particularly good.  Still, if we 
> accept on-line cash donations we shouldn't restrict. ourselves to a 
> single provider like PayPal or Western Union, particularly if there 
> isn't any regular cost for maintaining the account

We don't. See above. 

> It would be nice, for instance, to have some means to "buy" Wikipedia on 
> CD-ROM (or DVD) as a "donation" to the Wikimedia Foundation.  This is 
> certainly under the realm of something to worry about in terms of 
> fundraising techniques.

That would be wampum given to people who donate certain amounts. However, the
logistics of making that actually work is beyond what our current volunteer
staff can handle at the moment. 

Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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