Micropayments and the incentive program at e-gold

[Jim Davidson]

Dear Friends,

James A. Donald points out that tens of thousands of
micropayments are being made on the e-gold system
every day.  If we assert that less than a tenth of
a gram of gold is a micropayment, then the web page
http://www.e-gold.com/stats.html
gives us some information.

  Spend size  quantity      value involved
0 mg - 1 mg     6959      (Total: 5.60 g)
1 mg - 10 mg    4854      (Total: 23.73 g)
10 mg - 100 mg 21825      (Total: 1.04 kg)

A question arises, where do these events come
from?  Mr. Donald offers the thought that the
spends involve the e-gold incentive program, but
thinks some other activities such as per-click
micropayments for banner ads might be involved.
He writes, "Some proportion of these payments must
be e-gold's own referral scheme." JP May offers the
thought that the HYIP or "neoteric gaming" or, in
my view, Ponzi scheme activity may be the major factor.

Let's talk a bit about those events.  Every time
a spend takes place at e-gold.com, there are
several activities which report through.  First,
an account holder authorizes a spend of metal
(we'll stick with gold in this example) from his
account to another account.  Second, e-gold.com
records a "payment receive fee" against the
account of the person receiving the payment in
the amount of 1% of the amount spent, capped at
50 cents.  Third, e-gold.com captures half of
this receive fee and divides the other half between
two other accounts: the account which sponsored
the spender and the account which sponsored the
receiver.

However, I don't believe that payment receive fees,
spender-sponsor incentive fees, or receiver-sponsor
incentive fees can be involved in *any* of these
micropayments.  Why not?  If that were true, then
every user initiated spend event would generate two
or three automatic spend events on the e-gold system.
A user-initiated spend would generate two auto-spends
in the form of incentive fees to the sponsors of the
spender and the receiver.  It would generate those
two plus a payment receive fee spend to the e-gold
account.  However, that would only represent the
situation if the number of e-gold spends were always
evenly divisible by three or four.  Since the number
of spends I see right now is 72470, and that number
isn't evenly divisible by three nor by four, I
think the incentive program cannot be involved in
the "spends" figure.

Help me out here, Jay Wherley or Jim Ray, if you
would, since you guys at e-gold know the whole
story.  I think "spends" is user-initiated events,
and that *none* of the incentive payments are
counted as spends.  That makes sense, since if
the incentive payments were "spends" on the e-gold
system, they would incur payment receive fees,
and generate further incentive fees, in a rather
recursive fashion - an infinite loop.  What's
more, they would show up in "payments received"
in the account history, whereas they show up
only in the "incentive fees" history. And, the
number of spends, if incentive fees are counted,
would have to be invariably a number evenly
divisible by three, which is not the case in
the instance cited here.  So, it is just a total
non-starter.  The e-gold incentive program is not
a part of the "spends" figure on the stats.html
page at e-gold.com.

Next we have to ask whether micropayments arise
as a part of the Ponzi activities.  That may be
true, since we can suppose that Ponzi operators
would want to provide incentive payments to these
jerks who violate the e-gold user agreement and
keep sending spam around.  If there were not
incentive fees paid to spammers, there would be
no reason for the spammers to spam, QED.  Thus,
I suppose that if a Ponzi scheme takes in, say,
$25, it pays out to the referrer some fee like
$1 or twenty-five cents.  I'd have to be a lot
more interested in Ponzis to do the research on
this matter.  Based on the fact that spams which
promote Ponzis are sent out, even though the
account holder risks losing his account if the
spam is reported to abuse at e-gold.com (see the
account user agreement), then there must be
some sort of incentive payment involved.  As
the spams are a form of advertising, and as
there are probably opt-in lists for Ponzis
and web sites describing various Ponzis, I do
agree with Mr. Donald that "these are mostly
... payments for ads" though I suspect they
are on a commission-only basis rather than on
a per-click-through basis in most instances.

Finally, we have the question of "anonymity."
Mr. Donald says, "These are non anonymous, in that
e-gold can link payer to payee, but anonymous in
that it laborious to link e-gold account numbers
to true names."  I agree with the first half of
this comma splice sentence.  These payments are
not anonymous.  The payer knows whose account is
being paid, and the payee knows where the payment
came from.

Since the e-gold.com system records an account
history, and since those records are kept in one
of the most litigious jurisdictions on Earth
(the USA), any prosecutor or defense attorney
or other party equipped with a court order can
get account histories.  There is no privacy to
the system, certainly not in comparison to a
wholly offshore-hosted system like GoldMoney.com
or 1MDC.

However, there is the e-gold.com registration
process, which allows anyone with a working e-mail
address to get set up with an e-gold account.
Thus, accounts may be pseudonymous, or opened
with a pseudonym.  They might even be opened
with fake IDs or the like, depending on what
sort of due diligence gets imposed by e-gold.com.

Nevertheless, pseudonyms can be penetrated. Not
easily, as Mr. Donald points out, but with some
effort, I think.  That's especially true where
some exchange provider converts one of the e-gold
account holder's gold to some other form of funds.
The payment to the exchanger is in the e-gold
account history.  Most exchangers have web sites
where there locations can be found, and all can
be located by anyone offering to buy gold from
an exchanger because some coordinates for a
wire or a money order are going to be forthcoming.

Then it is only a matter of a court order to
get that exchanger's record of where the payment
was sent.  Even if that is only an intermediary
account, further record searches can be
undertaken to track the pseudonym back to some
individual.  Of course, if the account holder
uses an exchanger in a different jurisdiction,
or runs several accounts in series so that there
is an e-gold > exchanger > bank > e-gold >
exchanger > bank series before the recipient
gets his funds, the problem can be made more
difficult, especially if the exchangers and banks
in the series are in different countries.

Finally, I suspect that a large percentage,
perhaps 20% of all spends involve an exchange
provider.  Given that the total inventory of
e-gold turns over in less than a week, I think
a lot of account holders are replenishing their
accounts with gold from exchangers.  Some
exchangers may be paying incentive fees, too.

Regards,

Jim
  http://www.ezez.com/


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