Creating an e-gold account is very easy. All you have to do is go to the new account page on the e-gold site and fill in the form. It’s very important to choose a good passphrase, because the passphrase is what keeps random hackers from breaking into your account and robbing you. I generated a passphrase as carefully as I would a PGP passphrase (or maybe more so), and that will be sufficient. Just don’t use something trivial, like “password!”
Anyone can create an account, and it doesn’t cost anything to create or have one. To be of any use, though, you need to have some e-gold in your account. At this point the process gets much more complicated. e-gold doesn’t actually provide any way to buy or sell e-gold themselves, instead you must use what they call a “market maker.” I’m not sure where this name comes from, because they’re really just ordinary currency exchangers. There is a page on the e-gold website that lists several of them.
I went through the entire list, and found that there is some variation in the fees the different market makers charge. For a small transaction the fees range from 4.5% to 10%, and some don’t accept small transactions at all. This is fine for me, because I get to shop around for the best deal. I suspect it would be a major problem for someone who just wants to get some e-gold quickly and easily for an e-bay auction. Maybe it would help if e-gold could handle purchases directly–say, at a very high transaction fee so as not to compete with the independents?
The market makers all prefer bank wire transfers and money orders for e-gold purchases. Some of them offer other options, such as PayPal or even credit card, but those have much higher transaction fees–presumably because of the high risk of fraud. A small number have an option where you can go into a bank branch and deposit funds directly. If you happen to live near one of those banks, this is probably the best choice. The transaction fees are low for this, and there’s less delay and inconvenience than a wire transfer or money order.
After looking at the competition, I decided to try Business Express.They have relatively low transaction fees, and they also allow the option of wiring the money via Western Union. After having just taken a week to get a money order, I wanted something fast. It turns out that was a mistake, because Western Union is pretty expensive itself.
Theoretically it takes one or two business days for them to fund my e-gold account. I sent the money on Friday, so hopefully the transaction should complete on Monday or Tuesday. Once it does, then I can try buying something with e-gold and converting e-gold to US dollars. From what I read, getting dollars is much easier and has few or no transaction fees.
I like the ease of setting up an account, and the fact that it doesn’t cost anything to open or maintain one makes it easy to try out the interface even if you don’t want to use it. However, the process of converting dollars to e-gold is currently inconvenient and slow–I think the e-gold people need to come up with some deal that makes it easier. Working out a deal with a major bank probably wouldn’t work, since the banks are likely to see e-gold as competition (and in a way it is). Maybe a deal with one of the “business service” chains like Kinko’s or Mailboxes, Etc. would do the trick.
[Scripting News]
What I’ve ended up doing is writing post with lots of HTML (like this one) on my Newton. There is a package called nHTML which displays an HTML editing palette over whatever package is active at the time. I’ve added a screenshot showing nHTML floating over HyperNewt as I write this.