E-gold is a way to pay gold with more convenience than cheques or credit cards offer for fiat currencies. You can pay gold with a few mouse clicks wherever the internet reaches. When you make a payment, the gold stays in the same place (e-gold Ltd.'s vaults); only the ownership changes. If you have an e-gold account, anyone else can pay gold to you with the same clickable convenience. And of course you can demand physical gold at any time you wish, or you can use your e-gold to buy gold coin or bullion on the open market, or you can "Out-exchange" your e-gold to have a cheque promptly sent to anyone you wish, in any of a wide range of fiat currencies. 

E-gold is similar in economic principle to 100% reserve banking under a gold standard, but e-gold is not banking; it differs from banking in legal principle. A bank deposit is legally a loan from the depositor to the bank. So a bank is not legally obliged to retain physical possession of the money you deposit with it; its obligation is merely to re-pay you sometime. In fact, banks do the sensible thing under that contract and re-lend most depositors' money to earn interest, keeping only enough cash to cover a fraction of deposits, which is why it is called fractional reserve banking. So the loan contract allows banks legally to create deposits far beyond their holdings of basic money. I.e., the doctrine of deposit-as-loan allows banks to inflate--and thus to create the risk of deflation. Deposit-as-loan created a monetary system that is legally vulnerable to bouts of inflation and deflation; the world has endured such bouts for centuries.

E-gold is based on a completely different contract called bailment. When you bail gold to an e-gold account, the ownership of the gold remains with you; it is not a loan to the payments company. You are merely entrusting it to e-gold Ltd. for safekeeping and for your convenience in making payments. E-gold Ltd.'s contractual obligation is physically to possess the gold that you bail to it. Bailment is no new thing; it is the contract under which elevator companies store a farmer's grain. An elevator company which issued receipts for more grain than it held in storage would be fraudulent, and so would e-gold Ltd. if it issued more e-gold than it had physical gold. As long as contract law is upheld, e-gold inflation is impossible! 

So e-gold Ltd. is not a bank, and putting gold into it is not making a deposit. That said, the e-gold system is what most people erroneously believe banking to be. When you deposit your paycheque, do you really mean to lend your entire month's pay to the bank? Did you even know that that's what you've been doing every month? "Money in the bank" is not ready cash (that depends on the bank's financial health), but "gold in bailment" is ready cash. It is real money with all (and more!) of the convenience that you associate with fiat money bank accounts.

Through e-gold, a genuine gold standard is rapidly taking shape through the private choices of individuals. As did the World Wide Web, e-gold is growing too fast for gold's enemies to collect their wits and mount a campaign against it. Even when statists wake up to e-gold a few years from now and try to stamp it out, they will find that to be politically impossible. By then e-gold will be woven seamlessly into so many vital uses that any attack on e-gold will be resisted fiercely by potent constituencies that would face ruin without it. Furthermore, e-gold is inherently an international currency; it'll be able to find a friendly jurisdiction somewhere in the world--and that'll be enough for a world-wide monetary revolution!

Join the revolution! You pay nothing to open an e-gold account, and it's already cheaper to accept online payments into your e-gold account than into a credit card merchant account! There are no delays waiting for a payment to clear; an e-gold spend is complete in itself, like physically handing over a coin. The fees for storage and spends are very reasonable. 

In addition, e-gold has an incentive plan which--once you've activated it--pays you a fraction of the spend fees generated by anyone who opens an account within a week of reaching the e-gold site through a link which contains your account number. The link immediately below displays the needed format, and contains my account number. (That's a hint, folks! Please, enable cookies in your browser and open your account(s) through my link. It will cost you nit, and I'll collect some gold dust from your spend fees.) 
 

1. Find scads of information!  http://www.e-gold.com/e-gold.asp?cid=107481. 
2. Cheer the growth of e-gold!  http://www.e-gold.com/stats.html. (For comparison, there were only 7417 accounts and under 4,000 ounces of gold at mid September 1999. Wow!)
3. Open an e-gold account in about a minute!  https://www.e-gold.com/newacct/newaccount.asp?cid=107481
4. Activate your incentive plan to collect some gold dust of your very own! http://www.e-gold.com/unsecure/incentive.htm 
5. Buy e-gold to fund your account! Through Gold &Silver Reserve, Inc.'s InExchange, or shop around for a faster or more convenient alternative at BearerInstruments or Gold Directory. (G&SR's current (July, 2000) minimum InExchange is C$1500; other market-makers have much lower minimum purchases.)

If you have the capital, buy lots of e-gold; enough to be able to sell some to friends and colleagues. The procedure is simplicity itself: friend hands you $100, you spend (say) $95 to his account, done. Fast, fast, fast friendly funding! E-gold's software automatically takes care of currency conversion at the going price of gold. You've covered the costs of acquiring your e-gold, and your friend gets as good a deal as he'd get anywhere. As more and more of your friends come to own e-gold, you'll be able to buy it from them with the same swift ease. Such personal market-making will be a huge factor in the swift victory of e-gold's monetary revolution.

The number of e-gold accounts has been growing exponentially for at least 4 years, doubling every 4 months! E-gold is growing by Fisher-Pry processes into an unfathomably vast number of markets. If that growth continues for even a few more years, e-gold will become a giant. There is every reason to expect its growth to continue; the more users a currency has, the more useful it is to all users--and that implies exponential growth. Think how fast the Web grew. Same principle, same explosive growth. In a mere five to ten years from now, e-gold can produce a de facto worldwide gold standard even without a breakdown in the world's fiat currencies. But if those fiat currencies do shed value rapidly, as they did in the 1970s, hang onto your hat! 

When e-gold grows big enough, it will itself become a factor in the world-wide gold market. A new gold currency is a new use for gold--and it will therefore raise the value of gold, according to uncontroversial economic law. The value of gold will boom! Those who join the monetary revolution early will profit! Buy plenty.

You needn’t despair at inflatable, deflatable fiat money—you can become a quackgrass activist! Copy this article! Keep the original for future copies. Paper meetings with it! Paper your office! Leave a stack on your business counter! If you expect hostility, use stealth and cunning—it’ll drive your opponents wild! Be ingenious! Have fun!