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E-gold was a digital gold currency operated by Gold & Silver Reserve Inc. (G&SR) under e-gold Ltd. that allowed users to open an account on their web site denominated in grams of gold (or other precious metals) and the ability to make instant transfers of value ("spends") to other e-gold accounts. The e-gold system was launched online in 1996 and had grown to five million accounts by 2009, when transfers were suspended due to legal issues. At its peak in 2006 e-gold was processing more than US$2 billion worth of spends per year, on a monetary base of only USD $71 million worth of gold (~3.5 metric tonnes), indicating a high monetary turnover (velocity) of about 28 times per year (for comparison, annual velocity of USD is about 6 for M1 and less than 1.6 for M2 ) . e-gold Ltd. was incorporated in Nevis, Saint Kitts and Nevis with operations conducted out of Florida, USA. ==Beginnings== e-gold was founded by oncologist Douglas Jackson and attorney Barry Downey in 1996. The pair originally backed the services accounts with gold coins stored in a bank safe deposit box in Melbourne, Florida. By 1998, G&SR (the system operator) was an Affiliate Member of NACHA and a Full Member of NACHA's The Internet Council. The company was launched two years before PayPal but did not manifest exponential growth until 2000. By 2004 there were over a million accounts. It was the first successful digital currency system to gain a widespread user base and merchant adoption, noted July 13, 1999 in the Financial Times as “"the only electronic currency that has achieved critical mass on the web”. It was also the first non-credit-card payment service provider to offer an application programming interface (API) enabling other services and e-commerce transactions to be built on top of it. After initial demonstration of an e-gold Spend via Palm Pilot in February 1999, e-gold introduced support for wireless mobile payments. e-gold was used by both individuals and merchants for services including metals trading, online merchants, online auctions, online casinos, political organizations, and non-profit organizations. From 1996 through 1999, currency exchange services referred to as “InExchange” and “OutExchange” were directly supported on the e-gold platform. This arrangement exposed the system’s operator, G&SR, to the financial risks attendant to provision of exchange services. It also tended to inhibit third parties from offering exchange services on an independent competitive basis. In 2000 the system was re-structured to effect a separation of currency exchange activities from the core functions of e-metal issuance and settlement of transfers. G&SR devolved ownership and responsibility for these core functions to e-gold Ltd., a newly formed offshore company organized for that express purpose. G&SR itself, now a customer of e-gold, continued to offer exchange services under the newly created OmniPay brand. Beginning spring 2000, there was a proliferation of independent exchange services marking the first emergence of an industry providing exchange between conventional national currencies and a privately issued brand of money. By 2001 several dozen companies and individuals from around the world were offering third party exchange services between national currencies and e-gold, further extending e-gold's international user base. e-gold, which allowed transactions as small as one ten-thousandth of a gram of gold, was also the world's only successful micropayment system. The company's payment statistics were published live and showed hundreds of thousands of micro-transactions were being made daily by computer programs using the API. From its inception in 1996, e-gold pioneered the decoupling of the numeraire for specifying a payment (Spend) instruction from the native unit of account of the settlement currency. For example, while AUG® (the trademarked designation for e-gold) was denominated in grams and decimal fractions (or in troy ounces since, as weight units, both are related by fixed arithmetic ratio), a Spend Instruction might be specified as “Pay (account ) 10 USD’ worth of e-gold”. Calculation of the actual quantity to convey was made using a table of reference exchange rates maintained by the company, reflecting current actual exchange rates published by exchange providers. By the early 2000s (decade), the capability of immediate settlement, as implemented by e-gold, was recognized as key to the emergence of systems for peer-to-peer transfers of digital rights such as “smart contracts”. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「E-gold」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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