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November 14, 2012, 01:25:42 AM |
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I have been working with 'no-chargebacks' currencys since e-gold about 10 years ago.
Egold was basically a gold-bank with no ID checks, no charge-backs, no deleted accounts and even 10 years ago people immidiatly saw its value and began using it for all kinds of 'grey market' websites.
Im not talking about 100% blackmarket operations like silkroad, Egold was popular with sellers of stolen creditcards and maybe even drugs, but the biggest use was in:
- High Yield Investment Programs (Ok i know you had pirate with bitcoin, but the 'real' HYIP industry is 100 times bigger).
- VPNs, anonymous hosting (bitcoin has that too, but the big sites still dont use it)
- Gambling (same as above)
- Other services which are legal in some countrys, but arent in other countrys, like teen modeling sites, piracy etc.
- Basically any site who either wants to protect their own or their buyers privacy/anonymity
Today those websites usually use Liberty Reserve and Webmoney since Egold got shut down by the US government (it was located in the US) and it looks like both are just 'working good enough' so the old websites dont have much reason to look into bitcoin.
New sites get created out of the bitcoin economy, but if those old sites would only add bitcoin as another payment method exchange rate would be 10x of what it is now within a short time, they basically have the neccessary transaction volume we all want in bitcoin.
I suspect Liberty Reserve will go down sooner or later. Either they get shut down, or they do stupid things like accepting creditcards and becoming a bank (looks like that was their plan). They even froze lots of accounts recently so trust is already gone a bit, but still 'good enough' obviously.
Webmoney is already a bad alternative since its hard to verify accounts anonymously.
Pecunix (gold ecurrency) is maybe the last real alternative, but not widely known, maybe even smaller than bitcoin (except for some people who do VERY large transfers over pecunix).
I mean point of sale terminals and smartphone apps for bitcoins is a great thing, but if you want people to 'need bitcoins' you should advertise it a bit in those grey markets.
At least most of the exchangers which were primarily doing Liberty Reserve (after Egold) now also do Bitcoin, i think its a sign that we are going into the right direction.
Any opinions?
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