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Comment by Thiz | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin is here to stay, can't deny that, but I believe e-gold will be the future e-currency if somebody nails it.

Buy gold shares with your dollars, use it as e-currency, exchange it for e-goods, merchants sell the shares and get dollars back.

I'd invest money in that venture, and money in that currency.

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http://ripple.com

It's a cryptocurrency system that lets you store ANY currency that someone, somewhere is willing to support through it. So far it's just USD, AUD, EUR, CHF, BTC and a few others, but gold and silver are definitely going to appear soon.

Sounds like a few steps faster than the inevitable death of a gold standard: Gold coins, then bank storage, then gold lending, then gold certificate use, then lending of certificates, then certificates are declared paper money, then overprinted, then gold backing removed…

The problem with e-gold is it's hard to verify that the gold exists. This isn't an issue with physical gold or BTC.

The problem with that is... who backs it? it's a radically different concept, not comparable to Bitcoin.

That's essentially what gold backed currency used to be. It'd be "easy" to do that for bitcoin backed currency right now.

Gold backed credit cards are flourishing in europe, that got me thinking about internet transactions in gold.

there was literally a company called e-gold, which was sucessful until they were shutdown.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold#Crime_and_fraud

inevitably, if a competing currency pisses off the governemnt, it will be shutdown if it is centralized. it isn't really possible to do decentralized gold-backed currency (except perhaps, ripple may solve this).

Sounds like an interesting idea... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold

Found this interesting link about digital gold currency

http://www.dgcmagazine.com/voucher-safe-a-next-generation-di...

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