E-gold demands to provide Personal Tax Identification Number

The proclamation of “A new beginning” made lots of people look at e-gold skeptically. The system that is a father of e-payment systems and the originator of the online transactions decided to show everybody its “purity and transparency”. However, it is known that the main part of e-gold users is those who don’t need any publicity, and this move of e-gold caused a wave of withdrawals from the system. Though some devoted users preferred to stay with their processor.

Last week Douglas Jackson came out with another announcement. Here is his statement: “As I noted in my post to this blog on July 21, 2008, e-gold Ltd. is working diligently to reach compliance with U.S. law and regulation as quickly as possible. As a major step towards implementing a more robust Customer Identification Program, effective September 18, 2008, e-gold account Users are now required to include a Personal Tax Identification Number (PTID) for the point of contact for any e-gold account they control in order to make outgoing Spends.  For United States residents the PTID must be either their Social Security Number (SSN) or Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN).  Residents of other countries will need to provide their tax identifying number applicable to their country.

e-gold Ltd. remains highly committed to continuing to offer a cost effective Internet payment system making instantaneous settlement, free of chargeback risk, available to customers around the world.  We continue to be confident that a regulated e-gold rebuilt to a more systematic specification will be less hospitable to criminals, and more attractive to mainstream business use without being less accessible to those disregarded by legacy payment systems”.

In other words, e-gold decided to be super transparent. Everybody knows that the whole database of e-gold is regularly checked by the governmental agencies and the PTIDs are just the last step of the stairway to US government office dealing with online transactions. Submission of those numbers will be the same if one goes to that office and tells about his or her activity.

Who will win from that situation? E-gold? We are not sure as the old accountholders who don’t want to become the “visitor of the US government office” will stay any longer after such statement. Customers? May be just the minor part of them who use e-currencies just to purchasing some small items for everyday life. However, the greatest part having lots of money in their accounts will hardly be able to explain the origination of their funds, so they will turn into the fraudsters possessing some illegal funds. The Government? In this situation the US government has the best position but we are not sure that the agencies are interested in that minor group of users we have mentioned above who are ready to handle their PTIDs.

So, what will be next?

Submission of the documents is doubtless a move but in a wrong direction. Today one can see dozens of processors that are much better than e-gold. E-gold was interesting only like an anonymous system to make the transactions and was demanded only owing to its name. But with the start of “new beginning” e-gold can get “a new end” due to the mass run of the old customers and absence of the new ones as “creation of new accounts is temporarily suspended”…