Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

49
DIGITALGOLD.MONEY 1 DIGITAL GOLD January 2016 Vol. 1 Issue 1 Available January 2016 INSIDE THE NEW DGX UI SILENCING BITCOIN BITGOLD: A MODERN REVOLUTION IN FINANCE COEPTIS IS LIVE BETA

description

Premiere issue of Digital Gold Magazine.

Transcript of Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

Page 1: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 1

DIGITALGOLD

January 2016 Vol 1 Issue 1

Available January 2016

INSIDE THE NEW DGX UI

SILENCING BITCOIN

BITGOLDA MODERN REVOLUTION IN FINANCE

COEPTIS IS LIVE BETA

2 JANUARY 2016

DIGITALGOLD

MAGAZINE

Publishedby

Digital CurrencyIntelligence Authority

DCIA Ltd71ndash75 Shelton Street

Covent GardenLondon UK

editordigitalgoldmoneycarldciaus

Skype lsquodigitalcurrencyrsquo

Digital Gold Magazine is published 12 times a year

online Some of the products featured in this magazine

are not yet available to US residents Please check local

laws before using any product mentioned in this digital

publicationNo part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any

form without written permission from DCIA Ltd The information

contained herein are opinions of sources and interviews DCIA Ltd claims no reliability or accuracy to any information contained within

The Digital Gold Magazine is published for reference purposes

only and is not materially responsible for errors

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 3

ContentsDigital Gold Magazine - January 2016 wwwdigitalgoldmoney

5 Coeptis is Live in Beta

7 Coinify amp DigixGlobal Announce Bitcoin Partnership

9 The Power to Issue Money by Jim Davidson

12 Silencing Bitcoin

17 A Sneak Peek at the New DigixGlobal User Interface

32 Bitgold A Modern Revolution in Finance by Nick Marinoff

36 The Digix Asset Tokenization Process

45 New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements

46 What Group Will Soon be Enjoying the Benefits of Digital Currency

4 JANUARY 2016

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 5

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Melbourne Florida (December 26 2015) ndash CMO Inc (COEPTIS) has launched a beta of its Global Standard System which is an alternative global payment system utilizing next generation technologies mobilizing the value of gold for electronic transfer of value on the Internet

The System resolves shortcomings that plague online payments by providing substantial benefits to both businesses and consumers while achieving high levels of consumer protection and privacy The patent pending System is secure easily accessible makes e commerce more available to customers not adequately served by traditional payment systems and brings greater efficiency to payment settlement in an increasingly global economy The System currency (AUG) is 100 reserved by physical gold Payment occurs on a centralized settlement platform which is universally accessible to customers Payments are very efficient settle immediately and are final The cost of a transaction is lower than alternatives The system has strong controls for anti-money laundering and consumer protection and meets or exceeds all federal state and international regulatory requirements

COEPTIS is licensed or otherwise authorized to operate in US states representing nearly two-thirds the US population and will be obtaining approvals in the remaining states as well as Canada and Europe before expanding to a larger global market The current beta launch is designed to manage the expected high early growth of the System Sign-up is currently by invitation only with priority to persons in states in which COEPTIS is currently licensed A request for an invitation can be made at wwwcoeptiscom Full launch of the System is expected soon

Bill Cunningham CEO of COEPTIS said ldquoWe are very excited to bring this System to the market Our team has worked hard to ensure we bring great benefit to consumers and businesses while also providing the protections required by these consumers and our regulatory authoritiesrdquo

COEPTIS recognizes that global payments are too slow uncertain costly and inefficient globally and that there is a growing concern with identity protection COEPTIS was started in 2013 to build out intellectual property to address these market concerns while also addressing public policy and regulatory concerns with payments COEPTIS is headquartered in Melbourne FL

For further information contactinfocoeptiscom855-673-7176 (701)

6 JANUARY 2016

WebMoney Gets a EU License and Expands its Presence in The European Union

November 18 2015

The global settlement system WebMoney Transfer has entered into partnership with a new guarantor licensed to issue e-money within the European Union

The FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) license granted to WebMoney Europe Ltd with head offices in Cambridge United Kingdom has secured the company`s status as an e-money issuer in all countries within the European Economic Area As a result the Euro purses within the system are acquiring the status of e-money and are in full compliance with the legislation of the European Union

As a part of the expansion of its presence in Europe in the recent months WebMoney has significantly increased the number of top-up points for Euro purses as well as the number of online stores accepting WebMoney The WebMoney technical support team is already providing support for Euro purses while the services within the system are being adapted for the European users

Currently the system is used by over 29 million users worldwide with around 10 thousand users registering with the system daily WebMoney is accepted as a payment method by more than 100 thousand online stores globally

Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has licensed WebMoney Europe Ltd as an emoney issuer in all European Union countries With more than 29 million currency users WebMoney is accepted by more than 100 thousand online stores around the world

An announcement from BitGold December 31 2015

The Request Gold Payment tool is now live allowing users to earn gold onto the network by sending payment requests for their time labour goods or services

We believe that transferring value online should be easy instant and secure BitGold allows you to send a payment request to other individuals anywhere in the world ndash with or without a BitGold account with the resulting payment settled in gold to your private vault account

Someone working in Greece and parting with their services can be earning gold in Canada London Zurich or elsewhere

Just log in to your BitGold Dashboard and select the Request Payment tab to get started It is as easy as entering the contact name email address or mobile number and the amount you are requesting Once you have sent a Request for Payment the recipient will receive an email that will prompt them to open their BitGold account if they havent already fund their account and complete the payment request

Unfortunately at this time US users will not be able to send receive or request gold payments on the platform Additionally gold received into the Dubai vault may be restricted from some functionality Contact the company for more details

copy Copyright 2015 BitGold Inc 334 Adelaide St W Toronto ON M5V 1R4 All rights reserved

Request Gold Payment Tool Has Officially Launched on the BitGold Platform

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 7

October 26 2015

Coinify and DigixGlobal Private Limited (Singapore UEN 201479386E) are proud to announce a formal business partnership All bitcoin payments going through Digix will solely be processed through Coinify

This represents a significant initiative between Ethereum and Bitcoin based companies demonstrating how both blockchain ecosystems can work together The partnership between an Ethereum based company and a Bitcoin based company is one of the industryrsquos first signifying that both ecosystems can grow together Bitcoin users can now easily own Ethereum digital assets apart from Ether

Digix allows users to purchase assets like investment grade gold bullion with bitcoin thereafter facilitating physical asset issuances on the blockchain These digital keys issued on the Ethereum blockchain will have the same transactional utility of Bitcoin and can also be made fungible into divisible digital tokens called ldquo Digix Tokens rdquo representative of grams of gold allocated 11

Morten Bebe Coinifyrsquos sales manager believes that this is a significant step in future collaboration with other blockchains ldquo Digixrsquos unique and decentralized approach in the creation of gold backed tokens will help promote the crypto ecosystemrdquo

ldquoWe are very excited to be working with Coinifyrdquo says Kai the CEO Co-Founder of Digix ldquoWe have looked at other payment processors and found Coinify

Coinify and DigixGlobal Announce Bitcoin Partnership in Singapore

Coinify is the first bitcoin payment processor to partner with an Ethereum based company processing bitcoin payments for crypto-assets on Ethereum

to be the best in terms of service reliability and willingness to innovate with young companies in Asia Now end users can easily purchase crypto assets on Ethereum with bitcoinrdquo Kai adds ldquoWe have always been open to collaborations and100 thousand online stores globally

About CoinifyCoinify ApS drives mainstream adoption of digital currencies such as Bitcoin for merchants and consumers Merchants benefit from Coinifyrsquos Payment Service (PSP) enabling free instant settlements in a fraud-free and chargeback-free blockchain payment environment while customers get access to secure one-click payments that reveal no sensitive information Coinify is backed by a multi-million dollar capital injection from SEED Capital (funded by the Danish government) and Accelerace and is the leading European digital currency market player For more information about Coinify visit their website at coinifycom

About DigixDigix is an asset ownership certification and tokeniization platform for physical assets Users who purchase or store gold bullion with Digixrsquos participating suppliers and custodial vaults will be able to own digital assets on the blockchain and create divisible gold tokens that have the same transactional utility and functionality as bitcoin For more information please contact

Coinify ApSHerlev Hovedgade 15B 12730 Herlev Greater Copenhagen Denmark+45 3693 4994Marketing and PR - Lenka HudakovaEmail lhucoinifycom

DigixGlobal Pte Ltd10 Anson Road 05-17International Plaza S079903 Singapore+1-917-267-8977Co-Founder amp CEO - Kai Cheng ChngEmail kcchngdgxiohttpdgxio

8 JANUARY 2016

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 9

Who should have the power to issue money

It seems likely that a great many people probably havenrsquot thought about this question ever After all since the beginning of recorded history various types of governments including republics kings priest-kings and dictatorships have issued money

If you open up your wallet you probably find some paper money in there issued by some government or on behalf of a central bank that is authorized by some government Very likely you also have some credit or debit cards issued by banks or credit unions but these are only corporate extensions of governments so not really that different Some people have gift cards from various companies but these are corporations therefore creatures of the state Moreover most gift cards are denominated in national currencies

My own wallet has a couple of Ron Helwigrsquos Shire silver and gold wire cards too These are laminated cards which contain thin strips of silver in one case and a length of thin gold wire in the other In other words they are actual gold and silver visibly embedded in the clear plastic laminate of the card

If you are fond of history you may have heard of the tendency of Roman emperors to debase their gold and silver coinage and the tendency of the Byzantine emperors to stick with the good stuff You may have heard that Revolutionary France was beset with inflated paper money called the assignat by the national assembly and the mandat by the Directorate ndash the same Directorate that used guillotines in its search for peace and justice and discovered only baskets of severed heads and rivers of blood

You may know that one of Napoleonrsquos secrets to popularity was restoring gold and silver coins to circulation and melting the printer plates used to make the paper money You may be aware of the adventures of Marco Polo with paper money in China under Kublai Khan And you are probably aware of the creation in late 1913 of a Federal Reserve that gradually replaced gold and silver coins in the United States with book entry and paper money along with coins made out of base metals like zinc

If you arenrsquot fond of history essentially nothing in the preceding two paragraphs means anything to you Which

The Power To Issue MoneyBY JIM DAVIDSON

AH TAKE THE CASH AND LET THE CREDIT GONOR HEED THE RUMBLE OF A DISTANT DRUM

~EDWARD FITZGERALD THE RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

10 JANUARY 2016

might be ok if you werenrsquot living in interesting times As it turns out Thucydides was correct in believing that the future if it does not mirror the past at least reflects it And of course Santayana says that if you wonrsquot learn the lessons of history you may be doomed to repeat them

Given that there is currently a sovereign debt crisis that has turned Greece into an economic wasteland plunged Chinarsquos markets down and which is spreading to many other countries in the coming months and years and given that the money you have in your wallet is only backed by the full faith and credit of the United States which has not exactly shown itself to be credit-worthy or faithful you may find yourself very interested in the question who should issue money

Your PowerNow if you believe as I do that the only just form of government is one that derives its powers from the unanimous consent of the governed you should recognize who has the power to issue money Since governments are issuing money and since all the powers that governments have must have been either seized from the people or delegated to the government with the consent of the people it follows naturally that the power to issue money comes originally from the people It is also my view that powers are not collective in nature but like rights are individual in character In other words you have the power to issue money

Whether that comes as a surprise to you or not it is clear from simply looking around that not everyone is issuing money If each individual has the power to issue money why isnrsquot everyone doing so

It turns out that one of the key features of money is acceptability It matters a great deal less if you issue money than it does if someone else accepts it In order to generate demand for its currency your national government accepts that currency for payment of taxes The fact that there are a great many taxes not only at the national level but also at state and local levels means that there are lots of places where the national governmentrsquos currency is accepted Not only is it accepted by tax authorities it is also accepted by merchants because they know they can use it to pay their taxes It is therefore accepted by those who

supply merchants with products so they can pay their taxes and so forth

So the problems of central bank policies the problems with the economy the problems with many government policies are to put it simply your fault You choose to use the national currency of your country You choose not to accept alternatives even though alternatives exist and have existed in the case of gold and silver coins for thousands of years You choose to engage in trade and commerce for fiat money which means that the problems of fiat money the problems of central planning the difficulties you face as a result of errors in what the Federal Reserve and other monetary manipulators do are your problems They are caused by your choices just as much as by the choices of hundreds of millions of others in your country and billions around the world You have the power to change this situation directly to your own advantage Does that seem harsh

Taxation Is TheftMany years ago at the end of the last century I met a member of the Somena First Nation up in Canada I was attending the world congress of the International Society for Individual Liberty at the time Meaghan Walker-Champion explained to me that she had spoken to the elders of her community and they had many long talks among themselves thinking about what the Somena word for ldquotax collectorrdquo would be They concluded that the word in their language was the same as the word for ldquothiefrdquo

Writing at the end of World War Two EC Riegel reached the same conclusion He noted that money is extremely useful in trade and commerce and that the issue power properly belongs to those engaged in free enterprise Since governments are not engaged in buying and selling but only in stealing from others they are entirely inappropriate to the purpose of issuing money He makes these and many other excellent arguments against state socialism in A New Approach to Freedom My friend Spencer MacCallum helped organise EC Riegelrsquos papers An authorized free and complete version of A New Approach to Freedom is available on the web here

To be continued on page 37

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 11

12 JANUARY 2016

SBC - What Is Silent BitcoinSilent Bitcoin (or SBC) is a digital voucher currency 100 backed by bitcoins This means that 10 SBC equals 10 BTC When a user spends BTC to a wallet hash controlled by SilentVault they receive in exchange a voucher (a cryptographically signed XML object) for the same amount in SBC Thereafter the SBC voucher value circulates privately off-chain between SilentVault wallets until a holder redeems their SBC voucher for BTC At that point the SBC value is decirculated and a BTC spend is made from SilentVaultrsquos reserve to the address hash designated by the user who surrendered the voucher (Which is probably but doesnrsquot have to be the userrsquos own)

Using SBCThe Voucher-Safe network operates differently from the Bitcoin network in several important respects

Silencing BitcoinSilentVault lets you spend and receive bitcoin (and litecoin) off the blockchain entirely and move your coins to and from regular bitcoin addresses whenever you want Our wallets are multi-asset and can hold any supported asset types side-by-side

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 13

bull A Voucher Publisher (or VP) signs vouchers and clears voucher payments to prevent double-spending While each VP is centralized the protocol supports multiple Publishers This means that payments clear in seconds with no need to wait for transaction confirmations (Note however that a BTC spend to purchase a SBC voucher does require 6 confirmations before the SBC voucher will be issued)

bull Input vouchers are always destroyed in every transaction and replaced with output vouchers bearing fresh unique serial numbers This means that unlike with the blockchain no public transaction history exists balances are private and no ldquotaintrdquo can attach to coins (Taint violates fungibility a fundamental characteristic of sound money) This represents a vast privacy improvement over regular BTC spends and a lesser improvement even over ldquocoin laundryrdquo services

bull A payee must pick up their voucher payment within the 1-7 days designated by the payer If the payee does not do so the payment expires and becomes recoverable by the payer (indefinitely) This makes it impossible to lose value by spending it to a ldquodead walletrdquo

bull Receipts are generated by the payee not by the Publisher This prevents the clearing VP from needing to record transaction history or knowing anything about the private message context accompanying the payment The VP also never sees a user IP address

In short it is much faster more convenient more private and generally much safer to exchange SBC value between SilentVault

wallets than to perform ldquonaked spendsrdquo between BTC wallets on the blockchain (Though naturally it is also more expensive privacy being worth something)

Trading SBCExchanges in and out of SBC fromto BTC are performed via the ldquoExchangesrdquo tab in the SilentVault wallet by buying or selling SBC vouchers respectively These sales and repurchases are carried out with the exchange itself mdash meaning SilentVault is an agent for the Issuer of SBC SBC vouchers can also be traded to other users in exchange for vouchers representing other asset types (eg USD or EUR silver or gold etc) Users can specify the asset types they will accept and offer discounts or demand premiums The SVX (SilentVault Exchange) acts as a third-party escrow agent allowing all trades to be fully anonymous and secure You cannot know with whom you are trading and no KYC of any kind is performable by SilentVault You are your wallet keys period

Fee ScheduleThe fees currently charged by SilentVault are as follows

bull Purchase SBC with BTC 00 (free) minimum quantity 001 BTC

bull Redeem SBC for BTC 00 (free) minimum quantity 002 BTC

bull Make SBC voucher spend 00015 BTCbull Receive SBC voucher spend 00006 BTC

(first one is 00002)bull Escrow exchange 10 of amount

minimum quantity 002 BTC

httpssilentvaultcom

14 JANUARY 2016

YOUR PRIVACY MATTERSEacutelan Turbo VPN This VPN service is bundled with VoIP and private audiovideo calling via SIP plus unlimited bandwidth for surfing and streaming

Our Eacutelan Turbo VPN service is a standard single-hop VPN but with selectable exit proxies in Panama the USA the UK France and onto the Tor network As a subscriber yoursquoll also get an SIP extension that lets you place private audio and video calls to other users Unlike with Skype these calls can be encrypted end-to-end to conceal their content in transit And because yoursquore on our VPN the call metadata is also protected We also supply your own private Mumble server as an inexpensive add-on There are no bandwidth limitations with this package Surf and talk all you want

Eacutelan Max Security VPN This VPN service is bundled with email addresses and aliases 1 GB file storage plus 25 GB of monthly bandwidth

Our Eacutelan Max Security VPN service is a premiere multi-hop VPN which lives up to its name Multi-hop means that traffic flows between multiple points along its route from the entry gateway to the exit nodes something like changing planes a couple of times during an extended trip Inside the network internal routes are varied traffic is mixed alongside that of other users and random delays get inserted to defeat traffic analysis This technique known as ldquoserver cascadesrdquo same features and benefits as provides many of the Tor (Given that the Deep State agencies in various countries are now running most of the Tor exit nodes it might be even better) As a subscriber yoursquoll also get private email addresses and email aliases plus 1 GB of very secure file storage Because of its multi-hop architecture this VPN is less suitable for streaming applications and bandwidth usage is limited to 25 GB per month However you can also buy top-up packs to add more bandwidth

Elegantly Convenient No special hardware required

bull Software-only solutionbull Both individual and multi-user packages are availablebull Simple to install and use

Support for Windows Linux Mac Android and iOS httpelanvpnnet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 15

Wersquore long-time industry professionals with over a combined forty years in the IT industry Wersquore also committed advocates of human liberty and personal privacy With all the global spy networks hacks and data mining in the world today internet privacy is under attack as never beforeWe agree with E C Riegel who wrote

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and self-asserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

16 JANUARY 2016

What does Digix doWe are a Smart Asset company that allows anyone to securely send and receive ownerships of assets for eventual redemption on the blockchain The first asset listed is Gold and other assets such as diamonds will be available in the near future

What are Proof of Asset (PoA) CertificatesProof of Asset (PoA) Certificates prove the existence of gold through the entire chain of custody from the supplier to the custodial vault They are automatically created when a user purchases and stores gold at our participating custodial vaults It consists of 3 digital signatures from 3 independent entities vendor custodian and auditor Through this process a PoA card is issued representing your asset ownership on the blockchain This PoA card can then be sent and received by anyone on the Ethereum Blockchain for eventual redemption PoA certificates can also be sent to a Minter DAE to create DGX Gold tokens for fungibility

What are Digix Gold TokensDigix Gold tokens can only be created when a user sends in their PoA Certificates in exchange for them on a 11 weight basis on the Digix Minter DAE Each Digix Gold token represents 1g of gold For example if a PoA Certificate represents the ownership of a 100g gold bar it can be sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for 100 DGX tokens which will be deposited in your ethereum wallet

How do I know if these tokens or PoA certificates are safe from fraud or duplicationAll tokens and PoA certificates are created on the Ethereum Blockchain a public ledger where information stored can never be manipulated or counterfeited Our smart asset service can only exist because of blockchain technology

Where are the physical gold bars storedPhysical gold is kept with a participating custodian Each PoA Certificate will specify the name and location of the custodian that holds the gold The first participating custodian on the Digix Gold platform is Malca-Amit which maintains a high security storage facility at the Singapore Freeport

Why SingaporeDigixGlobal is incorporated in low crime and politically stable Singapore Investment Precious Metals are exempted from GST locally so you are purchasing gold at the lowest premiums available in the world

bull There are also no permits required to import or export precious metalsbull Singapore also has no jurisdictional relations with USA or Europebull We will only release your personal information by order of the Court of Law in Singapore

Frequently AskedQuestions

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 17

A Sneak Peek at the NewDigixGlobal User Interface

It will be available to the public in January 2016 for multiple operating systems and mobile platforms This software will manage client transactions for PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates Digix Asset Tokens and Ether tokens

DigixGlobal can create a digital asset certificate for any storable physical property Future versions of this software will include additional digital assets such as diamonds

When the interface opens users are presented with the main dashboard menu as shown below Access to all primary services and tools is available from this opening screen

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEVendor Information - Custodian Information - Auditor Information

To ensure quality and authenticity participating gold vendors only sell LBMA approved gold bars Gold purchased from an LBMA certified refinery is globally known for its quality These bullion sources guarantee the authenticity and purity of every single gold bar used on the Digix network Buying gold from the marketplace is the first step in the process of generating a PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificate

18 JANUARY 2016

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEShows gold bullion available for purchase as a digital gold certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 19

20 JANUARY 2016

GOLD TOKENS AND ETHER WALLETFrom this area a user can send Digix Gold Tokens or send Ether

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 21

The transaction hash for a completed certificate purchase is also available with just one click

(see below Raw Transaction Data Transaction Hash)

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets Individual users can create Digix Gold and Asset tokens by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoATM Certificate) to the Minter DAE It is a way to represent gold bars as units of tokens on the Ethereum Blockchain database One Digix Gold token represents 1 gram of gold

(Q) How do I know that there are actual gold bars backing PoA certificates or Digix Gold tokens

All material documents from the Proof of Asset protocol are made available via Swarm - Ethereumrsquos distributed file sharing This would mean that all assaying certificates custodial receipts of deposits and independent auditor documents from the entire chain of custody will be uploaded for public viewing to ascertain the authenticity of all PoA certificates and Digix Gold tokens Each entity in the chain of custody will also digitally sign on our PoA Certificate We only deal with vendors custodians and auditors that have passed our due diligence and that are world renowned with a history of excellence Private audits are also available for added assurance

The Ethereum platform allows users to create applications that run on a decentralized peer-to-peer network of computers without any central control and free from human interruption or corruption Vitalik Buterin invented Ethereum in late 2013 it was formally described by Dr Gavin Wood in 2014 then developed as an open source software project under the GNU Lesser General Public License It was officially launched on July 30 2015 The project is maintained by the Ethereum core developer team (ETHDEV) under the guidance of the non-profit Ethereum Foundation which had raised 31591 Bitcoins during their 2014 crowdsale

22 JANUARY 2016

From this page users may also view the assetrsquos history of trading within the Digix system

GOLD ASSET HISTORY

PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates

are Ethereum smart contracts

that provides a legally and

cryptographically binding

determination of ownership of

physical gold or other assets currently under

the guardianship of a participating custodian on the

Digix decentralized platform It

also certifies the agreement

between the user the vendor the custodian and

the independent auditor

The PoAtrade provides a complete history of the chain of control from the vendor

the custodian and all audit reports This proof guarantees that the purchase of the gold by the user its storage by the

custodian and regular inspection by the auditor has taken place

PoA Certificates can be transferred or sent to any Ethereum account sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or

Gold tokens or redeemed from the Recast DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or Gold

Tokens

Copies of the orignal signed documents are included as a part of the certificatersquos registration in the blockchain

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 23

24 JANUARY 2016

GOLD EXPLORER RECASTER (Above)

The Digix Minter DAE recognizes all valid Digix PoAtrade Certificates and can accept them from a user in exchange for divisible Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens The rules of the Digix platform dictates that only the Digix Minter has the authority through the request of the owner of a Digix PoAtrade certificate to allow that owner to issue their own Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens in exchange for the PoAtrade Certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 25

The interface conveniently walks customers through the online purchase of a Digital Gold PoA Certificate

26 JANUARY 2016

A completed purchase of the digital gold certificate representing this bar

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 27

TOOLS AND SETTINGS

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

28 JANUARY 2016

RESTORE WALLET

In addition to its security features users can configure the Aegis Vault to assign beneficiaries set the time-based distribution of funds or assets and delegate a power of attorney to another individual or a group of people

Digix is committed to bringing Ethereum use to the mainstream and the availability of a secure wallet is essential for realizing this goal

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 29

GENERATE A REDEMPTION KEY

(Q) What is the Digix Recaster Smart Contract

Digix Recaster Smart Contract allows the

conversion of Digix Gold tokens to a PoA card The

PoA card can be sent or received on the blockchain representing an ownership

of an entire gold bar or be used for redemption of

the physical gold bar at our office For example if you have 100 DGX tokens

representing 100g of weight in gold you can exchange

for a PoA card representing a 100g gold cast bar at

Digix This PoA card can be sent and received on the

Ethereum blockchain or be used to schedule a local

pick-up of the physical gold bar at Digix redemption

center in Singapore

You can currently recast into PoA certificates of

100g (100 DGX) or 1000g (1000 DGX) gold cast bar

denominations

30 JANUARY 2016

(Q) What about the Digix audit processWe have four types of audits at Digix

1 PRIVATE AUDITS Clients are welcome to come to our certified custodial vaults in Singapore to inspect your gold bars in a highly private and secure environment

2 EXTERNAL AUDITS We have engaged Inspectorate Singapore (wwwinspectoratecom) to audit our inventory and match them off with customersrsquo holdings at DGX We will hold such inspections at least twice a year

3 CUSTODIAL AUDITS Our certified custodians will provide a physical certification of proof that your gold bars are stored safely in their vaults They will take photographs of your serialized bars per request basis and have them keyed into their inventory management systems Some of our certified custodiansrsquo reputation are also on the line to provide us with their appraisal and storage services as they have to answer to their shareholders as a publicly listed company in Singapore

4 INTERNAL AUDITS We have patented a certification process called Proof of Asset (PoA) where auditors sign on the existence of Gold in our PoA certificate The digital certificate is then uploaded onto the Ethereum Blockchain

(Q) Are there KYCAML requirementsAll users who wish to redeem PoA certificates or Digix Gold Tokens for physical gold bars will have to go through KYC requirements at the pickup The gold bars will only be available for pick up at our office location in Singapore We must ensure that DigixGlobal and participating organizations are protected from any potential liabilities resulting from government prosecution and asset seizures so we ensure that we comply fully with regulatory requirements for Know your customer (KYC) and Anti-money laundering (AML)

ADDRESS BOOK

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 31

SilentVault is a secure private online wallet for making untraceable p2p payments

Unlike other crypto currency wallets SilentVault wallets support heterogeneous asset types such as fiat dollars euros metals gold and silver and crypto coins bitcoin litecoin SilentVault provides anonymous off blockchain payments made in bitcoin and litecoin It also features an integrated p2p escrow exchange where users can trade anonymously among different asset types with other users such as exchanging bitcoins for silver

The SilentVault Spark client is a fully functional Jabber chat client that is a branded and updated version of Spark Since Spark supports a plugin architecture our wallet client is implemented as a plugin You can obtain the SilentVault Spark client with plugin from this page You can also find the source code for both the plugin and SilentVaults customizations to the Spark source base elsewhere on this site A tutorial on SVSpark is here

The SilentVault wallet webstart client is a stand alone program that you can install from within your browser Like the SilentVault Spark client it communicates with the Voucher Safe payment network using extensions to the XMPP protocol This type of communication makes economic transactions indistinguishable from ordinary encrypted instant messaging traffic and avoids any need to run within an insecure browser environment or rely on web domains All client source code is published on this site and while you can run a prefabricated client you are also invited to build your own from source

You are also invited to develop applications for our integrated marketplaces that appear within SilentVault wallets A full API is available for your use as a development tool Please contact our team for details

The SilentVault technology is based on Voucher Safe which was developed 2008 2011 Voucher Safe is also the core technology of the Digital Cash Alliance

httpssilentvaultcom

32 JANUARY 2016

ldquoI love go-o-o-o-ldrdquo-Austin Powers in Goldmember

Not surprisingly most people feel the same

According to the Wall Street Journal gold prices and safe-haven demand in Asia have been skyrocketing since mid-November (1) proving that you donrsquot have to be a sea-faring pirate or a squire in a kingrsquos castle to enjoy its natural glare beauty and above all its ability to stimulate wealth

Since the days of the California Gold Rush people have enjoyed panning for it selling it and most of

all owning it Long considered one of the planetrsquos most precious and desired metals gold has grown heavily in value over the last several years and it appears more and more are trying to get their hands on it every single day

Something else is growing as wellhellip Bitcoin Often regarded as Americarsquos most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin has jumped heavily in value over the last few months spiking from $230 to nearly $350 Unlike gold which exists in solid physical form Bitcoin exists in ones and zeros binary coding that travels through the blockchain the technology that makes Bitcoin transactions possible between users and respective merchants

BITGOLD A MODERN REVOLUTION IN FINANCEBY NICK MARINOFF

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 33

Itrsquos interesting to witness nearly equal popularity rising for two different things that ultimately serve the same purpose and share similar goals Both are designed to enhance the world of finance Both can rise in value and both have the ability to make someone rich overnighthellip So what if we could combine the two What significant differences could there be if Bitcoin and gold were fused into one entity

Well itrsquos already been done Say hello to BitGold an early startup company stationed in Toronto Canada BitGold aims to offer international services for people and businesses to send payments and hold savings with physical gold (2) The company was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb Both have a long history in the financial sector with Sebag previously serving as the Founder and Managing Principal of Braavos Capital (an international private investment organization) and the Chairman of Natural Resource Holdings an investment company involved with natural resource assets (3) Josh Crumb was previously the Senior Metals Strategist at Goldman Sachs (4)

The company alleges that gold bullion is ldquothe worldrsquos oldest asset class and the centuryrsquos best performing currencyrdquo (5) According to BitGoldrsquos website their mission is

ldquohellipTo make gold accessible and useful in digital payments and secure savingshellip Wersquore advancing the digital payments revolution by helping people securely acquire store and now spend gold with unprecedented simplicity BitGold accounts are free and can be opened in minutes We provide users with a secure vault account to purchase and hold gold the ability to make and receive instant gold payments and a prepaid card for spending gold at traditional points of sale Through our network of ATMs customers can fund their accounts with local-currencyrdquo (4)

Present investors backing BitGold include Dundee Capital Markets GMP Securities and Sandstorm Gold although the initial investor in the company was Soros Brothers Investment which is presently run by Alexander Soros the son of Hungarian business magnate George Soros (2)

2015 has been a big year for the company CNBC has stated that BitGold currently serves over 100000 active customers and the platform stores approximately 276 kilograms of bullion within its walls Thatrsquos nearly $11 million total and over $100 per active user (6) In May BitGold began trading on the TSX Venture exchange in Canada and announced the purchase of GoldMoney worth nearly $52 million in Canadian dollars (7)

In June the company made citizens of the United States very happy with the following announcement

ldquoUS residents can sign up on the BitGold platform and buy sell or redeem gold using BitGoldrsquos Aurum payment and settlement technology US residents will also have access to the BitGold mobile app and a prepaid card when these features launch over the coming weeksrdquo (7)

The platform offers a number of products and services beneficial to any gold-lover across the country As the above quote suggests BitGold offers whatrsquos known as Aurum the gold-settlement technology thatrsquos compliant with several US financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase Wells Fargo Citi Bank of America US Bank Fidelity Capital One and Charles Schwab Users with an account at any one of these nationally-recognized banks can instantly redeem gold or authorize gold deposits The transactions thereby increase in safety and automation Users also receive a bonus in that they are usually able to avoid bank wire fees through the process (7)

Using the BitGold app users may also send and receive gold as payments to and from any other user or seller without paying any transaction fees They can even send gold to non-BitGold users via their mobile phones or through a simple email message The company also issues prepaid debit cards allowing users to spend funds directly from their BitGold accounts The card is compatible with ATMs so that users may withdraw local currency (7)

Lastly the company issues special ten-gram gold cubes worth approximately $380 each at press time Users may redeem these cubes on the BitGold platform and may demand physical delivery when they see fit (7)

34 JANUARY 2016

Vice-president of communications and PR Emily Cornelius explained in an email that they have no ldquostereotypicalrdquo user of the companyrsquos services but that there are predominantly three main use cases

ldquoThe traditional gold investor will gravitate to BitGold because our gold is unprecedentedly priced within 1 of spot price and we offer free storage in a Brinks vault of their choice globallyhellip The second use case is the user who seeks a more stable currency for their national savings outside of their potentially volatile local fiat currencyhellip Gold has gained over 3000 vs the US Dollar which is arguably the worldrsquos strongest fiat money Gold may seem to go up down or sideways but in reality and when viewed over long timescales such as the avg human lifecycle ndash it always riseshellip Gold has been rising against 9 of the worldrsquos most famous and well-known currencies almost every year since 2000hellip Thirdly BitGold is a powerful payments platformhellip BitGold allows a user to send an invoice for your labor to someone else anywhere in the world which the recipient can pay using any traditional payment methodhellip This gold is vaulted anywhere even outside their jurisdictionhellip This is important as it allows users to achieve upward mobility that are otherwise hindered by localized issues that are exogenous to their personal journeyrdquo

Cornelius also explained that the company offers ldquoall the benefits and efficiencies of a service like PayPal and a MasterCard but with a universally accepted more stable store of valuerdquo

Presently regulation over BitGold appears to be fairly non-existent BitGold does not list which regulators hold jurisdiction over its staff and operations nor do they list regulatory information regarding their trade practices (7) In fact co-founder Roy Sebag has stated in the past that he believes BitGold is not a bank nor does it serve as a financial institution in any traditional sense as it does not engage in fractional-reserve banking (2)According to page 20 of the companyrsquos initial public filing BitGold is not

ldquohellipEligible to be registered with the Financial

Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canadahellip There can be no assurance that BitGoldrsquos services or Internet platform will be acceptable to foreign regulatory bodies Foreign governments may seek to restrict access to BitGoldrsquos services block BitGoldrsquos website or impose other restrictions that may affect BitGoldrsquos ability to offer service to new or existing users in those for an extended period of time or indefinitelyrdquo (8)

Despite this it was confirmed in July of 2015 that the company did offer its services under the Canadian Bailment Law (9) This occurs in situations where physical personal property is transferred from one person (the bailor) to another for safekeeping and doing so does not require the binding notion of a written contract (10)

Presently the company employs 26 people including Sebag and Crumb Other notable BitGold personnel include Chief Executive Officer Darrell MacMullin Chief Technology Officer Alessandro Premoli Lead Mobile Engineer Paul Mennega and Team Manager Karman Lee The company also employs several vice-presidents five software engineers and two compliance officers (4)

It can be said that BitGold has accomplished quite a bit in less than two years Itrsquos likely such a volatile company has some big plans waiting in the wings for 2016 but Emily Cornelius isnrsquot dropping any hints as to what they could be

ldquoWe have a number of new features services and products cominghellip Yoursquoll have to wait and seerdquo

BitGold is steadily making its mark It has the backing the funds the technology and above all the drive Put all these items together (and add a touch of flair and public desire) and itrsquos clear that BitGold has what it takes to make the world of finance its own

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

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Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

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infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 2: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

2 JANUARY 2016

DIGITALGOLD

MAGAZINE

Publishedby

Digital CurrencyIntelligence Authority

DCIA Ltd71ndash75 Shelton Street

Covent GardenLondon UK

editordigitalgoldmoneycarldciaus

Skype lsquodigitalcurrencyrsquo

Digital Gold Magazine is published 12 times a year

online Some of the products featured in this magazine

are not yet available to US residents Please check local

laws before using any product mentioned in this digital

publicationNo part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any

form without written permission from DCIA Ltd The information

contained herein are opinions of sources and interviews DCIA Ltd claims no reliability or accuracy to any information contained within

The Digital Gold Magazine is published for reference purposes

only and is not materially responsible for errors

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 3

ContentsDigital Gold Magazine - January 2016 wwwdigitalgoldmoney

5 Coeptis is Live in Beta

7 Coinify amp DigixGlobal Announce Bitcoin Partnership

9 The Power to Issue Money by Jim Davidson

12 Silencing Bitcoin

17 A Sneak Peek at the New DigixGlobal User Interface

32 Bitgold A Modern Revolution in Finance by Nick Marinoff

36 The Digix Asset Tokenization Process

45 New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements

46 What Group Will Soon be Enjoying the Benefits of Digital Currency

4 JANUARY 2016

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 5

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Melbourne Florida (December 26 2015) ndash CMO Inc (COEPTIS) has launched a beta of its Global Standard System which is an alternative global payment system utilizing next generation technologies mobilizing the value of gold for electronic transfer of value on the Internet

The System resolves shortcomings that plague online payments by providing substantial benefits to both businesses and consumers while achieving high levels of consumer protection and privacy The patent pending System is secure easily accessible makes e commerce more available to customers not adequately served by traditional payment systems and brings greater efficiency to payment settlement in an increasingly global economy The System currency (AUG) is 100 reserved by physical gold Payment occurs on a centralized settlement platform which is universally accessible to customers Payments are very efficient settle immediately and are final The cost of a transaction is lower than alternatives The system has strong controls for anti-money laundering and consumer protection and meets or exceeds all federal state and international regulatory requirements

COEPTIS is licensed or otherwise authorized to operate in US states representing nearly two-thirds the US population and will be obtaining approvals in the remaining states as well as Canada and Europe before expanding to a larger global market The current beta launch is designed to manage the expected high early growth of the System Sign-up is currently by invitation only with priority to persons in states in which COEPTIS is currently licensed A request for an invitation can be made at wwwcoeptiscom Full launch of the System is expected soon

Bill Cunningham CEO of COEPTIS said ldquoWe are very excited to bring this System to the market Our team has worked hard to ensure we bring great benefit to consumers and businesses while also providing the protections required by these consumers and our regulatory authoritiesrdquo

COEPTIS recognizes that global payments are too slow uncertain costly and inefficient globally and that there is a growing concern with identity protection COEPTIS was started in 2013 to build out intellectual property to address these market concerns while also addressing public policy and regulatory concerns with payments COEPTIS is headquartered in Melbourne FL

For further information contactinfocoeptiscom855-673-7176 (701)

6 JANUARY 2016

WebMoney Gets a EU License and Expands its Presence in The European Union

November 18 2015

The global settlement system WebMoney Transfer has entered into partnership with a new guarantor licensed to issue e-money within the European Union

The FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) license granted to WebMoney Europe Ltd with head offices in Cambridge United Kingdom has secured the company`s status as an e-money issuer in all countries within the European Economic Area As a result the Euro purses within the system are acquiring the status of e-money and are in full compliance with the legislation of the European Union

As a part of the expansion of its presence in Europe in the recent months WebMoney has significantly increased the number of top-up points for Euro purses as well as the number of online stores accepting WebMoney The WebMoney technical support team is already providing support for Euro purses while the services within the system are being adapted for the European users

Currently the system is used by over 29 million users worldwide with around 10 thousand users registering with the system daily WebMoney is accepted as a payment method by more than 100 thousand online stores globally

Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has licensed WebMoney Europe Ltd as an emoney issuer in all European Union countries With more than 29 million currency users WebMoney is accepted by more than 100 thousand online stores around the world

An announcement from BitGold December 31 2015

The Request Gold Payment tool is now live allowing users to earn gold onto the network by sending payment requests for their time labour goods or services

We believe that transferring value online should be easy instant and secure BitGold allows you to send a payment request to other individuals anywhere in the world ndash with or without a BitGold account with the resulting payment settled in gold to your private vault account

Someone working in Greece and parting with their services can be earning gold in Canada London Zurich or elsewhere

Just log in to your BitGold Dashboard and select the Request Payment tab to get started It is as easy as entering the contact name email address or mobile number and the amount you are requesting Once you have sent a Request for Payment the recipient will receive an email that will prompt them to open their BitGold account if they havent already fund their account and complete the payment request

Unfortunately at this time US users will not be able to send receive or request gold payments on the platform Additionally gold received into the Dubai vault may be restricted from some functionality Contact the company for more details

copy Copyright 2015 BitGold Inc 334 Adelaide St W Toronto ON M5V 1R4 All rights reserved

Request Gold Payment Tool Has Officially Launched on the BitGold Platform

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 7

October 26 2015

Coinify and DigixGlobal Private Limited (Singapore UEN 201479386E) are proud to announce a formal business partnership All bitcoin payments going through Digix will solely be processed through Coinify

This represents a significant initiative between Ethereum and Bitcoin based companies demonstrating how both blockchain ecosystems can work together The partnership between an Ethereum based company and a Bitcoin based company is one of the industryrsquos first signifying that both ecosystems can grow together Bitcoin users can now easily own Ethereum digital assets apart from Ether

Digix allows users to purchase assets like investment grade gold bullion with bitcoin thereafter facilitating physical asset issuances on the blockchain These digital keys issued on the Ethereum blockchain will have the same transactional utility of Bitcoin and can also be made fungible into divisible digital tokens called ldquo Digix Tokens rdquo representative of grams of gold allocated 11

Morten Bebe Coinifyrsquos sales manager believes that this is a significant step in future collaboration with other blockchains ldquo Digixrsquos unique and decentralized approach in the creation of gold backed tokens will help promote the crypto ecosystemrdquo

ldquoWe are very excited to be working with Coinifyrdquo says Kai the CEO Co-Founder of Digix ldquoWe have looked at other payment processors and found Coinify

Coinify and DigixGlobal Announce Bitcoin Partnership in Singapore

Coinify is the first bitcoin payment processor to partner with an Ethereum based company processing bitcoin payments for crypto-assets on Ethereum

to be the best in terms of service reliability and willingness to innovate with young companies in Asia Now end users can easily purchase crypto assets on Ethereum with bitcoinrdquo Kai adds ldquoWe have always been open to collaborations and100 thousand online stores globally

About CoinifyCoinify ApS drives mainstream adoption of digital currencies such as Bitcoin for merchants and consumers Merchants benefit from Coinifyrsquos Payment Service (PSP) enabling free instant settlements in a fraud-free and chargeback-free blockchain payment environment while customers get access to secure one-click payments that reveal no sensitive information Coinify is backed by a multi-million dollar capital injection from SEED Capital (funded by the Danish government) and Accelerace and is the leading European digital currency market player For more information about Coinify visit their website at coinifycom

About DigixDigix is an asset ownership certification and tokeniization platform for physical assets Users who purchase or store gold bullion with Digixrsquos participating suppliers and custodial vaults will be able to own digital assets on the blockchain and create divisible gold tokens that have the same transactional utility and functionality as bitcoin For more information please contact

Coinify ApSHerlev Hovedgade 15B 12730 Herlev Greater Copenhagen Denmark+45 3693 4994Marketing and PR - Lenka HudakovaEmail lhucoinifycom

DigixGlobal Pte Ltd10 Anson Road 05-17International Plaza S079903 Singapore+1-917-267-8977Co-Founder amp CEO - Kai Cheng ChngEmail kcchngdgxiohttpdgxio

8 JANUARY 2016

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 9

Who should have the power to issue money

It seems likely that a great many people probably havenrsquot thought about this question ever After all since the beginning of recorded history various types of governments including republics kings priest-kings and dictatorships have issued money

If you open up your wallet you probably find some paper money in there issued by some government or on behalf of a central bank that is authorized by some government Very likely you also have some credit or debit cards issued by banks or credit unions but these are only corporate extensions of governments so not really that different Some people have gift cards from various companies but these are corporations therefore creatures of the state Moreover most gift cards are denominated in national currencies

My own wallet has a couple of Ron Helwigrsquos Shire silver and gold wire cards too These are laminated cards which contain thin strips of silver in one case and a length of thin gold wire in the other In other words they are actual gold and silver visibly embedded in the clear plastic laminate of the card

If you are fond of history you may have heard of the tendency of Roman emperors to debase their gold and silver coinage and the tendency of the Byzantine emperors to stick with the good stuff You may have heard that Revolutionary France was beset with inflated paper money called the assignat by the national assembly and the mandat by the Directorate ndash the same Directorate that used guillotines in its search for peace and justice and discovered only baskets of severed heads and rivers of blood

You may know that one of Napoleonrsquos secrets to popularity was restoring gold and silver coins to circulation and melting the printer plates used to make the paper money You may be aware of the adventures of Marco Polo with paper money in China under Kublai Khan And you are probably aware of the creation in late 1913 of a Federal Reserve that gradually replaced gold and silver coins in the United States with book entry and paper money along with coins made out of base metals like zinc

If you arenrsquot fond of history essentially nothing in the preceding two paragraphs means anything to you Which

The Power To Issue MoneyBY JIM DAVIDSON

AH TAKE THE CASH AND LET THE CREDIT GONOR HEED THE RUMBLE OF A DISTANT DRUM

~EDWARD FITZGERALD THE RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

10 JANUARY 2016

might be ok if you werenrsquot living in interesting times As it turns out Thucydides was correct in believing that the future if it does not mirror the past at least reflects it And of course Santayana says that if you wonrsquot learn the lessons of history you may be doomed to repeat them

Given that there is currently a sovereign debt crisis that has turned Greece into an economic wasteland plunged Chinarsquos markets down and which is spreading to many other countries in the coming months and years and given that the money you have in your wallet is only backed by the full faith and credit of the United States which has not exactly shown itself to be credit-worthy or faithful you may find yourself very interested in the question who should issue money

Your PowerNow if you believe as I do that the only just form of government is one that derives its powers from the unanimous consent of the governed you should recognize who has the power to issue money Since governments are issuing money and since all the powers that governments have must have been either seized from the people or delegated to the government with the consent of the people it follows naturally that the power to issue money comes originally from the people It is also my view that powers are not collective in nature but like rights are individual in character In other words you have the power to issue money

Whether that comes as a surprise to you or not it is clear from simply looking around that not everyone is issuing money If each individual has the power to issue money why isnrsquot everyone doing so

It turns out that one of the key features of money is acceptability It matters a great deal less if you issue money than it does if someone else accepts it In order to generate demand for its currency your national government accepts that currency for payment of taxes The fact that there are a great many taxes not only at the national level but also at state and local levels means that there are lots of places where the national governmentrsquos currency is accepted Not only is it accepted by tax authorities it is also accepted by merchants because they know they can use it to pay their taxes It is therefore accepted by those who

supply merchants with products so they can pay their taxes and so forth

So the problems of central bank policies the problems with the economy the problems with many government policies are to put it simply your fault You choose to use the national currency of your country You choose not to accept alternatives even though alternatives exist and have existed in the case of gold and silver coins for thousands of years You choose to engage in trade and commerce for fiat money which means that the problems of fiat money the problems of central planning the difficulties you face as a result of errors in what the Federal Reserve and other monetary manipulators do are your problems They are caused by your choices just as much as by the choices of hundreds of millions of others in your country and billions around the world You have the power to change this situation directly to your own advantage Does that seem harsh

Taxation Is TheftMany years ago at the end of the last century I met a member of the Somena First Nation up in Canada I was attending the world congress of the International Society for Individual Liberty at the time Meaghan Walker-Champion explained to me that she had spoken to the elders of her community and they had many long talks among themselves thinking about what the Somena word for ldquotax collectorrdquo would be They concluded that the word in their language was the same as the word for ldquothiefrdquo

Writing at the end of World War Two EC Riegel reached the same conclusion He noted that money is extremely useful in trade and commerce and that the issue power properly belongs to those engaged in free enterprise Since governments are not engaged in buying and selling but only in stealing from others they are entirely inappropriate to the purpose of issuing money He makes these and many other excellent arguments against state socialism in A New Approach to Freedom My friend Spencer MacCallum helped organise EC Riegelrsquos papers An authorized free and complete version of A New Approach to Freedom is available on the web here

To be continued on page 37

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 11

12 JANUARY 2016

SBC - What Is Silent BitcoinSilent Bitcoin (or SBC) is a digital voucher currency 100 backed by bitcoins This means that 10 SBC equals 10 BTC When a user spends BTC to a wallet hash controlled by SilentVault they receive in exchange a voucher (a cryptographically signed XML object) for the same amount in SBC Thereafter the SBC voucher value circulates privately off-chain between SilentVault wallets until a holder redeems their SBC voucher for BTC At that point the SBC value is decirculated and a BTC spend is made from SilentVaultrsquos reserve to the address hash designated by the user who surrendered the voucher (Which is probably but doesnrsquot have to be the userrsquos own)

Using SBCThe Voucher-Safe network operates differently from the Bitcoin network in several important respects

Silencing BitcoinSilentVault lets you spend and receive bitcoin (and litecoin) off the blockchain entirely and move your coins to and from regular bitcoin addresses whenever you want Our wallets are multi-asset and can hold any supported asset types side-by-side

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 13

bull A Voucher Publisher (or VP) signs vouchers and clears voucher payments to prevent double-spending While each VP is centralized the protocol supports multiple Publishers This means that payments clear in seconds with no need to wait for transaction confirmations (Note however that a BTC spend to purchase a SBC voucher does require 6 confirmations before the SBC voucher will be issued)

bull Input vouchers are always destroyed in every transaction and replaced with output vouchers bearing fresh unique serial numbers This means that unlike with the blockchain no public transaction history exists balances are private and no ldquotaintrdquo can attach to coins (Taint violates fungibility a fundamental characteristic of sound money) This represents a vast privacy improvement over regular BTC spends and a lesser improvement even over ldquocoin laundryrdquo services

bull A payee must pick up their voucher payment within the 1-7 days designated by the payer If the payee does not do so the payment expires and becomes recoverable by the payer (indefinitely) This makes it impossible to lose value by spending it to a ldquodead walletrdquo

bull Receipts are generated by the payee not by the Publisher This prevents the clearing VP from needing to record transaction history or knowing anything about the private message context accompanying the payment The VP also never sees a user IP address

In short it is much faster more convenient more private and generally much safer to exchange SBC value between SilentVault

wallets than to perform ldquonaked spendsrdquo between BTC wallets on the blockchain (Though naturally it is also more expensive privacy being worth something)

Trading SBCExchanges in and out of SBC fromto BTC are performed via the ldquoExchangesrdquo tab in the SilentVault wallet by buying or selling SBC vouchers respectively These sales and repurchases are carried out with the exchange itself mdash meaning SilentVault is an agent for the Issuer of SBC SBC vouchers can also be traded to other users in exchange for vouchers representing other asset types (eg USD or EUR silver or gold etc) Users can specify the asset types they will accept and offer discounts or demand premiums The SVX (SilentVault Exchange) acts as a third-party escrow agent allowing all trades to be fully anonymous and secure You cannot know with whom you are trading and no KYC of any kind is performable by SilentVault You are your wallet keys period

Fee ScheduleThe fees currently charged by SilentVault are as follows

bull Purchase SBC with BTC 00 (free) minimum quantity 001 BTC

bull Redeem SBC for BTC 00 (free) minimum quantity 002 BTC

bull Make SBC voucher spend 00015 BTCbull Receive SBC voucher spend 00006 BTC

(first one is 00002)bull Escrow exchange 10 of amount

minimum quantity 002 BTC

httpssilentvaultcom

14 JANUARY 2016

YOUR PRIVACY MATTERSEacutelan Turbo VPN This VPN service is bundled with VoIP and private audiovideo calling via SIP plus unlimited bandwidth for surfing and streaming

Our Eacutelan Turbo VPN service is a standard single-hop VPN but with selectable exit proxies in Panama the USA the UK France and onto the Tor network As a subscriber yoursquoll also get an SIP extension that lets you place private audio and video calls to other users Unlike with Skype these calls can be encrypted end-to-end to conceal their content in transit And because yoursquore on our VPN the call metadata is also protected We also supply your own private Mumble server as an inexpensive add-on There are no bandwidth limitations with this package Surf and talk all you want

Eacutelan Max Security VPN This VPN service is bundled with email addresses and aliases 1 GB file storage plus 25 GB of monthly bandwidth

Our Eacutelan Max Security VPN service is a premiere multi-hop VPN which lives up to its name Multi-hop means that traffic flows between multiple points along its route from the entry gateway to the exit nodes something like changing planes a couple of times during an extended trip Inside the network internal routes are varied traffic is mixed alongside that of other users and random delays get inserted to defeat traffic analysis This technique known as ldquoserver cascadesrdquo same features and benefits as provides many of the Tor (Given that the Deep State agencies in various countries are now running most of the Tor exit nodes it might be even better) As a subscriber yoursquoll also get private email addresses and email aliases plus 1 GB of very secure file storage Because of its multi-hop architecture this VPN is less suitable for streaming applications and bandwidth usage is limited to 25 GB per month However you can also buy top-up packs to add more bandwidth

Elegantly Convenient No special hardware required

bull Software-only solutionbull Both individual and multi-user packages are availablebull Simple to install and use

Support for Windows Linux Mac Android and iOS httpelanvpnnet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 15

Wersquore long-time industry professionals with over a combined forty years in the IT industry Wersquore also committed advocates of human liberty and personal privacy With all the global spy networks hacks and data mining in the world today internet privacy is under attack as never beforeWe agree with E C Riegel who wrote

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and self-asserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

16 JANUARY 2016

What does Digix doWe are a Smart Asset company that allows anyone to securely send and receive ownerships of assets for eventual redemption on the blockchain The first asset listed is Gold and other assets such as diamonds will be available in the near future

What are Proof of Asset (PoA) CertificatesProof of Asset (PoA) Certificates prove the existence of gold through the entire chain of custody from the supplier to the custodial vault They are automatically created when a user purchases and stores gold at our participating custodial vaults It consists of 3 digital signatures from 3 independent entities vendor custodian and auditor Through this process a PoA card is issued representing your asset ownership on the blockchain This PoA card can then be sent and received by anyone on the Ethereum Blockchain for eventual redemption PoA certificates can also be sent to a Minter DAE to create DGX Gold tokens for fungibility

What are Digix Gold TokensDigix Gold tokens can only be created when a user sends in their PoA Certificates in exchange for them on a 11 weight basis on the Digix Minter DAE Each Digix Gold token represents 1g of gold For example if a PoA Certificate represents the ownership of a 100g gold bar it can be sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for 100 DGX tokens which will be deposited in your ethereum wallet

How do I know if these tokens or PoA certificates are safe from fraud or duplicationAll tokens and PoA certificates are created on the Ethereum Blockchain a public ledger where information stored can never be manipulated or counterfeited Our smart asset service can only exist because of blockchain technology

Where are the physical gold bars storedPhysical gold is kept with a participating custodian Each PoA Certificate will specify the name and location of the custodian that holds the gold The first participating custodian on the Digix Gold platform is Malca-Amit which maintains a high security storage facility at the Singapore Freeport

Why SingaporeDigixGlobal is incorporated in low crime and politically stable Singapore Investment Precious Metals are exempted from GST locally so you are purchasing gold at the lowest premiums available in the world

bull There are also no permits required to import or export precious metalsbull Singapore also has no jurisdictional relations with USA or Europebull We will only release your personal information by order of the Court of Law in Singapore

Frequently AskedQuestions

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 17

A Sneak Peek at the NewDigixGlobal User Interface

It will be available to the public in January 2016 for multiple operating systems and mobile platforms This software will manage client transactions for PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates Digix Asset Tokens and Ether tokens

DigixGlobal can create a digital asset certificate for any storable physical property Future versions of this software will include additional digital assets such as diamonds

When the interface opens users are presented with the main dashboard menu as shown below Access to all primary services and tools is available from this opening screen

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEVendor Information - Custodian Information - Auditor Information

To ensure quality and authenticity participating gold vendors only sell LBMA approved gold bars Gold purchased from an LBMA certified refinery is globally known for its quality These bullion sources guarantee the authenticity and purity of every single gold bar used on the Digix network Buying gold from the marketplace is the first step in the process of generating a PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificate

18 JANUARY 2016

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEShows gold bullion available for purchase as a digital gold certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 19

20 JANUARY 2016

GOLD TOKENS AND ETHER WALLETFrom this area a user can send Digix Gold Tokens or send Ether

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 21

The transaction hash for a completed certificate purchase is also available with just one click

(see below Raw Transaction Data Transaction Hash)

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets Individual users can create Digix Gold and Asset tokens by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoATM Certificate) to the Minter DAE It is a way to represent gold bars as units of tokens on the Ethereum Blockchain database One Digix Gold token represents 1 gram of gold

(Q) How do I know that there are actual gold bars backing PoA certificates or Digix Gold tokens

All material documents from the Proof of Asset protocol are made available via Swarm - Ethereumrsquos distributed file sharing This would mean that all assaying certificates custodial receipts of deposits and independent auditor documents from the entire chain of custody will be uploaded for public viewing to ascertain the authenticity of all PoA certificates and Digix Gold tokens Each entity in the chain of custody will also digitally sign on our PoA Certificate We only deal with vendors custodians and auditors that have passed our due diligence and that are world renowned with a history of excellence Private audits are also available for added assurance

The Ethereum platform allows users to create applications that run on a decentralized peer-to-peer network of computers without any central control and free from human interruption or corruption Vitalik Buterin invented Ethereum in late 2013 it was formally described by Dr Gavin Wood in 2014 then developed as an open source software project under the GNU Lesser General Public License It was officially launched on July 30 2015 The project is maintained by the Ethereum core developer team (ETHDEV) under the guidance of the non-profit Ethereum Foundation which had raised 31591 Bitcoins during their 2014 crowdsale

22 JANUARY 2016

From this page users may also view the assetrsquos history of trading within the Digix system

GOLD ASSET HISTORY

PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates

are Ethereum smart contracts

that provides a legally and

cryptographically binding

determination of ownership of

physical gold or other assets currently under

the guardianship of a participating custodian on the

Digix decentralized platform It

also certifies the agreement

between the user the vendor the custodian and

the independent auditor

The PoAtrade provides a complete history of the chain of control from the vendor

the custodian and all audit reports This proof guarantees that the purchase of the gold by the user its storage by the

custodian and regular inspection by the auditor has taken place

PoA Certificates can be transferred or sent to any Ethereum account sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or

Gold tokens or redeemed from the Recast DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or Gold

Tokens

Copies of the orignal signed documents are included as a part of the certificatersquos registration in the blockchain

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 23

24 JANUARY 2016

GOLD EXPLORER RECASTER (Above)

The Digix Minter DAE recognizes all valid Digix PoAtrade Certificates and can accept them from a user in exchange for divisible Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens The rules of the Digix platform dictates that only the Digix Minter has the authority through the request of the owner of a Digix PoAtrade certificate to allow that owner to issue their own Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens in exchange for the PoAtrade Certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 25

The interface conveniently walks customers through the online purchase of a Digital Gold PoA Certificate

26 JANUARY 2016

A completed purchase of the digital gold certificate representing this bar

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 27

TOOLS AND SETTINGS

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

28 JANUARY 2016

RESTORE WALLET

In addition to its security features users can configure the Aegis Vault to assign beneficiaries set the time-based distribution of funds or assets and delegate a power of attorney to another individual or a group of people

Digix is committed to bringing Ethereum use to the mainstream and the availability of a secure wallet is essential for realizing this goal

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 29

GENERATE A REDEMPTION KEY

(Q) What is the Digix Recaster Smart Contract

Digix Recaster Smart Contract allows the

conversion of Digix Gold tokens to a PoA card The

PoA card can be sent or received on the blockchain representing an ownership

of an entire gold bar or be used for redemption of

the physical gold bar at our office For example if you have 100 DGX tokens

representing 100g of weight in gold you can exchange

for a PoA card representing a 100g gold cast bar at

Digix This PoA card can be sent and received on the

Ethereum blockchain or be used to schedule a local

pick-up of the physical gold bar at Digix redemption

center in Singapore

You can currently recast into PoA certificates of

100g (100 DGX) or 1000g (1000 DGX) gold cast bar

denominations

30 JANUARY 2016

(Q) What about the Digix audit processWe have four types of audits at Digix

1 PRIVATE AUDITS Clients are welcome to come to our certified custodial vaults in Singapore to inspect your gold bars in a highly private and secure environment

2 EXTERNAL AUDITS We have engaged Inspectorate Singapore (wwwinspectoratecom) to audit our inventory and match them off with customersrsquo holdings at DGX We will hold such inspections at least twice a year

3 CUSTODIAL AUDITS Our certified custodians will provide a physical certification of proof that your gold bars are stored safely in their vaults They will take photographs of your serialized bars per request basis and have them keyed into their inventory management systems Some of our certified custodiansrsquo reputation are also on the line to provide us with their appraisal and storage services as they have to answer to their shareholders as a publicly listed company in Singapore

4 INTERNAL AUDITS We have patented a certification process called Proof of Asset (PoA) where auditors sign on the existence of Gold in our PoA certificate The digital certificate is then uploaded onto the Ethereum Blockchain

(Q) Are there KYCAML requirementsAll users who wish to redeem PoA certificates or Digix Gold Tokens for physical gold bars will have to go through KYC requirements at the pickup The gold bars will only be available for pick up at our office location in Singapore We must ensure that DigixGlobal and participating organizations are protected from any potential liabilities resulting from government prosecution and asset seizures so we ensure that we comply fully with regulatory requirements for Know your customer (KYC) and Anti-money laundering (AML)

ADDRESS BOOK

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 31

SilentVault is a secure private online wallet for making untraceable p2p payments

Unlike other crypto currency wallets SilentVault wallets support heterogeneous asset types such as fiat dollars euros metals gold and silver and crypto coins bitcoin litecoin SilentVault provides anonymous off blockchain payments made in bitcoin and litecoin It also features an integrated p2p escrow exchange where users can trade anonymously among different asset types with other users such as exchanging bitcoins for silver

The SilentVault Spark client is a fully functional Jabber chat client that is a branded and updated version of Spark Since Spark supports a plugin architecture our wallet client is implemented as a plugin You can obtain the SilentVault Spark client with plugin from this page You can also find the source code for both the plugin and SilentVaults customizations to the Spark source base elsewhere on this site A tutorial on SVSpark is here

The SilentVault wallet webstart client is a stand alone program that you can install from within your browser Like the SilentVault Spark client it communicates with the Voucher Safe payment network using extensions to the XMPP protocol This type of communication makes economic transactions indistinguishable from ordinary encrypted instant messaging traffic and avoids any need to run within an insecure browser environment or rely on web domains All client source code is published on this site and while you can run a prefabricated client you are also invited to build your own from source

You are also invited to develop applications for our integrated marketplaces that appear within SilentVault wallets A full API is available for your use as a development tool Please contact our team for details

The SilentVault technology is based on Voucher Safe which was developed 2008 2011 Voucher Safe is also the core technology of the Digital Cash Alliance

httpssilentvaultcom

32 JANUARY 2016

ldquoI love go-o-o-o-ldrdquo-Austin Powers in Goldmember

Not surprisingly most people feel the same

According to the Wall Street Journal gold prices and safe-haven demand in Asia have been skyrocketing since mid-November (1) proving that you donrsquot have to be a sea-faring pirate or a squire in a kingrsquos castle to enjoy its natural glare beauty and above all its ability to stimulate wealth

Since the days of the California Gold Rush people have enjoyed panning for it selling it and most of

all owning it Long considered one of the planetrsquos most precious and desired metals gold has grown heavily in value over the last several years and it appears more and more are trying to get their hands on it every single day

Something else is growing as wellhellip Bitcoin Often regarded as Americarsquos most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin has jumped heavily in value over the last few months spiking from $230 to nearly $350 Unlike gold which exists in solid physical form Bitcoin exists in ones and zeros binary coding that travels through the blockchain the technology that makes Bitcoin transactions possible between users and respective merchants

BITGOLD A MODERN REVOLUTION IN FINANCEBY NICK MARINOFF

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 33

Itrsquos interesting to witness nearly equal popularity rising for two different things that ultimately serve the same purpose and share similar goals Both are designed to enhance the world of finance Both can rise in value and both have the ability to make someone rich overnighthellip So what if we could combine the two What significant differences could there be if Bitcoin and gold were fused into one entity

Well itrsquos already been done Say hello to BitGold an early startup company stationed in Toronto Canada BitGold aims to offer international services for people and businesses to send payments and hold savings with physical gold (2) The company was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb Both have a long history in the financial sector with Sebag previously serving as the Founder and Managing Principal of Braavos Capital (an international private investment organization) and the Chairman of Natural Resource Holdings an investment company involved with natural resource assets (3) Josh Crumb was previously the Senior Metals Strategist at Goldman Sachs (4)

The company alleges that gold bullion is ldquothe worldrsquos oldest asset class and the centuryrsquos best performing currencyrdquo (5) According to BitGoldrsquos website their mission is

ldquohellipTo make gold accessible and useful in digital payments and secure savingshellip Wersquore advancing the digital payments revolution by helping people securely acquire store and now spend gold with unprecedented simplicity BitGold accounts are free and can be opened in minutes We provide users with a secure vault account to purchase and hold gold the ability to make and receive instant gold payments and a prepaid card for spending gold at traditional points of sale Through our network of ATMs customers can fund their accounts with local-currencyrdquo (4)

Present investors backing BitGold include Dundee Capital Markets GMP Securities and Sandstorm Gold although the initial investor in the company was Soros Brothers Investment which is presently run by Alexander Soros the son of Hungarian business magnate George Soros (2)

2015 has been a big year for the company CNBC has stated that BitGold currently serves over 100000 active customers and the platform stores approximately 276 kilograms of bullion within its walls Thatrsquos nearly $11 million total and over $100 per active user (6) In May BitGold began trading on the TSX Venture exchange in Canada and announced the purchase of GoldMoney worth nearly $52 million in Canadian dollars (7)

In June the company made citizens of the United States very happy with the following announcement

ldquoUS residents can sign up on the BitGold platform and buy sell or redeem gold using BitGoldrsquos Aurum payment and settlement technology US residents will also have access to the BitGold mobile app and a prepaid card when these features launch over the coming weeksrdquo (7)

The platform offers a number of products and services beneficial to any gold-lover across the country As the above quote suggests BitGold offers whatrsquos known as Aurum the gold-settlement technology thatrsquos compliant with several US financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase Wells Fargo Citi Bank of America US Bank Fidelity Capital One and Charles Schwab Users with an account at any one of these nationally-recognized banks can instantly redeem gold or authorize gold deposits The transactions thereby increase in safety and automation Users also receive a bonus in that they are usually able to avoid bank wire fees through the process (7)

Using the BitGold app users may also send and receive gold as payments to and from any other user or seller without paying any transaction fees They can even send gold to non-BitGold users via their mobile phones or through a simple email message The company also issues prepaid debit cards allowing users to spend funds directly from their BitGold accounts The card is compatible with ATMs so that users may withdraw local currency (7)

Lastly the company issues special ten-gram gold cubes worth approximately $380 each at press time Users may redeem these cubes on the BitGold platform and may demand physical delivery when they see fit (7)

34 JANUARY 2016

Vice-president of communications and PR Emily Cornelius explained in an email that they have no ldquostereotypicalrdquo user of the companyrsquos services but that there are predominantly three main use cases

ldquoThe traditional gold investor will gravitate to BitGold because our gold is unprecedentedly priced within 1 of spot price and we offer free storage in a Brinks vault of their choice globallyhellip The second use case is the user who seeks a more stable currency for their national savings outside of their potentially volatile local fiat currencyhellip Gold has gained over 3000 vs the US Dollar which is arguably the worldrsquos strongest fiat money Gold may seem to go up down or sideways but in reality and when viewed over long timescales such as the avg human lifecycle ndash it always riseshellip Gold has been rising against 9 of the worldrsquos most famous and well-known currencies almost every year since 2000hellip Thirdly BitGold is a powerful payments platformhellip BitGold allows a user to send an invoice for your labor to someone else anywhere in the world which the recipient can pay using any traditional payment methodhellip This gold is vaulted anywhere even outside their jurisdictionhellip This is important as it allows users to achieve upward mobility that are otherwise hindered by localized issues that are exogenous to their personal journeyrdquo

Cornelius also explained that the company offers ldquoall the benefits and efficiencies of a service like PayPal and a MasterCard but with a universally accepted more stable store of valuerdquo

Presently regulation over BitGold appears to be fairly non-existent BitGold does not list which regulators hold jurisdiction over its staff and operations nor do they list regulatory information regarding their trade practices (7) In fact co-founder Roy Sebag has stated in the past that he believes BitGold is not a bank nor does it serve as a financial institution in any traditional sense as it does not engage in fractional-reserve banking (2)According to page 20 of the companyrsquos initial public filing BitGold is not

ldquohellipEligible to be registered with the Financial

Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canadahellip There can be no assurance that BitGoldrsquos services or Internet platform will be acceptable to foreign regulatory bodies Foreign governments may seek to restrict access to BitGoldrsquos services block BitGoldrsquos website or impose other restrictions that may affect BitGoldrsquos ability to offer service to new or existing users in those for an extended period of time or indefinitelyrdquo (8)

Despite this it was confirmed in July of 2015 that the company did offer its services under the Canadian Bailment Law (9) This occurs in situations where physical personal property is transferred from one person (the bailor) to another for safekeeping and doing so does not require the binding notion of a written contract (10)

Presently the company employs 26 people including Sebag and Crumb Other notable BitGold personnel include Chief Executive Officer Darrell MacMullin Chief Technology Officer Alessandro Premoli Lead Mobile Engineer Paul Mennega and Team Manager Karman Lee The company also employs several vice-presidents five software engineers and two compliance officers (4)

It can be said that BitGold has accomplished quite a bit in less than two years Itrsquos likely such a volatile company has some big plans waiting in the wings for 2016 but Emily Cornelius isnrsquot dropping any hints as to what they could be

ldquoWe have a number of new features services and products cominghellip Yoursquoll have to wait and seerdquo

BitGold is steadily making its mark It has the backing the funds the technology and above all the drive Put all these items together (and add a touch of flair and public desire) and itrsquos clear that BitGold has what it takes to make the world of finance its own

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 3: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 3

ContentsDigital Gold Magazine - January 2016 wwwdigitalgoldmoney

5 Coeptis is Live in Beta

7 Coinify amp DigixGlobal Announce Bitcoin Partnership

9 The Power to Issue Money by Jim Davidson

12 Silencing Bitcoin

17 A Sneak Peek at the New DigixGlobal User Interface

32 Bitgold A Modern Revolution in Finance by Nick Marinoff

36 The Digix Asset Tokenization Process

45 New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements

46 What Group Will Soon be Enjoying the Benefits of Digital Currency

4 JANUARY 2016

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 5

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Melbourne Florida (December 26 2015) ndash CMO Inc (COEPTIS) has launched a beta of its Global Standard System which is an alternative global payment system utilizing next generation technologies mobilizing the value of gold for electronic transfer of value on the Internet

The System resolves shortcomings that plague online payments by providing substantial benefits to both businesses and consumers while achieving high levels of consumer protection and privacy The patent pending System is secure easily accessible makes e commerce more available to customers not adequately served by traditional payment systems and brings greater efficiency to payment settlement in an increasingly global economy The System currency (AUG) is 100 reserved by physical gold Payment occurs on a centralized settlement platform which is universally accessible to customers Payments are very efficient settle immediately and are final The cost of a transaction is lower than alternatives The system has strong controls for anti-money laundering and consumer protection and meets or exceeds all federal state and international regulatory requirements

COEPTIS is licensed or otherwise authorized to operate in US states representing nearly two-thirds the US population and will be obtaining approvals in the remaining states as well as Canada and Europe before expanding to a larger global market The current beta launch is designed to manage the expected high early growth of the System Sign-up is currently by invitation only with priority to persons in states in which COEPTIS is currently licensed A request for an invitation can be made at wwwcoeptiscom Full launch of the System is expected soon

Bill Cunningham CEO of COEPTIS said ldquoWe are very excited to bring this System to the market Our team has worked hard to ensure we bring great benefit to consumers and businesses while also providing the protections required by these consumers and our regulatory authoritiesrdquo

COEPTIS recognizes that global payments are too slow uncertain costly and inefficient globally and that there is a growing concern with identity protection COEPTIS was started in 2013 to build out intellectual property to address these market concerns while also addressing public policy and regulatory concerns with payments COEPTIS is headquartered in Melbourne FL

For further information contactinfocoeptiscom855-673-7176 (701)

6 JANUARY 2016

WebMoney Gets a EU License and Expands its Presence in The European Union

November 18 2015

The global settlement system WebMoney Transfer has entered into partnership with a new guarantor licensed to issue e-money within the European Union

The FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) license granted to WebMoney Europe Ltd with head offices in Cambridge United Kingdom has secured the company`s status as an e-money issuer in all countries within the European Economic Area As a result the Euro purses within the system are acquiring the status of e-money and are in full compliance with the legislation of the European Union

As a part of the expansion of its presence in Europe in the recent months WebMoney has significantly increased the number of top-up points for Euro purses as well as the number of online stores accepting WebMoney The WebMoney technical support team is already providing support for Euro purses while the services within the system are being adapted for the European users

Currently the system is used by over 29 million users worldwide with around 10 thousand users registering with the system daily WebMoney is accepted as a payment method by more than 100 thousand online stores globally

Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has licensed WebMoney Europe Ltd as an emoney issuer in all European Union countries With more than 29 million currency users WebMoney is accepted by more than 100 thousand online stores around the world

An announcement from BitGold December 31 2015

The Request Gold Payment tool is now live allowing users to earn gold onto the network by sending payment requests for their time labour goods or services

We believe that transferring value online should be easy instant and secure BitGold allows you to send a payment request to other individuals anywhere in the world ndash with or without a BitGold account with the resulting payment settled in gold to your private vault account

Someone working in Greece and parting with their services can be earning gold in Canada London Zurich or elsewhere

Just log in to your BitGold Dashboard and select the Request Payment tab to get started It is as easy as entering the contact name email address or mobile number and the amount you are requesting Once you have sent a Request for Payment the recipient will receive an email that will prompt them to open their BitGold account if they havent already fund their account and complete the payment request

Unfortunately at this time US users will not be able to send receive or request gold payments on the platform Additionally gold received into the Dubai vault may be restricted from some functionality Contact the company for more details

copy Copyright 2015 BitGold Inc 334 Adelaide St W Toronto ON M5V 1R4 All rights reserved

Request Gold Payment Tool Has Officially Launched on the BitGold Platform

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 7

October 26 2015

Coinify and DigixGlobal Private Limited (Singapore UEN 201479386E) are proud to announce a formal business partnership All bitcoin payments going through Digix will solely be processed through Coinify

This represents a significant initiative between Ethereum and Bitcoin based companies demonstrating how both blockchain ecosystems can work together The partnership between an Ethereum based company and a Bitcoin based company is one of the industryrsquos first signifying that both ecosystems can grow together Bitcoin users can now easily own Ethereum digital assets apart from Ether

Digix allows users to purchase assets like investment grade gold bullion with bitcoin thereafter facilitating physical asset issuances on the blockchain These digital keys issued on the Ethereum blockchain will have the same transactional utility of Bitcoin and can also be made fungible into divisible digital tokens called ldquo Digix Tokens rdquo representative of grams of gold allocated 11

Morten Bebe Coinifyrsquos sales manager believes that this is a significant step in future collaboration with other blockchains ldquo Digixrsquos unique and decentralized approach in the creation of gold backed tokens will help promote the crypto ecosystemrdquo

ldquoWe are very excited to be working with Coinifyrdquo says Kai the CEO Co-Founder of Digix ldquoWe have looked at other payment processors and found Coinify

Coinify and DigixGlobal Announce Bitcoin Partnership in Singapore

Coinify is the first bitcoin payment processor to partner with an Ethereum based company processing bitcoin payments for crypto-assets on Ethereum

to be the best in terms of service reliability and willingness to innovate with young companies in Asia Now end users can easily purchase crypto assets on Ethereum with bitcoinrdquo Kai adds ldquoWe have always been open to collaborations and100 thousand online stores globally

About CoinifyCoinify ApS drives mainstream adoption of digital currencies such as Bitcoin for merchants and consumers Merchants benefit from Coinifyrsquos Payment Service (PSP) enabling free instant settlements in a fraud-free and chargeback-free blockchain payment environment while customers get access to secure one-click payments that reveal no sensitive information Coinify is backed by a multi-million dollar capital injection from SEED Capital (funded by the Danish government) and Accelerace and is the leading European digital currency market player For more information about Coinify visit their website at coinifycom

About DigixDigix is an asset ownership certification and tokeniization platform for physical assets Users who purchase or store gold bullion with Digixrsquos participating suppliers and custodial vaults will be able to own digital assets on the blockchain and create divisible gold tokens that have the same transactional utility and functionality as bitcoin For more information please contact

Coinify ApSHerlev Hovedgade 15B 12730 Herlev Greater Copenhagen Denmark+45 3693 4994Marketing and PR - Lenka HudakovaEmail lhucoinifycom

DigixGlobal Pte Ltd10 Anson Road 05-17International Plaza S079903 Singapore+1-917-267-8977Co-Founder amp CEO - Kai Cheng ChngEmail kcchngdgxiohttpdgxio

8 JANUARY 2016

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 9

Who should have the power to issue money

It seems likely that a great many people probably havenrsquot thought about this question ever After all since the beginning of recorded history various types of governments including republics kings priest-kings and dictatorships have issued money

If you open up your wallet you probably find some paper money in there issued by some government or on behalf of a central bank that is authorized by some government Very likely you also have some credit or debit cards issued by banks or credit unions but these are only corporate extensions of governments so not really that different Some people have gift cards from various companies but these are corporations therefore creatures of the state Moreover most gift cards are denominated in national currencies

My own wallet has a couple of Ron Helwigrsquos Shire silver and gold wire cards too These are laminated cards which contain thin strips of silver in one case and a length of thin gold wire in the other In other words they are actual gold and silver visibly embedded in the clear plastic laminate of the card

If you are fond of history you may have heard of the tendency of Roman emperors to debase their gold and silver coinage and the tendency of the Byzantine emperors to stick with the good stuff You may have heard that Revolutionary France was beset with inflated paper money called the assignat by the national assembly and the mandat by the Directorate ndash the same Directorate that used guillotines in its search for peace and justice and discovered only baskets of severed heads and rivers of blood

You may know that one of Napoleonrsquos secrets to popularity was restoring gold and silver coins to circulation and melting the printer plates used to make the paper money You may be aware of the adventures of Marco Polo with paper money in China under Kublai Khan And you are probably aware of the creation in late 1913 of a Federal Reserve that gradually replaced gold and silver coins in the United States with book entry and paper money along with coins made out of base metals like zinc

If you arenrsquot fond of history essentially nothing in the preceding two paragraphs means anything to you Which

The Power To Issue MoneyBY JIM DAVIDSON

AH TAKE THE CASH AND LET THE CREDIT GONOR HEED THE RUMBLE OF A DISTANT DRUM

~EDWARD FITZGERALD THE RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

10 JANUARY 2016

might be ok if you werenrsquot living in interesting times As it turns out Thucydides was correct in believing that the future if it does not mirror the past at least reflects it And of course Santayana says that if you wonrsquot learn the lessons of history you may be doomed to repeat them

Given that there is currently a sovereign debt crisis that has turned Greece into an economic wasteland plunged Chinarsquos markets down and which is spreading to many other countries in the coming months and years and given that the money you have in your wallet is only backed by the full faith and credit of the United States which has not exactly shown itself to be credit-worthy or faithful you may find yourself very interested in the question who should issue money

Your PowerNow if you believe as I do that the only just form of government is one that derives its powers from the unanimous consent of the governed you should recognize who has the power to issue money Since governments are issuing money and since all the powers that governments have must have been either seized from the people or delegated to the government with the consent of the people it follows naturally that the power to issue money comes originally from the people It is also my view that powers are not collective in nature but like rights are individual in character In other words you have the power to issue money

Whether that comes as a surprise to you or not it is clear from simply looking around that not everyone is issuing money If each individual has the power to issue money why isnrsquot everyone doing so

It turns out that one of the key features of money is acceptability It matters a great deal less if you issue money than it does if someone else accepts it In order to generate demand for its currency your national government accepts that currency for payment of taxes The fact that there are a great many taxes not only at the national level but also at state and local levels means that there are lots of places where the national governmentrsquos currency is accepted Not only is it accepted by tax authorities it is also accepted by merchants because they know they can use it to pay their taxes It is therefore accepted by those who

supply merchants with products so they can pay their taxes and so forth

So the problems of central bank policies the problems with the economy the problems with many government policies are to put it simply your fault You choose to use the national currency of your country You choose not to accept alternatives even though alternatives exist and have existed in the case of gold and silver coins for thousands of years You choose to engage in trade and commerce for fiat money which means that the problems of fiat money the problems of central planning the difficulties you face as a result of errors in what the Federal Reserve and other monetary manipulators do are your problems They are caused by your choices just as much as by the choices of hundreds of millions of others in your country and billions around the world You have the power to change this situation directly to your own advantage Does that seem harsh

Taxation Is TheftMany years ago at the end of the last century I met a member of the Somena First Nation up in Canada I was attending the world congress of the International Society for Individual Liberty at the time Meaghan Walker-Champion explained to me that she had spoken to the elders of her community and they had many long talks among themselves thinking about what the Somena word for ldquotax collectorrdquo would be They concluded that the word in their language was the same as the word for ldquothiefrdquo

Writing at the end of World War Two EC Riegel reached the same conclusion He noted that money is extremely useful in trade and commerce and that the issue power properly belongs to those engaged in free enterprise Since governments are not engaged in buying and selling but only in stealing from others they are entirely inappropriate to the purpose of issuing money He makes these and many other excellent arguments against state socialism in A New Approach to Freedom My friend Spencer MacCallum helped organise EC Riegelrsquos papers An authorized free and complete version of A New Approach to Freedom is available on the web here

To be continued on page 37

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 11

12 JANUARY 2016

SBC - What Is Silent BitcoinSilent Bitcoin (or SBC) is a digital voucher currency 100 backed by bitcoins This means that 10 SBC equals 10 BTC When a user spends BTC to a wallet hash controlled by SilentVault they receive in exchange a voucher (a cryptographically signed XML object) for the same amount in SBC Thereafter the SBC voucher value circulates privately off-chain between SilentVault wallets until a holder redeems their SBC voucher for BTC At that point the SBC value is decirculated and a BTC spend is made from SilentVaultrsquos reserve to the address hash designated by the user who surrendered the voucher (Which is probably but doesnrsquot have to be the userrsquos own)

Using SBCThe Voucher-Safe network operates differently from the Bitcoin network in several important respects

Silencing BitcoinSilentVault lets you spend and receive bitcoin (and litecoin) off the blockchain entirely and move your coins to and from regular bitcoin addresses whenever you want Our wallets are multi-asset and can hold any supported asset types side-by-side

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 13

bull A Voucher Publisher (or VP) signs vouchers and clears voucher payments to prevent double-spending While each VP is centralized the protocol supports multiple Publishers This means that payments clear in seconds with no need to wait for transaction confirmations (Note however that a BTC spend to purchase a SBC voucher does require 6 confirmations before the SBC voucher will be issued)

bull Input vouchers are always destroyed in every transaction and replaced with output vouchers bearing fresh unique serial numbers This means that unlike with the blockchain no public transaction history exists balances are private and no ldquotaintrdquo can attach to coins (Taint violates fungibility a fundamental characteristic of sound money) This represents a vast privacy improvement over regular BTC spends and a lesser improvement even over ldquocoin laundryrdquo services

bull A payee must pick up their voucher payment within the 1-7 days designated by the payer If the payee does not do so the payment expires and becomes recoverable by the payer (indefinitely) This makes it impossible to lose value by spending it to a ldquodead walletrdquo

bull Receipts are generated by the payee not by the Publisher This prevents the clearing VP from needing to record transaction history or knowing anything about the private message context accompanying the payment The VP also never sees a user IP address

In short it is much faster more convenient more private and generally much safer to exchange SBC value between SilentVault

wallets than to perform ldquonaked spendsrdquo between BTC wallets on the blockchain (Though naturally it is also more expensive privacy being worth something)

Trading SBCExchanges in and out of SBC fromto BTC are performed via the ldquoExchangesrdquo tab in the SilentVault wallet by buying or selling SBC vouchers respectively These sales and repurchases are carried out with the exchange itself mdash meaning SilentVault is an agent for the Issuer of SBC SBC vouchers can also be traded to other users in exchange for vouchers representing other asset types (eg USD or EUR silver or gold etc) Users can specify the asset types they will accept and offer discounts or demand premiums The SVX (SilentVault Exchange) acts as a third-party escrow agent allowing all trades to be fully anonymous and secure You cannot know with whom you are trading and no KYC of any kind is performable by SilentVault You are your wallet keys period

Fee ScheduleThe fees currently charged by SilentVault are as follows

bull Purchase SBC with BTC 00 (free) minimum quantity 001 BTC

bull Redeem SBC for BTC 00 (free) minimum quantity 002 BTC

bull Make SBC voucher spend 00015 BTCbull Receive SBC voucher spend 00006 BTC

(first one is 00002)bull Escrow exchange 10 of amount

minimum quantity 002 BTC

httpssilentvaultcom

14 JANUARY 2016

YOUR PRIVACY MATTERSEacutelan Turbo VPN This VPN service is bundled with VoIP and private audiovideo calling via SIP plus unlimited bandwidth for surfing and streaming

Our Eacutelan Turbo VPN service is a standard single-hop VPN but with selectable exit proxies in Panama the USA the UK France and onto the Tor network As a subscriber yoursquoll also get an SIP extension that lets you place private audio and video calls to other users Unlike with Skype these calls can be encrypted end-to-end to conceal their content in transit And because yoursquore on our VPN the call metadata is also protected We also supply your own private Mumble server as an inexpensive add-on There are no bandwidth limitations with this package Surf and talk all you want

Eacutelan Max Security VPN This VPN service is bundled with email addresses and aliases 1 GB file storage plus 25 GB of monthly bandwidth

Our Eacutelan Max Security VPN service is a premiere multi-hop VPN which lives up to its name Multi-hop means that traffic flows between multiple points along its route from the entry gateway to the exit nodes something like changing planes a couple of times during an extended trip Inside the network internal routes are varied traffic is mixed alongside that of other users and random delays get inserted to defeat traffic analysis This technique known as ldquoserver cascadesrdquo same features and benefits as provides many of the Tor (Given that the Deep State agencies in various countries are now running most of the Tor exit nodes it might be even better) As a subscriber yoursquoll also get private email addresses and email aliases plus 1 GB of very secure file storage Because of its multi-hop architecture this VPN is less suitable for streaming applications and bandwidth usage is limited to 25 GB per month However you can also buy top-up packs to add more bandwidth

Elegantly Convenient No special hardware required

bull Software-only solutionbull Both individual and multi-user packages are availablebull Simple to install and use

Support for Windows Linux Mac Android and iOS httpelanvpnnet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 15

Wersquore long-time industry professionals with over a combined forty years in the IT industry Wersquore also committed advocates of human liberty and personal privacy With all the global spy networks hacks and data mining in the world today internet privacy is under attack as never beforeWe agree with E C Riegel who wrote

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and self-asserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

16 JANUARY 2016

What does Digix doWe are a Smart Asset company that allows anyone to securely send and receive ownerships of assets for eventual redemption on the blockchain The first asset listed is Gold and other assets such as diamonds will be available in the near future

What are Proof of Asset (PoA) CertificatesProof of Asset (PoA) Certificates prove the existence of gold through the entire chain of custody from the supplier to the custodial vault They are automatically created when a user purchases and stores gold at our participating custodial vaults It consists of 3 digital signatures from 3 independent entities vendor custodian and auditor Through this process a PoA card is issued representing your asset ownership on the blockchain This PoA card can then be sent and received by anyone on the Ethereum Blockchain for eventual redemption PoA certificates can also be sent to a Minter DAE to create DGX Gold tokens for fungibility

What are Digix Gold TokensDigix Gold tokens can only be created when a user sends in their PoA Certificates in exchange for them on a 11 weight basis on the Digix Minter DAE Each Digix Gold token represents 1g of gold For example if a PoA Certificate represents the ownership of a 100g gold bar it can be sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for 100 DGX tokens which will be deposited in your ethereum wallet

How do I know if these tokens or PoA certificates are safe from fraud or duplicationAll tokens and PoA certificates are created on the Ethereum Blockchain a public ledger where information stored can never be manipulated or counterfeited Our smart asset service can only exist because of blockchain technology

Where are the physical gold bars storedPhysical gold is kept with a participating custodian Each PoA Certificate will specify the name and location of the custodian that holds the gold The first participating custodian on the Digix Gold platform is Malca-Amit which maintains a high security storage facility at the Singapore Freeport

Why SingaporeDigixGlobal is incorporated in low crime and politically stable Singapore Investment Precious Metals are exempted from GST locally so you are purchasing gold at the lowest premiums available in the world

bull There are also no permits required to import or export precious metalsbull Singapore also has no jurisdictional relations with USA or Europebull We will only release your personal information by order of the Court of Law in Singapore

Frequently AskedQuestions

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 17

A Sneak Peek at the NewDigixGlobal User Interface

It will be available to the public in January 2016 for multiple operating systems and mobile platforms This software will manage client transactions for PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates Digix Asset Tokens and Ether tokens

DigixGlobal can create a digital asset certificate for any storable physical property Future versions of this software will include additional digital assets such as diamonds

When the interface opens users are presented with the main dashboard menu as shown below Access to all primary services and tools is available from this opening screen

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEVendor Information - Custodian Information - Auditor Information

To ensure quality and authenticity participating gold vendors only sell LBMA approved gold bars Gold purchased from an LBMA certified refinery is globally known for its quality These bullion sources guarantee the authenticity and purity of every single gold bar used on the Digix network Buying gold from the marketplace is the first step in the process of generating a PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificate

18 JANUARY 2016

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEShows gold bullion available for purchase as a digital gold certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 19

20 JANUARY 2016

GOLD TOKENS AND ETHER WALLETFrom this area a user can send Digix Gold Tokens or send Ether

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 21

The transaction hash for a completed certificate purchase is also available with just one click

(see below Raw Transaction Data Transaction Hash)

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets Individual users can create Digix Gold and Asset tokens by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoATM Certificate) to the Minter DAE It is a way to represent gold bars as units of tokens on the Ethereum Blockchain database One Digix Gold token represents 1 gram of gold

(Q) How do I know that there are actual gold bars backing PoA certificates or Digix Gold tokens

All material documents from the Proof of Asset protocol are made available via Swarm - Ethereumrsquos distributed file sharing This would mean that all assaying certificates custodial receipts of deposits and independent auditor documents from the entire chain of custody will be uploaded for public viewing to ascertain the authenticity of all PoA certificates and Digix Gold tokens Each entity in the chain of custody will also digitally sign on our PoA Certificate We only deal with vendors custodians and auditors that have passed our due diligence and that are world renowned with a history of excellence Private audits are also available for added assurance

The Ethereum platform allows users to create applications that run on a decentralized peer-to-peer network of computers without any central control and free from human interruption or corruption Vitalik Buterin invented Ethereum in late 2013 it was formally described by Dr Gavin Wood in 2014 then developed as an open source software project under the GNU Lesser General Public License It was officially launched on July 30 2015 The project is maintained by the Ethereum core developer team (ETHDEV) under the guidance of the non-profit Ethereum Foundation which had raised 31591 Bitcoins during their 2014 crowdsale

22 JANUARY 2016

From this page users may also view the assetrsquos history of trading within the Digix system

GOLD ASSET HISTORY

PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates

are Ethereum smart contracts

that provides a legally and

cryptographically binding

determination of ownership of

physical gold or other assets currently under

the guardianship of a participating custodian on the

Digix decentralized platform It

also certifies the agreement

between the user the vendor the custodian and

the independent auditor

The PoAtrade provides a complete history of the chain of control from the vendor

the custodian and all audit reports This proof guarantees that the purchase of the gold by the user its storage by the

custodian and regular inspection by the auditor has taken place

PoA Certificates can be transferred or sent to any Ethereum account sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or

Gold tokens or redeemed from the Recast DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or Gold

Tokens

Copies of the orignal signed documents are included as a part of the certificatersquos registration in the blockchain

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 23

24 JANUARY 2016

GOLD EXPLORER RECASTER (Above)

The Digix Minter DAE recognizes all valid Digix PoAtrade Certificates and can accept them from a user in exchange for divisible Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens The rules of the Digix platform dictates that only the Digix Minter has the authority through the request of the owner of a Digix PoAtrade certificate to allow that owner to issue their own Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens in exchange for the PoAtrade Certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 25

The interface conveniently walks customers through the online purchase of a Digital Gold PoA Certificate

26 JANUARY 2016

A completed purchase of the digital gold certificate representing this bar

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 27

TOOLS AND SETTINGS

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

28 JANUARY 2016

RESTORE WALLET

In addition to its security features users can configure the Aegis Vault to assign beneficiaries set the time-based distribution of funds or assets and delegate a power of attorney to another individual or a group of people

Digix is committed to bringing Ethereum use to the mainstream and the availability of a secure wallet is essential for realizing this goal

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 29

GENERATE A REDEMPTION KEY

(Q) What is the Digix Recaster Smart Contract

Digix Recaster Smart Contract allows the

conversion of Digix Gold tokens to a PoA card The

PoA card can be sent or received on the blockchain representing an ownership

of an entire gold bar or be used for redemption of

the physical gold bar at our office For example if you have 100 DGX tokens

representing 100g of weight in gold you can exchange

for a PoA card representing a 100g gold cast bar at

Digix This PoA card can be sent and received on the

Ethereum blockchain or be used to schedule a local

pick-up of the physical gold bar at Digix redemption

center in Singapore

You can currently recast into PoA certificates of

100g (100 DGX) or 1000g (1000 DGX) gold cast bar

denominations

30 JANUARY 2016

(Q) What about the Digix audit processWe have four types of audits at Digix

1 PRIVATE AUDITS Clients are welcome to come to our certified custodial vaults in Singapore to inspect your gold bars in a highly private and secure environment

2 EXTERNAL AUDITS We have engaged Inspectorate Singapore (wwwinspectoratecom) to audit our inventory and match them off with customersrsquo holdings at DGX We will hold such inspections at least twice a year

3 CUSTODIAL AUDITS Our certified custodians will provide a physical certification of proof that your gold bars are stored safely in their vaults They will take photographs of your serialized bars per request basis and have them keyed into their inventory management systems Some of our certified custodiansrsquo reputation are also on the line to provide us with their appraisal and storage services as they have to answer to their shareholders as a publicly listed company in Singapore

4 INTERNAL AUDITS We have patented a certification process called Proof of Asset (PoA) where auditors sign on the existence of Gold in our PoA certificate The digital certificate is then uploaded onto the Ethereum Blockchain

(Q) Are there KYCAML requirementsAll users who wish to redeem PoA certificates or Digix Gold Tokens for physical gold bars will have to go through KYC requirements at the pickup The gold bars will only be available for pick up at our office location in Singapore We must ensure that DigixGlobal and participating organizations are protected from any potential liabilities resulting from government prosecution and asset seizures so we ensure that we comply fully with regulatory requirements for Know your customer (KYC) and Anti-money laundering (AML)

ADDRESS BOOK

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 31

SilentVault is a secure private online wallet for making untraceable p2p payments

Unlike other crypto currency wallets SilentVault wallets support heterogeneous asset types such as fiat dollars euros metals gold and silver and crypto coins bitcoin litecoin SilentVault provides anonymous off blockchain payments made in bitcoin and litecoin It also features an integrated p2p escrow exchange where users can trade anonymously among different asset types with other users such as exchanging bitcoins for silver

The SilentVault Spark client is a fully functional Jabber chat client that is a branded and updated version of Spark Since Spark supports a plugin architecture our wallet client is implemented as a plugin You can obtain the SilentVault Spark client with plugin from this page You can also find the source code for both the plugin and SilentVaults customizations to the Spark source base elsewhere on this site A tutorial on SVSpark is here

The SilentVault wallet webstart client is a stand alone program that you can install from within your browser Like the SilentVault Spark client it communicates with the Voucher Safe payment network using extensions to the XMPP protocol This type of communication makes economic transactions indistinguishable from ordinary encrypted instant messaging traffic and avoids any need to run within an insecure browser environment or rely on web domains All client source code is published on this site and while you can run a prefabricated client you are also invited to build your own from source

You are also invited to develop applications for our integrated marketplaces that appear within SilentVault wallets A full API is available for your use as a development tool Please contact our team for details

The SilentVault technology is based on Voucher Safe which was developed 2008 2011 Voucher Safe is also the core technology of the Digital Cash Alliance

httpssilentvaultcom

32 JANUARY 2016

ldquoI love go-o-o-o-ldrdquo-Austin Powers in Goldmember

Not surprisingly most people feel the same

According to the Wall Street Journal gold prices and safe-haven demand in Asia have been skyrocketing since mid-November (1) proving that you donrsquot have to be a sea-faring pirate or a squire in a kingrsquos castle to enjoy its natural glare beauty and above all its ability to stimulate wealth

Since the days of the California Gold Rush people have enjoyed panning for it selling it and most of

all owning it Long considered one of the planetrsquos most precious and desired metals gold has grown heavily in value over the last several years and it appears more and more are trying to get their hands on it every single day

Something else is growing as wellhellip Bitcoin Often regarded as Americarsquos most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin has jumped heavily in value over the last few months spiking from $230 to nearly $350 Unlike gold which exists in solid physical form Bitcoin exists in ones and zeros binary coding that travels through the blockchain the technology that makes Bitcoin transactions possible between users and respective merchants

BITGOLD A MODERN REVOLUTION IN FINANCEBY NICK MARINOFF

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 33

Itrsquos interesting to witness nearly equal popularity rising for two different things that ultimately serve the same purpose and share similar goals Both are designed to enhance the world of finance Both can rise in value and both have the ability to make someone rich overnighthellip So what if we could combine the two What significant differences could there be if Bitcoin and gold were fused into one entity

Well itrsquos already been done Say hello to BitGold an early startup company stationed in Toronto Canada BitGold aims to offer international services for people and businesses to send payments and hold savings with physical gold (2) The company was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb Both have a long history in the financial sector with Sebag previously serving as the Founder and Managing Principal of Braavos Capital (an international private investment organization) and the Chairman of Natural Resource Holdings an investment company involved with natural resource assets (3) Josh Crumb was previously the Senior Metals Strategist at Goldman Sachs (4)

The company alleges that gold bullion is ldquothe worldrsquos oldest asset class and the centuryrsquos best performing currencyrdquo (5) According to BitGoldrsquos website their mission is

ldquohellipTo make gold accessible and useful in digital payments and secure savingshellip Wersquore advancing the digital payments revolution by helping people securely acquire store and now spend gold with unprecedented simplicity BitGold accounts are free and can be opened in minutes We provide users with a secure vault account to purchase and hold gold the ability to make and receive instant gold payments and a prepaid card for spending gold at traditional points of sale Through our network of ATMs customers can fund their accounts with local-currencyrdquo (4)

Present investors backing BitGold include Dundee Capital Markets GMP Securities and Sandstorm Gold although the initial investor in the company was Soros Brothers Investment which is presently run by Alexander Soros the son of Hungarian business magnate George Soros (2)

2015 has been a big year for the company CNBC has stated that BitGold currently serves over 100000 active customers and the platform stores approximately 276 kilograms of bullion within its walls Thatrsquos nearly $11 million total and over $100 per active user (6) In May BitGold began trading on the TSX Venture exchange in Canada and announced the purchase of GoldMoney worth nearly $52 million in Canadian dollars (7)

In June the company made citizens of the United States very happy with the following announcement

ldquoUS residents can sign up on the BitGold platform and buy sell or redeem gold using BitGoldrsquos Aurum payment and settlement technology US residents will also have access to the BitGold mobile app and a prepaid card when these features launch over the coming weeksrdquo (7)

The platform offers a number of products and services beneficial to any gold-lover across the country As the above quote suggests BitGold offers whatrsquos known as Aurum the gold-settlement technology thatrsquos compliant with several US financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase Wells Fargo Citi Bank of America US Bank Fidelity Capital One and Charles Schwab Users with an account at any one of these nationally-recognized banks can instantly redeem gold or authorize gold deposits The transactions thereby increase in safety and automation Users also receive a bonus in that they are usually able to avoid bank wire fees through the process (7)

Using the BitGold app users may also send and receive gold as payments to and from any other user or seller without paying any transaction fees They can even send gold to non-BitGold users via their mobile phones or through a simple email message The company also issues prepaid debit cards allowing users to spend funds directly from their BitGold accounts The card is compatible with ATMs so that users may withdraw local currency (7)

Lastly the company issues special ten-gram gold cubes worth approximately $380 each at press time Users may redeem these cubes on the BitGold platform and may demand physical delivery when they see fit (7)

34 JANUARY 2016

Vice-president of communications and PR Emily Cornelius explained in an email that they have no ldquostereotypicalrdquo user of the companyrsquos services but that there are predominantly three main use cases

ldquoThe traditional gold investor will gravitate to BitGold because our gold is unprecedentedly priced within 1 of spot price and we offer free storage in a Brinks vault of their choice globallyhellip The second use case is the user who seeks a more stable currency for their national savings outside of their potentially volatile local fiat currencyhellip Gold has gained over 3000 vs the US Dollar which is arguably the worldrsquos strongest fiat money Gold may seem to go up down or sideways but in reality and when viewed over long timescales such as the avg human lifecycle ndash it always riseshellip Gold has been rising against 9 of the worldrsquos most famous and well-known currencies almost every year since 2000hellip Thirdly BitGold is a powerful payments platformhellip BitGold allows a user to send an invoice for your labor to someone else anywhere in the world which the recipient can pay using any traditional payment methodhellip This gold is vaulted anywhere even outside their jurisdictionhellip This is important as it allows users to achieve upward mobility that are otherwise hindered by localized issues that are exogenous to their personal journeyrdquo

Cornelius also explained that the company offers ldquoall the benefits and efficiencies of a service like PayPal and a MasterCard but with a universally accepted more stable store of valuerdquo

Presently regulation over BitGold appears to be fairly non-existent BitGold does not list which regulators hold jurisdiction over its staff and operations nor do they list regulatory information regarding their trade practices (7) In fact co-founder Roy Sebag has stated in the past that he believes BitGold is not a bank nor does it serve as a financial institution in any traditional sense as it does not engage in fractional-reserve banking (2)According to page 20 of the companyrsquos initial public filing BitGold is not

ldquohellipEligible to be registered with the Financial

Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canadahellip There can be no assurance that BitGoldrsquos services or Internet platform will be acceptable to foreign regulatory bodies Foreign governments may seek to restrict access to BitGoldrsquos services block BitGoldrsquos website or impose other restrictions that may affect BitGoldrsquos ability to offer service to new or existing users in those for an extended period of time or indefinitelyrdquo (8)

Despite this it was confirmed in July of 2015 that the company did offer its services under the Canadian Bailment Law (9) This occurs in situations where physical personal property is transferred from one person (the bailor) to another for safekeeping and doing so does not require the binding notion of a written contract (10)

Presently the company employs 26 people including Sebag and Crumb Other notable BitGold personnel include Chief Executive Officer Darrell MacMullin Chief Technology Officer Alessandro Premoli Lead Mobile Engineer Paul Mennega and Team Manager Karman Lee The company also employs several vice-presidents five software engineers and two compliance officers (4)

It can be said that BitGold has accomplished quite a bit in less than two years Itrsquos likely such a volatile company has some big plans waiting in the wings for 2016 but Emily Cornelius isnrsquot dropping any hints as to what they could be

ldquoWe have a number of new features services and products cominghellip Yoursquoll have to wait and seerdquo

BitGold is steadily making its mark It has the backing the funds the technology and above all the drive Put all these items together (and add a touch of flair and public desire) and itrsquos clear that BitGold has what it takes to make the world of finance its own

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 4: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

4 JANUARY 2016

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 5

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Melbourne Florida (December 26 2015) ndash CMO Inc (COEPTIS) has launched a beta of its Global Standard System which is an alternative global payment system utilizing next generation technologies mobilizing the value of gold for electronic transfer of value on the Internet

The System resolves shortcomings that plague online payments by providing substantial benefits to both businesses and consumers while achieving high levels of consumer protection and privacy The patent pending System is secure easily accessible makes e commerce more available to customers not adequately served by traditional payment systems and brings greater efficiency to payment settlement in an increasingly global economy The System currency (AUG) is 100 reserved by physical gold Payment occurs on a centralized settlement platform which is universally accessible to customers Payments are very efficient settle immediately and are final The cost of a transaction is lower than alternatives The system has strong controls for anti-money laundering and consumer protection and meets or exceeds all federal state and international regulatory requirements

COEPTIS is licensed or otherwise authorized to operate in US states representing nearly two-thirds the US population and will be obtaining approvals in the remaining states as well as Canada and Europe before expanding to a larger global market The current beta launch is designed to manage the expected high early growth of the System Sign-up is currently by invitation only with priority to persons in states in which COEPTIS is currently licensed A request for an invitation can be made at wwwcoeptiscom Full launch of the System is expected soon

Bill Cunningham CEO of COEPTIS said ldquoWe are very excited to bring this System to the market Our team has worked hard to ensure we bring great benefit to consumers and businesses while also providing the protections required by these consumers and our regulatory authoritiesrdquo

COEPTIS recognizes that global payments are too slow uncertain costly and inefficient globally and that there is a growing concern with identity protection COEPTIS was started in 2013 to build out intellectual property to address these market concerns while also addressing public policy and regulatory concerns with payments COEPTIS is headquartered in Melbourne FL

For further information contactinfocoeptiscom855-673-7176 (701)

6 JANUARY 2016

WebMoney Gets a EU License and Expands its Presence in The European Union

November 18 2015

The global settlement system WebMoney Transfer has entered into partnership with a new guarantor licensed to issue e-money within the European Union

The FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) license granted to WebMoney Europe Ltd with head offices in Cambridge United Kingdom has secured the company`s status as an e-money issuer in all countries within the European Economic Area As a result the Euro purses within the system are acquiring the status of e-money and are in full compliance with the legislation of the European Union

As a part of the expansion of its presence in Europe in the recent months WebMoney has significantly increased the number of top-up points for Euro purses as well as the number of online stores accepting WebMoney The WebMoney technical support team is already providing support for Euro purses while the services within the system are being adapted for the European users

Currently the system is used by over 29 million users worldwide with around 10 thousand users registering with the system daily WebMoney is accepted as a payment method by more than 100 thousand online stores globally

Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has licensed WebMoney Europe Ltd as an emoney issuer in all European Union countries With more than 29 million currency users WebMoney is accepted by more than 100 thousand online stores around the world

An announcement from BitGold December 31 2015

The Request Gold Payment tool is now live allowing users to earn gold onto the network by sending payment requests for their time labour goods or services

We believe that transferring value online should be easy instant and secure BitGold allows you to send a payment request to other individuals anywhere in the world ndash with or without a BitGold account with the resulting payment settled in gold to your private vault account

Someone working in Greece and parting with their services can be earning gold in Canada London Zurich or elsewhere

Just log in to your BitGold Dashboard and select the Request Payment tab to get started It is as easy as entering the contact name email address or mobile number and the amount you are requesting Once you have sent a Request for Payment the recipient will receive an email that will prompt them to open their BitGold account if they havent already fund their account and complete the payment request

Unfortunately at this time US users will not be able to send receive or request gold payments on the platform Additionally gold received into the Dubai vault may be restricted from some functionality Contact the company for more details

copy Copyright 2015 BitGold Inc 334 Adelaide St W Toronto ON M5V 1R4 All rights reserved

Request Gold Payment Tool Has Officially Launched on the BitGold Platform

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 7

October 26 2015

Coinify and DigixGlobal Private Limited (Singapore UEN 201479386E) are proud to announce a formal business partnership All bitcoin payments going through Digix will solely be processed through Coinify

This represents a significant initiative between Ethereum and Bitcoin based companies demonstrating how both blockchain ecosystems can work together The partnership between an Ethereum based company and a Bitcoin based company is one of the industryrsquos first signifying that both ecosystems can grow together Bitcoin users can now easily own Ethereum digital assets apart from Ether

Digix allows users to purchase assets like investment grade gold bullion with bitcoin thereafter facilitating physical asset issuances on the blockchain These digital keys issued on the Ethereum blockchain will have the same transactional utility of Bitcoin and can also be made fungible into divisible digital tokens called ldquo Digix Tokens rdquo representative of grams of gold allocated 11

Morten Bebe Coinifyrsquos sales manager believes that this is a significant step in future collaboration with other blockchains ldquo Digixrsquos unique and decentralized approach in the creation of gold backed tokens will help promote the crypto ecosystemrdquo

ldquoWe are very excited to be working with Coinifyrdquo says Kai the CEO Co-Founder of Digix ldquoWe have looked at other payment processors and found Coinify

Coinify and DigixGlobal Announce Bitcoin Partnership in Singapore

Coinify is the first bitcoin payment processor to partner with an Ethereum based company processing bitcoin payments for crypto-assets on Ethereum

to be the best in terms of service reliability and willingness to innovate with young companies in Asia Now end users can easily purchase crypto assets on Ethereum with bitcoinrdquo Kai adds ldquoWe have always been open to collaborations and100 thousand online stores globally

About CoinifyCoinify ApS drives mainstream adoption of digital currencies such as Bitcoin for merchants and consumers Merchants benefit from Coinifyrsquos Payment Service (PSP) enabling free instant settlements in a fraud-free and chargeback-free blockchain payment environment while customers get access to secure one-click payments that reveal no sensitive information Coinify is backed by a multi-million dollar capital injection from SEED Capital (funded by the Danish government) and Accelerace and is the leading European digital currency market player For more information about Coinify visit their website at coinifycom

About DigixDigix is an asset ownership certification and tokeniization platform for physical assets Users who purchase or store gold bullion with Digixrsquos participating suppliers and custodial vaults will be able to own digital assets on the blockchain and create divisible gold tokens that have the same transactional utility and functionality as bitcoin For more information please contact

Coinify ApSHerlev Hovedgade 15B 12730 Herlev Greater Copenhagen Denmark+45 3693 4994Marketing and PR - Lenka HudakovaEmail lhucoinifycom

DigixGlobal Pte Ltd10 Anson Road 05-17International Plaza S079903 Singapore+1-917-267-8977Co-Founder amp CEO - Kai Cheng ChngEmail kcchngdgxiohttpdgxio

8 JANUARY 2016

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 9

Who should have the power to issue money

It seems likely that a great many people probably havenrsquot thought about this question ever After all since the beginning of recorded history various types of governments including republics kings priest-kings and dictatorships have issued money

If you open up your wallet you probably find some paper money in there issued by some government or on behalf of a central bank that is authorized by some government Very likely you also have some credit or debit cards issued by banks or credit unions but these are only corporate extensions of governments so not really that different Some people have gift cards from various companies but these are corporations therefore creatures of the state Moreover most gift cards are denominated in national currencies

My own wallet has a couple of Ron Helwigrsquos Shire silver and gold wire cards too These are laminated cards which contain thin strips of silver in one case and a length of thin gold wire in the other In other words they are actual gold and silver visibly embedded in the clear plastic laminate of the card

If you are fond of history you may have heard of the tendency of Roman emperors to debase their gold and silver coinage and the tendency of the Byzantine emperors to stick with the good stuff You may have heard that Revolutionary France was beset with inflated paper money called the assignat by the national assembly and the mandat by the Directorate ndash the same Directorate that used guillotines in its search for peace and justice and discovered only baskets of severed heads and rivers of blood

You may know that one of Napoleonrsquos secrets to popularity was restoring gold and silver coins to circulation and melting the printer plates used to make the paper money You may be aware of the adventures of Marco Polo with paper money in China under Kublai Khan And you are probably aware of the creation in late 1913 of a Federal Reserve that gradually replaced gold and silver coins in the United States with book entry and paper money along with coins made out of base metals like zinc

If you arenrsquot fond of history essentially nothing in the preceding two paragraphs means anything to you Which

The Power To Issue MoneyBY JIM DAVIDSON

AH TAKE THE CASH AND LET THE CREDIT GONOR HEED THE RUMBLE OF A DISTANT DRUM

~EDWARD FITZGERALD THE RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

10 JANUARY 2016

might be ok if you werenrsquot living in interesting times As it turns out Thucydides was correct in believing that the future if it does not mirror the past at least reflects it And of course Santayana says that if you wonrsquot learn the lessons of history you may be doomed to repeat them

Given that there is currently a sovereign debt crisis that has turned Greece into an economic wasteland plunged Chinarsquos markets down and which is spreading to many other countries in the coming months and years and given that the money you have in your wallet is only backed by the full faith and credit of the United States which has not exactly shown itself to be credit-worthy or faithful you may find yourself very interested in the question who should issue money

Your PowerNow if you believe as I do that the only just form of government is one that derives its powers from the unanimous consent of the governed you should recognize who has the power to issue money Since governments are issuing money and since all the powers that governments have must have been either seized from the people or delegated to the government with the consent of the people it follows naturally that the power to issue money comes originally from the people It is also my view that powers are not collective in nature but like rights are individual in character In other words you have the power to issue money

Whether that comes as a surprise to you or not it is clear from simply looking around that not everyone is issuing money If each individual has the power to issue money why isnrsquot everyone doing so

It turns out that one of the key features of money is acceptability It matters a great deal less if you issue money than it does if someone else accepts it In order to generate demand for its currency your national government accepts that currency for payment of taxes The fact that there are a great many taxes not only at the national level but also at state and local levels means that there are lots of places where the national governmentrsquos currency is accepted Not only is it accepted by tax authorities it is also accepted by merchants because they know they can use it to pay their taxes It is therefore accepted by those who

supply merchants with products so they can pay their taxes and so forth

So the problems of central bank policies the problems with the economy the problems with many government policies are to put it simply your fault You choose to use the national currency of your country You choose not to accept alternatives even though alternatives exist and have existed in the case of gold and silver coins for thousands of years You choose to engage in trade and commerce for fiat money which means that the problems of fiat money the problems of central planning the difficulties you face as a result of errors in what the Federal Reserve and other monetary manipulators do are your problems They are caused by your choices just as much as by the choices of hundreds of millions of others in your country and billions around the world You have the power to change this situation directly to your own advantage Does that seem harsh

Taxation Is TheftMany years ago at the end of the last century I met a member of the Somena First Nation up in Canada I was attending the world congress of the International Society for Individual Liberty at the time Meaghan Walker-Champion explained to me that she had spoken to the elders of her community and they had many long talks among themselves thinking about what the Somena word for ldquotax collectorrdquo would be They concluded that the word in their language was the same as the word for ldquothiefrdquo

Writing at the end of World War Two EC Riegel reached the same conclusion He noted that money is extremely useful in trade and commerce and that the issue power properly belongs to those engaged in free enterprise Since governments are not engaged in buying and selling but only in stealing from others they are entirely inappropriate to the purpose of issuing money He makes these and many other excellent arguments against state socialism in A New Approach to Freedom My friend Spencer MacCallum helped organise EC Riegelrsquos papers An authorized free and complete version of A New Approach to Freedom is available on the web here

To be continued on page 37

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 11

12 JANUARY 2016

SBC - What Is Silent BitcoinSilent Bitcoin (or SBC) is a digital voucher currency 100 backed by bitcoins This means that 10 SBC equals 10 BTC When a user spends BTC to a wallet hash controlled by SilentVault they receive in exchange a voucher (a cryptographically signed XML object) for the same amount in SBC Thereafter the SBC voucher value circulates privately off-chain between SilentVault wallets until a holder redeems their SBC voucher for BTC At that point the SBC value is decirculated and a BTC spend is made from SilentVaultrsquos reserve to the address hash designated by the user who surrendered the voucher (Which is probably but doesnrsquot have to be the userrsquos own)

Using SBCThe Voucher-Safe network operates differently from the Bitcoin network in several important respects

Silencing BitcoinSilentVault lets you spend and receive bitcoin (and litecoin) off the blockchain entirely and move your coins to and from regular bitcoin addresses whenever you want Our wallets are multi-asset and can hold any supported asset types side-by-side

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 13

bull A Voucher Publisher (or VP) signs vouchers and clears voucher payments to prevent double-spending While each VP is centralized the protocol supports multiple Publishers This means that payments clear in seconds with no need to wait for transaction confirmations (Note however that a BTC spend to purchase a SBC voucher does require 6 confirmations before the SBC voucher will be issued)

bull Input vouchers are always destroyed in every transaction and replaced with output vouchers bearing fresh unique serial numbers This means that unlike with the blockchain no public transaction history exists balances are private and no ldquotaintrdquo can attach to coins (Taint violates fungibility a fundamental characteristic of sound money) This represents a vast privacy improvement over regular BTC spends and a lesser improvement even over ldquocoin laundryrdquo services

bull A payee must pick up their voucher payment within the 1-7 days designated by the payer If the payee does not do so the payment expires and becomes recoverable by the payer (indefinitely) This makes it impossible to lose value by spending it to a ldquodead walletrdquo

bull Receipts are generated by the payee not by the Publisher This prevents the clearing VP from needing to record transaction history or knowing anything about the private message context accompanying the payment The VP also never sees a user IP address

In short it is much faster more convenient more private and generally much safer to exchange SBC value between SilentVault

wallets than to perform ldquonaked spendsrdquo between BTC wallets on the blockchain (Though naturally it is also more expensive privacy being worth something)

Trading SBCExchanges in and out of SBC fromto BTC are performed via the ldquoExchangesrdquo tab in the SilentVault wallet by buying or selling SBC vouchers respectively These sales and repurchases are carried out with the exchange itself mdash meaning SilentVault is an agent for the Issuer of SBC SBC vouchers can also be traded to other users in exchange for vouchers representing other asset types (eg USD or EUR silver or gold etc) Users can specify the asset types they will accept and offer discounts or demand premiums The SVX (SilentVault Exchange) acts as a third-party escrow agent allowing all trades to be fully anonymous and secure You cannot know with whom you are trading and no KYC of any kind is performable by SilentVault You are your wallet keys period

Fee ScheduleThe fees currently charged by SilentVault are as follows

bull Purchase SBC with BTC 00 (free) minimum quantity 001 BTC

bull Redeem SBC for BTC 00 (free) minimum quantity 002 BTC

bull Make SBC voucher spend 00015 BTCbull Receive SBC voucher spend 00006 BTC

(first one is 00002)bull Escrow exchange 10 of amount

minimum quantity 002 BTC

httpssilentvaultcom

14 JANUARY 2016

YOUR PRIVACY MATTERSEacutelan Turbo VPN This VPN service is bundled with VoIP and private audiovideo calling via SIP plus unlimited bandwidth for surfing and streaming

Our Eacutelan Turbo VPN service is a standard single-hop VPN but with selectable exit proxies in Panama the USA the UK France and onto the Tor network As a subscriber yoursquoll also get an SIP extension that lets you place private audio and video calls to other users Unlike with Skype these calls can be encrypted end-to-end to conceal their content in transit And because yoursquore on our VPN the call metadata is also protected We also supply your own private Mumble server as an inexpensive add-on There are no bandwidth limitations with this package Surf and talk all you want

Eacutelan Max Security VPN This VPN service is bundled with email addresses and aliases 1 GB file storage plus 25 GB of monthly bandwidth

Our Eacutelan Max Security VPN service is a premiere multi-hop VPN which lives up to its name Multi-hop means that traffic flows between multiple points along its route from the entry gateway to the exit nodes something like changing planes a couple of times during an extended trip Inside the network internal routes are varied traffic is mixed alongside that of other users and random delays get inserted to defeat traffic analysis This technique known as ldquoserver cascadesrdquo same features and benefits as provides many of the Tor (Given that the Deep State agencies in various countries are now running most of the Tor exit nodes it might be even better) As a subscriber yoursquoll also get private email addresses and email aliases plus 1 GB of very secure file storage Because of its multi-hop architecture this VPN is less suitable for streaming applications and bandwidth usage is limited to 25 GB per month However you can also buy top-up packs to add more bandwidth

Elegantly Convenient No special hardware required

bull Software-only solutionbull Both individual and multi-user packages are availablebull Simple to install and use

Support for Windows Linux Mac Android and iOS httpelanvpnnet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 15

Wersquore long-time industry professionals with over a combined forty years in the IT industry Wersquore also committed advocates of human liberty and personal privacy With all the global spy networks hacks and data mining in the world today internet privacy is under attack as never beforeWe agree with E C Riegel who wrote

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and self-asserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

16 JANUARY 2016

What does Digix doWe are a Smart Asset company that allows anyone to securely send and receive ownerships of assets for eventual redemption on the blockchain The first asset listed is Gold and other assets such as diamonds will be available in the near future

What are Proof of Asset (PoA) CertificatesProof of Asset (PoA) Certificates prove the existence of gold through the entire chain of custody from the supplier to the custodial vault They are automatically created when a user purchases and stores gold at our participating custodial vaults It consists of 3 digital signatures from 3 independent entities vendor custodian and auditor Through this process a PoA card is issued representing your asset ownership on the blockchain This PoA card can then be sent and received by anyone on the Ethereum Blockchain for eventual redemption PoA certificates can also be sent to a Minter DAE to create DGX Gold tokens for fungibility

What are Digix Gold TokensDigix Gold tokens can only be created when a user sends in their PoA Certificates in exchange for them on a 11 weight basis on the Digix Minter DAE Each Digix Gold token represents 1g of gold For example if a PoA Certificate represents the ownership of a 100g gold bar it can be sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for 100 DGX tokens which will be deposited in your ethereum wallet

How do I know if these tokens or PoA certificates are safe from fraud or duplicationAll tokens and PoA certificates are created on the Ethereum Blockchain a public ledger where information stored can never be manipulated or counterfeited Our smart asset service can only exist because of blockchain technology

Where are the physical gold bars storedPhysical gold is kept with a participating custodian Each PoA Certificate will specify the name and location of the custodian that holds the gold The first participating custodian on the Digix Gold platform is Malca-Amit which maintains a high security storage facility at the Singapore Freeport

Why SingaporeDigixGlobal is incorporated in low crime and politically stable Singapore Investment Precious Metals are exempted from GST locally so you are purchasing gold at the lowest premiums available in the world

bull There are also no permits required to import or export precious metalsbull Singapore also has no jurisdictional relations with USA or Europebull We will only release your personal information by order of the Court of Law in Singapore

Frequently AskedQuestions

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 17

A Sneak Peek at the NewDigixGlobal User Interface

It will be available to the public in January 2016 for multiple operating systems and mobile platforms This software will manage client transactions for PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates Digix Asset Tokens and Ether tokens

DigixGlobal can create a digital asset certificate for any storable physical property Future versions of this software will include additional digital assets such as diamonds

When the interface opens users are presented with the main dashboard menu as shown below Access to all primary services and tools is available from this opening screen

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEVendor Information - Custodian Information - Auditor Information

To ensure quality and authenticity participating gold vendors only sell LBMA approved gold bars Gold purchased from an LBMA certified refinery is globally known for its quality These bullion sources guarantee the authenticity and purity of every single gold bar used on the Digix network Buying gold from the marketplace is the first step in the process of generating a PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificate

18 JANUARY 2016

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEShows gold bullion available for purchase as a digital gold certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 19

20 JANUARY 2016

GOLD TOKENS AND ETHER WALLETFrom this area a user can send Digix Gold Tokens or send Ether

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 21

The transaction hash for a completed certificate purchase is also available with just one click

(see below Raw Transaction Data Transaction Hash)

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets Individual users can create Digix Gold and Asset tokens by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoATM Certificate) to the Minter DAE It is a way to represent gold bars as units of tokens on the Ethereum Blockchain database One Digix Gold token represents 1 gram of gold

(Q) How do I know that there are actual gold bars backing PoA certificates or Digix Gold tokens

All material documents from the Proof of Asset protocol are made available via Swarm - Ethereumrsquos distributed file sharing This would mean that all assaying certificates custodial receipts of deposits and independent auditor documents from the entire chain of custody will be uploaded for public viewing to ascertain the authenticity of all PoA certificates and Digix Gold tokens Each entity in the chain of custody will also digitally sign on our PoA Certificate We only deal with vendors custodians and auditors that have passed our due diligence and that are world renowned with a history of excellence Private audits are also available for added assurance

The Ethereum platform allows users to create applications that run on a decentralized peer-to-peer network of computers without any central control and free from human interruption or corruption Vitalik Buterin invented Ethereum in late 2013 it was formally described by Dr Gavin Wood in 2014 then developed as an open source software project under the GNU Lesser General Public License It was officially launched on July 30 2015 The project is maintained by the Ethereum core developer team (ETHDEV) under the guidance of the non-profit Ethereum Foundation which had raised 31591 Bitcoins during their 2014 crowdsale

22 JANUARY 2016

From this page users may also view the assetrsquos history of trading within the Digix system

GOLD ASSET HISTORY

PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates

are Ethereum smart contracts

that provides a legally and

cryptographically binding

determination of ownership of

physical gold or other assets currently under

the guardianship of a participating custodian on the

Digix decentralized platform It

also certifies the agreement

between the user the vendor the custodian and

the independent auditor

The PoAtrade provides a complete history of the chain of control from the vendor

the custodian and all audit reports This proof guarantees that the purchase of the gold by the user its storage by the

custodian and regular inspection by the auditor has taken place

PoA Certificates can be transferred or sent to any Ethereum account sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or

Gold tokens or redeemed from the Recast DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or Gold

Tokens

Copies of the orignal signed documents are included as a part of the certificatersquos registration in the blockchain

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 23

24 JANUARY 2016

GOLD EXPLORER RECASTER (Above)

The Digix Minter DAE recognizes all valid Digix PoAtrade Certificates and can accept them from a user in exchange for divisible Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens The rules of the Digix platform dictates that only the Digix Minter has the authority through the request of the owner of a Digix PoAtrade certificate to allow that owner to issue their own Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens in exchange for the PoAtrade Certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 25

The interface conveniently walks customers through the online purchase of a Digital Gold PoA Certificate

26 JANUARY 2016

A completed purchase of the digital gold certificate representing this bar

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 27

TOOLS AND SETTINGS

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

28 JANUARY 2016

RESTORE WALLET

In addition to its security features users can configure the Aegis Vault to assign beneficiaries set the time-based distribution of funds or assets and delegate a power of attorney to another individual or a group of people

Digix is committed to bringing Ethereum use to the mainstream and the availability of a secure wallet is essential for realizing this goal

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 29

GENERATE A REDEMPTION KEY

(Q) What is the Digix Recaster Smart Contract

Digix Recaster Smart Contract allows the

conversion of Digix Gold tokens to a PoA card The

PoA card can be sent or received on the blockchain representing an ownership

of an entire gold bar or be used for redemption of

the physical gold bar at our office For example if you have 100 DGX tokens

representing 100g of weight in gold you can exchange

for a PoA card representing a 100g gold cast bar at

Digix This PoA card can be sent and received on the

Ethereum blockchain or be used to schedule a local

pick-up of the physical gold bar at Digix redemption

center in Singapore

You can currently recast into PoA certificates of

100g (100 DGX) or 1000g (1000 DGX) gold cast bar

denominations

30 JANUARY 2016

(Q) What about the Digix audit processWe have four types of audits at Digix

1 PRIVATE AUDITS Clients are welcome to come to our certified custodial vaults in Singapore to inspect your gold bars in a highly private and secure environment

2 EXTERNAL AUDITS We have engaged Inspectorate Singapore (wwwinspectoratecom) to audit our inventory and match them off with customersrsquo holdings at DGX We will hold such inspections at least twice a year

3 CUSTODIAL AUDITS Our certified custodians will provide a physical certification of proof that your gold bars are stored safely in their vaults They will take photographs of your serialized bars per request basis and have them keyed into their inventory management systems Some of our certified custodiansrsquo reputation are also on the line to provide us with their appraisal and storage services as they have to answer to their shareholders as a publicly listed company in Singapore

4 INTERNAL AUDITS We have patented a certification process called Proof of Asset (PoA) where auditors sign on the existence of Gold in our PoA certificate The digital certificate is then uploaded onto the Ethereum Blockchain

(Q) Are there KYCAML requirementsAll users who wish to redeem PoA certificates or Digix Gold Tokens for physical gold bars will have to go through KYC requirements at the pickup The gold bars will only be available for pick up at our office location in Singapore We must ensure that DigixGlobal and participating organizations are protected from any potential liabilities resulting from government prosecution and asset seizures so we ensure that we comply fully with regulatory requirements for Know your customer (KYC) and Anti-money laundering (AML)

ADDRESS BOOK

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 31

SilentVault is a secure private online wallet for making untraceable p2p payments

Unlike other crypto currency wallets SilentVault wallets support heterogeneous asset types such as fiat dollars euros metals gold and silver and crypto coins bitcoin litecoin SilentVault provides anonymous off blockchain payments made in bitcoin and litecoin It also features an integrated p2p escrow exchange where users can trade anonymously among different asset types with other users such as exchanging bitcoins for silver

The SilentVault Spark client is a fully functional Jabber chat client that is a branded and updated version of Spark Since Spark supports a plugin architecture our wallet client is implemented as a plugin You can obtain the SilentVault Spark client with plugin from this page You can also find the source code for both the plugin and SilentVaults customizations to the Spark source base elsewhere on this site A tutorial on SVSpark is here

The SilentVault wallet webstart client is a stand alone program that you can install from within your browser Like the SilentVault Spark client it communicates with the Voucher Safe payment network using extensions to the XMPP protocol This type of communication makes economic transactions indistinguishable from ordinary encrypted instant messaging traffic and avoids any need to run within an insecure browser environment or rely on web domains All client source code is published on this site and while you can run a prefabricated client you are also invited to build your own from source

You are also invited to develop applications for our integrated marketplaces that appear within SilentVault wallets A full API is available for your use as a development tool Please contact our team for details

The SilentVault technology is based on Voucher Safe which was developed 2008 2011 Voucher Safe is also the core technology of the Digital Cash Alliance

httpssilentvaultcom

32 JANUARY 2016

ldquoI love go-o-o-o-ldrdquo-Austin Powers in Goldmember

Not surprisingly most people feel the same

According to the Wall Street Journal gold prices and safe-haven demand in Asia have been skyrocketing since mid-November (1) proving that you donrsquot have to be a sea-faring pirate or a squire in a kingrsquos castle to enjoy its natural glare beauty and above all its ability to stimulate wealth

Since the days of the California Gold Rush people have enjoyed panning for it selling it and most of

all owning it Long considered one of the planetrsquos most precious and desired metals gold has grown heavily in value over the last several years and it appears more and more are trying to get their hands on it every single day

Something else is growing as wellhellip Bitcoin Often regarded as Americarsquos most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin has jumped heavily in value over the last few months spiking from $230 to nearly $350 Unlike gold which exists in solid physical form Bitcoin exists in ones and zeros binary coding that travels through the blockchain the technology that makes Bitcoin transactions possible between users and respective merchants

BITGOLD A MODERN REVOLUTION IN FINANCEBY NICK MARINOFF

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 33

Itrsquos interesting to witness nearly equal popularity rising for two different things that ultimately serve the same purpose and share similar goals Both are designed to enhance the world of finance Both can rise in value and both have the ability to make someone rich overnighthellip So what if we could combine the two What significant differences could there be if Bitcoin and gold were fused into one entity

Well itrsquos already been done Say hello to BitGold an early startup company stationed in Toronto Canada BitGold aims to offer international services for people and businesses to send payments and hold savings with physical gold (2) The company was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb Both have a long history in the financial sector with Sebag previously serving as the Founder and Managing Principal of Braavos Capital (an international private investment organization) and the Chairman of Natural Resource Holdings an investment company involved with natural resource assets (3) Josh Crumb was previously the Senior Metals Strategist at Goldman Sachs (4)

The company alleges that gold bullion is ldquothe worldrsquos oldest asset class and the centuryrsquos best performing currencyrdquo (5) According to BitGoldrsquos website their mission is

ldquohellipTo make gold accessible and useful in digital payments and secure savingshellip Wersquore advancing the digital payments revolution by helping people securely acquire store and now spend gold with unprecedented simplicity BitGold accounts are free and can be opened in minutes We provide users with a secure vault account to purchase and hold gold the ability to make and receive instant gold payments and a prepaid card for spending gold at traditional points of sale Through our network of ATMs customers can fund their accounts with local-currencyrdquo (4)

Present investors backing BitGold include Dundee Capital Markets GMP Securities and Sandstorm Gold although the initial investor in the company was Soros Brothers Investment which is presently run by Alexander Soros the son of Hungarian business magnate George Soros (2)

2015 has been a big year for the company CNBC has stated that BitGold currently serves over 100000 active customers and the platform stores approximately 276 kilograms of bullion within its walls Thatrsquos nearly $11 million total and over $100 per active user (6) In May BitGold began trading on the TSX Venture exchange in Canada and announced the purchase of GoldMoney worth nearly $52 million in Canadian dollars (7)

In June the company made citizens of the United States very happy with the following announcement

ldquoUS residents can sign up on the BitGold platform and buy sell or redeem gold using BitGoldrsquos Aurum payment and settlement technology US residents will also have access to the BitGold mobile app and a prepaid card when these features launch over the coming weeksrdquo (7)

The platform offers a number of products and services beneficial to any gold-lover across the country As the above quote suggests BitGold offers whatrsquos known as Aurum the gold-settlement technology thatrsquos compliant with several US financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase Wells Fargo Citi Bank of America US Bank Fidelity Capital One and Charles Schwab Users with an account at any one of these nationally-recognized banks can instantly redeem gold or authorize gold deposits The transactions thereby increase in safety and automation Users also receive a bonus in that they are usually able to avoid bank wire fees through the process (7)

Using the BitGold app users may also send and receive gold as payments to and from any other user or seller without paying any transaction fees They can even send gold to non-BitGold users via their mobile phones or through a simple email message The company also issues prepaid debit cards allowing users to spend funds directly from their BitGold accounts The card is compatible with ATMs so that users may withdraw local currency (7)

Lastly the company issues special ten-gram gold cubes worth approximately $380 each at press time Users may redeem these cubes on the BitGold platform and may demand physical delivery when they see fit (7)

34 JANUARY 2016

Vice-president of communications and PR Emily Cornelius explained in an email that they have no ldquostereotypicalrdquo user of the companyrsquos services but that there are predominantly three main use cases

ldquoThe traditional gold investor will gravitate to BitGold because our gold is unprecedentedly priced within 1 of spot price and we offer free storage in a Brinks vault of their choice globallyhellip The second use case is the user who seeks a more stable currency for their national savings outside of their potentially volatile local fiat currencyhellip Gold has gained over 3000 vs the US Dollar which is arguably the worldrsquos strongest fiat money Gold may seem to go up down or sideways but in reality and when viewed over long timescales such as the avg human lifecycle ndash it always riseshellip Gold has been rising against 9 of the worldrsquos most famous and well-known currencies almost every year since 2000hellip Thirdly BitGold is a powerful payments platformhellip BitGold allows a user to send an invoice for your labor to someone else anywhere in the world which the recipient can pay using any traditional payment methodhellip This gold is vaulted anywhere even outside their jurisdictionhellip This is important as it allows users to achieve upward mobility that are otherwise hindered by localized issues that are exogenous to their personal journeyrdquo

Cornelius also explained that the company offers ldquoall the benefits and efficiencies of a service like PayPal and a MasterCard but with a universally accepted more stable store of valuerdquo

Presently regulation over BitGold appears to be fairly non-existent BitGold does not list which regulators hold jurisdiction over its staff and operations nor do they list regulatory information regarding their trade practices (7) In fact co-founder Roy Sebag has stated in the past that he believes BitGold is not a bank nor does it serve as a financial institution in any traditional sense as it does not engage in fractional-reserve banking (2)According to page 20 of the companyrsquos initial public filing BitGold is not

ldquohellipEligible to be registered with the Financial

Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canadahellip There can be no assurance that BitGoldrsquos services or Internet platform will be acceptable to foreign regulatory bodies Foreign governments may seek to restrict access to BitGoldrsquos services block BitGoldrsquos website or impose other restrictions that may affect BitGoldrsquos ability to offer service to new or existing users in those for an extended period of time or indefinitelyrdquo (8)

Despite this it was confirmed in July of 2015 that the company did offer its services under the Canadian Bailment Law (9) This occurs in situations where physical personal property is transferred from one person (the bailor) to another for safekeeping and doing so does not require the binding notion of a written contract (10)

Presently the company employs 26 people including Sebag and Crumb Other notable BitGold personnel include Chief Executive Officer Darrell MacMullin Chief Technology Officer Alessandro Premoli Lead Mobile Engineer Paul Mennega and Team Manager Karman Lee The company also employs several vice-presidents five software engineers and two compliance officers (4)

It can be said that BitGold has accomplished quite a bit in less than two years Itrsquos likely such a volatile company has some big plans waiting in the wings for 2016 but Emily Cornelius isnrsquot dropping any hints as to what they could be

ldquoWe have a number of new features services and products cominghellip Yoursquoll have to wait and seerdquo

BitGold is steadily making its mark It has the backing the funds the technology and above all the drive Put all these items together (and add a touch of flair and public desire) and itrsquos clear that BitGold has what it takes to make the world of finance its own

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 5: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 5

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Melbourne Florida (December 26 2015) ndash CMO Inc (COEPTIS) has launched a beta of its Global Standard System which is an alternative global payment system utilizing next generation technologies mobilizing the value of gold for electronic transfer of value on the Internet

The System resolves shortcomings that plague online payments by providing substantial benefits to both businesses and consumers while achieving high levels of consumer protection and privacy The patent pending System is secure easily accessible makes e commerce more available to customers not adequately served by traditional payment systems and brings greater efficiency to payment settlement in an increasingly global economy The System currency (AUG) is 100 reserved by physical gold Payment occurs on a centralized settlement platform which is universally accessible to customers Payments are very efficient settle immediately and are final The cost of a transaction is lower than alternatives The system has strong controls for anti-money laundering and consumer protection and meets or exceeds all federal state and international regulatory requirements

COEPTIS is licensed or otherwise authorized to operate in US states representing nearly two-thirds the US population and will be obtaining approvals in the remaining states as well as Canada and Europe before expanding to a larger global market The current beta launch is designed to manage the expected high early growth of the System Sign-up is currently by invitation only with priority to persons in states in which COEPTIS is currently licensed A request for an invitation can be made at wwwcoeptiscom Full launch of the System is expected soon

Bill Cunningham CEO of COEPTIS said ldquoWe are very excited to bring this System to the market Our team has worked hard to ensure we bring great benefit to consumers and businesses while also providing the protections required by these consumers and our regulatory authoritiesrdquo

COEPTIS recognizes that global payments are too slow uncertain costly and inefficient globally and that there is a growing concern with identity protection COEPTIS was started in 2013 to build out intellectual property to address these market concerns while also addressing public policy and regulatory concerns with payments COEPTIS is headquartered in Melbourne FL

For further information contactinfocoeptiscom855-673-7176 (701)

6 JANUARY 2016

WebMoney Gets a EU License and Expands its Presence in The European Union

November 18 2015

The global settlement system WebMoney Transfer has entered into partnership with a new guarantor licensed to issue e-money within the European Union

The FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) license granted to WebMoney Europe Ltd with head offices in Cambridge United Kingdom has secured the company`s status as an e-money issuer in all countries within the European Economic Area As a result the Euro purses within the system are acquiring the status of e-money and are in full compliance with the legislation of the European Union

As a part of the expansion of its presence in Europe in the recent months WebMoney has significantly increased the number of top-up points for Euro purses as well as the number of online stores accepting WebMoney The WebMoney technical support team is already providing support for Euro purses while the services within the system are being adapted for the European users

Currently the system is used by over 29 million users worldwide with around 10 thousand users registering with the system daily WebMoney is accepted as a payment method by more than 100 thousand online stores globally

Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has licensed WebMoney Europe Ltd as an emoney issuer in all European Union countries With more than 29 million currency users WebMoney is accepted by more than 100 thousand online stores around the world

An announcement from BitGold December 31 2015

The Request Gold Payment tool is now live allowing users to earn gold onto the network by sending payment requests for their time labour goods or services

We believe that transferring value online should be easy instant and secure BitGold allows you to send a payment request to other individuals anywhere in the world ndash with or without a BitGold account with the resulting payment settled in gold to your private vault account

Someone working in Greece and parting with their services can be earning gold in Canada London Zurich or elsewhere

Just log in to your BitGold Dashboard and select the Request Payment tab to get started It is as easy as entering the contact name email address or mobile number and the amount you are requesting Once you have sent a Request for Payment the recipient will receive an email that will prompt them to open their BitGold account if they havent already fund their account and complete the payment request

Unfortunately at this time US users will not be able to send receive or request gold payments on the platform Additionally gold received into the Dubai vault may be restricted from some functionality Contact the company for more details

copy Copyright 2015 BitGold Inc 334 Adelaide St W Toronto ON M5V 1R4 All rights reserved

Request Gold Payment Tool Has Officially Launched on the BitGold Platform

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 7

October 26 2015

Coinify and DigixGlobal Private Limited (Singapore UEN 201479386E) are proud to announce a formal business partnership All bitcoin payments going through Digix will solely be processed through Coinify

This represents a significant initiative between Ethereum and Bitcoin based companies demonstrating how both blockchain ecosystems can work together The partnership between an Ethereum based company and a Bitcoin based company is one of the industryrsquos first signifying that both ecosystems can grow together Bitcoin users can now easily own Ethereum digital assets apart from Ether

Digix allows users to purchase assets like investment grade gold bullion with bitcoin thereafter facilitating physical asset issuances on the blockchain These digital keys issued on the Ethereum blockchain will have the same transactional utility of Bitcoin and can also be made fungible into divisible digital tokens called ldquo Digix Tokens rdquo representative of grams of gold allocated 11

Morten Bebe Coinifyrsquos sales manager believes that this is a significant step in future collaboration with other blockchains ldquo Digixrsquos unique and decentralized approach in the creation of gold backed tokens will help promote the crypto ecosystemrdquo

ldquoWe are very excited to be working with Coinifyrdquo says Kai the CEO Co-Founder of Digix ldquoWe have looked at other payment processors and found Coinify

Coinify and DigixGlobal Announce Bitcoin Partnership in Singapore

Coinify is the first bitcoin payment processor to partner with an Ethereum based company processing bitcoin payments for crypto-assets on Ethereum

to be the best in terms of service reliability and willingness to innovate with young companies in Asia Now end users can easily purchase crypto assets on Ethereum with bitcoinrdquo Kai adds ldquoWe have always been open to collaborations and100 thousand online stores globally

About CoinifyCoinify ApS drives mainstream adoption of digital currencies such as Bitcoin for merchants and consumers Merchants benefit from Coinifyrsquos Payment Service (PSP) enabling free instant settlements in a fraud-free and chargeback-free blockchain payment environment while customers get access to secure one-click payments that reveal no sensitive information Coinify is backed by a multi-million dollar capital injection from SEED Capital (funded by the Danish government) and Accelerace and is the leading European digital currency market player For more information about Coinify visit their website at coinifycom

About DigixDigix is an asset ownership certification and tokeniization platform for physical assets Users who purchase or store gold bullion with Digixrsquos participating suppliers and custodial vaults will be able to own digital assets on the blockchain and create divisible gold tokens that have the same transactional utility and functionality as bitcoin For more information please contact

Coinify ApSHerlev Hovedgade 15B 12730 Herlev Greater Copenhagen Denmark+45 3693 4994Marketing and PR - Lenka HudakovaEmail lhucoinifycom

DigixGlobal Pte Ltd10 Anson Road 05-17International Plaza S079903 Singapore+1-917-267-8977Co-Founder amp CEO - Kai Cheng ChngEmail kcchngdgxiohttpdgxio

8 JANUARY 2016

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 9

Who should have the power to issue money

It seems likely that a great many people probably havenrsquot thought about this question ever After all since the beginning of recorded history various types of governments including republics kings priest-kings and dictatorships have issued money

If you open up your wallet you probably find some paper money in there issued by some government or on behalf of a central bank that is authorized by some government Very likely you also have some credit or debit cards issued by banks or credit unions but these are only corporate extensions of governments so not really that different Some people have gift cards from various companies but these are corporations therefore creatures of the state Moreover most gift cards are denominated in national currencies

My own wallet has a couple of Ron Helwigrsquos Shire silver and gold wire cards too These are laminated cards which contain thin strips of silver in one case and a length of thin gold wire in the other In other words they are actual gold and silver visibly embedded in the clear plastic laminate of the card

If you are fond of history you may have heard of the tendency of Roman emperors to debase their gold and silver coinage and the tendency of the Byzantine emperors to stick with the good stuff You may have heard that Revolutionary France was beset with inflated paper money called the assignat by the national assembly and the mandat by the Directorate ndash the same Directorate that used guillotines in its search for peace and justice and discovered only baskets of severed heads and rivers of blood

You may know that one of Napoleonrsquos secrets to popularity was restoring gold and silver coins to circulation and melting the printer plates used to make the paper money You may be aware of the adventures of Marco Polo with paper money in China under Kublai Khan And you are probably aware of the creation in late 1913 of a Federal Reserve that gradually replaced gold and silver coins in the United States with book entry and paper money along with coins made out of base metals like zinc

If you arenrsquot fond of history essentially nothing in the preceding two paragraphs means anything to you Which

The Power To Issue MoneyBY JIM DAVIDSON

AH TAKE THE CASH AND LET THE CREDIT GONOR HEED THE RUMBLE OF A DISTANT DRUM

~EDWARD FITZGERALD THE RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

10 JANUARY 2016

might be ok if you werenrsquot living in interesting times As it turns out Thucydides was correct in believing that the future if it does not mirror the past at least reflects it And of course Santayana says that if you wonrsquot learn the lessons of history you may be doomed to repeat them

Given that there is currently a sovereign debt crisis that has turned Greece into an economic wasteland plunged Chinarsquos markets down and which is spreading to many other countries in the coming months and years and given that the money you have in your wallet is only backed by the full faith and credit of the United States which has not exactly shown itself to be credit-worthy or faithful you may find yourself very interested in the question who should issue money

Your PowerNow if you believe as I do that the only just form of government is one that derives its powers from the unanimous consent of the governed you should recognize who has the power to issue money Since governments are issuing money and since all the powers that governments have must have been either seized from the people or delegated to the government with the consent of the people it follows naturally that the power to issue money comes originally from the people It is also my view that powers are not collective in nature but like rights are individual in character In other words you have the power to issue money

Whether that comes as a surprise to you or not it is clear from simply looking around that not everyone is issuing money If each individual has the power to issue money why isnrsquot everyone doing so

It turns out that one of the key features of money is acceptability It matters a great deal less if you issue money than it does if someone else accepts it In order to generate demand for its currency your national government accepts that currency for payment of taxes The fact that there are a great many taxes not only at the national level but also at state and local levels means that there are lots of places where the national governmentrsquos currency is accepted Not only is it accepted by tax authorities it is also accepted by merchants because they know they can use it to pay their taxes It is therefore accepted by those who

supply merchants with products so they can pay their taxes and so forth

So the problems of central bank policies the problems with the economy the problems with many government policies are to put it simply your fault You choose to use the national currency of your country You choose not to accept alternatives even though alternatives exist and have existed in the case of gold and silver coins for thousands of years You choose to engage in trade and commerce for fiat money which means that the problems of fiat money the problems of central planning the difficulties you face as a result of errors in what the Federal Reserve and other monetary manipulators do are your problems They are caused by your choices just as much as by the choices of hundreds of millions of others in your country and billions around the world You have the power to change this situation directly to your own advantage Does that seem harsh

Taxation Is TheftMany years ago at the end of the last century I met a member of the Somena First Nation up in Canada I was attending the world congress of the International Society for Individual Liberty at the time Meaghan Walker-Champion explained to me that she had spoken to the elders of her community and they had many long talks among themselves thinking about what the Somena word for ldquotax collectorrdquo would be They concluded that the word in their language was the same as the word for ldquothiefrdquo

Writing at the end of World War Two EC Riegel reached the same conclusion He noted that money is extremely useful in trade and commerce and that the issue power properly belongs to those engaged in free enterprise Since governments are not engaged in buying and selling but only in stealing from others they are entirely inappropriate to the purpose of issuing money He makes these and many other excellent arguments against state socialism in A New Approach to Freedom My friend Spencer MacCallum helped organise EC Riegelrsquos papers An authorized free and complete version of A New Approach to Freedom is available on the web here

To be continued on page 37

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 11

12 JANUARY 2016

SBC - What Is Silent BitcoinSilent Bitcoin (or SBC) is a digital voucher currency 100 backed by bitcoins This means that 10 SBC equals 10 BTC When a user spends BTC to a wallet hash controlled by SilentVault they receive in exchange a voucher (a cryptographically signed XML object) for the same amount in SBC Thereafter the SBC voucher value circulates privately off-chain between SilentVault wallets until a holder redeems their SBC voucher for BTC At that point the SBC value is decirculated and a BTC spend is made from SilentVaultrsquos reserve to the address hash designated by the user who surrendered the voucher (Which is probably but doesnrsquot have to be the userrsquos own)

Using SBCThe Voucher-Safe network operates differently from the Bitcoin network in several important respects

Silencing BitcoinSilentVault lets you spend and receive bitcoin (and litecoin) off the blockchain entirely and move your coins to and from regular bitcoin addresses whenever you want Our wallets are multi-asset and can hold any supported asset types side-by-side

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 13

bull A Voucher Publisher (or VP) signs vouchers and clears voucher payments to prevent double-spending While each VP is centralized the protocol supports multiple Publishers This means that payments clear in seconds with no need to wait for transaction confirmations (Note however that a BTC spend to purchase a SBC voucher does require 6 confirmations before the SBC voucher will be issued)

bull Input vouchers are always destroyed in every transaction and replaced with output vouchers bearing fresh unique serial numbers This means that unlike with the blockchain no public transaction history exists balances are private and no ldquotaintrdquo can attach to coins (Taint violates fungibility a fundamental characteristic of sound money) This represents a vast privacy improvement over regular BTC spends and a lesser improvement even over ldquocoin laundryrdquo services

bull A payee must pick up their voucher payment within the 1-7 days designated by the payer If the payee does not do so the payment expires and becomes recoverable by the payer (indefinitely) This makes it impossible to lose value by spending it to a ldquodead walletrdquo

bull Receipts are generated by the payee not by the Publisher This prevents the clearing VP from needing to record transaction history or knowing anything about the private message context accompanying the payment The VP also never sees a user IP address

In short it is much faster more convenient more private and generally much safer to exchange SBC value between SilentVault

wallets than to perform ldquonaked spendsrdquo between BTC wallets on the blockchain (Though naturally it is also more expensive privacy being worth something)

Trading SBCExchanges in and out of SBC fromto BTC are performed via the ldquoExchangesrdquo tab in the SilentVault wallet by buying or selling SBC vouchers respectively These sales and repurchases are carried out with the exchange itself mdash meaning SilentVault is an agent for the Issuer of SBC SBC vouchers can also be traded to other users in exchange for vouchers representing other asset types (eg USD or EUR silver or gold etc) Users can specify the asset types they will accept and offer discounts or demand premiums The SVX (SilentVault Exchange) acts as a third-party escrow agent allowing all trades to be fully anonymous and secure You cannot know with whom you are trading and no KYC of any kind is performable by SilentVault You are your wallet keys period

Fee ScheduleThe fees currently charged by SilentVault are as follows

bull Purchase SBC with BTC 00 (free) minimum quantity 001 BTC

bull Redeem SBC for BTC 00 (free) minimum quantity 002 BTC

bull Make SBC voucher spend 00015 BTCbull Receive SBC voucher spend 00006 BTC

(first one is 00002)bull Escrow exchange 10 of amount

minimum quantity 002 BTC

httpssilentvaultcom

14 JANUARY 2016

YOUR PRIVACY MATTERSEacutelan Turbo VPN This VPN service is bundled with VoIP and private audiovideo calling via SIP plus unlimited bandwidth for surfing and streaming

Our Eacutelan Turbo VPN service is a standard single-hop VPN but with selectable exit proxies in Panama the USA the UK France and onto the Tor network As a subscriber yoursquoll also get an SIP extension that lets you place private audio and video calls to other users Unlike with Skype these calls can be encrypted end-to-end to conceal their content in transit And because yoursquore on our VPN the call metadata is also protected We also supply your own private Mumble server as an inexpensive add-on There are no bandwidth limitations with this package Surf and talk all you want

Eacutelan Max Security VPN This VPN service is bundled with email addresses and aliases 1 GB file storage plus 25 GB of monthly bandwidth

Our Eacutelan Max Security VPN service is a premiere multi-hop VPN which lives up to its name Multi-hop means that traffic flows between multiple points along its route from the entry gateway to the exit nodes something like changing planes a couple of times during an extended trip Inside the network internal routes are varied traffic is mixed alongside that of other users and random delays get inserted to defeat traffic analysis This technique known as ldquoserver cascadesrdquo same features and benefits as provides many of the Tor (Given that the Deep State agencies in various countries are now running most of the Tor exit nodes it might be even better) As a subscriber yoursquoll also get private email addresses and email aliases plus 1 GB of very secure file storage Because of its multi-hop architecture this VPN is less suitable for streaming applications and bandwidth usage is limited to 25 GB per month However you can also buy top-up packs to add more bandwidth

Elegantly Convenient No special hardware required

bull Software-only solutionbull Both individual and multi-user packages are availablebull Simple to install and use

Support for Windows Linux Mac Android and iOS httpelanvpnnet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 15

Wersquore long-time industry professionals with over a combined forty years in the IT industry Wersquore also committed advocates of human liberty and personal privacy With all the global spy networks hacks and data mining in the world today internet privacy is under attack as never beforeWe agree with E C Riegel who wrote

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and self-asserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

16 JANUARY 2016

What does Digix doWe are a Smart Asset company that allows anyone to securely send and receive ownerships of assets for eventual redemption on the blockchain The first asset listed is Gold and other assets such as diamonds will be available in the near future

What are Proof of Asset (PoA) CertificatesProof of Asset (PoA) Certificates prove the existence of gold through the entire chain of custody from the supplier to the custodial vault They are automatically created when a user purchases and stores gold at our participating custodial vaults It consists of 3 digital signatures from 3 independent entities vendor custodian and auditor Through this process a PoA card is issued representing your asset ownership on the blockchain This PoA card can then be sent and received by anyone on the Ethereum Blockchain for eventual redemption PoA certificates can also be sent to a Minter DAE to create DGX Gold tokens for fungibility

What are Digix Gold TokensDigix Gold tokens can only be created when a user sends in their PoA Certificates in exchange for them on a 11 weight basis on the Digix Minter DAE Each Digix Gold token represents 1g of gold For example if a PoA Certificate represents the ownership of a 100g gold bar it can be sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for 100 DGX tokens which will be deposited in your ethereum wallet

How do I know if these tokens or PoA certificates are safe from fraud or duplicationAll tokens and PoA certificates are created on the Ethereum Blockchain a public ledger where information stored can never be manipulated or counterfeited Our smart asset service can only exist because of blockchain technology

Where are the physical gold bars storedPhysical gold is kept with a participating custodian Each PoA Certificate will specify the name and location of the custodian that holds the gold The first participating custodian on the Digix Gold platform is Malca-Amit which maintains a high security storage facility at the Singapore Freeport

Why SingaporeDigixGlobal is incorporated in low crime and politically stable Singapore Investment Precious Metals are exempted from GST locally so you are purchasing gold at the lowest premiums available in the world

bull There are also no permits required to import or export precious metalsbull Singapore also has no jurisdictional relations with USA or Europebull We will only release your personal information by order of the Court of Law in Singapore

Frequently AskedQuestions

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 17

A Sneak Peek at the NewDigixGlobal User Interface

It will be available to the public in January 2016 for multiple operating systems and mobile platforms This software will manage client transactions for PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates Digix Asset Tokens and Ether tokens

DigixGlobal can create a digital asset certificate for any storable physical property Future versions of this software will include additional digital assets such as diamonds

When the interface opens users are presented with the main dashboard menu as shown below Access to all primary services and tools is available from this opening screen

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEVendor Information - Custodian Information - Auditor Information

To ensure quality and authenticity participating gold vendors only sell LBMA approved gold bars Gold purchased from an LBMA certified refinery is globally known for its quality These bullion sources guarantee the authenticity and purity of every single gold bar used on the Digix network Buying gold from the marketplace is the first step in the process of generating a PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificate

18 JANUARY 2016

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEShows gold bullion available for purchase as a digital gold certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 19

20 JANUARY 2016

GOLD TOKENS AND ETHER WALLETFrom this area a user can send Digix Gold Tokens or send Ether

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 21

The transaction hash for a completed certificate purchase is also available with just one click

(see below Raw Transaction Data Transaction Hash)

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets Individual users can create Digix Gold and Asset tokens by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoATM Certificate) to the Minter DAE It is a way to represent gold bars as units of tokens on the Ethereum Blockchain database One Digix Gold token represents 1 gram of gold

(Q) How do I know that there are actual gold bars backing PoA certificates or Digix Gold tokens

All material documents from the Proof of Asset protocol are made available via Swarm - Ethereumrsquos distributed file sharing This would mean that all assaying certificates custodial receipts of deposits and independent auditor documents from the entire chain of custody will be uploaded for public viewing to ascertain the authenticity of all PoA certificates and Digix Gold tokens Each entity in the chain of custody will also digitally sign on our PoA Certificate We only deal with vendors custodians and auditors that have passed our due diligence and that are world renowned with a history of excellence Private audits are also available for added assurance

The Ethereum platform allows users to create applications that run on a decentralized peer-to-peer network of computers without any central control and free from human interruption or corruption Vitalik Buterin invented Ethereum in late 2013 it was formally described by Dr Gavin Wood in 2014 then developed as an open source software project under the GNU Lesser General Public License It was officially launched on July 30 2015 The project is maintained by the Ethereum core developer team (ETHDEV) under the guidance of the non-profit Ethereum Foundation which had raised 31591 Bitcoins during their 2014 crowdsale

22 JANUARY 2016

From this page users may also view the assetrsquos history of trading within the Digix system

GOLD ASSET HISTORY

PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates

are Ethereum smart contracts

that provides a legally and

cryptographically binding

determination of ownership of

physical gold or other assets currently under

the guardianship of a participating custodian on the

Digix decentralized platform It

also certifies the agreement

between the user the vendor the custodian and

the independent auditor

The PoAtrade provides a complete history of the chain of control from the vendor

the custodian and all audit reports This proof guarantees that the purchase of the gold by the user its storage by the

custodian and regular inspection by the auditor has taken place

PoA Certificates can be transferred or sent to any Ethereum account sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or

Gold tokens or redeemed from the Recast DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or Gold

Tokens

Copies of the orignal signed documents are included as a part of the certificatersquos registration in the blockchain

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 23

24 JANUARY 2016

GOLD EXPLORER RECASTER (Above)

The Digix Minter DAE recognizes all valid Digix PoAtrade Certificates and can accept them from a user in exchange for divisible Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens The rules of the Digix platform dictates that only the Digix Minter has the authority through the request of the owner of a Digix PoAtrade certificate to allow that owner to issue their own Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens in exchange for the PoAtrade Certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 25

The interface conveniently walks customers through the online purchase of a Digital Gold PoA Certificate

26 JANUARY 2016

A completed purchase of the digital gold certificate representing this bar

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 27

TOOLS AND SETTINGS

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

28 JANUARY 2016

RESTORE WALLET

In addition to its security features users can configure the Aegis Vault to assign beneficiaries set the time-based distribution of funds or assets and delegate a power of attorney to another individual or a group of people

Digix is committed to bringing Ethereum use to the mainstream and the availability of a secure wallet is essential for realizing this goal

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 29

GENERATE A REDEMPTION KEY

(Q) What is the Digix Recaster Smart Contract

Digix Recaster Smart Contract allows the

conversion of Digix Gold tokens to a PoA card The

PoA card can be sent or received on the blockchain representing an ownership

of an entire gold bar or be used for redemption of

the physical gold bar at our office For example if you have 100 DGX tokens

representing 100g of weight in gold you can exchange

for a PoA card representing a 100g gold cast bar at

Digix This PoA card can be sent and received on the

Ethereum blockchain or be used to schedule a local

pick-up of the physical gold bar at Digix redemption

center in Singapore

You can currently recast into PoA certificates of

100g (100 DGX) or 1000g (1000 DGX) gold cast bar

denominations

30 JANUARY 2016

(Q) What about the Digix audit processWe have four types of audits at Digix

1 PRIVATE AUDITS Clients are welcome to come to our certified custodial vaults in Singapore to inspect your gold bars in a highly private and secure environment

2 EXTERNAL AUDITS We have engaged Inspectorate Singapore (wwwinspectoratecom) to audit our inventory and match them off with customersrsquo holdings at DGX We will hold such inspections at least twice a year

3 CUSTODIAL AUDITS Our certified custodians will provide a physical certification of proof that your gold bars are stored safely in their vaults They will take photographs of your serialized bars per request basis and have them keyed into their inventory management systems Some of our certified custodiansrsquo reputation are also on the line to provide us with their appraisal and storage services as they have to answer to their shareholders as a publicly listed company in Singapore

4 INTERNAL AUDITS We have patented a certification process called Proof of Asset (PoA) where auditors sign on the existence of Gold in our PoA certificate The digital certificate is then uploaded onto the Ethereum Blockchain

(Q) Are there KYCAML requirementsAll users who wish to redeem PoA certificates or Digix Gold Tokens for physical gold bars will have to go through KYC requirements at the pickup The gold bars will only be available for pick up at our office location in Singapore We must ensure that DigixGlobal and participating organizations are protected from any potential liabilities resulting from government prosecution and asset seizures so we ensure that we comply fully with regulatory requirements for Know your customer (KYC) and Anti-money laundering (AML)

ADDRESS BOOK

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 31

SilentVault is a secure private online wallet for making untraceable p2p payments

Unlike other crypto currency wallets SilentVault wallets support heterogeneous asset types such as fiat dollars euros metals gold and silver and crypto coins bitcoin litecoin SilentVault provides anonymous off blockchain payments made in bitcoin and litecoin It also features an integrated p2p escrow exchange where users can trade anonymously among different asset types with other users such as exchanging bitcoins for silver

The SilentVault Spark client is a fully functional Jabber chat client that is a branded and updated version of Spark Since Spark supports a plugin architecture our wallet client is implemented as a plugin You can obtain the SilentVault Spark client with plugin from this page You can also find the source code for both the plugin and SilentVaults customizations to the Spark source base elsewhere on this site A tutorial on SVSpark is here

The SilentVault wallet webstart client is a stand alone program that you can install from within your browser Like the SilentVault Spark client it communicates with the Voucher Safe payment network using extensions to the XMPP protocol This type of communication makes economic transactions indistinguishable from ordinary encrypted instant messaging traffic and avoids any need to run within an insecure browser environment or rely on web domains All client source code is published on this site and while you can run a prefabricated client you are also invited to build your own from source

You are also invited to develop applications for our integrated marketplaces that appear within SilentVault wallets A full API is available for your use as a development tool Please contact our team for details

The SilentVault technology is based on Voucher Safe which was developed 2008 2011 Voucher Safe is also the core technology of the Digital Cash Alliance

httpssilentvaultcom

32 JANUARY 2016

ldquoI love go-o-o-o-ldrdquo-Austin Powers in Goldmember

Not surprisingly most people feel the same

According to the Wall Street Journal gold prices and safe-haven demand in Asia have been skyrocketing since mid-November (1) proving that you donrsquot have to be a sea-faring pirate or a squire in a kingrsquos castle to enjoy its natural glare beauty and above all its ability to stimulate wealth

Since the days of the California Gold Rush people have enjoyed panning for it selling it and most of

all owning it Long considered one of the planetrsquos most precious and desired metals gold has grown heavily in value over the last several years and it appears more and more are trying to get their hands on it every single day

Something else is growing as wellhellip Bitcoin Often regarded as Americarsquos most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin has jumped heavily in value over the last few months spiking from $230 to nearly $350 Unlike gold which exists in solid physical form Bitcoin exists in ones and zeros binary coding that travels through the blockchain the technology that makes Bitcoin transactions possible between users and respective merchants

BITGOLD A MODERN REVOLUTION IN FINANCEBY NICK MARINOFF

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 33

Itrsquos interesting to witness nearly equal popularity rising for two different things that ultimately serve the same purpose and share similar goals Both are designed to enhance the world of finance Both can rise in value and both have the ability to make someone rich overnighthellip So what if we could combine the two What significant differences could there be if Bitcoin and gold were fused into one entity

Well itrsquos already been done Say hello to BitGold an early startup company stationed in Toronto Canada BitGold aims to offer international services for people and businesses to send payments and hold savings with physical gold (2) The company was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb Both have a long history in the financial sector with Sebag previously serving as the Founder and Managing Principal of Braavos Capital (an international private investment organization) and the Chairman of Natural Resource Holdings an investment company involved with natural resource assets (3) Josh Crumb was previously the Senior Metals Strategist at Goldman Sachs (4)

The company alleges that gold bullion is ldquothe worldrsquos oldest asset class and the centuryrsquos best performing currencyrdquo (5) According to BitGoldrsquos website their mission is

ldquohellipTo make gold accessible and useful in digital payments and secure savingshellip Wersquore advancing the digital payments revolution by helping people securely acquire store and now spend gold with unprecedented simplicity BitGold accounts are free and can be opened in minutes We provide users with a secure vault account to purchase and hold gold the ability to make and receive instant gold payments and a prepaid card for spending gold at traditional points of sale Through our network of ATMs customers can fund their accounts with local-currencyrdquo (4)

Present investors backing BitGold include Dundee Capital Markets GMP Securities and Sandstorm Gold although the initial investor in the company was Soros Brothers Investment which is presently run by Alexander Soros the son of Hungarian business magnate George Soros (2)

2015 has been a big year for the company CNBC has stated that BitGold currently serves over 100000 active customers and the platform stores approximately 276 kilograms of bullion within its walls Thatrsquos nearly $11 million total and over $100 per active user (6) In May BitGold began trading on the TSX Venture exchange in Canada and announced the purchase of GoldMoney worth nearly $52 million in Canadian dollars (7)

In June the company made citizens of the United States very happy with the following announcement

ldquoUS residents can sign up on the BitGold platform and buy sell or redeem gold using BitGoldrsquos Aurum payment and settlement technology US residents will also have access to the BitGold mobile app and a prepaid card when these features launch over the coming weeksrdquo (7)

The platform offers a number of products and services beneficial to any gold-lover across the country As the above quote suggests BitGold offers whatrsquos known as Aurum the gold-settlement technology thatrsquos compliant with several US financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase Wells Fargo Citi Bank of America US Bank Fidelity Capital One and Charles Schwab Users with an account at any one of these nationally-recognized banks can instantly redeem gold or authorize gold deposits The transactions thereby increase in safety and automation Users also receive a bonus in that they are usually able to avoid bank wire fees through the process (7)

Using the BitGold app users may also send and receive gold as payments to and from any other user or seller without paying any transaction fees They can even send gold to non-BitGold users via their mobile phones or through a simple email message The company also issues prepaid debit cards allowing users to spend funds directly from their BitGold accounts The card is compatible with ATMs so that users may withdraw local currency (7)

Lastly the company issues special ten-gram gold cubes worth approximately $380 each at press time Users may redeem these cubes on the BitGold platform and may demand physical delivery when they see fit (7)

34 JANUARY 2016

Vice-president of communications and PR Emily Cornelius explained in an email that they have no ldquostereotypicalrdquo user of the companyrsquos services but that there are predominantly three main use cases

ldquoThe traditional gold investor will gravitate to BitGold because our gold is unprecedentedly priced within 1 of spot price and we offer free storage in a Brinks vault of their choice globallyhellip The second use case is the user who seeks a more stable currency for their national savings outside of their potentially volatile local fiat currencyhellip Gold has gained over 3000 vs the US Dollar which is arguably the worldrsquos strongest fiat money Gold may seem to go up down or sideways but in reality and when viewed over long timescales such as the avg human lifecycle ndash it always riseshellip Gold has been rising against 9 of the worldrsquos most famous and well-known currencies almost every year since 2000hellip Thirdly BitGold is a powerful payments platformhellip BitGold allows a user to send an invoice for your labor to someone else anywhere in the world which the recipient can pay using any traditional payment methodhellip This gold is vaulted anywhere even outside their jurisdictionhellip This is important as it allows users to achieve upward mobility that are otherwise hindered by localized issues that are exogenous to their personal journeyrdquo

Cornelius also explained that the company offers ldquoall the benefits and efficiencies of a service like PayPal and a MasterCard but with a universally accepted more stable store of valuerdquo

Presently regulation over BitGold appears to be fairly non-existent BitGold does not list which regulators hold jurisdiction over its staff and operations nor do they list regulatory information regarding their trade practices (7) In fact co-founder Roy Sebag has stated in the past that he believes BitGold is not a bank nor does it serve as a financial institution in any traditional sense as it does not engage in fractional-reserve banking (2)According to page 20 of the companyrsquos initial public filing BitGold is not

ldquohellipEligible to be registered with the Financial

Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canadahellip There can be no assurance that BitGoldrsquos services or Internet platform will be acceptable to foreign regulatory bodies Foreign governments may seek to restrict access to BitGoldrsquos services block BitGoldrsquos website or impose other restrictions that may affect BitGoldrsquos ability to offer service to new or existing users in those for an extended period of time or indefinitelyrdquo (8)

Despite this it was confirmed in July of 2015 that the company did offer its services under the Canadian Bailment Law (9) This occurs in situations where physical personal property is transferred from one person (the bailor) to another for safekeeping and doing so does not require the binding notion of a written contract (10)

Presently the company employs 26 people including Sebag and Crumb Other notable BitGold personnel include Chief Executive Officer Darrell MacMullin Chief Technology Officer Alessandro Premoli Lead Mobile Engineer Paul Mennega and Team Manager Karman Lee The company also employs several vice-presidents five software engineers and two compliance officers (4)

It can be said that BitGold has accomplished quite a bit in less than two years Itrsquos likely such a volatile company has some big plans waiting in the wings for 2016 but Emily Cornelius isnrsquot dropping any hints as to what they could be

ldquoWe have a number of new features services and products cominghellip Yoursquoll have to wait and seerdquo

BitGold is steadily making its mark It has the backing the funds the technology and above all the drive Put all these items together (and add a touch of flair and public desire) and itrsquos clear that BitGold has what it takes to make the world of finance its own

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 6: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

6 JANUARY 2016

WebMoney Gets a EU License and Expands its Presence in The European Union

November 18 2015

The global settlement system WebMoney Transfer has entered into partnership with a new guarantor licensed to issue e-money within the European Union

The FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) license granted to WebMoney Europe Ltd with head offices in Cambridge United Kingdom has secured the company`s status as an e-money issuer in all countries within the European Economic Area As a result the Euro purses within the system are acquiring the status of e-money and are in full compliance with the legislation of the European Union

As a part of the expansion of its presence in Europe in the recent months WebMoney has significantly increased the number of top-up points for Euro purses as well as the number of online stores accepting WebMoney The WebMoney technical support team is already providing support for Euro purses while the services within the system are being adapted for the European users

Currently the system is used by over 29 million users worldwide with around 10 thousand users registering with the system daily WebMoney is accepted as a payment method by more than 100 thousand online stores globally

Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has licensed WebMoney Europe Ltd as an emoney issuer in all European Union countries With more than 29 million currency users WebMoney is accepted by more than 100 thousand online stores around the world

An announcement from BitGold December 31 2015

The Request Gold Payment tool is now live allowing users to earn gold onto the network by sending payment requests for their time labour goods or services

We believe that transferring value online should be easy instant and secure BitGold allows you to send a payment request to other individuals anywhere in the world ndash with or without a BitGold account with the resulting payment settled in gold to your private vault account

Someone working in Greece and parting with their services can be earning gold in Canada London Zurich or elsewhere

Just log in to your BitGold Dashboard and select the Request Payment tab to get started It is as easy as entering the contact name email address or mobile number and the amount you are requesting Once you have sent a Request for Payment the recipient will receive an email that will prompt them to open their BitGold account if they havent already fund their account and complete the payment request

Unfortunately at this time US users will not be able to send receive or request gold payments on the platform Additionally gold received into the Dubai vault may be restricted from some functionality Contact the company for more details

copy Copyright 2015 BitGold Inc 334 Adelaide St W Toronto ON M5V 1R4 All rights reserved

Request Gold Payment Tool Has Officially Launched on the BitGold Platform

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 7

October 26 2015

Coinify and DigixGlobal Private Limited (Singapore UEN 201479386E) are proud to announce a formal business partnership All bitcoin payments going through Digix will solely be processed through Coinify

This represents a significant initiative between Ethereum and Bitcoin based companies demonstrating how both blockchain ecosystems can work together The partnership between an Ethereum based company and a Bitcoin based company is one of the industryrsquos first signifying that both ecosystems can grow together Bitcoin users can now easily own Ethereum digital assets apart from Ether

Digix allows users to purchase assets like investment grade gold bullion with bitcoin thereafter facilitating physical asset issuances on the blockchain These digital keys issued on the Ethereum blockchain will have the same transactional utility of Bitcoin and can also be made fungible into divisible digital tokens called ldquo Digix Tokens rdquo representative of grams of gold allocated 11

Morten Bebe Coinifyrsquos sales manager believes that this is a significant step in future collaboration with other blockchains ldquo Digixrsquos unique and decentralized approach in the creation of gold backed tokens will help promote the crypto ecosystemrdquo

ldquoWe are very excited to be working with Coinifyrdquo says Kai the CEO Co-Founder of Digix ldquoWe have looked at other payment processors and found Coinify

Coinify and DigixGlobal Announce Bitcoin Partnership in Singapore

Coinify is the first bitcoin payment processor to partner with an Ethereum based company processing bitcoin payments for crypto-assets on Ethereum

to be the best in terms of service reliability and willingness to innovate with young companies in Asia Now end users can easily purchase crypto assets on Ethereum with bitcoinrdquo Kai adds ldquoWe have always been open to collaborations and100 thousand online stores globally

About CoinifyCoinify ApS drives mainstream adoption of digital currencies such as Bitcoin for merchants and consumers Merchants benefit from Coinifyrsquos Payment Service (PSP) enabling free instant settlements in a fraud-free and chargeback-free blockchain payment environment while customers get access to secure one-click payments that reveal no sensitive information Coinify is backed by a multi-million dollar capital injection from SEED Capital (funded by the Danish government) and Accelerace and is the leading European digital currency market player For more information about Coinify visit their website at coinifycom

About DigixDigix is an asset ownership certification and tokeniization platform for physical assets Users who purchase or store gold bullion with Digixrsquos participating suppliers and custodial vaults will be able to own digital assets on the blockchain and create divisible gold tokens that have the same transactional utility and functionality as bitcoin For more information please contact

Coinify ApSHerlev Hovedgade 15B 12730 Herlev Greater Copenhagen Denmark+45 3693 4994Marketing and PR - Lenka HudakovaEmail lhucoinifycom

DigixGlobal Pte Ltd10 Anson Road 05-17International Plaza S079903 Singapore+1-917-267-8977Co-Founder amp CEO - Kai Cheng ChngEmail kcchngdgxiohttpdgxio

8 JANUARY 2016

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 9

Who should have the power to issue money

It seems likely that a great many people probably havenrsquot thought about this question ever After all since the beginning of recorded history various types of governments including republics kings priest-kings and dictatorships have issued money

If you open up your wallet you probably find some paper money in there issued by some government or on behalf of a central bank that is authorized by some government Very likely you also have some credit or debit cards issued by banks or credit unions but these are only corporate extensions of governments so not really that different Some people have gift cards from various companies but these are corporations therefore creatures of the state Moreover most gift cards are denominated in national currencies

My own wallet has a couple of Ron Helwigrsquos Shire silver and gold wire cards too These are laminated cards which contain thin strips of silver in one case and a length of thin gold wire in the other In other words they are actual gold and silver visibly embedded in the clear plastic laminate of the card

If you are fond of history you may have heard of the tendency of Roman emperors to debase their gold and silver coinage and the tendency of the Byzantine emperors to stick with the good stuff You may have heard that Revolutionary France was beset with inflated paper money called the assignat by the national assembly and the mandat by the Directorate ndash the same Directorate that used guillotines in its search for peace and justice and discovered only baskets of severed heads and rivers of blood

You may know that one of Napoleonrsquos secrets to popularity was restoring gold and silver coins to circulation and melting the printer plates used to make the paper money You may be aware of the adventures of Marco Polo with paper money in China under Kublai Khan And you are probably aware of the creation in late 1913 of a Federal Reserve that gradually replaced gold and silver coins in the United States with book entry and paper money along with coins made out of base metals like zinc

If you arenrsquot fond of history essentially nothing in the preceding two paragraphs means anything to you Which

The Power To Issue MoneyBY JIM DAVIDSON

AH TAKE THE CASH AND LET THE CREDIT GONOR HEED THE RUMBLE OF A DISTANT DRUM

~EDWARD FITZGERALD THE RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

10 JANUARY 2016

might be ok if you werenrsquot living in interesting times As it turns out Thucydides was correct in believing that the future if it does not mirror the past at least reflects it And of course Santayana says that if you wonrsquot learn the lessons of history you may be doomed to repeat them

Given that there is currently a sovereign debt crisis that has turned Greece into an economic wasteland plunged Chinarsquos markets down and which is spreading to many other countries in the coming months and years and given that the money you have in your wallet is only backed by the full faith and credit of the United States which has not exactly shown itself to be credit-worthy or faithful you may find yourself very interested in the question who should issue money

Your PowerNow if you believe as I do that the only just form of government is one that derives its powers from the unanimous consent of the governed you should recognize who has the power to issue money Since governments are issuing money and since all the powers that governments have must have been either seized from the people or delegated to the government with the consent of the people it follows naturally that the power to issue money comes originally from the people It is also my view that powers are not collective in nature but like rights are individual in character In other words you have the power to issue money

Whether that comes as a surprise to you or not it is clear from simply looking around that not everyone is issuing money If each individual has the power to issue money why isnrsquot everyone doing so

It turns out that one of the key features of money is acceptability It matters a great deal less if you issue money than it does if someone else accepts it In order to generate demand for its currency your national government accepts that currency for payment of taxes The fact that there are a great many taxes not only at the national level but also at state and local levels means that there are lots of places where the national governmentrsquos currency is accepted Not only is it accepted by tax authorities it is also accepted by merchants because they know they can use it to pay their taxes It is therefore accepted by those who

supply merchants with products so they can pay their taxes and so forth

So the problems of central bank policies the problems with the economy the problems with many government policies are to put it simply your fault You choose to use the national currency of your country You choose not to accept alternatives even though alternatives exist and have existed in the case of gold and silver coins for thousands of years You choose to engage in trade and commerce for fiat money which means that the problems of fiat money the problems of central planning the difficulties you face as a result of errors in what the Federal Reserve and other monetary manipulators do are your problems They are caused by your choices just as much as by the choices of hundreds of millions of others in your country and billions around the world You have the power to change this situation directly to your own advantage Does that seem harsh

Taxation Is TheftMany years ago at the end of the last century I met a member of the Somena First Nation up in Canada I was attending the world congress of the International Society for Individual Liberty at the time Meaghan Walker-Champion explained to me that she had spoken to the elders of her community and they had many long talks among themselves thinking about what the Somena word for ldquotax collectorrdquo would be They concluded that the word in their language was the same as the word for ldquothiefrdquo

Writing at the end of World War Two EC Riegel reached the same conclusion He noted that money is extremely useful in trade and commerce and that the issue power properly belongs to those engaged in free enterprise Since governments are not engaged in buying and selling but only in stealing from others they are entirely inappropriate to the purpose of issuing money He makes these and many other excellent arguments against state socialism in A New Approach to Freedom My friend Spencer MacCallum helped organise EC Riegelrsquos papers An authorized free and complete version of A New Approach to Freedom is available on the web here

To be continued on page 37

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 11

12 JANUARY 2016

SBC - What Is Silent BitcoinSilent Bitcoin (or SBC) is a digital voucher currency 100 backed by bitcoins This means that 10 SBC equals 10 BTC When a user spends BTC to a wallet hash controlled by SilentVault they receive in exchange a voucher (a cryptographically signed XML object) for the same amount in SBC Thereafter the SBC voucher value circulates privately off-chain between SilentVault wallets until a holder redeems their SBC voucher for BTC At that point the SBC value is decirculated and a BTC spend is made from SilentVaultrsquos reserve to the address hash designated by the user who surrendered the voucher (Which is probably but doesnrsquot have to be the userrsquos own)

Using SBCThe Voucher-Safe network operates differently from the Bitcoin network in several important respects

Silencing BitcoinSilentVault lets you spend and receive bitcoin (and litecoin) off the blockchain entirely and move your coins to and from regular bitcoin addresses whenever you want Our wallets are multi-asset and can hold any supported asset types side-by-side

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 13

bull A Voucher Publisher (or VP) signs vouchers and clears voucher payments to prevent double-spending While each VP is centralized the protocol supports multiple Publishers This means that payments clear in seconds with no need to wait for transaction confirmations (Note however that a BTC spend to purchase a SBC voucher does require 6 confirmations before the SBC voucher will be issued)

bull Input vouchers are always destroyed in every transaction and replaced with output vouchers bearing fresh unique serial numbers This means that unlike with the blockchain no public transaction history exists balances are private and no ldquotaintrdquo can attach to coins (Taint violates fungibility a fundamental characteristic of sound money) This represents a vast privacy improvement over regular BTC spends and a lesser improvement even over ldquocoin laundryrdquo services

bull A payee must pick up their voucher payment within the 1-7 days designated by the payer If the payee does not do so the payment expires and becomes recoverable by the payer (indefinitely) This makes it impossible to lose value by spending it to a ldquodead walletrdquo

bull Receipts are generated by the payee not by the Publisher This prevents the clearing VP from needing to record transaction history or knowing anything about the private message context accompanying the payment The VP also never sees a user IP address

In short it is much faster more convenient more private and generally much safer to exchange SBC value between SilentVault

wallets than to perform ldquonaked spendsrdquo between BTC wallets on the blockchain (Though naturally it is also more expensive privacy being worth something)

Trading SBCExchanges in and out of SBC fromto BTC are performed via the ldquoExchangesrdquo tab in the SilentVault wallet by buying or selling SBC vouchers respectively These sales and repurchases are carried out with the exchange itself mdash meaning SilentVault is an agent for the Issuer of SBC SBC vouchers can also be traded to other users in exchange for vouchers representing other asset types (eg USD or EUR silver or gold etc) Users can specify the asset types they will accept and offer discounts or demand premiums The SVX (SilentVault Exchange) acts as a third-party escrow agent allowing all trades to be fully anonymous and secure You cannot know with whom you are trading and no KYC of any kind is performable by SilentVault You are your wallet keys period

Fee ScheduleThe fees currently charged by SilentVault are as follows

bull Purchase SBC with BTC 00 (free) minimum quantity 001 BTC

bull Redeem SBC for BTC 00 (free) minimum quantity 002 BTC

bull Make SBC voucher spend 00015 BTCbull Receive SBC voucher spend 00006 BTC

(first one is 00002)bull Escrow exchange 10 of amount

minimum quantity 002 BTC

httpssilentvaultcom

14 JANUARY 2016

YOUR PRIVACY MATTERSEacutelan Turbo VPN This VPN service is bundled with VoIP and private audiovideo calling via SIP plus unlimited bandwidth for surfing and streaming

Our Eacutelan Turbo VPN service is a standard single-hop VPN but with selectable exit proxies in Panama the USA the UK France and onto the Tor network As a subscriber yoursquoll also get an SIP extension that lets you place private audio and video calls to other users Unlike with Skype these calls can be encrypted end-to-end to conceal their content in transit And because yoursquore on our VPN the call metadata is also protected We also supply your own private Mumble server as an inexpensive add-on There are no bandwidth limitations with this package Surf and talk all you want

Eacutelan Max Security VPN This VPN service is bundled with email addresses and aliases 1 GB file storage plus 25 GB of monthly bandwidth

Our Eacutelan Max Security VPN service is a premiere multi-hop VPN which lives up to its name Multi-hop means that traffic flows between multiple points along its route from the entry gateway to the exit nodes something like changing planes a couple of times during an extended trip Inside the network internal routes are varied traffic is mixed alongside that of other users and random delays get inserted to defeat traffic analysis This technique known as ldquoserver cascadesrdquo same features and benefits as provides many of the Tor (Given that the Deep State agencies in various countries are now running most of the Tor exit nodes it might be even better) As a subscriber yoursquoll also get private email addresses and email aliases plus 1 GB of very secure file storage Because of its multi-hop architecture this VPN is less suitable for streaming applications and bandwidth usage is limited to 25 GB per month However you can also buy top-up packs to add more bandwidth

Elegantly Convenient No special hardware required

bull Software-only solutionbull Both individual and multi-user packages are availablebull Simple to install and use

Support for Windows Linux Mac Android and iOS httpelanvpnnet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 15

Wersquore long-time industry professionals with over a combined forty years in the IT industry Wersquore also committed advocates of human liberty and personal privacy With all the global spy networks hacks and data mining in the world today internet privacy is under attack as never beforeWe agree with E C Riegel who wrote

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and self-asserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

16 JANUARY 2016

What does Digix doWe are a Smart Asset company that allows anyone to securely send and receive ownerships of assets for eventual redemption on the blockchain The first asset listed is Gold and other assets such as diamonds will be available in the near future

What are Proof of Asset (PoA) CertificatesProof of Asset (PoA) Certificates prove the existence of gold through the entire chain of custody from the supplier to the custodial vault They are automatically created when a user purchases and stores gold at our participating custodial vaults It consists of 3 digital signatures from 3 independent entities vendor custodian and auditor Through this process a PoA card is issued representing your asset ownership on the blockchain This PoA card can then be sent and received by anyone on the Ethereum Blockchain for eventual redemption PoA certificates can also be sent to a Minter DAE to create DGX Gold tokens for fungibility

What are Digix Gold TokensDigix Gold tokens can only be created when a user sends in their PoA Certificates in exchange for them on a 11 weight basis on the Digix Minter DAE Each Digix Gold token represents 1g of gold For example if a PoA Certificate represents the ownership of a 100g gold bar it can be sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for 100 DGX tokens which will be deposited in your ethereum wallet

How do I know if these tokens or PoA certificates are safe from fraud or duplicationAll tokens and PoA certificates are created on the Ethereum Blockchain a public ledger where information stored can never be manipulated or counterfeited Our smart asset service can only exist because of blockchain technology

Where are the physical gold bars storedPhysical gold is kept with a participating custodian Each PoA Certificate will specify the name and location of the custodian that holds the gold The first participating custodian on the Digix Gold platform is Malca-Amit which maintains a high security storage facility at the Singapore Freeport

Why SingaporeDigixGlobal is incorporated in low crime and politically stable Singapore Investment Precious Metals are exempted from GST locally so you are purchasing gold at the lowest premiums available in the world

bull There are also no permits required to import or export precious metalsbull Singapore also has no jurisdictional relations with USA or Europebull We will only release your personal information by order of the Court of Law in Singapore

Frequently AskedQuestions

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 17

A Sneak Peek at the NewDigixGlobal User Interface

It will be available to the public in January 2016 for multiple operating systems and mobile platforms This software will manage client transactions for PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates Digix Asset Tokens and Ether tokens

DigixGlobal can create a digital asset certificate for any storable physical property Future versions of this software will include additional digital assets such as diamonds

When the interface opens users are presented with the main dashboard menu as shown below Access to all primary services and tools is available from this opening screen

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEVendor Information - Custodian Information - Auditor Information

To ensure quality and authenticity participating gold vendors only sell LBMA approved gold bars Gold purchased from an LBMA certified refinery is globally known for its quality These bullion sources guarantee the authenticity and purity of every single gold bar used on the Digix network Buying gold from the marketplace is the first step in the process of generating a PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificate

18 JANUARY 2016

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEShows gold bullion available for purchase as a digital gold certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 19

20 JANUARY 2016

GOLD TOKENS AND ETHER WALLETFrom this area a user can send Digix Gold Tokens or send Ether

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 21

The transaction hash for a completed certificate purchase is also available with just one click

(see below Raw Transaction Data Transaction Hash)

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets Individual users can create Digix Gold and Asset tokens by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoATM Certificate) to the Minter DAE It is a way to represent gold bars as units of tokens on the Ethereum Blockchain database One Digix Gold token represents 1 gram of gold

(Q) How do I know that there are actual gold bars backing PoA certificates or Digix Gold tokens

All material documents from the Proof of Asset protocol are made available via Swarm - Ethereumrsquos distributed file sharing This would mean that all assaying certificates custodial receipts of deposits and independent auditor documents from the entire chain of custody will be uploaded for public viewing to ascertain the authenticity of all PoA certificates and Digix Gold tokens Each entity in the chain of custody will also digitally sign on our PoA Certificate We only deal with vendors custodians and auditors that have passed our due diligence and that are world renowned with a history of excellence Private audits are also available for added assurance

The Ethereum platform allows users to create applications that run on a decentralized peer-to-peer network of computers without any central control and free from human interruption or corruption Vitalik Buterin invented Ethereum in late 2013 it was formally described by Dr Gavin Wood in 2014 then developed as an open source software project under the GNU Lesser General Public License It was officially launched on July 30 2015 The project is maintained by the Ethereum core developer team (ETHDEV) under the guidance of the non-profit Ethereum Foundation which had raised 31591 Bitcoins during their 2014 crowdsale

22 JANUARY 2016

From this page users may also view the assetrsquos history of trading within the Digix system

GOLD ASSET HISTORY

PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates

are Ethereum smart contracts

that provides a legally and

cryptographically binding

determination of ownership of

physical gold or other assets currently under

the guardianship of a participating custodian on the

Digix decentralized platform It

also certifies the agreement

between the user the vendor the custodian and

the independent auditor

The PoAtrade provides a complete history of the chain of control from the vendor

the custodian and all audit reports This proof guarantees that the purchase of the gold by the user its storage by the

custodian and regular inspection by the auditor has taken place

PoA Certificates can be transferred or sent to any Ethereum account sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or

Gold tokens or redeemed from the Recast DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or Gold

Tokens

Copies of the orignal signed documents are included as a part of the certificatersquos registration in the blockchain

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 23

24 JANUARY 2016

GOLD EXPLORER RECASTER (Above)

The Digix Minter DAE recognizes all valid Digix PoAtrade Certificates and can accept them from a user in exchange for divisible Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens The rules of the Digix platform dictates that only the Digix Minter has the authority through the request of the owner of a Digix PoAtrade certificate to allow that owner to issue their own Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens in exchange for the PoAtrade Certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 25

The interface conveniently walks customers through the online purchase of a Digital Gold PoA Certificate

26 JANUARY 2016

A completed purchase of the digital gold certificate representing this bar

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 27

TOOLS AND SETTINGS

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

28 JANUARY 2016

RESTORE WALLET

In addition to its security features users can configure the Aegis Vault to assign beneficiaries set the time-based distribution of funds or assets and delegate a power of attorney to another individual or a group of people

Digix is committed to bringing Ethereum use to the mainstream and the availability of a secure wallet is essential for realizing this goal

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 29

GENERATE A REDEMPTION KEY

(Q) What is the Digix Recaster Smart Contract

Digix Recaster Smart Contract allows the

conversion of Digix Gold tokens to a PoA card The

PoA card can be sent or received on the blockchain representing an ownership

of an entire gold bar or be used for redemption of

the physical gold bar at our office For example if you have 100 DGX tokens

representing 100g of weight in gold you can exchange

for a PoA card representing a 100g gold cast bar at

Digix This PoA card can be sent and received on the

Ethereum blockchain or be used to schedule a local

pick-up of the physical gold bar at Digix redemption

center in Singapore

You can currently recast into PoA certificates of

100g (100 DGX) or 1000g (1000 DGX) gold cast bar

denominations

30 JANUARY 2016

(Q) What about the Digix audit processWe have four types of audits at Digix

1 PRIVATE AUDITS Clients are welcome to come to our certified custodial vaults in Singapore to inspect your gold bars in a highly private and secure environment

2 EXTERNAL AUDITS We have engaged Inspectorate Singapore (wwwinspectoratecom) to audit our inventory and match them off with customersrsquo holdings at DGX We will hold such inspections at least twice a year

3 CUSTODIAL AUDITS Our certified custodians will provide a physical certification of proof that your gold bars are stored safely in their vaults They will take photographs of your serialized bars per request basis and have them keyed into their inventory management systems Some of our certified custodiansrsquo reputation are also on the line to provide us with their appraisal and storage services as they have to answer to their shareholders as a publicly listed company in Singapore

4 INTERNAL AUDITS We have patented a certification process called Proof of Asset (PoA) where auditors sign on the existence of Gold in our PoA certificate The digital certificate is then uploaded onto the Ethereum Blockchain

(Q) Are there KYCAML requirementsAll users who wish to redeem PoA certificates or Digix Gold Tokens for physical gold bars will have to go through KYC requirements at the pickup The gold bars will only be available for pick up at our office location in Singapore We must ensure that DigixGlobal and participating organizations are protected from any potential liabilities resulting from government prosecution and asset seizures so we ensure that we comply fully with regulatory requirements for Know your customer (KYC) and Anti-money laundering (AML)

ADDRESS BOOK

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 31

SilentVault is a secure private online wallet for making untraceable p2p payments

Unlike other crypto currency wallets SilentVault wallets support heterogeneous asset types such as fiat dollars euros metals gold and silver and crypto coins bitcoin litecoin SilentVault provides anonymous off blockchain payments made in bitcoin and litecoin It also features an integrated p2p escrow exchange where users can trade anonymously among different asset types with other users such as exchanging bitcoins for silver

The SilentVault Spark client is a fully functional Jabber chat client that is a branded and updated version of Spark Since Spark supports a plugin architecture our wallet client is implemented as a plugin You can obtain the SilentVault Spark client with plugin from this page You can also find the source code for both the plugin and SilentVaults customizations to the Spark source base elsewhere on this site A tutorial on SVSpark is here

The SilentVault wallet webstart client is a stand alone program that you can install from within your browser Like the SilentVault Spark client it communicates with the Voucher Safe payment network using extensions to the XMPP protocol This type of communication makes economic transactions indistinguishable from ordinary encrypted instant messaging traffic and avoids any need to run within an insecure browser environment or rely on web domains All client source code is published on this site and while you can run a prefabricated client you are also invited to build your own from source

You are also invited to develop applications for our integrated marketplaces that appear within SilentVault wallets A full API is available for your use as a development tool Please contact our team for details

The SilentVault technology is based on Voucher Safe which was developed 2008 2011 Voucher Safe is also the core technology of the Digital Cash Alliance

httpssilentvaultcom

32 JANUARY 2016

ldquoI love go-o-o-o-ldrdquo-Austin Powers in Goldmember

Not surprisingly most people feel the same

According to the Wall Street Journal gold prices and safe-haven demand in Asia have been skyrocketing since mid-November (1) proving that you donrsquot have to be a sea-faring pirate or a squire in a kingrsquos castle to enjoy its natural glare beauty and above all its ability to stimulate wealth

Since the days of the California Gold Rush people have enjoyed panning for it selling it and most of

all owning it Long considered one of the planetrsquos most precious and desired metals gold has grown heavily in value over the last several years and it appears more and more are trying to get their hands on it every single day

Something else is growing as wellhellip Bitcoin Often regarded as Americarsquos most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin has jumped heavily in value over the last few months spiking from $230 to nearly $350 Unlike gold which exists in solid physical form Bitcoin exists in ones and zeros binary coding that travels through the blockchain the technology that makes Bitcoin transactions possible between users and respective merchants

BITGOLD A MODERN REVOLUTION IN FINANCEBY NICK MARINOFF

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 33

Itrsquos interesting to witness nearly equal popularity rising for two different things that ultimately serve the same purpose and share similar goals Both are designed to enhance the world of finance Both can rise in value and both have the ability to make someone rich overnighthellip So what if we could combine the two What significant differences could there be if Bitcoin and gold were fused into one entity

Well itrsquos already been done Say hello to BitGold an early startup company stationed in Toronto Canada BitGold aims to offer international services for people and businesses to send payments and hold savings with physical gold (2) The company was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb Both have a long history in the financial sector with Sebag previously serving as the Founder and Managing Principal of Braavos Capital (an international private investment organization) and the Chairman of Natural Resource Holdings an investment company involved with natural resource assets (3) Josh Crumb was previously the Senior Metals Strategist at Goldman Sachs (4)

The company alleges that gold bullion is ldquothe worldrsquos oldest asset class and the centuryrsquos best performing currencyrdquo (5) According to BitGoldrsquos website their mission is

ldquohellipTo make gold accessible and useful in digital payments and secure savingshellip Wersquore advancing the digital payments revolution by helping people securely acquire store and now spend gold with unprecedented simplicity BitGold accounts are free and can be opened in minutes We provide users with a secure vault account to purchase and hold gold the ability to make and receive instant gold payments and a prepaid card for spending gold at traditional points of sale Through our network of ATMs customers can fund their accounts with local-currencyrdquo (4)

Present investors backing BitGold include Dundee Capital Markets GMP Securities and Sandstorm Gold although the initial investor in the company was Soros Brothers Investment which is presently run by Alexander Soros the son of Hungarian business magnate George Soros (2)

2015 has been a big year for the company CNBC has stated that BitGold currently serves over 100000 active customers and the platform stores approximately 276 kilograms of bullion within its walls Thatrsquos nearly $11 million total and over $100 per active user (6) In May BitGold began trading on the TSX Venture exchange in Canada and announced the purchase of GoldMoney worth nearly $52 million in Canadian dollars (7)

In June the company made citizens of the United States very happy with the following announcement

ldquoUS residents can sign up on the BitGold platform and buy sell or redeem gold using BitGoldrsquos Aurum payment and settlement technology US residents will also have access to the BitGold mobile app and a prepaid card when these features launch over the coming weeksrdquo (7)

The platform offers a number of products and services beneficial to any gold-lover across the country As the above quote suggests BitGold offers whatrsquos known as Aurum the gold-settlement technology thatrsquos compliant with several US financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase Wells Fargo Citi Bank of America US Bank Fidelity Capital One and Charles Schwab Users with an account at any one of these nationally-recognized banks can instantly redeem gold or authorize gold deposits The transactions thereby increase in safety and automation Users also receive a bonus in that they are usually able to avoid bank wire fees through the process (7)

Using the BitGold app users may also send and receive gold as payments to and from any other user or seller without paying any transaction fees They can even send gold to non-BitGold users via their mobile phones or through a simple email message The company also issues prepaid debit cards allowing users to spend funds directly from their BitGold accounts The card is compatible with ATMs so that users may withdraw local currency (7)

Lastly the company issues special ten-gram gold cubes worth approximately $380 each at press time Users may redeem these cubes on the BitGold platform and may demand physical delivery when they see fit (7)

34 JANUARY 2016

Vice-president of communications and PR Emily Cornelius explained in an email that they have no ldquostereotypicalrdquo user of the companyrsquos services but that there are predominantly three main use cases

ldquoThe traditional gold investor will gravitate to BitGold because our gold is unprecedentedly priced within 1 of spot price and we offer free storage in a Brinks vault of their choice globallyhellip The second use case is the user who seeks a more stable currency for their national savings outside of their potentially volatile local fiat currencyhellip Gold has gained over 3000 vs the US Dollar which is arguably the worldrsquos strongest fiat money Gold may seem to go up down or sideways but in reality and when viewed over long timescales such as the avg human lifecycle ndash it always riseshellip Gold has been rising against 9 of the worldrsquos most famous and well-known currencies almost every year since 2000hellip Thirdly BitGold is a powerful payments platformhellip BitGold allows a user to send an invoice for your labor to someone else anywhere in the world which the recipient can pay using any traditional payment methodhellip This gold is vaulted anywhere even outside their jurisdictionhellip This is important as it allows users to achieve upward mobility that are otherwise hindered by localized issues that are exogenous to their personal journeyrdquo

Cornelius also explained that the company offers ldquoall the benefits and efficiencies of a service like PayPal and a MasterCard but with a universally accepted more stable store of valuerdquo

Presently regulation over BitGold appears to be fairly non-existent BitGold does not list which regulators hold jurisdiction over its staff and operations nor do they list regulatory information regarding their trade practices (7) In fact co-founder Roy Sebag has stated in the past that he believes BitGold is not a bank nor does it serve as a financial institution in any traditional sense as it does not engage in fractional-reserve banking (2)According to page 20 of the companyrsquos initial public filing BitGold is not

ldquohellipEligible to be registered with the Financial

Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canadahellip There can be no assurance that BitGoldrsquos services or Internet platform will be acceptable to foreign regulatory bodies Foreign governments may seek to restrict access to BitGoldrsquos services block BitGoldrsquos website or impose other restrictions that may affect BitGoldrsquos ability to offer service to new or existing users in those for an extended period of time or indefinitelyrdquo (8)

Despite this it was confirmed in July of 2015 that the company did offer its services under the Canadian Bailment Law (9) This occurs in situations where physical personal property is transferred from one person (the bailor) to another for safekeeping and doing so does not require the binding notion of a written contract (10)

Presently the company employs 26 people including Sebag and Crumb Other notable BitGold personnel include Chief Executive Officer Darrell MacMullin Chief Technology Officer Alessandro Premoli Lead Mobile Engineer Paul Mennega and Team Manager Karman Lee The company also employs several vice-presidents five software engineers and two compliance officers (4)

It can be said that BitGold has accomplished quite a bit in less than two years Itrsquos likely such a volatile company has some big plans waiting in the wings for 2016 but Emily Cornelius isnrsquot dropping any hints as to what they could be

ldquoWe have a number of new features services and products cominghellip Yoursquoll have to wait and seerdquo

BitGold is steadily making its mark It has the backing the funds the technology and above all the drive Put all these items together (and add a touch of flair and public desire) and itrsquos clear that BitGold has what it takes to make the world of finance its own

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 7: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 7

October 26 2015

Coinify and DigixGlobal Private Limited (Singapore UEN 201479386E) are proud to announce a formal business partnership All bitcoin payments going through Digix will solely be processed through Coinify

This represents a significant initiative between Ethereum and Bitcoin based companies demonstrating how both blockchain ecosystems can work together The partnership between an Ethereum based company and a Bitcoin based company is one of the industryrsquos first signifying that both ecosystems can grow together Bitcoin users can now easily own Ethereum digital assets apart from Ether

Digix allows users to purchase assets like investment grade gold bullion with bitcoin thereafter facilitating physical asset issuances on the blockchain These digital keys issued on the Ethereum blockchain will have the same transactional utility of Bitcoin and can also be made fungible into divisible digital tokens called ldquo Digix Tokens rdquo representative of grams of gold allocated 11

Morten Bebe Coinifyrsquos sales manager believes that this is a significant step in future collaboration with other blockchains ldquo Digixrsquos unique and decentralized approach in the creation of gold backed tokens will help promote the crypto ecosystemrdquo

ldquoWe are very excited to be working with Coinifyrdquo says Kai the CEO Co-Founder of Digix ldquoWe have looked at other payment processors and found Coinify

Coinify and DigixGlobal Announce Bitcoin Partnership in Singapore

Coinify is the first bitcoin payment processor to partner with an Ethereum based company processing bitcoin payments for crypto-assets on Ethereum

to be the best in terms of service reliability and willingness to innovate with young companies in Asia Now end users can easily purchase crypto assets on Ethereum with bitcoinrdquo Kai adds ldquoWe have always been open to collaborations and100 thousand online stores globally

About CoinifyCoinify ApS drives mainstream adoption of digital currencies such as Bitcoin for merchants and consumers Merchants benefit from Coinifyrsquos Payment Service (PSP) enabling free instant settlements in a fraud-free and chargeback-free blockchain payment environment while customers get access to secure one-click payments that reveal no sensitive information Coinify is backed by a multi-million dollar capital injection from SEED Capital (funded by the Danish government) and Accelerace and is the leading European digital currency market player For more information about Coinify visit their website at coinifycom

About DigixDigix is an asset ownership certification and tokeniization platform for physical assets Users who purchase or store gold bullion with Digixrsquos participating suppliers and custodial vaults will be able to own digital assets on the blockchain and create divisible gold tokens that have the same transactional utility and functionality as bitcoin For more information please contact

Coinify ApSHerlev Hovedgade 15B 12730 Herlev Greater Copenhagen Denmark+45 3693 4994Marketing and PR - Lenka HudakovaEmail lhucoinifycom

DigixGlobal Pte Ltd10 Anson Road 05-17International Plaza S079903 Singapore+1-917-267-8977Co-Founder amp CEO - Kai Cheng ChngEmail kcchngdgxiohttpdgxio

8 JANUARY 2016

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 9

Who should have the power to issue money

It seems likely that a great many people probably havenrsquot thought about this question ever After all since the beginning of recorded history various types of governments including republics kings priest-kings and dictatorships have issued money

If you open up your wallet you probably find some paper money in there issued by some government or on behalf of a central bank that is authorized by some government Very likely you also have some credit or debit cards issued by banks or credit unions but these are only corporate extensions of governments so not really that different Some people have gift cards from various companies but these are corporations therefore creatures of the state Moreover most gift cards are denominated in national currencies

My own wallet has a couple of Ron Helwigrsquos Shire silver and gold wire cards too These are laminated cards which contain thin strips of silver in one case and a length of thin gold wire in the other In other words they are actual gold and silver visibly embedded in the clear plastic laminate of the card

If you are fond of history you may have heard of the tendency of Roman emperors to debase their gold and silver coinage and the tendency of the Byzantine emperors to stick with the good stuff You may have heard that Revolutionary France was beset with inflated paper money called the assignat by the national assembly and the mandat by the Directorate ndash the same Directorate that used guillotines in its search for peace and justice and discovered only baskets of severed heads and rivers of blood

You may know that one of Napoleonrsquos secrets to popularity was restoring gold and silver coins to circulation and melting the printer plates used to make the paper money You may be aware of the adventures of Marco Polo with paper money in China under Kublai Khan And you are probably aware of the creation in late 1913 of a Federal Reserve that gradually replaced gold and silver coins in the United States with book entry and paper money along with coins made out of base metals like zinc

If you arenrsquot fond of history essentially nothing in the preceding two paragraphs means anything to you Which

The Power To Issue MoneyBY JIM DAVIDSON

AH TAKE THE CASH AND LET THE CREDIT GONOR HEED THE RUMBLE OF A DISTANT DRUM

~EDWARD FITZGERALD THE RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

10 JANUARY 2016

might be ok if you werenrsquot living in interesting times As it turns out Thucydides was correct in believing that the future if it does not mirror the past at least reflects it And of course Santayana says that if you wonrsquot learn the lessons of history you may be doomed to repeat them

Given that there is currently a sovereign debt crisis that has turned Greece into an economic wasteland plunged Chinarsquos markets down and which is spreading to many other countries in the coming months and years and given that the money you have in your wallet is only backed by the full faith and credit of the United States which has not exactly shown itself to be credit-worthy or faithful you may find yourself very interested in the question who should issue money

Your PowerNow if you believe as I do that the only just form of government is one that derives its powers from the unanimous consent of the governed you should recognize who has the power to issue money Since governments are issuing money and since all the powers that governments have must have been either seized from the people or delegated to the government with the consent of the people it follows naturally that the power to issue money comes originally from the people It is also my view that powers are not collective in nature but like rights are individual in character In other words you have the power to issue money

Whether that comes as a surprise to you or not it is clear from simply looking around that not everyone is issuing money If each individual has the power to issue money why isnrsquot everyone doing so

It turns out that one of the key features of money is acceptability It matters a great deal less if you issue money than it does if someone else accepts it In order to generate demand for its currency your national government accepts that currency for payment of taxes The fact that there are a great many taxes not only at the national level but also at state and local levels means that there are lots of places where the national governmentrsquos currency is accepted Not only is it accepted by tax authorities it is also accepted by merchants because they know they can use it to pay their taxes It is therefore accepted by those who

supply merchants with products so they can pay their taxes and so forth

So the problems of central bank policies the problems with the economy the problems with many government policies are to put it simply your fault You choose to use the national currency of your country You choose not to accept alternatives even though alternatives exist and have existed in the case of gold and silver coins for thousands of years You choose to engage in trade and commerce for fiat money which means that the problems of fiat money the problems of central planning the difficulties you face as a result of errors in what the Federal Reserve and other monetary manipulators do are your problems They are caused by your choices just as much as by the choices of hundreds of millions of others in your country and billions around the world You have the power to change this situation directly to your own advantage Does that seem harsh

Taxation Is TheftMany years ago at the end of the last century I met a member of the Somena First Nation up in Canada I was attending the world congress of the International Society for Individual Liberty at the time Meaghan Walker-Champion explained to me that she had spoken to the elders of her community and they had many long talks among themselves thinking about what the Somena word for ldquotax collectorrdquo would be They concluded that the word in their language was the same as the word for ldquothiefrdquo

Writing at the end of World War Two EC Riegel reached the same conclusion He noted that money is extremely useful in trade and commerce and that the issue power properly belongs to those engaged in free enterprise Since governments are not engaged in buying and selling but only in stealing from others they are entirely inappropriate to the purpose of issuing money He makes these and many other excellent arguments against state socialism in A New Approach to Freedom My friend Spencer MacCallum helped organise EC Riegelrsquos papers An authorized free and complete version of A New Approach to Freedom is available on the web here

To be continued on page 37

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 11

12 JANUARY 2016

SBC - What Is Silent BitcoinSilent Bitcoin (or SBC) is a digital voucher currency 100 backed by bitcoins This means that 10 SBC equals 10 BTC When a user spends BTC to a wallet hash controlled by SilentVault they receive in exchange a voucher (a cryptographically signed XML object) for the same amount in SBC Thereafter the SBC voucher value circulates privately off-chain between SilentVault wallets until a holder redeems their SBC voucher for BTC At that point the SBC value is decirculated and a BTC spend is made from SilentVaultrsquos reserve to the address hash designated by the user who surrendered the voucher (Which is probably but doesnrsquot have to be the userrsquos own)

Using SBCThe Voucher-Safe network operates differently from the Bitcoin network in several important respects

Silencing BitcoinSilentVault lets you spend and receive bitcoin (and litecoin) off the blockchain entirely and move your coins to and from regular bitcoin addresses whenever you want Our wallets are multi-asset and can hold any supported asset types side-by-side

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 13

bull A Voucher Publisher (or VP) signs vouchers and clears voucher payments to prevent double-spending While each VP is centralized the protocol supports multiple Publishers This means that payments clear in seconds with no need to wait for transaction confirmations (Note however that a BTC spend to purchase a SBC voucher does require 6 confirmations before the SBC voucher will be issued)

bull Input vouchers are always destroyed in every transaction and replaced with output vouchers bearing fresh unique serial numbers This means that unlike with the blockchain no public transaction history exists balances are private and no ldquotaintrdquo can attach to coins (Taint violates fungibility a fundamental characteristic of sound money) This represents a vast privacy improvement over regular BTC spends and a lesser improvement even over ldquocoin laundryrdquo services

bull A payee must pick up their voucher payment within the 1-7 days designated by the payer If the payee does not do so the payment expires and becomes recoverable by the payer (indefinitely) This makes it impossible to lose value by spending it to a ldquodead walletrdquo

bull Receipts are generated by the payee not by the Publisher This prevents the clearing VP from needing to record transaction history or knowing anything about the private message context accompanying the payment The VP also never sees a user IP address

In short it is much faster more convenient more private and generally much safer to exchange SBC value between SilentVault

wallets than to perform ldquonaked spendsrdquo between BTC wallets on the blockchain (Though naturally it is also more expensive privacy being worth something)

Trading SBCExchanges in and out of SBC fromto BTC are performed via the ldquoExchangesrdquo tab in the SilentVault wallet by buying or selling SBC vouchers respectively These sales and repurchases are carried out with the exchange itself mdash meaning SilentVault is an agent for the Issuer of SBC SBC vouchers can also be traded to other users in exchange for vouchers representing other asset types (eg USD or EUR silver or gold etc) Users can specify the asset types they will accept and offer discounts or demand premiums The SVX (SilentVault Exchange) acts as a third-party escrow agent allowing all trades to be fully anonymous and secure You cannot know with whom you are trading and no KYC of any kind is performable by SilentVault You are your wallet keys period

Fee ScheduleThe fees currently charged by SilentVault are as follows

bull Purchase SBC with BTC 00 (free) minimum quantity 001 BTC

bull Redeem SBC for BTC 00 (free) minimum quantity 002 BTC

bull Make SBC voucher spend 00015 BTCbull Receive SBC voucher spend 00006 BTC

(first one is 00002)bull Escrow exchange 10 of amount

minimum quantity 002 BTC

httpssilentvaultcom

14 JANUARY 2016

YOUR PRIVACY MATTERSEacutelan Turbo VPN This VPN service is bundled with VoIP and private audiovideo calling via SIP plus unlimited bandwidth for surfing and streaming

Our Eacutelan Turbo VPN service is a standard single-hop VPN but with selectable exit proxies in Panama the USA the UK France and onto the Tor network As a subscriber yoursquoll also get an SIP extension that lets you place private audio and video calls to other users Unlike with Skype these calls can be encrypted end-to-end to conceal their content in transit And because yoursquore on our VPN the call metadata is also protected We also supply your own private Mumble server as an inexpensive add-on There are no bandwidth limitations with this package Surf and talk all you want

Eacutelan Max Security VPN This VPN service is bundled with email addresses and aliases 1 GB file storage plus 25 GB of monthly bandwidth

Our Eacutelan Max Security VPN service is a premiere multi-hop VPN which lives up to its name Multi-hop means that traffic flows between multiple points along its route from the entry gateway to the exit nodes something like changing planes a couple of times during an extended trip Inside the network internal routes are varied traffic is mixed alongside that of other users and random delays get inserted to defeat traffic analysis This technique known as ldquoserver cascadesrdquo same features and benefits as provides many of the Tor (Given that the Deep State agencies in various countries are now running most of the Tor exit nodes it might be even better) As a subscriber yoursquoll also get private email addresses and email aliases plus 1 GB of very secure file storage Because of its multi-hop architecture this VPN is less suitable for streaming applications and bandwidth usage is limited to 25 GB per month However you can also buy top-up packs to add more bandwidth

Elegantly Convenient No special hardware required

bull Software-only solutionbull Both individual and multi-user packages are availablebull Simple to install and use

Support for Windows Linux Mac Android and iOS httpelanvpnnet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 15

Wersquore long-time industry professionals with over a combined forty years in the IT industry Wersquore also committed advocates of human liberty and personal privacy With all the global spy networks hacks and data mining in the world today internet privacy is under attack as never beforeWe agree with E C Riegel who wrote

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and self-asserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

16 JANUARY 2016

What does Digix doWe are a Smart Asset company that allows anyone to securely send and receive ownerships of assets for eventual redemption on the blockchain The first asset listed is Gold and other assets such as diamonds will be available in the near future

What are Proof of Asset (PoA) CertificatesProof of Asset (PoA) Certificates prove the existence of gold through the entire chain of custody from the supplier to the custodial vault They are automatically created when a user purchases and stores gold at our participating custodial vaults It consists of 3 digital signatures from 3 independent entities vendor custodian and auditor Through this process a PoA card is issued representing your asset ownership on the blockchain This PoA card can then be sent and received by anyone on the Ethereum Blockchain for eventual redemption PoA certificates can also be sent to a Minter DAE to create DGX Gold tokens for fungibility

What are Digix Gold TokensDigix Gold tokens can only be created when a user sends in their PoA Certificates in exchange for them on a 11 weight basis on the Digix Minter DAE Each Digix Gold token represents 1g of gold For example if a PoA Certificate represents the ownership of a 100g gold bar it can be sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for 100 DGX tokens which will be deposited in your ethereum wallet

How do I know if these tokens or PoA certificates are safe from fraud or duplicationAll tokens and PoA certificates are created on the Ethereum Blockchain a public ledger where information stored can never be manipulated or counterfeited Our smart asset service can only exist because of blockchain technology

Where are the physical gold bars storedPhysical gold is kept with a participating custodian Each PoA Certificate will specify the name and location of the custodian that holds the gold The first participating custodian on the Digix Gold platform is Malca-Amit which maintains a high security storage facility at the Singapore Freeport

Why SingaporeDigixGlobal is incorporated in low crime and politically stable Singapore Investment Precious Metals are exempted from GST locally so you are purchasing gold at the lowest premiums available in the world

bull There are also no permits required to import or export precious metalsbull Singapore also has no jurisdictional relations with USA or Europebull We will only release your personal information by order of the Court of Law in Singapore

Frequently AskedQuestions

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 17

A Sneak Peek at the NewDigixGlobal User Interface

It will be available to the public in January 2016 for multiple operating systems and mobile platforms This software will manage client transactions for PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates Digix Asset Tokens and Ether tokens

DigixGlobal can create a digital asset certificate for any storable physical property Future versions of this software will include additional digital assets such as diamonds

When the interface opens users are presented with the main dashboard menu as shown below Access to all primary services and tools is available from this opening screen

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEVendor Information - Custodian Information - Auditor Information

To ensure quality and authenticity participating gold vendors only sell LBMA approved gold bars Gold purchased from an LBMA certified refinery is globally known for its quality These bullion sources guarantee the authenticity and purity of every single gold bar used on the Digix network Buying gold from the marketplace is the first step in the process of generating a PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificate

18 JANUARY 2016

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEShows gold bullion available for purchase as a digital gold certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 19

20 JANUARY 2016

GOLD TOKENS AND ETHER WALLETFrom this area a user can send Digix Gold Tokens or send Ether

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 21

The transaction hash for a completed certificate purchase is also available with just one click

(see below Raw Transaction Data Transaction Hash)

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets Individual users can create Digix Gold and Asset tokens by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoATM Certificate) to the Minter DAE It is a way to represent gold bars as units of tokens on the Ethereum Blockchain database One Digix Gold token represents 1 gram of gold

(Q) How do I know that there are actual gold bars backing PoA certificates or Digix Gold tokens

All material documents from the Proof of Asset protocol are made available via Swarm - Ethereumrsquos distributed file sharing This would mean that all assaying certificates custodial receipts of deposits and independent auditor documents from the entire chain of custody will be uploaded for public viewing to ascertain the authenticity of all PoA certificates and Digix Gold tokens Each entity in the chain of custody will also digitally sign on our PoA Certificate We only deal with vendors custodians and auditors that have passed our due diligence and that are world renowned with a history of excellence Private audits are also available for added assurance

The Ethereum platform allows users to create applications that run on a decentralized peer-to-peer network of computers without any central control and free from human interruption or corruption Vitalik Buterin invented Ethereum in late 2013 it was formally described by Dr Gavin Wood in 2014 then developed as an open source software project under the GNU Lesser General Public License It was officially launched on July 30 2015 The project is maintained by the Ethereum core developer team (ETHDEV) under the guidance of the non-profit Ethereum Foundation which had raised 31591 Bitcoins during their 2014 crowdsale

22 JANUARY 2016

From this page users may also view the assetrsquos history of trading within the Digix system

GOLD ASSET HISTORY

PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates

are Ethereum smart contracts

that provides a legally and

cryptographically binding

determination of ownership of

physical gold or other assets currently under

the guardianship of a participating custodian on the

Digix decentralized platform It

also certifies the agreement

between the user the vendor the custodian and

the independent auditor

The PoAtrade provides a complete history of the chain of control from the vendor

the custodian and all audit reports This proof guarantees that the purchase of the gold by the user its storage by the

custodian and regular inspection by the auditor has taken place

PoA Certificates can be transferred or sent to any Ethereum account sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or

Gold tokens or redeemed from the Recast DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or Gold

Tokens

Copies of the orignal signed documents are included as a part of the certificatersquos registration in the blockchain

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 23

24 JANUARY 2016

GOLD EXPLORER RECASTER (Above)

The Digix Minter DAE recognizes all valid Digix PoAtrade Certificates and can accept them from a user in exchange for divisible Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens The rules of the Digix platform dictates that only the Digix Minter has the authority through the request of the owner of a Digix PoAtrade certificate to allow that owner to issue their own Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens in exchange for the PoAtrade Certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 25

The interface conveniently walks customers through the online purchase of a Digital Gold PoA Certificate

26 JANUARY 2016

A completed purchase of the digital gold certificate representing this bar

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 27

TOOLS AND SETTINGS

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

28 JANUARY 2016

RESTORE WALLET

In addition to its security features users can configure the Aegis Vault to assign beneficiaries set the time-based distribution of funds or assets and delegate a power of attorney to another individual or a group of people

Digix is committed to bringing Ethereum use to the mainstream and the availability of a secure wallet is essential for realizing this goal

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 29

GENERATE A REDEMPTION KEY

(Q) What is the Digix Recaster Smart Contract

Digix Recaster Smart Contract allows the

conversion of Digix Gold tokens to a PoA card The

PoA card can be sent or received on the blockchain representing an ownership

of an entire gold bar or be used for redemption of

the physical gold bar at our office For example if you have 100 DGX tokens

representing 100g of weight in gold you can exchange

for a PoA card representing a 100g gold cast bar at

Digix This PoA card can be sent and received on the

Ethereum blockchain or be used to schedule a local

pick-up of the physical gold bar at Digix redemption

center in Singapore

You can currently recast into PoA certificates of

100g (100 DGX) or 1000g (1000 DGX) gold cast bar

denominations

30 JANUARY 2016

(Q) What about the Digix audit processWe have four types of audits at Digix

1 PRIVATE AUDITS Clients are welcome to come to our certified custodial vaults in Singapore to inspect your gold bars in a highly private and secure environment

2 EXTERNAL AUDITS We have engaged Inspectorate Singapore (wwwinspectoratecom) to audit our inventory and match them off with customersrsquo holdings at DGX We will hold such inspections at least twice a year

3 CUSTODIAL AUDITS Our certified custodians will provide a physical certification of proof that your gold bars are stored safely in their vaults They will take photographs of your serialized bars per request basis and have them keyed into their inventory management systems Some of our certified custodiansrsquo reputation are also on the line to provide us with their appraisal and storage services as they have to answer to their shareholders as a publicly listed company in Singapore

4 INTERNAL AUDITS We have patented a certification process called Proof of Asset (PoA) where auditors sign on the existence of Gold in our PoA certificate The digital certificate is then uploaded onto the Ethereum Blockchain

(Q) Are there KYCAML requirementsAll users who wish to redeem PoA certificates or Digix Gold Tokens for physical gold bars will have to go through KYC requirements at the pickup The gold bars will only be available for pick up at our office location in Singapore We must ensure that DigixGlobal and participating organizations are protected from any potential liabilities resulting from government prosecution and asset seizures so we ensure that we comply fully with regulatory requirements for Know your customer (KYC) and Anti-money laundering (AML)

ADDRESS BOOK

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 31

SilentVault is a secure private online wallet for making untraceable p2p payments

Unlike other crypto currency wallets SilentVault wallets support heterogeneous asset types such as fiat dollars euros metals gold and silver and crypto coins bitcoin litecoin SilentVault provides anonymous off blockchain payments made in bitcoin and litecoin It also features an integrated p2p escrow exchange where users can trade anonymously among different asset types with other users such as exchanging bitcoins for silver

The SilentVault Spark client is a fully functional Jabber chat client that is a branded and updated version of Spark Since Spark supports a plugin architecture our wallet client is implemented as a plugin You can obtain the SilentVault Spark client with plugin from this page You can also find the source code for both the plugin and SilentVaults customizations to the Spark source base elsewhere on this site A tutorial on SVSpark is here

The SilentVault wallet webstart client is a stand alone program that you can install from within your browser Like the SilentVault Spark client it communicates with the Voucher Safe payment network using extensions to the XMPP protocol This type of communication makes economic transactions indistinguishable from ordinary encrypted instant messaging traffic and avoids any need to run within an insecure browser environment or rely on web domains All client source code is published on this site and while you can run a prefabricated client you are also invited to build your own from source

You are also invited to develop applications for our integrated marketplaces that appear within SilentVault wallets A full API is available for your use as a development tool Please contact our team for details

The SilentVault technology is based on Voucher Safe which was developed 2008 2011 Voucher Safe is also the core technology of the Digital Cash Alliance

httpssilentvaultcom

32 JANUARY 2016

ldquoI love go-o-o-o-ldrdquo-Austin Powers in Goldmember

Not surprisingly most people feel the same

According to the Wall Street Journal gold prices and safe-haven demand in Asia have been skyrocketing since mid-November (1) proving that you donrsquot have to be a sea-faring pirate or a squire in a kingrsquos castle to enjoy its natural glare beauty and above all its ability to stimulate wealth

Since the days of the California Gold Rush people have enjoyed panning for it selling it and most of

all owning it Long considered one of the planetrsquos most precious and desired metals gold has grown heavily in value over the last several years and it appears more and more are trying to get their hands on it every single day

Something else is growing as wellhellip Bitcoin Often regarded as Americarsquos most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin has jumped heavily in value over the last few months spiking from $230 to nearly $350 Unlike gold which exists in solid physical form Bitcoin exists in ones and zeros binary coding that travels through the blockchain the technology that makes Bitcoin transactions possible between users and respective merchants

BITGOLD A MODERN REVOLUTION IN FINANCEBY NICK MARINOFF

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 33

Itrsquos interesting to witness nearly equal popularity rising for two different things that ultimately serve the same purpose and share similar goals Both are designed to enhance the world of finance Both can rise in value and both have the ability to make someone rich overnighthellip So what if we could combine the two What significant differences could there be if Bitcoin and gold were fused into one entity

Well itrsquos already been done Say hello to BitGold an early startup company stationed in Toronto Canada BitGold aims to offer international services for people and businesses to send payments and hold savings with physical gold (2) The company was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb Both have a long history in the financial sector with Sebag previously serving as the Founder and Managing Principal of Braavos Capital (an international private investment organization) and the Chairman of Natural Resource Holdings an investment company involved with natural resource assets (3) Josh Crumb was previously the Senior Metals Strategist at Goldman Sachs (4)

The company alleges that gold bullion is ldquothe worldrsquos oldest asset class and the centuryrsquos best performing currencyrdquo (5) According to BitGoldrsquos website their mission is

ldquohellipTo make gold accessible and useful in digital payments and secure savingshellip Wersquore advancing the digital payments revolution by helping people securely acquire store and now spend gold with unprecedented simplicity BitGold accounts are free and can be opened in minutes We provide users with a secure vault account to purchase and hold gold the ability to make and receive instant gold payments and a prepaid card for spending gold at traditional points of sale Through our network of ATMs customers can fund their accounts with local-currencyrdquo (4)

Present investors backing BitGold include Dundee Capital Markets GMP Securities and Sandstorm Gold although the initial investor in the company was Soros Brothers Investment which is presently run by Alexander Soros the son of Hungarian business magnate George Soros (2)

2015 has been a big year for the company CNBC has stated that BitGold currently serves over 100000 active customers and the platform stores approximately 276 kilograms of bullion within its walls Thatrsquos nearly $11 million total and over $100 per active user (6) In May BitGold began trading on the TSX Venture exchange in Canada and announced the purchase of GoldMoney worth nearly $52 million in Canadian dollars (7)

In June the company made citizens of the United States very happy with the following announcement

ldquoUS residents can sign up on the BitGold platform and buy sell or redeem gold using BitGoldrsquos Aurum payment and settlement technology US residents will also have access to the BitGold mobile app and a prepaid card when these features launch over the coming weeksrdquo (7)

The platform offers a number of products and services beneficial to any gold-lover across the country As the above quote suggests BitGold offers whatrsquos known as Aurum the gold-settlement technology thatrsquos compliant with several US financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase Wells Fargo Citi Bank of America US Bank Fidelity Capital One and Charles Schwab Users with an account at any one of these nationally-recognized banks can instantly redeem gold or authorize gold deposits The transactions thereby increase in safety and automation Users also receive a bonus in that they are usually able to avoid bank wire fees through the process (7)

Using the BitGold app users may also send and receive gold as payments to and from any other user or seller without paying any transaction fees They can even send gold to non-BitGold users via their mobile phones or through a simple email message The company also issues prepaid debit cards allowing users to spend funds directly from their BitGold accounts The card is compatible with ATMs so that users may withdraw local currency (7)

Lastly the company issues special ten-gram gold cubes worth approximately $380 each at press time Users may redeem these cubes on the BitGold platform and may demand physical delivery when they see fit (7)

34 JANUARY 2016

Vice-president of communications and PR Emily Cornelius explained in an email that they have no ldquostereotypicalrdquo user of the companyrsquos services but that there are predominantly three main use cases

ldquoThe traditional gold investor will gravitate to BitGold because our gold is unprecedentedly priced within 1 of spot price and we offer free storage in a Brinks vault of their choice globallyhellip The second use case is the user who seeks a more stable currency for their national savings outside of their potentially volatile local fiat currencyhellip Gold has gained over 3000 vs the US Dollar which is arguably the worldrsquos strongest fiat money Gold may seem to go up down or sideways but in reality and when viewed over long timescales such as the avg human lifecycle ndash it always riseshellip Gold has been rising against 9 of the worldrsquos most famous and well-known currencies almost every year since 2000hellip Thirdly BitGold is a powerful payments platformhellip BitGold allows a user to send an invoice for your labor to someone else anywhere in the world which the recipient can pay using any traditional payment methodhellip This gold is vaulted anywhere even outside their jurisdictionhellip This is important as it allows users to achieve upward mobility that are otherwise hindered by localized issues that are exogenous to their personal journeyrdquo

Cornelius also explained that the company offers ldquoall the benefits and efficiencies of a service like PayPal and a MasterCard but with a universally accepted more stable store of valuerdquo

Presently regulation over BitGold appears to be fairly non-existent BitGold does not list which regulators hold jurisdiction over its staff and operations nor do they list regulatory information regarding their trade practices (7) In fact co-founder Roy Sebag has stated in the past that he believes BitGold is not a bank nor does it serve as a financial institution in any traditional sense as it does not engage in fractional-reserve banking (2)According to page 20 of the companyrsquos initial public filing BitGold is not

ldquohellipEligible to be registered with the Financial

Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canadahellip There can be no assurance that BitGoldrsquos services or Internet platform will be acceptable to foreign regulatory bodies Foreign governments may seek to restrict access to BitGoldrsquos services block BitGoldrsquos website or impose other restrictions that may affect BitGoldrsquos ability to offer service to new or existing users in those for an extended period of time or indefinitelyrdquo (8)

Despite this it was confirmed in July of 2015 that the company did offer its services under the Canadian Bailment Law (9) This occurs in situations where physical personal property is transferred from one person (the bailor) to another for safekeeping and doing so does not require the binding notion of a written contract (10)

Presently the company employs 26 people including Sebag and Crumb Other notable BitGold personnel include Chief Executive Officer Darrell MacMullin Chief Technology Officer Alessandro Premoli Lead Mobile Engineer Paul Mennega and Team Manager Karman Lee The company also employs several vice-presidents five software engineers and two compliance officers (4)

It can be said that BitGold has accomplished quite a bit in less than two years Itrsquos likely such a volatile company has some big plans waiting in the wings for 2016 but Emily Cornelius isnrsquot dropping any hints as to what they could be

ldquoWe have a number of new features services and products cominghellip Yoursquoll have to wait and seerdquo

BitGold is steadily making its mark It has the backing the funds the technology and above all the drive Put all these items together (and add a touch of flair and public desire) and itrsquos clear that BitGold has what it takes to make the world of finance its own

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 8: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

8 JANUARY 2016

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 9

Who should have the power to issue money

It seems likely that a great many people probably havenrsquot thought about this question ever After all since the beginning of recorded history various types of governments including republics kings priest-kings and dictatorships have issued money

If you open up your wallet you probably find some paper money in there issued by some government or on behalf of a central bank that is authorized by some government Very likely you also have some credit or debit cards issued by banks or credit unions but these are only corporate extensions of governments so not really that different Some people have gift cards from various companies but these are corporations therefore creatures of the state Moreover most gift cards are denominated in national currencies

My own wallet has a couple of Ron Helwigrsquos Shire silver and gold wire cards too These are laminated cards which contain thin strips of silver in one case and a length of thin gold wire in the other In other words they are actual gold and silver visibly embedded in the clear plastic laminate of the card

If you are fond of history you may have heard of the tendency of Roman emperors to debase their gold and silver coinage and the tendency of the Byzantine emperors to stick with the good stuff You may have heard that Revolutionary France was beset with inflated paper money called the assignat by the national assembly and the mandat by the Directorate ndash the same Directorate that used guillotines in its search for peace and justice and discovered only baskets of severed heads and rivers of blood

You may know that one of Napoleonrsquos secrets to popularity was restoring gold and silver coins to circulation and melting the printer plates used to make the paper money You may be aware of the adventures of Marco Polo with paper money in China under Kublai Khan And you are probably aware of the creation in late 1913 of a Federal Reserve that gradually replaced gold and silver coins in the United States with book entry and paper money along with coins made out of base metals like zinc

If you arenrsquot fond of history essentially nothing in the preceding two paragraphs means anything to you Which

The Power To Issue MoneyBY JIM DAVIDSON

AH TAKE THE CASH AND LET THE CREDIT GONOR HEED THE RUMBLE OF A DISTANT DRUM

~EDWARD FITZGERALD THE RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

10 JANUARY 2016

might be ok if you werenrsquot living in interesting times As it turns out Thucydides was correct in believing that the future if it does not mirror the past at least reflects it And of course Santayana says that if you wonrsquot learn the lessons of history you may be doomed to repeat them

Given that there is currently a sovereign debt crisis that has turned Greece into an economic wasteland plunged Chinarsquos markets down and which is spreading to many other countries in the coming months and years and given that the money you have in your wallet is only backed by the full faith and credit of the United States which has not exactly shown itself to be credit-worthy or faithful you may find yourself very interested in the question who should issue money

Your PowerNow if you believe as I do that the only just form of government is one that derives its powers from the unanimous consent of the governed you should recognize who has the power to issue money Since governments are issuing money and since all the powers that governments have must have been either seized from the people or delegated to the government with the consent of the people it follows naturally that the power to issue money comes originally from the people It is also my view that powers are not collective in nature but like rights are individual in character In other words you have the power to issue money

Whether that comes as a surprise to you or not it is clear from simply looking around that not everyone is issuing money If each individual has the power to issue money why isnrsquot everyone doing so

It turns out that one of the key features of money is acceptability It matters a great deal less if you issue money than it does if someone else accepts it In order to generate demand for its currency your national government accepts that currency for payment of taxes The fact that there are a great many taxes not only at the national level but also at state and local levels means that there are lots of places where the national governmentrsquos currency is accepted Not only is it accepted by tax authorities it is also accepted by merchants because they know they can use it to pay their taxes It is therefore accepted by those who

supply merchants with products so they can pay their taxes and so forth

So the problems of central bank policies the problems with the economy the problems with many government policies are to put it simply your fault You choose to use the national currency of your country You choose not to accept alternatives even though alternatives exist and have existed in the case of gold and silver coins for thousands of years You choose to engage in trade and commerce for fiat money which means that the problems of fiat money the problems of central planning the difficulties you face as a result of errors in what the Federal Reserve and other monetary manipulators do are your problems They are caused by your choices just as much as by the choices of hundreds of millions of others in your country and billions around the world You have the power to change this situation directly to your own advantage Does that seem harsh

Taxation Is TheftMany years ago at the end of the last century I met a member of the Somena First Nation up in Canada I was attending the world congress of the International Society for Individual Liberty at the time Meaghan Walker-Champion explained to me that she had spoken to the elders of her community and they had many long talks among themselves thinking about what the Somena word for ldquotax collectorrdquo would be They concluded that the word in their language was the same as the word for ldquothiefrdquo

Writing at the end of World War Two EC Riegel reached the same conclusion He noted that money is extremely useful in trade and commerce and that the issue power properly belongs to those engaged in free enterprise Since governments are not engaged in buying and selling but only in stealing from others they are entirely inappropriate to the purpose of issuing money He makes these and many other excellent arguments against state socialism in A New Approach to Freedom My friend Spencer MacCallum helped organise EC Riegelrsquos papers An authorized free and complete version of A New Approach to Freedom is available on the web here

To be continued on page 37

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 11

12 JANUARY 2016

SBC - What Is Silent BitcoinSilent Bitcoin (or SBC) is a digital voucher currency 100 backed by bitcoins This means that 10 SBC equals 10 BTC When a user spends BTC to a wallet hash controlled by SilentVault they receive in exchange a voucher (a cryptographically signed XML object) for the same amount in SBC Thereafter the SBC voucher value circulates privately off-chain between SilentVault wallets until a holder redeems their SBC voucher for BTC At that point the SBC value is decirculated and a BTC spend is made from SilentVaultrsquos reserve to the address hash designated by the user who surrendered the voucher (Which is probably but doesnrsquot have to be the userrsquos own)

Using SBCThe Voucher-Safe network operates differently from the Bitcoin network in several important respects

Silencing BitcoinSilentVault lets you spend and receive bitcoin (and litecoin) off the blockchain entirely and move your coins to and from regular bitcoin addresses whenever you want Our wallets are multi-asset and can hold any supported asset types side-by-side

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 13

bull A Voucher Publisher (or VP) signs vouchers and clears voucher payments to prevent double-spending While each VP is centralized the protocol supports multiple Publishers This means that payments clear in seconds with no need to wait for transaction confirmations (Note however that a BTC spend to purchase a SBC voucher does require 6 confirmations before the SBC voucher will be issued)

bull Input vouchers are always destroyed in every transaction and replaced with output vouchers bearing fresh unique serial numbers This means that unlike with the blockchain no public transaction history exists balances are private and no ldquotaintrdquo can attach to coins (Taint violates fungibility a fundamental characteristic of sound money) This represents a vast privacy improvement over regular BTC spends and a lesser improvement even over ldquocoin laundryrdquo services

bull A payee must pick up their voucher payment within the 1-7 days designated by the payer If the payee does not do so the payment expires and becomes recoverable by the payer (indefinitely) This makes it impossible to lose value by spending it to a ldquodead walletrdquo

bull Receipts are generated by the payee not by the Publisher This prevents the clearing VP from needing to record transaction history or knowing anything about the private message context accompanying the payment The VP also never sees a user IP address

In short it is much faster more convenient more private and generally much safer to exchange SBC value between SilentVault

wallets than to perform ldquonaked spendsrdquo between BTC wallets on the blockchain (Though naturally it is also more expensive privacy being worth something)

Trading SBCExchanges in and out of SBC fromto BTC are performed via the ldquoExchangesrdquo tab in the SilentVault wallet by buying or selling SBC vouchers respectively These sales and repurchases are carried out with the exchange itself mdash meaning SilentVault is an agent for the Issuer of SBC SBC vouchers can also be traded to other users in exchange for vouchers representing other asset types (eg USD or EUR silver or gold etc) Users can specify the asset types they will accept and offer discounts or demand premiums The SVX (SilentVault Exchange) acts as a third-party escrow agent allowing all trades to be fully anonymous and secure You cannot know with whom you are trading and no KYC of any kind is performable by SilentVault You are your wallet keys period

Fee ScheduleThe fees currently charged by SilentVault are as follows

bull Purchase SBC with BTC 00 (free) minimum quantity 001 BTC

bull Redeem SBC for BTC 00 (free) minimum quantity 002 BTC

bull Make SBC voucher spend 00015 BTCbull Receive SBC voucher spend 00006 BTC

(first one is 00002)bull Escrow exchange 10 of amount

minimum quantity 002 BTC

httpssilentvaultcom

14 JANUARY 2016

YOUR PRIVACY MATTERSEacutelan Turbo VPN This VPN service is bundled with VoIP and private audiovideo calling via SIP plus unlimited bandwidth for surfing and streaming

Our Eacutelan Turbo VPN service is a standard single-hop VPN but with selectable exit proxies in Panama the USA the UK France and onto the Tor network As a subscriber yoursquoll also get an SIP extension that lets you place private audio and video calls to other users Unlike with Skype these calls can be encrypted end-to-end to conceal their content in transit And because yoursquore on our VPN the call metadata is also protected We also supply your own private Mumble server as an inexpensive add-on There are no bandwidth limitations with this package Surf and talk all you want

Eacutelan Max Security VPN This VPN service is bundled with email addresses and aliases 1 GB file storage plus 25 GB of monthly bandwidth

Our Eacutelan Max Security VPN service is a premiere multi-hop VPN which lives up to its name Multi-hop means that traffic flows between multiple points along its route from the entry gateway to the exit nodes something like changing planes a couple of times during an extended trip Inside the network internal routes are varied traffic is mixed alongside that of other users and random delays get inserted to defeat traffic analysis This technique known as ldquoserver cascadesrdquo same features and benefits as provides many of the Tor (Given that the Deep State agencies in various countries are now running most of the Tor exit nodes it might be even better) As a subscriber yoursquoll also get private email addresses and email aliases plus 1 GB of very secure file storage Because of its multi-hop architecture this VPN is less suitable for streaming applications and bandwidth usage is limited to 25 GB per month However you can also buy top-up packs to add more bandwidth

Elegantly Convenient No special hardware required

bull Software-only solutionbull Both individual and multi-user packages are availablebull Simple to install and use

Support for Windows Linux Mac Android and iOS httpelanvpnnet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 15

Wersquore long-time industry professionals with over a combined forty years in the IT industry Wersquore also committed advocates of human liberty and personal privacy With all the global spy networks hacks and data mining in the world today internet privacy is under attack as never beforeWe agree with E C Riegel who wrote

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and self-asserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

16 JANUARY 2016

What does Digix doWe are a Smart Asset company that allows anyone to securely send and receive ownerships of assets for eventual redemption on the blockchain The first asset listed is Gold and other assets such as diamonds will be available in the near future

What are Proof of Asset (PoA) CertificatesProof of Asset (PoA) Certificates prove the existence of gold through the entire chain of custody from the supplier to the custodial vault They are automatically created when a user purchases and stores gold at our participating custodial vaults It consists of 3 digital signatures from 3 independent entities vendor custodian and auditor Through this process a PoA card is issued representing your asset ownership on the blockchain This PoA card can then be sent and received by anyone on the Ethereum Blockchain for eventual redemption PoA certificates can also be sent to a Minter DAE to create DGX Gold tokens for fungibility

What are Digix Gold TokensDigix Gold tokens can only be created when a user sends in their PoA Certificates in exchange for them on a 11 weight basis on the Digix Minter DAE Each Digix Gold token represents 1g of gold For example if a PoA Certificate represents the ownership of a 100g gold bar it can be sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for 100 DGX tokens which will be deposited in your ethereum wallet

How do I know if these tokens or PoA certificates are safe from fraud or duplicationAll tokens and PoA certificates are created on the Ethereum Blockchain a public ledger where information stored can never be manipulated or counterfeited Our smart asset service can only exist because of blockchain technology

Where are the physical gold bars storedPhysical gold is kept with a participating custodian Each PoA Certificate will specify the name and location of the custodian that holds the gold The first participating custodian on the Digix Gold platform is Malca-Amit which maintains a high security storage facility at the Singapore Freeport

Why SingaporeDigixGlobal is incorporated in low crime and politically stable Singapore Investment Precious Metals are exempted from GST locally so you are purchasing gold at the lowest premiums available in the world

bull There are also no permits required to import or export precious metalsbull Singapore also has no jurisdictional relations with USA or Europebull We will only release your personal information by order of the Court of Law in Singapore

Frequently AskedQuestions

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 17

A Sneak Peek at the NewDigixGlobal User Interface

It will be available to the public in January 2016 for multiple operating systems and mobile platforms This software will manage client transactions for PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates Digix Asset Tokens and Ether tokens

DigixGlobal can create a digital asset certificate for any storable physical property Future versions of this software will include additional digital assets such as diamonds

When the interface opens users are presented with the main dashboard menu as shown below Access to all primary services and tools is available from this opening screen

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEVendor Information - Custodian Information - Auditor Information

To ensure quality and authenticity participating gold vendors only sell LBMA approved gold bars Gold purchased from an LBMA certified refinery is globally known for its quality These bullion sources guarantee the authenticity and purity of every single gold bar used on the Digix network Buying gold from the marketplace is the first step in the process of generating a PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificate

18 JANUARY 2016

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEShows gold bullion available for purchase as a digital gold certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 19

20 JANUARY 2016

GOLD TOKENS AND ETHER WALLETFrom this area a user can send Digix Gold Tokens or send Ether

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 21

The transaction hash for a completed certificate purchase is also available with just one click

(see below Raw Transaction Data Transaction Hash)

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets Individual users can create Digix Gold and Asset tokens by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoATM Certificate) to the Minter DAE It is a way to represent gold bars as units of tokens on the Ethereum Blockchain database One Digix Gold token represents 1 gram of gold

(Q) How do I know that there are actual gold bars backing PoA certificates or Digix Gold tokens

All material documents from the Proof of Asset protocol are made available via Swarm - Ethereumrsquos distributed file sharing This would mean that all assaying certificates custodial receipts of deposits and independent auditor documents from the entire chain of custody will be uploaded for public viewing to ascertain the authenticity of all PoA certificates and Digix Gold tokens Each entity in the chain of custody will also digitally sign on our PoA Certificate We only deal with vendors custodians and auditors that have passed our due diligence and that are world renowned with a history of excellence Private audits are also available for added assurance

The Ethereum platform allows users to create applications that run on a decentralized peer-to-peer network of computers without any central control and free from human interruption or corruption Vitalik Buterin invented Ethereum in late 2013 it was formally described by Dr Gavin Wood in 2014 then developed as an open source software project under the GNU Lesser General Public License It was officially launched on July 30 2015 The project is maintained by the Ethereum core developer team (ETHDEV) under the guidance of the non-profit Ethereum Foundation which had raised 31591 Bitcoins during their 2014 crowdsale

22 JANUARY 2016

From this page users may also view the assetrsquos history of trading within the Digix system

GOLD ASSET HISTORY

PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates

are Ethereum smart contracts

that provides a legally and

cryptographically binding

determination of ownership of

physical gold or other assets currently under

the guardianship of a participating custodian on the

Digix decentralized platform It

also certifies the agreement

between the user the vendor the custodian and

the independent auditor

The PoAtrade provides a complete history of the chain of control from the vendor

the custodian and all audit reports This proof guarantees that the purchase of the gold by the user its storage by the

custodian and regular inspection by the auditor has taken place

PoA Certificates can be transferred or sent to any Ethereum account sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or

Gold tokens or redeemed from the Recast DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or Gold

Tokens

Copies of the orignal signed documents are included as a part of the certificatersquos registration in the blockchain

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 23

24 JANUARY 2016

GOLD EXPLORER RECASTER (Above)

The Digix Minter DAE recognizes all valid Digix PoAtrade Certificates and can accept them from a user in exchange for divisible Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens The rules of the Digix platform dictates that only the Digix Minter has the authority through the request of the owner of a Digix PoAtrade certificate to allow that owner to issue their own Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens in exchange for the PoAtrade Certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 25

The interface conveniently walks customers through the online purchase of a Digital Gold PoA Certificate

26 JANUARY 2016

A completed purchase of the digital gold certificate representing this bar

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 27

TOOLS AND SETTINGS

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

28 JANUARY 2016

RESTORE WALLET

In addition to its security features users can configure the Aegis Vault to assign beneficiaries set the time-based distribution of funds or assets and delegate a power of attorney to another individual or a group of people

Digix is committed to bringing Ethereum use to the mainstream and the availability of a secure wallet is essential for realizing this goal

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 29

GENERATE A REDEMPTION KEY

(Q) What is the Digix Recaster Smart Contract

Digix Recaster Smart Contract allows the

conversion of Digix Gold tokens to a PoA card The

PoA card can be sent or received on the blockchain representing an ownership

of an entire gold bar or be used for redemption of

the physical gold bar at our office For example if you have 100 DGX tokens

representing 100g of weight in gold you can exchange

for a PoA card representing a 100g gold cast bar at

Digix This PoA card can be sent and received on the

Ethereum blockchain or be used to schedule a local

pick-up of the physical gold bar at Digix redemption

center in Singapore

You can currently recast into PoA certificates of

100g (100 DGX) or 1000g (1000 DGX) gold cast bar

denominations

30 JANUARY 2016

(Q) What about the Digix audit processWe have four types of audits at Digix

1 PRIVATE AUDITS Clients are welcome to come to our certified custodial vaults in Singapore to inspect your gold bars in a highly private and secure environment

2 EXTERNAL AUDITS We have engaged Inspectorate Singapore (wwwinspectoratecom) to audit our inventory and match them off with customersrsquo holdings at DGX We will hold such inspections at least twice a year

3 CUSTODIAL AUDITS Our certified custodians will provide a physical certification of proof that your gold bars are stored safely in their vaults They will take photographs of your serialized bars per request basis and have them keyed into their inventory management systems Some of our certified custodiansrsquo reputation are also on the line to provide us with their appraisal and storage services as they have to answer to their shareholders as a publicly listed company in Singapore

4 INTERNAL AUDITS We have patented a certification process called Proof of Asset (PoA) where auditors sign on the existence of Gold in our PoA certificate The digital certificate is then uploaded onto the Ethereum Blockchain

(Q) Are there KYCAML requirementsAll users who wish to redeem PoA certificates or Digix Gold Tokens for physical gold bars will have to go through KYC requirements at the pickup The gold bars will only be available for pick up at our office location in Singapore We must ensure that DigixGlobal and participating organizations are protected from any potential liabilities resulting from government prosecution and asset seizures so we ensure that we comply fully with regulatory requirements for Know your customer (KYC) and Anti-money laundering (AML)

ADDRESS BOOK

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 31

SilentVault is a secure private online wallet for making untraceable p2p payments

Unlike other crypto currency wallets SilentVault wallets support heterogeneous asset types such as fiat dollars euros metals gold and silver and crypto coins bitcoin litecoin SilentVault provides anonymous off blockchain payments made in bitcoin and litecoin It also features an integrated p2p escrow exchange where users can trade anonymously among different asset types with other users such as exchanging bitcoins for silver

The SilentVault Spark client is a fully functional Jabber chat client that is a branded and updated version of Spark Since Spark supports a plugin architecture our wallet client is implemented as a plugin You can obtain the SilentVault Spark client with plugin from this page You can also find the source code for both the plugin and SilentVaults customizations to the Spark source base elsewhere on this site A tutorial on SVSpark is here

The SilentVault wallet webstart client is a stand alone program that you can install from within your browser Like the SilentVault Spark client it communicates with the Voucher Safe payment network using extensions to the XMPP protocol This type of communication makes economic transactions indistinguishable from ordinary encrypted instant messaging traffic and avoids any need to run within an insecure browser environment or rely on web domains All client source code is published on this site and while you can run a prefabricated client you are also invited to build your own from source

You are also invited to develop applications for our integrated marketplaces that appear within SilentVault wallets A full API is available for your use as a development tool Please contact our team for details

The SilentVault technology is based on Voucher Safe which was developed 2008 2011 Voucher Safe is also the core technology of the Digital Cash Alliance

httpssilentvaultcom

32 JANUARY 2016

ldquoI love go-o-o-o-ldrdquo-Austin Powers in Goldmember

Not surprisingly most people feel the same

According to the Wall Street Journal gold prices and safe-haven demand in Asia have been skyrocketing since mid-November (1) proving that you donrsquot have to be a sea-faring pirate or a squire in a kingrsquos castle to enjoy its natural glare beauty and above all its ability to stimulate wealth

Since the days of the California Gold Rush people have enjoyed panning for it selling it and most of

all owning it Long considered one of the planetrsquos most precious and desired metals gold has grown heavily in value over the last several years and it appears more and more are trying to get their hands on it every single day

Something else is growing as wellhellip Bitcoin Often regarded as Americarsquos most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin has jumped heavily in value over the last few months spiking from $230 to nearly $350 Unlike gold which exists in solid physical form Bitcoin exists in ones and zeros binary coding that travels through the blockchain the technology that makes Bitcoin transactions possible between users and respective merchants

BITGOLD A MODERN REVOLUTION IN FINANCEBY NICK MARINOFF

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 33

Itrsquos interesting to witness nearly equal popularity rising for two different things that ultimately serve the same purpose and share similar goals Both are designed to enhance the world of finance Both can rise in value and both have the ability to make someone rich overnighthellip So what if we could combine the two What significant differences could there be if Bitcoin and gold were fused into one entity

Well itrsquos already been done Say hello to BitGold an early startup company stationed in Toronto Canada BitGold aims to offer international services for people and businesses to send payments and hold savings with physical gold (2) The company was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb Both have a long history in the financial sector with Sebag previously serving as the Founder and Managing Principal of Braavos Capital (an international private investment organization) and the Chairman of Natural Resource Holdings an investment company involved with natural resource assets (3) Josh Crumb was previously the Senior Metals Strategist at Goldman Sachs (4)

The company alleges that gold bullion is ldquothe worldrsquos oldest asset class and the centuryrsquos best performing currencyrdquo (5) According to BitGoldrsquos website their mission is

ldquohellipTo make gold accessible and useful in digital payments and secure savingshellip Wersquore advancing the digital payments revolution by helping people securely acquire store and now spend gold with unprecedented simplicity BitGold accounts are free and can be opened in minutes We provide users with a secure vault account to purchase and hold gold the ability to make and receive instant gold payments and a prepaid card for spending gold at traditional points of sale Through our network of ATMs customers can fund their accounts with local-currencyrdquo (4)

Present investors backing BitGold include Dundee Capital Markets GMP Securities and Sandstorm Gold although the initial investor in the company was Soros Brothers Investment which is presently run by Alexander Soros the son of Hungarian business magnate George Soros (2)

2015 has been a big year for the company CNBC has stated that BitGold currently serves over 100000 active customers and the platform stores approximately 276 kilograms of bullion within its walls Thatrsquos nearly $11 million total and over $100 per active user (6) In May BitGold began trading on the TSX Venture exchange in Canada and announced the purchase of GoldMoney worth nearly $52 million in Canadian dollars (7)

In June the company made citizens of the United States very happy with the following announcement

ldquoUS residents can sign up on the BitGold platform and buy sell or redeem gold using BitGoldrsquos Aurum payment and settlement technology US residents will also have access to the BitGold mobile app and a prepaid card when these features launch over the coming weeksrdquo (7)

The platform offers a number of products and services beneficial to any gold-lover across the country As the above quote suggests BitGold offers whatrsquos known as Aurum the gold-settlement technology thatrsquos compliant with several US financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase Wells Fargo Citi Bank of America US Bank Fidelity Capital One and Charles Schwab Users with an account at any one of these nationally-recognized banks can instantly redeem gold or authorize gold deposits The transactions thereby increase in safety and automation Users also receive a bonus in that they are usually able to avoid bank wire fees through the process (7)

Using the BitGold app users may also send and receive gold as payments to and from any other user or seller without paying any transaction fees They can even send gold to non-BitGold users via their mobile phones or through a simple email message The company also issues prepaid debit cards allowing users to spend funds directly from their BitGold accounts The card is compatible with ATMs so that users may withdraw local currency (7)

Lastly the company issues special ten-gram gold cubes worth approximately $380 each at press time Users may redeem these cubes on the BitGold platform and may demand physical delivery when they see fit (7)

34 JANUARY 2016

Vice-president of communications and PR Emily Cornelius explained in an email that they have no ldquostereotypicalrdquo user of the companyrsquos services but that there are predominantly three main use cases

ldquoThe traditional gold investor will gravitate to BitGold because our gold is unprecedentedly priced within 1 of spot price and we offer free storage in a Brinks vault of their choice globallyhellip The second use case is the user who seeks a more stable currency for their national savings outside of their potentially volatile local fiat currencyhellip Gold has gained over 3000 vs the US Dollar which is arguably the worldrsquos strongest fiat money Gold may seem to go up down or sideways but in reality and when viewed over long timescales such as the avg human lifecycle ndash it always riseshellip Gold has been rising against 9 of the worldrsquos most famous and well-known currencies almost every year since 2000hellip Thirdly BitGold is a powerful payments platformhellip BitGold allows a user to send an invoice for your labor to someone else anywhere in the world which the recipient can pay using any traditional payment methodhellip This gold is vaulted anywhere even outside their jurisdictionhellip This is important as it allows users to achieve upward mobility that are otherwise hindered by localized issues that are exogenous to their personal journeyrdquo

Cornelius also explained that the company offers ldquoall the benefits and efficiencies of a service like PayPal and a MasterCard but with a universally accepted more stable store of valuerdquo

Presently regulation over BitGold appears to be fairly non-existent BitGold does not list which regulators hold jurisdiction over its staff and operations nor do they list regulatory information regarding their trade practices (7) In fact co-founder Roy Sebag has stated in the past that he believes BitGold is not a bank nor does it serve as a financial institution in any traditional sense as it does not engage in fractional-reserve banking (2)According to page 20 of the companyrsquos initial public filing BitGold is not

ldquohellipEligible to be registered with the Financial

Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canadahellip There can be no assurance that BitGoldrsquos services or Internet platform will be acceptable to foreign regulatory bodies Foreign governments may seek to restrict access to BitGoldrsquos services block BitGoldrsquos website or impose other restrictions that may affect BitGoldrsquos ability to offer service to new or existing users in those for an extended period of time or indefinitelyrdquo (8)

Despite this it was confirmed in July of 2015 that the company did offer its services under the Canadian Bailment Law (9) This occurs in situations where physical personal property is transferred from one person (the bailor) to another for safekeeping and doing so does not require the binding notion of a written contract (10)

Presently the company employs 26 people including Sebag and Crumb Other notable BitGold personnel include Chief Executive Officer Darrell MacMullin Chief Technology Officer Alessandro Premoli Lead Mobile Engineer Paul Mennega and Team Manager Karman Lee The company also employs several vice-presidents five software engineers and two compliance officers (4)

It can be said that BitGold has accomplished quite a bit in less than two years Itrsquos likely such a volatile company has some big plans waiting in the wings for 2016 but Emily Cornelius isnrsquot dropping any hints as to what they could be

ldquoWe have a number of new features services and products cominghellip Yoursquoll have to wait and seerdquo

BitGold is steadily making its mark It has the backing the funds the technology and above all the drive Put all these items together (and add a touch of flair and public desire) and itrsquos clear that BitGold has what it takes to make the world of finance its own

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 9: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 9

Who should have the power to issue money

It seems likely that a great many people probably havenrsquot thought about this question ever After all since the beginning of recorded history various types of governments including republics kings priest-kings and dictatorships have issued money

If you open up your wallet you probably find some paper money in there issued by some government or on behalf of a central bank that is authorized by some government Very likely you also have some credit or debit cards issued by banks or credit unions but these are only corporate extensions of governments so not really that different Some people have gift cards from various companies but these are corporations therefore creatures of the state Moreover most gift cards are denominated in national currencies

My own wallet has a couple of Ron Helwigrsquos Shire silver and gold wire cards too These are laminated cards which contain thin strips of silver in one case and a length of thin gold wire in the other In other words they are actual gold and silver visibly embedded in the clear plastic laminate of the card

If you are fond of history you may have heard of the tendency of Roman emperors to debase their gold and silver coinage and the tendency of the Byzantine emperors to stick with the good stuff You may have heard that Revolutionary France was beset with inflated paper money called the assignat by the national assembly and the mandat by the Directorate ndash the same Directorate that used guillotines in its search for peace and justice and discovered only baskets of severed heads and rivers of blood

You may know that one of Napoleonrsquos secrets to popularity was restoring gold and silver coins to circulation and melting the printer plates used to make the paper money You may be aware of the adventures of Marco Polo with paper money in China under Kublai Khan And you are probably aware of the creation in late 1913 of a Federal Reserve that gradually replaced gold and silver coins in the United States with book entry and paper money along with coins made out of base metals like zinc

If you arenrsquot fond of history essentially nothing in the preceding two paragraphs means anything to you Which

The Power To Issue MoneyBY JIM DAVIDSON

AH TAKE THE CASH AND LET THE CREDIT GONOR HEED THE RUMBLE OF A DISTANT DRUM

~EDWARD FITZGERALD THE RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

10 JANUARY 2016

might be ok if you werenrsquot living in interesting times As it turns out Thucydides was correct in believing that the future if it does not mirror the past at least reflects it And of course Santayana says that if you wonrsquot learn the lessons of history you may be doomed to repeat them

Given that there is currently a sovereign debt crisis that has turned Greece into an economic wasteland plunged Chinarsquos markets down and which is spreading to many other countries in the coming months and years and given that the money you have in your wallet is only backed by the full faith and credit of the United States which has not exactly shown itself to be credit-worthy or faithful you may find yourself very interested in the question who should issue money

Your PowerNow if you believe as I do that the only just form of government is one that derives its powers from the unanimous consent of the governed you should recognize who has the power to issue money Since governments are issuing money and since all the powers that governments have must have been either seized from the people or delegated to the government with the consent of the people it follows naturally that the power to issue money comes originally from the people It is also my view that powers are not collective in nature but like rights are individual in character In other words you have the power to issue money

Whether that comes as a surprise to you or not it is clear from simply looking around that not everyone is issuing money If each individual has the power to issue money why isnrsquot everyone doing so

It turns out that one of the key features of money is acceptability It matters a great deal less if you issue money than it does if someone else accepts it In order to generate demand for its currency your national government accepts that currency for payment of taxes The fact that there are a great many taxes not only at the national level but also at state and local levels means that there are lots of places where the national governmentrsquos currency is accepted Not only is it accepted by tax authorities it is also accepted by merchants because they know they can use it to pay their taxes It is therefore accepted by those who

supply merchants with products so they can pay their taxes and so forth

So the problems of central bank policies the problems with the economy the problems with many government policies are to put it simply your fault You choose to use the national currency of your country You choose not to accept alternatives even though alternatives exist and have existed in the case of gold and silver coins for thousands of years You choose to engage in trade and commerce for fiat money which means that the problems of fiat money the problems of central planning the difficulties you face as a result of errors in what the Federal Reserve and other monetary manipulators do are your problems They are caused by your choices just as much as by the choices of hundreds of millions of others in your country and billions around the world You have the power to change this situation directly to your own advantage Does that seem harsh

Taxation Is TheftMany years ago at the end of the last century I met a member of the Somena First Nation up in Canada I was attending the world congress of the International Society for Individual Liberty at the time Meaghan Walker-Champion explained to me that she had spoken to the elders of her community and they had many long talks among themselves thinking about what the Somena word for ldquotax collectorrdquo would be They concluded that the word in their language was the same as the word for ldquothiefrdquo

Writing at the end of World War Two EC Riegel reached the same conclusion He noted that money is extremely useful in trade and commerce and that the issue power properly belongs to those engaged in free enterprise Since governments are not engaged in buying and selling but only in stealing from others they are entirely inappropriate to the purpose of issuing money He makes these and many other excellent arguments against state socialism in A New Approach to Freedom My friend Spencer MacCallum helped organise EC Riegelrsquos papers An authorized free and complete version of A New Approach to Freedom is available on the web here

To be continued on page 37

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 11

12 JANUARY 2016

SBC - What Is Silent BitcoinSilent Bitcoin (or SBC) is a digital voucher currency 100 backed by bitcoins This means that 10 SBC equals 10 BTC When a user spends BTC to a wallet hash controlled by SilentVault they receive in exchange a voucher (a cryptographically signed XML object) for the same amount in SBC Thereafter the SBC voucher value circulates privately off-chain between SilentVault wallets until a holder redeems their SBC voucher for BTC At that point the SBC value is decirculated and a BTC spend is made from SilentVaultrsquos reserve to the address hash designated by the user who surrendered the voucher (Which is probably but doesnrsquot have to be the userrsquos own)

Using SBCThe Voucher-Safe network operates differently from the Bitcoin network in several important respects

Silencing BitcoinSilentVault lets you spend and receive bitcoin (and litecoin) off the blockchain entirely and move your coins to and from regular bitcoin addresses whenever you want Our wallets are multi-asset and can hold any supported asset types side-by-side

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 13

bull A Voucher Publisher (or VP) signs vouchers and clears voucher payments to prevent double-spending While each VP is centralized the protocol supports multiple Publishers This means that payments clear in seconds with no need to wait for transaction confirmations (Note however that a BTC spend to purchase a SBC voucher does require 6 confirmations before the SBC voucher will be issued)

bull Input vouchers are always destroyed in every transaction and replaced with output vouchers bearing fresh unique serial numbers This means that unlike with the blockchain no public transaction history exists balances are private and no ldquotaintrdquo can attach to coins (Taint violates fungibility a fundamental characteristic of sound money) This represents a vast privacy improvement over regular BTC spends and a lesser improvement even over ldquocoin laundryrdquo services

bull A payee must pick up their voucher payment within the 1-7 days designated by the payer If the payee does not do so the payment expires and becomes recoverable by the payer (indefinitely) This makes it impossible to lose value by spending it to a ldquodead walletrdquo

bull Receipts are generated by the payee not by the Publisher This prevents the clearing VP from needing to record transaction history or knowing anything about the private message context accompanying the payment The VP also never sees a user IP address

In short it is much faster more convenient more private and generally much safer to exchange SBC value between SilentVault

wallets than to perform ldquonaked spendsrdquo between BTC wallets on the blockchain (Though naturally it is also more expensive privacy being worth something)

Trading SBCExchanges in and out of SBC fromto BTC are performed via the ldquoExchangesrdquo tab in the SilentVault wallet by buying or selling SBC vouchers respectively These sales and repurchases are carried out with the exchange itself mdash meaning SilentVault is an agent for the Issuer of SBC SBC vouchers can also be traded to other users in exchange for vouchers representing other asset types (eg USD or EUR silver or gold etc) Users can specify the asset types they will accept and offer discounts or demand premiums The SVX (SilentVault Exchange) acts as a third-party escrow agent allowing all trades to be fully anonymous and secure You cannot know with whom you are trading and no KYC of any kind is performable by SilentVault You are your wallet keys period

Fee ScheduleThe fees currently charged by SilentVault are as follows

bull Purchase SBC with BTC 00 (free) minimum quantity 001 BTC

bull Redeem SBC for BTC 00 (free) minimum quantity 002 BTC

bull Make SBC voucher spend 00015 BTCbull Receive SBC voucher spend 00006 BTC

(first one is 00002)bull Escrow exchange 10 of amount

minimum quantity 002 BTC

httpssilentvaultcom

14 JANUARY 2016

YOUR PRIVACY MATTERSEacutelan Turbo VPN This VPN service is bundled with VoIP and private audiovideo calling via SIP plus unlimited bandwidth for surfing and streaming

Our Eacutelan Turbo VPN service is a standard single-hop VPN but with selectable exit proxies in Panama the USA the UK France and onto the Tor network As a subscriber yoursquoll also get an SIP extension that lets you place private audio and video calls to other users Unlike with Skype these calls can be encrypted end-to-end to conceal their content in transit And because yoursquore on our VPN the call metadata is also protected We also supply your own private Mumble server as an inexpensive add-on There are no bandwidth limitations with this package Surf and talk all you want

Eacutelan Max Security VPN This VPN service is bundled with email addresses and aliases 1 GB file storage plus 25 GB of monthly bandwidth

Our Eacutelan Max Security VPN service is a premiere multi-hop VPN which lives up to its name Multi-hop means that traffic flows between multiple points along its route from the entry gateway to the exit nodes something like changing planes a couple of times during an extended trip Inside the network internal routes are varied traffic is mixed alongside that of other users and random delays get inserted to defeat traffic analysis This technique known as ldquoserver cascadesrdquo same features and benefits as provides many of the Tor (Given that the Deep State agencies in various countries are now running most of the Tor exit nodes it might be even better) As a subscriber yoursquoll also get private email addresses and email aliases plus 1 GB of very secure file storage Because of its multi-hop architecture this VPN is less suitable for streaming applications and bandwidth usage is limited to 25 GB per month However you can also buy top-up packs to add more bandwidth

Elegantly Convenient No special hardware required

bull Software-only solutionbull Both individual and multi-user packages are availablebull Simple to install and use

Support for Windows Linux Mac Android and iOS httpelanvpnnet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 15

Wersquore long-time industry professionals with over a combined forty years in the IT industry Wersquore also committed advocates of human liberty and personal privacy With all the global spy networks hacks and data mining in the world today internet privacy is under attack as never beforeWe agree with E C Riegel who wrote

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and self-asserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

16 JANUARY 2016

What does Digix doWe are a Smart Asset company that allows anyone to securely send and receive ownerships of assets for eventual redemption on the blockchain The first asset listed is Gold and other assets such as diamonds will be available in the near future

What are Proof of Asset (PoA) CertificatesProof of Asset (PoA) Certificates prove the existence of gold through the entire chain of custody from the supplier to the custodial vault They are automatically created when a user purchases and stores gold at our participating custodial vaults It consists of 3 digital signatures from 3 independent entities vendor custodian and auditor Through this process a PoA card is issued representing your asset ownership on the blockchain This PoA card can then be sent and received by anyone on the Ethereum Blockchain for eventual redemption PoA certificates can also be sent to a Minter DAE to create DGX Gold tokens for fungibility

What are Digix Gold TokensDigix Gold tokens can only be created when a user sends in their PoA Certificates in exchange for them on a 11 weight basis on the Digix Minter DAE Each Digix Gold token represents 1g of gold For example if a PoA Certificate represents the ownership of a 100g gold bar it can be sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for 100 DGX tokens which will be deposited in your ethereum wallet

How do I know if these tokens or PoA certificates are safe from fraud or duplicationAll tokens and PoA certificates are created on the Ethereum Blockchain a public ledger where information stored can never be manipulated or counterfeited Our smart asset service can only exist because of blockchain technology

Where are the physical gold bars storedPhysical gold is kept with a participating custodian Each PoA Certificate will specify the name and location of the custodian that holds the gold The first participating custodian on the Digix Gold platform is Malca-Amit which maintains a high security storage facility at the Singapore Freeport

Why SingaporeDigixGlobal is incorporated in low crime and politically stable Singapore Investment Precious Metals are exempted from GST locally so you are purchasing gold at the lowest premiums available in the world

bull There are also no permits required to import or export precious metalsbull Singapore also has no jurisdictional relations with USA or Europebull We will only release your personal information by order of the Court of Law in Singapore

Frequently AskedQuestions

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 17

A Sneak Peek at the NewDigixGlobal User Interface

It will be available to the public in January 2016 for multiple operating systems and mobile platforms This software will manage client transactions for PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates Digix Asset Tokens and Ether tokens

DigixGlobal can create a digital asset certificate for any storable physical property Future versions of this software will include additional digital assets such as diamonds

When the interface opens users are presented with the main dashboard menu as shown below Access to all primary services and tools is available from this opening screen

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEVendor Information - Custodian Information - Auditor Information

To ensure quality and authenticity participating gold vendors only sell LBMA approved gold bars Gold purchased from an LBMA certified refinery is globally known for its quality These bullion sources guarantee the authenticity and purity of every single gold bar used on the Digix network Buying gold from the marketplace is the first step in the process of generating a PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificate

18 JANUARY 2016

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEShows gold bullion available for purchase as a digital gold certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 19

20 JANUARY 2016

GOLD TOKENS AND ETHER WALLETFrom this area a user can send Digix Gold Tokens or send Ether

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 21

The transaction hash for a completed certificate purchase is also available with just one click

(see below Raw Transaction Data Transaction Hash)

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets Individual users can create Digix Gold and Asset tokens by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoATM Certificate) to the Minter DAE It is a way to represent gold bars as units of tokens on the Ethereum Blockchain database One Digix Gold token represents 1 gram of gold

(Q) How do I know that there are actual gold bars backing PoA certificates or Digix Gold tokens

All material documents from the Proof of Asset protocol are made available via Swarm - Ethereumrsquos distributed file sharing This would mean that all assaying certificates custodial receipts of deposits and independent auditor documents from the entire chain of custody will be uploaded for public viewing to ascertain the authenticity of all PoA certificates and Digix Gold tokens Each entity in the chain of custody will also digitally sign on our PoA Certificate We only deal with vendors custodians and auditors that have passed our due diligence and that are world renowned with a history of excellence Private audits are also available for added assurance

The Ethereum platform allows users to create applications that run on a decentralized peer-to-peer network of computers without any central control and free from human interruption or corruption Vitalik Buterin invented Ethereum in late 2013 it was formally described by Dr Gavin Wood in 2014 then developed as an open source software project under the GNU Lesser General Public License It was officially launched on July 30 2015 The project is maintained by the Ethereum core developer team (ETHDEV) under the guidance of the non-profit Ethereum Foundation which had raised 31591 Bitcoins during their 2014 crowdsale

22 JANUARY 2016

From this page users may also view the assetrsquos history of trading within the Digix system

GOLD ASSET HISTORY

PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates

are Ethereum smart contracts

that provides a legally and

cryptographically binding

determination of ownership of

physical gold or other assets currently under

the guardianship of a participating custodian on the

Digix decentralized platform It

also certifies the agreement

between the user the vendor the custodian and

the independent auditor

The PoAtrade provides a complete history of the chain of control from the vendor

the custodian and all audit reports This proof guarantees that the purchase of the gold by the user its storage by the

custodian and regular inspection by the auditor has taken place

PoA Certificates can be transferred or sent to any Ethereum account sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or

Gold tokens or redeemed from the Recast DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or Gold

Tokens

Copies of the orignal signed documents are included as a part of the certificatersquos registration in the blockchain

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 23

24 JANUARY 2016

GOLD EXPLORER RECASTER (Above)

The Digix Minter DAE recognizes all valid Digix PoAtrade Certificates and can accept them from a user in exchange for divisible Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens The rules of the Digix platform dictates that only the Digix Minter has the authority through the request of the owner of a Digix PoAtrade certificate to allow that owner to issue their own Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens in exchange for the PoAtrade Certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 25

The interface conveniently walks customers through the online purchase of a Digital Gold PoA Certificate

26 JANUARY 2016

A completed purchase of the digital gold certificate representing this bar

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 27

TOOLS AND SETTINGS

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

28 JANUARY 2016

RESTORE WALLET

In addition to its security features users can configure the Aegis Vault to assign beneficiaries set the time-based distribution of funds or assets and delegate a power of attorney to another individual or a group of people

Digix is committed to bringing Ethereum use to the mainstream and the availability of a secure wallet is essential for realizing this goal

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 29

GENERATE A REDEMPTION KEY

(Q) What is the Digix Recaster Smart Contract

Digix Recaster Smart Contract allows the

conversion of Digix Gold tokens to a PoA card The

PoA card can be sent or received on the blockchain representing an ownership

of an entire gold bar or be used for redemption of

the physical gold bar at our office For example if you have 100 DGX tokens

representing 100g of weight in gold you can exchange

for a PoA card representing a 100g gold cast bar at

Digix This PoA card can be sent and received on the

Ethereum blockchain or be used to schedule a local

pick-up of the physical gold bar at Digix redemption

center in Singapore

You can currently recast into PoA certificates of

100g (100 DGX) or 1000g (1000 DGX) gold cast bar

denominations

30 JANUARY 2016

(Q) What about the Digix audit processWe have four types of audits at Digix

1 PRIVATE AUDITS Clients are welcome to come to our certified custodial vaults in Singapore to inspect your gold bars in a highly private and secure environment

2 EXTERNAL AUDITS We have engaged Inspectorate Singapore (wwwinspectoratecom) to audit our inventory and match them off with customersrsquo holdings at DGX We will hold such inspections at least twice a year

3 CUSTODIAL AUDITS Our certified custodians will provide a physical certification of proof that your gold bars are stored safely in their vaults They will take photographs of your serialized bars per request basis and have them keyed into their inventory management systems Some of our certified custodiansrsquo reputation are also on the line to provide us with their appraisal and storage services as they have to answer to their shareholders as a publicly listed company in Singapore

4 INTERNAL AUDITS We have patented a certification process called Proof of Asset (PoA) where auditors sign on the existence of Gold in our PoA certificate The digital certificate is then uploaded onto the Ethereum Blockchain

(Q) Are there KYCAML requirementsAll users who wish to redeem PoA certificates or Digix Gold Tokens for physical gold bars will have to go through KYC requirements at the pickup The gold bars will only be available for pick up at our office location in Singapore We must ensure that DigixGlobal and participating organizations are protected from any potential liabilities resulting from government prosecution and asset seizures so we ensure that we comply fully with regulatory requirements for Know your customer (KYC) and Anti-money laundering (AML)

ADDRESS BOOK

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 31

SilentVault is a secure private online wallet for making untraceable p2p payments

Unlike other crypto currency wallets SilentVault wallets support heterogeneous asset types such as fiat dollars euros metals gold and silver and crypto coins bitcoin litecoin SilentVault provides anonymous off blockchain payments made in bitcoin and litecoin It also features an integrated p2p escrow exchange where users can trade anonymously among different asset types with other users such as exchanging bitcoins for silver

The SilentVault Spark client is a fully functional Jabber chat client that is a branded and updated version of Spark Since Spark supports a plugin architecture our wallet client is implemented as a plugin You can obtain the SilentVault Spark client with plugin from this page You can also find the source code for both the plugin and SilentVaults customizations to the Spark source base elsewhere on this site A tutorial on SVSpark is here

The SilentVault wallet webstart client is a stand alone program that you can install from within your browser Like the SilentVault Spark client it communicates with the Voucher Safe payment network using extensions to the XMPP protocol This type of communication makes economic transactions indistinguishable from ordinary encrypted instant messaging traffic and avoids any need to run within an insecure browser environment or rely on web domains All client source code is published on this site and while you can run a prefabricated client you are also invited to build your own from source

You are also invited to develop applications for our integrated marketplaces that appear within SilentVault wallets A full API is available for your use as a development tool Please contact our team for details

The SilentVault technology is based on Voucher Safe which was developed 2008 2011 Voucher Safe is also the core technology of the Digital Cash Alliance

httpssilentvaultcom

32 JANUARY 2016

ldquoI love go-o-o-o-ldrdquo-Austin Powers in Goldmember

Not surprisingly most people feel the same

According to the Wall Street Journal gold prices and safe-haven demand in Asia have been skyrocketing since mid-November (1) proving that you donrsquot have to be a sea-faring pirate or a squire in a kingrsquos castle to enjoy its natural glare beauty and above all its ability to stimulate wealth

Since the days of the California Gold Rush people have enjoyed panning for it selling it and most of

all owning it Long considered one of the planetrsquos most precious and desired metals gold has grown heavily in value over the last several years and it appears more and more are trying to get their hands on it every single day

Something else is growing as wellhellip Bitcoin Often regarded as Americarsquos most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin has jumped heavily in value over the last few months spiking from $230 to nearly $350 Unlike gold which exists in solid physical form Bitcoin exists in ones and zeros binary coding that travels through the blockchain the technology that makes Bitcoin transactions possible between users and respective merchants

BITGOLD A MODERN REVOLUTION IN FINANCEBY NICK MARINOFF

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 33

Itrsquos interesting to witness nearly equal popularity rising for two different things that ultimately serve the same purpose and share similar goals Both are designed to enhance the world of finance Both can rise in value and both have the ability to make someone rich overnighthellip So what if we could combine the two What significant differences could there be if Bitcoin and gold were fused into one entity

Well itrsquos already been done Say hello to BitGold an early startup company stationed in Toronto Canada BitGold aims to offer international services for people and businesses to send payments and hold savings with physical gold (2) The company was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb Both have a long history in the financial sector with Sebag previously serving as the Founder and Managing Principal of Braavos Capital (an international private investment organization) and the Chairman of Natural Resource Holdings an investment company involved with natural resource assets (3) Josh Crumb was previously the Senior Metals Strategist at Goldman Sachs (4)

The company alleges that gold bullion is ldquothe worldrsquos oldest asset class and the centuryrsquos best performing currencyrdquo (5) According to BitGoldrsquos website their mission is

ldquohellipTo make gold accessible and useful in digital payments and secure savingshellip Wersquore advancing the digital payments revolution by helping people securely acquire store and now spend gold with unprecedented simplicity BitGold accounts are free and can be opened in minutes We provide users with a secure vault account to purchase and hold gold the ability to make and receive instant gold payments and a prepaid card for spending gold at traditional points of sale Through our network of ATMs customers can fund their accounts with local-currencyrdquo (4)

Present investors backing BitGold include Dundee Capital Markets GMP Securities and Sandstorm Gold although the initial investor in the company was Soros Brothers Investment which is presently run by Alexander Soros the son of Hungarian business magnate George Soros (2)

2015 has been a big year for the company CNBC has stated that BitGold currently serves over 100000 active customers and the platform stores approximately 276 kilograms of bullion within its walls Thatrsquos nearly $11 million total and over $100 per active user (6) In May BitGold began trading on the TSX Venture exchange in Canada and announced the purchase of GoldMoney worth nearly $52 million in Canadian dollars (7)

In June the company made citizens of the United States very happy with the following announcement

ldquoUS residents can sign up on the BitGold platform and buy sell or redeem gold using BitGoldrsquos Aurum payment and settlement technology US residents will also have access to the BitGold mobile app and a prepaid card when these features launch over the coming weeksrdquo (7)

The platform offers a number of products and services beneficial to any gold-lover across the country As the above quote suggests BitGold offers whatrsquos known as Aurum the gold-settlement technology thatrsquos compliant with several US financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase Wells Fargo Citi Bank of America US Bank Fidelity Capital One and Charles Schwab Users with an account at any one of these nationally-recognized banks can instantly redeem gold or authorize gold deposits The transactions thereby increase in safety and automation Users also receive a bonus in that they are usually able to avoid bank wire fees through the process (7)

Using the BitGold app users may also send and receive gold as payments to and from any other user or seller without paying any transaction fees They can even send gold to non-BitGold users via their mobile phones or through a simple email message The company also issues prepaid debit cards allowing users to spend funds directly from their BitGold accounts The card is compatible with ATMs so that users may withdraw local currency (7)

Lastly the company issues special ten-gram gold cubes worth approximately $380 each at press time Users may redeem these cubes on the BitGold platform and may demand physical delivery when they see fit (7)

34 JANUARY 2016

Vice-president of communications and PR Emily Cornelius explained in an email that they have no ldquostereotypicalrdquo user of the companyrsquos services but that there are predominantly three main use cases

ldquoThe traditional gold investor will gravitate to BitGold because our gold is unprecedentedly priced within 1 of spot price and we offer free storage in a Brinks vault of their choice globallyhellip The second use case is the user who seeks a more stable currency for their national savings outside of their potentially volatile local fiat currencyhellip Gold has gained over 3000 vs the US Dollar which is arguably the worldrsquos strongest fiat money Gold may seem to go up down or sideways but in reality and when viewed over long timescales such as the avg human lifecycle ndash it always riseshellip Gold has been rising against 9 of the worldrsquos most famous and well-known currencies almost every year since 2000hellip Thirdly BitGold is a powerful payments platformhellip BitGold allows a user to send an invoice for your labor to someone else anywhere in the world which the recipient can pay using any traditional payment methodhellip This gold is vaulted anywhere even outside their jurisdictionhellip This is important as it allows users to achieve upward mobility that are otherwise hindered by localized issues that are exogenous to their personal journeyrdquo

Cornelius also explained that the company offers ldquoall the benefits and efficiencies of a service like PayPal and a MasterCard but with a universally accepted more stable store of valuerdquo

Presently regulation over BitGold appears to be fairly non-existent BitGold does not list which regulators hold jurisdiction over its staff and operations nor do they list regulatory information regarding their trade practices (7) In fact co-founder Roy Sebag has stated in the past that he believes BitGold is not a bank nor does it serve as a financial institution in any traditional sense as it does not engage in fractional-reserve banking (2)According to page 20 of the companyrsquos initial public filing BitGold is not

ldquohellipEligible to be registered with the Financial

Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canadahellip There can be no assurance that BitGoldrsquos services or Internet platform will be acceptable to foreign regulatory bodies Foreign governments may seek to restrict access to BitGoldrsquos services block BitGoldrsquos website or impose other restrictions that may affect BitGoldrsquos ability to offer service to new or existing users in those for an extended period of time or indefinitelyrdquo (8)

Despite this it was confirmed in July of 2015 that the company did offer its services under the Canadian Bailment Law (9) This occurs in situations where physical personal property is transferred from one person (the bailor) to another for safekeeping and doing so does not require the binding notion of a written contract (10)

Presently the company employs 26 people including Sebag and Crumb Other notable BitGold personnel include Chief Executive Officer Darrell MacMullin Chief Technology Officer Alessandro Premoli Lead Mobile Engineer Paul Mennega and Team Manager Karman Lee The company also employs several vice-presidents five software engineers and two compliance officers (4)

It can be said that BitGold has accomplished quite a bit in less than two years Itrsquos likely such a volatile company has some big plans waiting in the wings for 2016 but Emily Cornelius isnrsquot dropping any hints as to what they could be

ldquoWe have a number of new features services and products cominghellip Yoursquoll have to wait and seerdquo

BitGold is steadily making its mark It has the backing the funds the technology and above all the drive Put all these items together (and add a touch of flair and public desire) and itrsquos clear that BitGold has what it takes to make the world of finance its own

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 10: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

10 JANUARY 2016

might be ok if you werenrsquot living in interesting times As it turns out Thucydides was correct in believing that the future if it does not mirror the past at least reflects it And of course Santayana says that if you wonrsquot learn the lessons of history you may be doomed to repeat them

Given that there is currently a sovereign debt crisis that has turned Greece into an economic wasteland plunged Chinarsquos markets down and which is spreading to many other countries in the coming months and years and given that the money you have in your wallet is only backed by the full faith and credit of the United States which has not exactly shown itself to be credit-worthy or faithful you may find yourself very interested in the question who should issue money

Your PowerNow if you believe as I do that the only just form of government is one that derives its powers from the unanimous consent of the governed you should recognize who has the power to issue money Since governments are issuing money and since all the powers that governments have must have been either seized from the people or delegated to the government with the consent of the people it follows naturally that the power to issue money comes originally from the people It is also my view that powers are not collective in nature but like rights are individual in character In other words you have the power to issue money

Whether that comes as a surprise to you or not it is clear from simply looking around that not everyone is issuing money If each individual has the power to issue money why isnrsquot everyone doing so

It turns out that one of the key features of money is acceptability It matters a great deal less if you issue money than it does if someone else accepts it In order to generate demand for its currency your national government accepts that currency for payment of taxes The fact that there are a great many taxes not only at the national level but also at state and local levels means that there are lots of places where the national governmentrsquos currency is accepted Not only is it accepted by tax authorities it is also accepted by merchants because they know they can use it to pay their taxes It is therefore accepted by those who

supply merchants with products so they can pay their taxes and so forth

So the problems of central bank policies the problems with the economy the problems with many government policies are to put it simply your fault You choose to use the national currency of your country You choose not to accept alternatives even though alternatives exist and have existed in the case of gold and silver coins for thousands of years You choose to engage in trade and commerce for fiat money which means that the problems of fiat money the problems of central planning the difficulties you face as a result of errors in what the Federal Reserve and other monetary manipulators do are your problems They are caused by your choices just as much as by the choices of hundreds of millions of others in your country and billions around the world You have the power to change this situation directly to your own advantage Does that seem harsh

Taxation Is TheftMany years ago at the end of the last century I met a member of the Somena First Nation up in Canada I was attending the world congress of the International Society for Individual Liberty at the time Meaghan Walker-Champion explained to me that she had spoken to the elders of her community and they had many long talks among themselves thinking about what the Somena word for ldquotax collectorrdquo would be They concluded that the word in their language was the same as the word for ldquothiefrdquo

Writing at the end of World War Two EC Riegel reached the same conclusion He noted that money is extremely useful in trade and commerce and that the issue power properly belongs to those engaged in free enterprise Since governments are not engaged in buying and selling but only in stealing from others they are entirely inappropriate to the purpose of issuing money He makes these and many other excellent arguments against state socialism in A New Approach to Freedom My friend Spencer MacCallum helped organise EC Riegelrsquos papers An authorized free and complete version of A New Approach to Freedom is available on the web here

To be continued on page 37

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 11

12 JANUARY 2016

SBC - What Is Silent BitcoinSilent Bitcoin (or SBC) is a digital voucher currency 100 backed by bitcoins This means that 10 SBC equals 10 BTC When a user spends BTC to a wallet hash controlled by SilentVault they receive in exchange a voucher (a cryptographically signed XML object) for the same amount in SBC Thereafter the SBC voucher value circulates privately off-chain between SilentVault wallets until a holder redeems their SBC voucher for BTC At that point the SBC value is decirculated and a BTC spend is made from SilentVaultrsquos reserve to the address hash designated by the user who surrendered the voucher (Which is probably but doesnrsquot have to be the userrsquos own)

Using SBCThe Voucher-Safe network operates differently from the Bitcoin network in several important respects

Silencing BitcoinSilentVault lets you spend and receive bitcoin (and litecoin) off the blockchain entirely and move your coins to and from regular bitcoin addresses whenever you want Our wallets are multi-asset and can hold any supported asset types side-by-side

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 13

bull A Voucher Publisher (or VP) signs vouchers and clears voucher payments to prevent double-spending While each VP is centralized the protocol supports multiple Publishers This means that payments clear in seconds with no need to wait for transaction confirmations (Note however that a BTC spend to purchase a SBC voucher does require 6 confirmations before the SBC voucher will be issued)

bull Input vouchers are always destroyed in every transaction and replaced with output vouchers bearing fresh unique serial numbers This means that unlike with the blockchain no public transaction history exists balances are private and no ldquotaintrdquo can attach to coins (Taint violates fungibility a fundamental characteristic of sound money) This represents a vast privacy improvement over regular BTC spends and a lesser improvement even over ldquocoin laundryrdquo services

bull A payee must pick up their voucher payment within the 1-7 days designated by the payer If the payee does not do so the payment expires and becomes recoverable by the payer (indefinitely) This makes it impossible to lose value by spending it to a ldquodead walletrdquo

bull Receipts are generated by the payee not by the Publisher This prevents the clearing VP from needing to record transaction history or knowing anything about the private message context accompanying the payment The VP also never sees a user IP address

In short it is much faster more convenient more private and generally much safer to exchange SBC value between SilentVault

wallets than to perform ldquonaked spendsrdquo between BTC wallets on the blockchain (Though naturally it is also more expensive privacy being worth something)

Trading SBCExchanges in and out of SBC fromto BTC are performed via the ldquoExchangesrdquo tab in the SilentVault wallet by buying or selling SBC vouchers respectively These sales and repurchases are carried out with the exchange itself mdash meaning SilentVault is an agent for the Issuer of SBC SBC vouchers can also be traded to other users in exchange for vouchers representing other asset types (eg USD or EUR silver or gold etc) Users can specify the asset types they will accept and offer discounts or demand premiums The SVX (SilentVault Exchange) acts as a third-party escrow agent allowing all trades to be fully anonymous and secure You cannot know with whom you are trading and no KYC of any kind is performable by SilentVault You are your wallet keys period

Fee ScheduleThe fees currently charged by SilentVault are as follows

bull Purchase SBC with BTC 00 (free) minimum quantity 001 BTC

bull Redeem SBC for BTC 00 (free) minimum quantity 002 BTC

bull Make SBC voucher spend 00015 BTCbull Receive SBC voucher spend 00006 BTC

(first one is 00002)bull Escrow exchange 10 of amount

minimum quantity 002 BTC

httpssilentvaultcom

14 JANUARY 2016

YOUR PRIVACY MATTERSEacutelan Turbo VPN This VPN service is bundled with VoIP and private audiovideo calling via SIP plus unlimited bandwidth for surfing and streaming

Our Eacutelan Turbo VPN service is a standard single-hop VPN but with selectable exit proxies in Panama the USA the UK France and onto the Tor network As a subscriber yoursquoll also get an SIP extension that lets you place private audio and video calls to other users Unlike with Skype these calls can be encrypted end-to-end to conceal their content in transit And because yoursquore on our VPN the call metadata is also protected We also supply your own private Mumble server as an inexpensive add-on There are no bandwidth limitations with this package Surf and talk all you want

Eacutelan Max Security VPN This VPN service is bundled with email addresses and aliases 1 GB file storage plus 25 GB of monthly bandwidth

Our Eacutelan Max Security VPN service is a premiere multi-hop VPN which lives up to its name Multi-hop means that traffic flows between multiple points along its route from the entry gateway to the exit nodes something like changing planes a couple of times during an extended trip Inside the network internal routes are varied traffic is mixed alongside that of other users and random delays get inserted to defeat traffic analysis This technique known as ldquoserver cascadesrdquo same features and benefits as provides many of the Tor (Given that the Deep State agencies in various countries are now running most of the Tor exit nodes it might be even better) As a subscriber yoursquoll also get private email addresses and email aliases plus 1 GB of very secure file storage Because of its multi-hop architecture this VPN is less suitable for streaming applications and bandwidth usage is limited to 25 GB per month However you can also buy top-up packs to add more bandwidth

Elegantly Convenient No special hardware required

bull Software-only solutionbull Both individual and multi-user packages are availablebull Simple to install and use

Support for Windows Linux Mac Android and iOS httpelanvpnnet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 15

Wersquore long-time industry professionals with over a combined forty years in the IT industry Wersquore also committed advocates of human liberty and personal privacy With all the global spy networks hacks and data mining in the world today internet privacy is under attack as never beforeWe agree with E C Riegel who wrote

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and self-asserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

16 JANUARY 2016

What does Digix doWe are a Smart Asset company that allows anyone to securely send and receive ownerships of assets for eventual redemption on the blockchain The first asset listed is Gold and other assets such as diamonds will be available in the near future

What are Proof of Asset (PoA) CertificatesProof of Asset (PoA) Certificates prove the existence of gold through the entire chain of custody from the supplier to the custodial vault They are automatically created when a user purchases and stores gold at our participating custodial vaults It consists of 3 digital signatures from 3 independent entities vendor custodian and auditor Through this process a PoA card is issued representing your asset ownership on the blockchain This PoA card can then be sent and received by anyone on the Ethereum Blockchain for eventual redemption PoA certificates can also be sent to a Minter DAE to create DGX Gold tokens for fungibility

What are Digix Gold TokensDigix Gold tokens can only be created when a user sends in their PoA Certificates in exchange for them on a 11 weight basis on the Digix Minter DAE Each Digix Gold token represents 1g of gold For example if a PoA Certificate represents the ownership of a 100g gold bar it can be sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for 100 DGX tokens which will be deposited in your ethereum wallet

How do I know if these tokens or PoA certificates are safe from fraud or duplicationAll tokens and PoA certificates are created on the Ethereum Blockchain a public ledger where information stored can never be manipulated or counterfeited Our smart asset service can only exist because of blockchain technology

Where are the physical gold bars storedPhysical gold is kept with a participating custodian Each PoA Certificate will specify the name and location of the custodian that holds the gold The first participating custodian on the Digix Gold platform is Malca-Amit which maintains a high security storage facility at the Singapore Freeport

Why SingaporeDigixGlobal is incorporated in low crime and politically stable Singapore Investment Precious Metals are exempted from GST locally so you are purchasing gold at the lowest premiums available in the world

bull There are also no permits required to import or export precious metalsbull Singapore also has no jurisdictional relations with USA or Europebull We will only release your personal information by order of the Court of Law in Singapore

Frequently AskedQuestions

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 17

A Sneak Peek at the NewDigixGlobal User Interface

It will be available to the public in January 2016 for multiple operating systems and mobile platforms This software will manage client transactions for PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates Digix Asset Tokens and Ether tokens

DigixGlobal can create a digital asset certificate for any storable physical property Future versions of this software will include additional digital assets such as diamonds

When the interface opens users are presented with the main dashboard menu as shown below Access to all primary services and tools is available from this opening screen

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEVendor Information - Custodian Information - Auditor Information

To ensure quality and authenticity participating gold vendors only sell LBMA approved gold bars Gold purchased from an LBMA certified refinery is globally known for its quality These bullion sources guarantee the authenticity and purity of every single gold bar used on the Digix network Buying gold from the marketplace is the first step in the process of generating a PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificate

18 JANUARY 2016

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEShows gold bullion available for purchase as a digital gold certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 19

20 JANUARY 2016

GOLD TOKENS AND ETHER WALLETFrom this area a user can send Digix Gold Tokens or send Ether

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 21

The transaction hash for a completed certificate purchase is also available with just one click

(see below Raw Transaction Data Transaction Hash)

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets Individual users can create Digix Gold and Asset tokens by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoATM Certificate) to the Minter DAE It is a way to represent gold bars as units of tokens on the Ethereum Blockchain database One Digix Gold token represents 1 gram of gold

(Q) How do I know that there are actual gold bars backing PoA certificates or Digix Gold tokens

All material documents from the Proof of Asset protocol are made available via Swarm - Ethereumrsquos distributed file sharing This would mean that all assaying certificates custodial receipts of deposits and independent auditor documents from the entire chain of custody will be uploaded for public viewing to ascertain the authenticity of all PoA certificates and Digix Gold tokens Each entity in the chain of custody will also digitally sign on our PoA Certificate We only deal with vendors custodians and auditors that have passed our due diligence and that are world renowned with a history of excellence Private audits are also available for added assurance

The Ethereum platform allows users to create applications that run on a decentralized peer-to-peer network of computers without any central control and free from human interruption or corruption Vitalik Buterin invented Ethereum in late 2013 it was formally described by Dr Gavin Wood in 2014 then developed as an open source software project under the GNU Lesser General Public License It was officially launched on July 30 2015 The project is maintained by the Ethereum core developer team (ETHDEV) under the guidance of the non-profit Ethereum Foundation which had raised 31591 Bitcoins during their 2014 crowdsale

22 JANUARY 2016

From this page users may also view the assetrsquos history of trading within the Digix system

GOLD ASSET HISTORY

PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates

are Ethereum smart contracts

that provides a legally and

cryptographically binding

determination of ownership of

physical gold or other assets currently under

the guardianship of a participating custodian on the

Digix decentralized platform It

also certifies the agreement

between the user the vendor the custodian and

the independent auditor

The PoAtrade provides a complete history of the chain of control from the vendor

the custodian and all audit reports This proof guarantees that the purchase of the gold by the user its storage by the

custodian and regular inspection by the auditor has taken place

PoA Certificates can be transferred or sent to any Ethereum account sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or

Gold tokens or redeemed from the Recast DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or Gold

Tokens

Copies of the orignal signed documents are included as a part of the certificatersquos registration in the blockchain

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 23

24 JANUARY 2016

GOLD EXPLORER RECASTER (Above)

The Digix Minter DAE recognizes all valid Digix PoAtrade Certificates and can accept them from a user in exchange for divisible Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens The rules of the Digix platform dictates that only the Digix Minter has the authority through the request of the owner of a Digix PoAtrade certificate to allow that owner to issue their own Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens in exchange for the PoAtrade Certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 25

The interface conveniently walks customers through the online purchase of a Digital Gold PoA Certificate

26 JANUARY 2016

A completed purchase of the digital gold certificate representing this bar

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 27

TOOLS AND SETTINGS

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

28 JANUARY 2016

RESTORE WALLET

In addition to its security features users can configure the Aegis Vault to assign beneficiaries set the time-based distribution of funds or assets and delegate a power of attorney to another individual or a group of people

Digix is committed to bringing Ethereum use to the mainstream and the availability of a secure wallet is essential for realizing this goal

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 29

GENERATE A REDEMPTION KEY

(Q) What is the Digix Recaster Smart Contract

Digix Recaster Smart Contract allows the

conversion of Digix Gold tokens to a PoA card The

PoA card can be sent or received on the blockchain representing an ownership

of an entire gold bar or be used for redemption of

the physical gold bar at our office For example if you have 100 DGX tokens

representing 100g of weight in gold you can exchange

for a PoA card representing a 100g gold cast bar at

Digix This PoA card can be sent and received on the

Ethereum blockchain or be used to schedule a local

pick-up of the physical gold bar at Digix redemption

center in Singapore

You can currently recast into PoA certificates of

100g (100 DGX) or 1000g (1000 DGX) gold cast bar

denominations

30 JANUARY 2016

(Q) What about the Digix audit processWe have four types of audits at Digix

1 PRIVATE AUDITS Clients are welcome to come to our certified custodial vaults in Singapore to inspect your gold bars in a highly private and secure environment

2 EXTERNAL AUDITS We have engaged Inspectorate Singapore (wwwinspectoratecom) to audit our inventory and match them off with customersrsquo holdings at DGX We will hold such inspections at least twice a year

3 CUSTODIAL AUDITS Our certified custodians will provide a physical certification of proof that your gold bars are stored safely in their vaults They will take photographs of your serialized bars per request basis and have them keyed into their inventory management systems Some of our certified custodiansrsquo reputation are also on the line to provide us with their appraisal and storage services as they have to answer to their shareholders as a publicly listed company in Singapore

4 INTERNAL AUDITS We have patented a certification process called Proof of Asset (PoA) where auditors sign on the existence of Gold in our PoA certificate The digital certificate is then uploaded onto the Ethereum Blockchain

(Q) Are there KYCAML requirementsAll users who wish to redeem PoA certificates or Digix Gold Tokens for physical gold bars will have to go through KYC requirements at the pickup The gold bars will only be available for pick up at our office location in Singapore We must ensure that DigixGlobal and participating organizations are protected from any potential liabilities resulting from government prosecution and asset seizures so we ensure that we comply fully with regulatory requirements for Know your customer (KYC) and Anti-money laundering (AML)

ADDRESS BOOK

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 31

SilentVault is a secure private online wallet for making untraceable p2p payments

Unlike other crypto currency wallets SilentVault wallets support heterogeneous asset types such as fiat dollars euros metals gold and silver and crypto coins bitcoin litecoin SilentVault provides anonymous off blockchain payments made in bitcoin and litecoin It also features an integrated p2p escrow exchange where users can trade anonymously among different asset types with other users such as exchanging bitcoins for silver

The SilentVault Spark client is a fully functional Jabber chat client that is a branded and updated version of Spark Since Spark supports a plugin architecture our wallet client is implemented as a plugin You can obtain the SilentVault Spark client with plugin from this page You can also find the source code for both the plugin and SilentVaults customizations to the Spark source base elsewhere on this site A tutorial on SVSpark is here

The SilentVault wallet webstart client is a stand alone program that you can install from within your browser Like the SilentVault Spark client it communicates with the Voucher Safe payment network using extensions to the XMPP protocol This type of communication makes economic transactions indistinguishable from ordinary encrypted instant messaging traffic and avoids any need to run within an insecure browser environment or rely on web domains All client source code is published on this site and while you can run a prefabricated client you are also invited to build your own from source

You are also invited to develop applications for our integrated marketplaces that appear within SilentVault wallets A full API is available for your use as a development tool Please contact our team for details

The SilentVault technology is based on Voucher Safe which was developed 2008 2011 Voucher Safe is also the core technology of the Digital Cash Alliance

httpssilentvaultcom

32 JANUARY 2016

ldquoI love go-o-o-o-ldrdquo-Austin Powers in Goldmember

Not surprisingly most people feel the same

According to the Wall Street Journal gold prices and safe-haven demand in Asia have been skyrocketing since mid-November (1) proving that you donrsquot have to be a sea-faring pirate or a squire in a kingrsquos castle to enjoy its natural glare beauty and above all its ability to stimulate wealth

Since the days of the California Gold Rush people have enjoyed panning for it selling it and most of

all owning it Long considered one of the planetrsquos most precious and desired metals gold has grown heavily in value over the last several years and it appears more and more are trying to get their hands on it every single day

Something else is growing as wellhellip Bitcoin Often regarded as Americarsquos most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin has jumped heavily in value over the last few months spiking from $230 to nearly $350 Unlike gold which exists in solid physical form Bitcoin exists in ones and zeros binary coding that travels through the blockchain the technology that makes Bitcoin transactions possible between users and respective merchants

BITGOLD A MODERN REVOLUTION IN FINANCEBY NICK MARINOFF

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 33

Itrsquos interesting to witness nearly equal popularity rising for two different things that ultimately serve the same purpose and share similar goals Both are designed to enhance the world of finance Both can rise in value and both have the ability to make someone rich overnighthellip So what if we could combine the two What significant differences could there be if Bitcoin and gold were fused into one entity

Well itrsquos already been done Say hello to BitGold an early startup company stationed in Toronto Canada BitGold aims to offer international services for people and businesses to send payments and hold savings with physical gold (2) The company was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb Both have a long history in the financial sector with Sebag previously serving as the Founder and Managing Principal of Braavos Capital (an international private investment organization) and the Chairman of Natural Resource Holdings an investment company involved with natural resource assets (3) Josh Crumb was previously the Senior Metals Strategist at Goldman Sachs (4)

The company alleges that gold bullion is ldquothe worldrsquos oldest asset class and the centuryrsquos best performing currencyrdquo (5) According to BitGoldrsquos website their mission is

ldquohellipTo make gold accessible and useful in digital payments and secure savingshellip Wersquore advancing the digital payments revolution by helping people securely acquire store and now spend gold with unprecedented simplicity BitGold accounts are free and can be opened in minutes We provide users with a secure vault account to purchase and hold gold the ability to make and receive instant gold payments and a prepaid card for spending gold at traditional points of sale Through our network of ATMs customers can fund their accounts with local-currencyrdquo (4)

Present investors backing BitGold include Dundee Capital Markets GMP Securities and Sandstorm Gold although the initial investor in the company was Soros Brothers Investment which is presently run by Alexander Soros the son of Hungarian business magnate George Soros (2)

2015 has been a big year for the company CNBC has stated that BitGold currently serves over 100000 active customers and the platform stores approximately 276 kilograms of bullion within its walls Thatrsquos nearly $11 million total and over $100 per active user (6) In May BitGold began trading on the TSX Venture exchange in Canada and announced the purchase of GoldMoney worth nearly $52 million in Canadian dollars (7)

In June the company made citizens of the United States very happy with the following announcement

ldquoUS residents can sign up on the BitGold platform and buy sell or redeem gold using BitGoldrsquos Aurum payment and settlement technology US residents will also have access to the BitGold mobile app and a prepaid card when these features launch over the coming weeksrdquo (7)

The platform offers a number of products and services beneficial to any gold-lover across the country As the above quote suggests BitGold offers whatrsquos known as Aurum the gold-settlement technology thatrsquos compliant with several US financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase Wells Fargo Citi Bank of America US Bank Fidelity Capital One and Charles Schwab Users with an account at any one of these nationally-recognized banks can instantly redeem gold or authorize gold deposits The transactions thereby increase in safety and automation Users also receive a bonus in that they are usually able to avoid bank wire fees through the process (7)

Using the BitGold app users may also send and receive gold as payments to and from any other user or seller without paying any transaction fees They can even send gold to non-BitGold users via their mobile phones or through a simple email message The company also issues prepaid debit cards allowing users to spend funds directly from their BitGold accounts The card is compatible with ATMs so that users may withdraw local currency (7)

Lastly the company issues special ten-gram gold cubes worth approximately $380 each at press time Users may redeem these cubes on the BitGold platform and may demand physical delivery when they see fit (7)

34 JANUARY 2016

Vice-president of communications and PR Emily Cornelius explained in an email that they have no ldquostereotypicalrdquo user of the companyrsquos services but that there are predominantly three main use cases

ldquoThe traditional gold investor will gravitate to BitGold because our gold is unprecedentedly priced within 1 of spot price and we offer free storage in a Brinks vault of their choice globallyhellip The second use case is the user who seeks a more stable currency for their national savings outside of their potentially volatile local fiat currencyhellip Gold has gained over 3000 vs the US Dollar which is arguably the worldrsquos strongest fiat money Gold may seem to go up down or sideways but in reality and when viewed over long timescales such as the avg human lifecycle ndash it always riseshellip Gold has been rising against 9 of the worldrsquos most famous and well-known currencies almost every year since 2000hellip Thirdly BitGold is a powerful payments platformhellip BitGold allows a user to send an invoice for your labor to someone else anywhere in the world which the recipient can pay using any traditional payment methodhellip This gold is vaulted anywhere even outside their jurisdictionhellip This is important as it allows users to achieve upward mobility that are otherwise hindered by localized issues that are exogenous to their personal journeyrdquo

Cornelius also explained that the company offers ldquoall the benefits and efficiencies of a service like PayPal and a MasterCard but with a universally accepted more stable store of valuerdquo

Presently regulation over BitGold appears to be fairly non-existent BitGold does not list which regulators hold jurisdiction over its staff and operations nor do they list regulatory information regarding their trade practices (7) In fact co-founder Roy Sebag has stated in the past that he believes BitGold is not a bank nor does it serve as a financial institution in any traditional sense as it does not engage in fractional-reserve banking (2)According to page 20 of the companyrsquos initial public filing BitGold is not

ldquohellipEligible to be registered with the Financial

Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canadahellip There can be no assurance that BitGoldrsquos services or Internet platform will be acceptable to foreign regulatory bodies Foreign governments may seek to restrict access to BitGoldrsquos services block BitGoldrsquos website or impose other restrictions that may affect BitGoldrsquos ability to offer service to new or existing users in those for an extended period of time or indefinitelyrdquo (8)

Despite this it was confirmed in July of 2015 that the company did offer its services under the Canadian Bailment Law (9) This occurs in situations where physical personal property is transferred from one person (the bailor) to another for safekeeping and doing so does not require the binding notion of a written contract (10)

Presently the company employs 26 people including Sebag and Crumb Other notable BitGold personnel include Chief Executive Officer Darrell MacMullin Chief Technology Officer Alessandro Premoli Lead Mobile Engineer Paul Mennega and Team Manager Karman Lee The company also employs several vice-presidents five software engineers and two compliance officers (4)

It can be said that BitGold has accomplished quite a bit in less than two years Itrsquos likely such a volatile company has some big plans waiting in the wings for 2016 but Emily Cornelius isnrsquot dropping any hints as to what they could be

ldquoWe have a number of new features services and products cominghellip Yoursquoll have to wait and seerdquo

BitGold is steadily making its mark It has the backing the funds the technology and above all the drive Put all these items together (and add a touch of flair and public desire) and itrsquos clear that BitGold has what it takes to make the world of finance its own

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 11: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 11

12 JANUARY 2016

SBC - What Is Silent BitcoinSilent Bitcoin (or SBC) is a digital voucher currency 100 backed by bitcoins This means that 10 SBC equals 10 BTC When a user spends BTC to a wallet hash controlled by SilentVault they receive in exchange a voucher (a cryptographically signed XML object) for the same amount in SBC Thereafter the SBC voucher value circulates privately off-chain between SilentVault wallets until a holder redeems their SBC voucher for BTC At that point the SBC value is decirculated and a BTC spend is made from SilentVaultrsquos reserve to the address hash designated by the user who surrendered the voucher (Which is probably but doesnrsquot have to be the userrsquos own)

Using SBCThe Voucher-Safe network operates differently from the Bitcoin network in several important respects

Silencing BitcoinSilentVault lets you spend and receive bitcoin (and litecoin) off the blockchain entirely and move your coins to and from regular bitcoin addresses whenever you want Our wallets are multi-asset and can hold any supported asset types side-by-side

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 13

bull A Voucher Publisher (or VP) signs vouchers and clears voucher payments to prevent double-spending While each VP is centralized the protocol supports multiple Publishers This means that payments clear in seconds with no need to wait for transaction confirmations (Note however that a BTC spend to purchase a SBC voucher does require 6 confirmations before the SBC voucher will be issued)

bull Input vouchers are always destroyed in every transaction and replaced with output vouchers bearing fresh unique serial numbers This means that unlike with the blockchain no public transaction history exists balances are private and no ldquotaintrdquo can attach to coins (Taint violates fungibility a fundamental characteristic of sound money) This represents a vast privacy improvement over regular BTC spends and a lesser improvement even over ldquocoin laundryrdquo services

bull A payee must pick up their voucher payment within the 1-7 days designated by the payer If the payee does not do so the payment expires and becomes recoverable by the payer (indefinitely) This makes it impossible to lose value by spending it to a ldquodead walletrdquo

bull Receipts are generated by the payee not by the Publisher This prevents the clearing VP from needing to record transaction history or knowing anything about the private message context accompanying the payment The VP also never sees a user IP address

In short it is much faster more convenient more private and generally much safer to exchange SBC value between SilentVault

wallets than to perform ldquonaked spendsrdquo between BTC wallets on the blockchain (Though naturally it is also more expensive privacy being worth something)

Trading SBCExchanges in and out of SBC fromto BTC are performed via the ldquoExchangesrdquo tab in the SilentVault wallet by buying or selling SBC vouchers respectively These sales and repurchases are carried out with the exchange itself mdash meaning SilentVault is an agent for the Issuer of SBC SBC vouchers can also be traded to other users in exchange for vouchers representing other asset types (eg USD or EUR silver or gold etc) Users can specify the asset types they will accept and offer discounts or demand premiums The SVX (SilentVault Exchange) acts as a third-party escrow agent allowing all trades to be fully anonymous and secure You cannot know with whom you are trading and no KYC of any kind is performable by SilentVault You are your wallet keys period

Fee ScheduleThe fees currently charged by SilentVault are as follows

bull Purchase SBC with BTC 00 (free) minimum quantity 001 BTC

bull Redeem SBC for BTC 00 (free) minimum quantity 002 BTC

bull Make SBC voucher spend 00015 BTCbull Receive SBC voucher spend 00006 BTC

(first one is 00002)bull Escrow exchange 10 of amount

minimum quantity 002 BTC

httpssilentvaultcom

14 JANUARY 2016

YOUR PRIVACY MATTERSEacutelan Turbo VPN This VPN service is bundled with VoIP and private audiovideo calling via SIP plus unlimited bandwidth for surfing and streaming

Our Eacutelan Turbo VPN service is a standard single-hop VPN but with selectable exit proxies in Panama the USA the UK France and onto the Tor network As a subscriber yoursquoll also get an SIP extension that lets you place private audio and video calls to other users Unlike with Skype these calls can be encrypted end-to-end to conceal their content in transit And because yoursquore on our VPN the call metadata is also protected We also supply your own private Mumble server as an inexpensive add-on There are no bandwidth limitations with this package Surf and talk all you want

Eacutelan Max Security VPN This VPN service is bundled with email addresses and aliases 1 GB file storage plus 25 GB of monthly bandwidth

Our Eacutelan Max Security VPN service is a premiere multi-hop VPN which lives up to its name Multi-hop means that traffic flows between multiple points along its route from the entry gateway to the exit nodes something like changing planes a couple of times during an extended trip Inside the network internal routes are varied traffic is mixed alongside that of other users and random delays get inserted to defeat traffic analysis This technique known as ldquoserver cascadesrdquo same features and benefits as provides many of the Tor (Given that the Deep State agencies in various countries are now running most of the Tor exit nodes it might be even better) As a subscriber yoursquoll also get private email addresses and email aliases plus 1 GB of very secure file storage Because of its multi-hop architecture this VPN is less suitable for streaming applications and bandwidth usage is limited to 25 GB per month However you can also buy top-up packs to add more bandwidth

Elegantly Convenient No special hardware required

bull Software-only solutionbull Both individual and multi-user packages are availablebull Simple to install and use

Support for Windows Linux Mac Android and iOS httpelanvpnnet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 15

Wersquore long-time industry professionals with over a combined forty years in the IT industry Wersquore also committed advocates of human liberty and personal privacy With all the global spy networks hacks and data mining in the world today internet privacy is under attack as never beforeWe agree with E C Riegel who wrote

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and self-asserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

16 JANUARY 2016

What does Digix doWe are a Smart Asset company that allows anyone to securely send and receive ownerships of assets for eventual redemption on the blockchain The first asset listed is Gold and other assets such as diamonds will be available in the near future

What are Proof of Asset (PoA) CertificatesProof of Asset (PoA) Certificates prove the existence of gold through the entire chain of custody from the supplier to the custodial vault They are automatically created when a user purchases and stores gold at our participating custodial vaults It consists of 3 digital signatures from 3 independent entities vendor custodian and auditor Through this process a PoA card is issued representing your asset ownership on the blockchain This PoA card can then be sent and received by anyone on the Ethereum Blockchain for eventual redemption PoA certificates can also be sent to a Minter DAE to create DGX Gold tokens for fungibility

What are Digix Gold TokensDigix Gold tokens can only be created when a user sends in their PoA Certificates in exchange for them on a 11 weight basis on the Digix Minter DAE Each Digix Gold token represents 1g of gold For example if a PoA Certificate represents the ownership of a 100g gold bar it can be sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for 100 DGX tokens which will be deposited in your ethereum wallet

How do I know if these tokens or PoA certificates are safe from fraud or duplicationAll tokens and PoA certificates are created on the Ethereum Blockchain a public ledger where information stored can never be manipulated or counterfeited Our smart asset service can only exist because of blockchain technology

Where are the physical gold bars storedPhysical gold is kept with a participating custodian Each PoA Certificate will specify the name and location of the custodian that holds the gold The first participating custodian on the Digix Gold platform is Malca-Amit which maintains a high security storage facility at the Singapore Freeport

Why SingaporeDigixGlobal is incorporated in low crime and politically stable Singapore Investment Precious Metals are exempted from GST locally so you are purchasing gold at the lowest premiums available in the world

bull There are also no permits required to import or export precious metalsbull Singapore also has no jurisdictional relations with USA or Europebull We will only release your personal information by order of the Court of Law in Singapore

Frequently AskedQuestions

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 17

A Sneak Peek at the NewDigixGlobal User Interface

It will be available to the public in January 2016 for multiple operating systems and mobile platforms This software will manage client transactions for PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates Digix Asset Tokens and Ether tokens

DigixGlobal can create a digital asset certificate for any storable physical property Future versions of this software will include additional digital assets such as diamonds

When the interface opens users are presented with the main dashboard menu as shown below Access to all primary services and tools is available from this opening screen

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEVendor Information - Custodian Information - Auditor Information

To ensure quality and authenticity participating gold vendors only sell LBMA approved gold bars Gold purchased from an LBMA certified refinery is globally known for its quality These bullion sources guarantee the authenticity and purity of every single gold bar used on the Digix network Buying gold from the marketplace is the first step in the process of generating a PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificate

18 JANUARY 2016

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEShows gold bullion available for purchase as a digital gold certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 19

20 JANUARY 2016

GOLD TOKENS AND ETHER WALLETFrom this area a user can send Digix Gold Tokens or send Ether

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 21

The transaction hash for a completed certificate purchase is also available with just one click

(see below Raw Transaction Data Transaction Hash)

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets Individual users can create Digix Gold and Asset tokens by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoATM Certificate) to the Minter DAE It is a way to represent gold bars as units of tokens on the Ethereum Blockchain database One Digix Gold token represents 1 gram of gold

(Q) How do I know that there are actual gold bars backing PoA certificates or Digix Gold tokens

All material documents from the Proof of Asset protocol are made available via Swarm - Ethereumrsquos distributed file sharing This would mean that all assaying certificates custodial receipts of deposits and independent auditor documents from the entire chain of custody will be uploaded for public viewing to ascertain the authenticity of all PoA certificates and Digix Gold tokens Each entity in the chain of custody will also digitally sign on our PoA Certificate We only deal with vendors custodians and auditors that have passed our due diligence and that are world renowned with a history of excellence Private audits are also available for added assurance

The Ethereum platform allows users to create applications that run on a decentralized peer-to-peer network of computers without any central control and free from human interruption or corruption Vitalik Buterin invented Ethereum in late 2013 it was formally described by Dr Gavin Wood in 2014 then developed as an open source software project under the GNU Lesser General Public License It was officially launched on July 30 2015 The project is maintained by the Ethereum core developer team (ETHDEV) under the guidance of the non-profit Ethereum Foundation which had raised 31591 Bitcoins during their 2014 crowdsale

22 JANUARY 2016

From this page users may also view the assetrsquos history of trading within the Digix system

GOLD ASSET HISTORY

PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates

are Ethereum smart contracts

that provides a legally and

cryptographically binding

determination of ownership of

physical gold or other assets currently under

the guardianship of a participating custodian on the

Digix decentralized platform It

also certifies the agreement

between the user the vendor the custodian and

the independent auditor

The PoAtrade provides a complete history of the chain of control from the vendor

the custodian and all audit reports This proof guarantees that the purchase of the gold by the user its storage by the

custodian and regular inspection by the auditor has taken place

PoA Certificates can be transferred or sent to any Ethereum account sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or

Gold tokens or redeemed from the Recast DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or Gold

Tokens

Copies of the orignal signed documents are included as a part of the certificatersquos registration in the blockchain

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 23

24 JANUARY 2016

GOLD EXPLORER RECASTER (Above)

The Digix Minter DAE recognizes all valid Digix PoAtrade Certificates and can accept them from a user in exchange for divisible Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens The rules of the Digix platform dictates that only the Digix Minter has the authority through the request of the owner of a Digix PoAtrade certificate to allow that owner to issue their own Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens in exchange for the PoAtrade Certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 25

The interface conveniently walks customers through the online purchase of a Digital Gold PoA Certificate

26 JANUARY 2016

A completed purchase of the digital gold certificate representing this bar

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 27

TOOLS AND SETTINGS

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

28 JANUARY 2016

RESTORE WALLET

In addition to its security features users can configure the Aegis Vault to assign beneficiaries set the time-based distribution of funds or assets and delegate a power of attorney to another individual or a group of people

Digix is committed to bringing Ethereum use to the mainstream and the availability of a secure wallet is essential for realizing this goal

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 29

GENERATE A REDEMPTION KEY

(Q) What is the Digix Recaster Smart Contract

Digix Recaster Smart Contract allows the

conversion of Digix Gold tokens to a PoA card The

PoA card can be sent or received on the blockchain representing an ownership

of an entire gold bar or be used for redemption of

the physical gold bar at our office For example if you have 100 DGX tokens

representing 100g of weight in gold you can exchange

for a PoA card representing a 100g gold cast bar at

Digix This PoA card can be sent and received on the

Ethereum blockchain or be used to schedule a local

pick-up of the physical gold bar at Digix redemption

center in Singapore

You can currently recast into PoA certificates of

100g (100 DGX) or 1000g (1000 DGX) gold cast bar

denominations

30 JANUARY 2016

(Q) What about the Digix audit processWe have four types of audits at Digix

1 PRIVATE AUDITS Clients are welcome to come to our certified custodial vaults in Singapore to inspect your gold bars in a highly private and secure environment

2 EXTERNAL AUDITS We have engaged Inspectorate Singapore (wwwinspectoratecom) to audit our inventory and match them off with customersrsquo holdings at DGX We will hold such inspections at least twice a year

3 CUSTODIAL AUDITS Our certified custodians will provide a physical certification of proof that your gold bars are stored safely in their vaults They will take photographs of your serialized bars per request basis and have them keyed into their inventory management systems Some of our certified custodiansrsquo reputation are also on the line to provide us with their appraisal and storage services as they have to answer to their shareholders as a publicly listed company in Singapore

4 INTERNAL AUDITS We have patented a certification process called Proof of Asset (PoA) where auditors sign on the existence of Gold in our PoA certificate The digital certificate is then uploaded onto the Ethereum Blockchain

(Q) Are there KYCAML requirementsAll users who wish to redeem PoA certificates or Digix Gold Tokens for physical gold bars will have to go through KYC requirements at the pickup The gold bars will only be available for pick up at our office location in Singapore We must ensure that DigixGlobal and participating organizations are protected from any potential liabilities resulting from government prosecution and asset seizures so we ensure that we comply fully with regulatory requirements for Know your customer (KYC) and Anti-money laundering (AML)

ADDRESS BOOK

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 31

SilentVault is a secure private online wallet for making untraceable p2p payments

Unlike other crypto currency wallets SilentVault wallets support heterogeneous asset types such as fiat dollars euros metals gold and silver and crypto coins bitcoin litecoin SilentVault provides anonymous off blockchain payments made in bitcoin and litecoin It also features an integrated p2p escrow exchange where users can trade anonymously among different asset types with other users such as exchanging bitcoins for silver

The SilentVault Spark client is a fully functional Jabber chat client that is a branded and updated version of Spark Since Spark supports a plugin architecture our wallet client is implemented as a plugin You can obtain the SilentVault Spark client with plugin from this page You can also find the source code for both the plugin and SilentVaults customizations to the Spark source base elsewhere on this site A tutorial on SVSpark is here

The SilentVault wallet webstart client is a stand alone program that you can install from within your browser Like the SilentVault Spark client it communicates with the Voucher Safe payment network using extensions to the XMPP protocol This type of communication makes economic transactions indistinguishable from ordinary encrypted instant messaging traffic and avoids any need to run within an insecure browser environment or rely on web domains All client source code is published on this site and while you can run a prefabricated client you are also invited to build your own from source

You are also invited to develop applications for our integrated marketplaces that appear within SilentVault wallets A full API is available for your use as a development tool Please contact our team for details

The SilentVault technology is based on Voucher Safe which was developed 2008 2011 Voucher Safe is also the core technology of the Digital Cash Alliance

httpssilentvaultcom

32 JANUARY 2016

ldquoI love go-o-o-o-ldrdquo-Austin Powers in Goldmember

Not surprisingly most people feel the same

According to the Wall Street Journal gold prices and safe-haven demand in Asia have been skyrocketing since mid-November (1) proving that you donrsquot have to be a sea-faring pirate or a squire in a kingrsquos castle to enjoy its natural glare beauty and above all its ability to stimulate wealth

Since the days of the California Gold Rush people have enjoyed panning for it selling it and most of

all owning it Long considered one of the planetrsquos most precious and desired metals gold has grown heavily in value over the last several years and it appears more and more are trying to get their hands on it every single day

Something else is growing as wellhellip Bitcoin Often regarded as Americarsquos most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin has jumped heavily in value over the last few months spiking from $230 to nearly $350 Unlike gold which exists in solid physical form Bitcoin exists in ones and zeros binary coding that travels through the blockchain the technology that makes Bitcoin transactions possible between users and respective merchants

BITGOLD A MODERN REVOLUTION IN FINANCEBY NICK MARINOFF

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 33

Itrsquos interesting to witness nearly equal popularity rising for two different things that ultimately serve the same purpose and share similar goals Both are designed to enhance the world of finance Both can rise in value and both have the ability to make someone rich overnighthellip So what if we could combine the two What significant differences could there be if Bitcoin and gold were fused into one entity

Well itrsquos already been done Say hello to BitGold an early startup company stationed in Toronto Canada BitGold aims to offer international services for people and businesses to send payments and hold savings with physical gold (2) The company was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb Both have a long history in the financial sector with Sebag previously serving as the Founder and Managing Principal of Braavos Capital (an international private investment organization) and the Chairman of Natural Resource Holdings an investment company involved with natural resource assets (3) Josh Crumb was previously the Senior Metals Strategist at Goldman Sachs (4)

The company alleges that gold bullion is ldquothe worldrsquos oldest asset class and the centuryrsquos best performing currencyrdquo (5) According to BitGoldrsquos website their mission is

ldquohellipTo make gold accessible and useful in digital payments and secure savingshellip Wersquore advancing the digital payments revolution by helping people securely acquire store and now spend gold with unprecedented simplicity BitGold accounts are free and can be opened in minutes We provide users with a secure vault account to purchase and hold gold the ability to make and receive instant gold payments and a prepaid card for spending gold at traditional points of sale Through our network of ATMs customers can fund their accounts with local-currencyrdquo (4)

Present investors backing BitGold include Dundee Capital Markets GMP Securities and Sandstorm Gold although the initial investor in the company was Soros Brothers Investment which is presently run by Alexander Soros the son of Hungarian business magnate George Soros (2)

2015 has been a big year for the company CNBC has stated that BitGold currently serves over 100000 active customers and the platform stores approximately 276 kilograms of bullion within its walls Thatrsquos nearly $11 million total and over $100 per active user (6) In May BitGold began trading on the TSX Venture exchange in Canada and announced the purchase of GoldMoney worth nearly $52 million in Canadian dollars (7)

In June the company made citizens of the United States very happy with the following announcement

ldquoUS residents can sign up on the BitGold platform and buy sell or redeem gold using BitGoldrsquos Aurum payment and settlement technology US residents will also have access to the BitGold mobile app and a prepaid card when these features launch over the coming weeksrdquo (7)

The platform offers a number of products and services beneficial to any gold-lover across the country As the above quote suggests BitGold offers whatrsquos known as Aurum the gold-settlement technology thatrsquos compliant with several US financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase Wells Fargo Citi Bank of America US Bank Fidelity Capital One and Charles Schwab Users with an account at any one of these nationally-recognized banks can instantly redeem gold or authorize gold deposits The transactions thereby increase in safety and automation Users also receive a bonus in that they are usually able to avoid bank wire fees through the process (7)

Using the BitGold app users may also send and receive gold as payments to and from any other user or seller without paying any transaction fees They can even send gold to non-BitGold users via their mobile phones or through a simple email message The company also issues prepaid debit cards allowing users to spend funds directly from their BitGold accounts The card is compatible with ATMs so that users may withdraw local currency (7)

Lastly the company issues special ten-gram gold cubes worth approximately $380 each at press time Users may redeem these cubes on the BitGold platform and may demand physical delivery when they see fit (7)

34 JANUARY 2016

Vice-president of communications and PR Emily Cornelius explained in an email that they have no ldquostereotypicalrdquo user of the companyrsquos services but that there are predominantly three main use cases

ldquoThe traditional gold investor will gravitate to BitGold because our gold is unprecedentedly priced within 1 of spot price and we offer free storage in a Brinks vault of their choice globallyhellip The second use case is the user who seeks a more stable currency for their national savings outside of their potentially volatile local fiat currencyhellip Gold has gained over 3000 vs the US Dollar which is arguably the worldrsquos strongest fiat money Gold may seem to go up down or sideways but in reality and when viewed over long timescales such as the avg human lifecycle ndash it always riseshellip Gold has been rising against 9 of the worldrsquos most famous and well-known currencies almost every year since 2000hellip Thirdly BitGold is a powerful payments platformhellip BitGold allows a user to send an invoice for your labor to someone else anywhere in the world which the recipient can pay using any traditional payment methodhellip This gold is vaulted anywhere even outside their jurisdictionhellip This is important as it allows users to achieve upward mobility that are otherwise hindered by localized issues that are exogenous to their personal journeyrdquo

Cornelius also explained that the company offers ldquoall the benefits and efficiencies of a service like PayPal and a MasterCard but with a universally accepted more stable store of valuerdquo

Presently regulation over BitGold appears to be fairly non-existent BitGold does not list which regulators hold jurisdiction over its staff and operations nor do they list regulatory information regarding their trade practices (7) In fact co-founder Roy Sebag has stated in the past that he believes BitGold is not a bank nor does it serve as a financial institution in any traditional sense as it does not engage in fractional-reserve banking (2)According to page 20 of the companyrsquos initial public filing BitGold is not

ldquohellipEligible to be registered with the Financial

Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canadahellip There can be no assurance that BitGoldrsquos services or Internet platform will be acceptable to foreign regulatory bodies Foreign governments may seek to restrict access to BitGoldrsquos services block BitGoldrsquos website or impose other restrictions that may affect BitGoldrsquos ability to offer service to new or existing users in those for an extended period of time or indefinitelyrdquo (8)

Despite this it was confirmed in July of 2015 that the company did offer its services under the Canadian Bailment Law (9) This occurs in situations where physical personal property is transferred from one person (the bailor) to another for safekeeping and doing so does not require the binding notion of a written contract (10)

Presently the company employs 26 people including Sebag and Crumb Other notable BitGold personnel include Chief Executive Officer Darrell MacMullin Chief Technology Officer Alessandro Premoli Lead Mobile Engineer Paul Mennega and Team Manager Karman Lee The company also employs several vice-presidents five software engineers and two compliance officers (4)

It can be said that BitGold has accomplished quite a bit in less than two years Itrsquos likely such a volatile company has some big plans waiting in the wings for 2016 but Emily Cornelius isnrsquot dropping any hints as to what they could be

ldquoWe have a number of new features services and products cominghellip Yoursquoll have to wait and seerdquo

BitGold is steadily making its mark It has the backing the funds the technology and above all the drive Put all these items together (and add a touch of flair and public desire) and itrsquos clear that BitGold has what it takes to make the world of finance its own

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 12: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

12 JANUARY 2016

SBC - What Is Silent BitcoinSilent Bitcoin (or SBC) is a digital voucher currency 100 backed by bitcoins This means that 10 SBC equals 10 BTC When a user spends BTC to a wallet hash controlled by SilentVault they receive in exchange a voucher (a cryptographically signed XML object) for the same amount in SBC Thereafter the SBC voucher value circulates privately off-chain between SilentVault wallets until a holder redeems their SBC voucher for BTC At that point the SBC value is decirculated and a BTC spend is made from SilentVaultrsquos reserve to the address hash designated by the user who surrendered the voucher (Which is probably but doesnrsquot have to be the userrsquos own)

Using SBCThe Voucher-Safe network operates differently from the Bitcoin network in several important respects

Silencing BitcoinSilentVault lets you spend and receive bitcoin (and litecoin) off the blockchain entirely and move your coins to and from regular bitcoin addresses whenever you want Our wallets are multi-asset and can hold any supported asset types side-by-side

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 13

bull A Voucher Publisher (or VP) signs vouchers and clears voucher payments to prevent double-spending While each VP is centralized the protocol supports multiple Publishers This means that payments clear in seconds with no need to wait for transaction confirmations (Note however that a BTC spend to purchase a SBC voucher does require 6 confirmations before the SBC voucher will be issued)

bull Input vouchers are always destroyed in every transaction and replaced with output vouchers bearing fresh unique serial numbers This means that unlike with the blockchain no public transaction history exists balances are private and no ldquotaintrdquo can attach to coins (Taint violates fungibility a fundamental characteristic of sound money) This represents a vast privacy improvement over regular BTC spends and a lesser improvement even over ldquocoin laundryrdquo services

bull A payee must pick up their voucher payment within the 1-7 days designated by the payer If the payee does not do so the payment expires and becomes recoverable by the payer (indefinitely) This makes it impossible to lose value by spending it to a ldquodead walletrdquo

bull Receipts are generated by the payee not by the Publisher This prevents the clearing VP from needing to record transaction history or knowing anything about the private message context accompanying the payment The VP also never sees a user IP address

In short it is much faster more convenient more private and generally much safer to exchange SBC value between SilentVault

wallets than to perform ldquonaked spendsrdquo between BTC wallets on the blockchain (Though naturally it is also more expensive privacy being worth something)

Trading SBCExchanges in and out of SBC fromto BTC are performed via the ldquoExchangesrdquo tab in the SilentVault wallet by buying or selling SBC vouchers respectively These sales and repurchases are carried out with the exchange itself mdash meaning SilentVault is an agent for the Issuer of SBC SBC vouchers can also be traded to other users in exchange for vouchers representing other asset types (eg USD or EUR silver or gold etc) Users can specify the asset types they will accept and offer discounts or demand premiums The SVX (SilentVault Exchange) acts as a third-party escrow agent allowing all trades to be fully anonymous and secure You cannot know with whom you are trading and no KYC of any kind is performable by SilentVault You are your wallet keys period

Fee ScheduleThe fees currently charged by SilentVault are as follows

bull Purchase SBC with BTC 00 (free) minimum quantity 001 BTC

bull Redeem SBC for BTC 00 (free) minimum quantity 002 BTC

bull Make SBC voucher spend 00015 BTCbull Receive SBC voucher spend 00006 BTC

(first one is 00002)bull Escrow exchange 10 of amount

minimum quantity 002 BTC

httpssilentvaultcom

14 JANUARY 2016

YOUR PRIVACY MATTERSEacutelan Turbo VPN This VPN service is bundled with VoIP and private audiovideo calling via SIP plus unlimited bandwidth for surfing and streaming

Our Eacutelan Turbo VPN service is a standard single-hop VPN but with selectable exit proxies in Panama the USA the UK France and onto the Tor network As a subscriber yoursquoll also get an SIP extension that lets you place private audio and video calls to other users Unlike with Skype these calls can be encrypted end-to-end to conceal their content in transit And because yoursquore on our VPN the call metadata is also protected We also supply your own private Mumble server as an inexpensive add-on There are no bandwidth limitations with this package Surf and talk all you want

Eacutelan Max Security VPN This VPN service is bundled with email addresses and aliases 1 GB file storage plus 25 GB of monthly bandwidth

Our Eacutelan Max Security VPN service is a premiere multi-hop VPN which lives up to its name Multi-hop means that traffic flows between multiple points along its route from the entry gateway to the exit nodes something like changing planes a couple of times during an extended trip Inside the network internal routes are varied traffic is mixed alongside that of other users and random delays get inserted to defeat traffic analysis This technique known as ldquoserver cascadesrdquo same features and benefits as provides many of the Tor (Given that the Deep State agencies in various countries are now running most of the Tor exit nodes it might be even better) As a subscriber yoursquoll also get private email addresses and email aliases plus 1 GB of very secure file storage Because of its multi-hop architecture this VPN is less suitable for streaming applications and bandwidth usage is limited to 25 GB per month However you can also buy top-up packs to add more bandwidth

Elegantly Convenient No special hardware required

bull Software-only solutionbull Both individual and multi-user packages are availablebull Simple to install and use

Support for Windows Linux Mac Android and iOS httpelanvpnnet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 15

Wersquore long-time industry professionals with over a combined forty years in the IT industry Wersquore also committed advocates of human liberty and personal privacy With all the global spy networks hacks and data mining in the world today internet privacy is under attack as never beforeWe agree with E C Riegel who wrote

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and self-asserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

16 JANUARY 2016

What does Digix doWe are a Smart Asset company that allows anyone to securely send and receive ownerships of assets for eventual redemption on the blockchain The first asset listed is Gold and other assets such as diamonds will be available in the near future

What are Proof of Asset (PoA) CertificatesProof of Asset (PoA) Certificates prove the existence of gold through the entire chain of custody from the supplier to the custodial vault They are automatically created when a user purchases and stores gold at our participating custodial vaults It consists of 3 digital signatures from 3 independent entities vendor custodian and auditor Through this process a PoA card is issued representing your asset ownership on the blockchain This PoA card can then be sent and received by anyone on the Ethereum Blockchain for eventual redemption PoA certificates can also be sent to a Minter DAE to create DGX Gold tokens for fungibility

What are Digix Gold TokensDigix Gold tokens can only be created when a user sends in their PoA Certificates in exchange for them on a 11 weight basis on the Digix Minter DAE Each Digix Gold token represents 1g of gold For example if a PoA Certificate represents the ownership of a 100g gold bar it can be sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for 100 DGX tokens which will be deposited in your ethereum wallet

How do I know if these tokens or PoA certificates are safe from fraud or duplicationAll tokens and PoA certificates are created on the Ethereum Blockchain a public ledger where information stored can never be manipulated or counterfeited Our smart asset service can only exist because of blockchain technology

Where are the physical gold bars storedPhysical gold is kept with a participating custodian Each PoA Certificate will specify the name and location of the custodian that holds the gold The first participating custodian on the Digix Gold platform is Malca-Amit which maintains a high security storage facility at the Singapore Freeport

Why SingaporeDigixGlobal is incorporated in low crime and politically stable Singapore Investment Precious Metals are exempted from GST locally so you are purchasing gold at the lowest premiums available in the world

bull There are also no permits required to import or export precious metalsbull Singapore also has no jurisdictional relations with USA or Europebull We will only release your personal information by order of the Court of Law in Singapore

Frequently AskedQuestions

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 17

A Sneak Peek at the NewDigixGlobal User Interface

It will be available to the public in January 2016 for multiple operating systems and mobile platforms This software will manage client transactions for PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates Digix Asset Tokens and Ether tokens

DigixGlobal can create a digital asset certificate for any storable physical property Future versions of this software will include additional digital assets such as diamonds

When the interface opens users are presented with the main dashboard menu as shown below Access to all primary services and tools is available from this opening screen

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEVendor Information - Custodian Information - Auditor Information

To ensure quality and authenticity participating gold vendors only sell LBMA approved gold bars Gold purchased from an LBMA certified refinery is globally known for its quality These bullion sources guarantee the authenticity and purity of every single gold bar used on the Digix network Buying gold from the marketplace is the first step in the process of generating a PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificate

18 JANUARY 2016

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEShows gold bullion available for purchase as a digital gold certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 19

20 JANUARY 2016

GOLD TOKENS AND ETHER WALLETFrom this area a user can send Digix Gold Tokens or send Ether

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 21

The transaction hash for a completed certificate purchase is also available with just one click

(see below Raw Transaction Data Transaction Hash)

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets Individual users can create Digix Gold and Asset tokens by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoATM Certificate) to the Minter DAE It is a way to represent gold bars as units of tokens on the Ethereum Blockchain database One Digix Gold token represents 1 gram of gold

(Q) How do I know that there are actual gold bars backing PoA certificates or Digix Gold tokens

All material documents from the Proof of Asset protocol are made available via Swarm - Ethereumrsquos distributed file sharing This would mean that all assaying certificates custodial receipts of deposits and independent auditor documents from the entire chain of custody will be uploaded for public viewing to ascertain the authenticity of all PoA certificates and Digix Gold tokens Each entity in the chain of custody will also digitally sign on our PoA Certificate We only deal with vendors custodians and auditors that have passed our due diligence and that are world renowned with a history of excellence Private audits are also available for added assurance

The Ethereum platform allows users to create applications that run on a decentralized peer-to-peer network of computers without any central control and free from human interruption or corruption Vitalik Buterin invented Ethereum in late 2013 it was formally described by Dr Gavin Wood in 2014 then developed as an open source software project under the GNU Lesser General Public License It was officially launched on July 30 2015 The project is maintained by the Ethereum core developer team (ETHDEV) under the guidance of the non-profit Ethereum Foundation which had raised 31591 Bitcoins during their 2014 crowdsale

22 JANUARY 2016

From this page users may also view the assetrsquos history of trading within the Digix system

GOLD ASSET HISTORY

PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates

are Ethereum smart contracts

that provides a legally and

cryptographically binding

determination of ownership of

physical gold or other assets currently under

the guardianship of a participating custodian on the

Digix decentralized platform It

also certifies the agreement

between the user the vendor the custodian and

the independent auditor

The PoAtrade provides a complete history of the chain of control from the vendor

the custodian and all audit reports This proof guarantees that the purchase of the gold by the user its storage by the

custodian and regular inspection by the auditor has taken place

PoA Certificates can be transferred or sent to any Ethereum account sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or

Gold tokens or redeemed from the Recast DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or Gold

Tokens

Copies of the orignal signed documents are included as a part of the certificatersquos registration in the blockchain

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 23

24 JANUARY 2016

GOLD EXPLORER RECASTER (Above)

The Digix Minter DAE recognizes all valid Digix PoAtrade Certificates and can accept them from a user in exchange for divisible Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens The rules of the Digix platform dictates that only the Digix Minter has the authority through the request of the owner of a Digix PoAtrade certificate to allow that owner to issue their own Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens in exchange for the PoAtrade Certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 25

The interface conveniently walks customers through the online purchase of a Digital Gold PoA Certificate

26 JANUARY 2016

A completed purchase of the digital gold certificate representing this bar

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 27

TOOLS AND SETTINGS

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

28 JANUARY 2016

RESTORE WALLET

In addition to its security features users can configure the Aegis Vault to assign beneficiaries set the time-based distribution of funds or assets and delegate a power of attorney to another individual or a group of people

Digix is committed to bringing Ethereum use to the mainstream and the availability of a secure wallet is essential for realizing this goal

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 29

GENERATE A REDEMPTION KEY

(Q) What is the Digix Recaster Smart Contract

Digix Recaster Smart Contract allows the

conversion of Digix Gold tokens to a PoA card The

PoA card can be sent or received on the blockchain representing an ownership

of an entire gold bar or be used for redemption of

the physical gold bar at our office For example if you have 100 DGX tokens

representing 100g of weight in gold you can exchange

for a PoA card representing a 100g gold cast bar at

Digix This PoA card can be sent and received on the

Ethereum blockchain or be used to schedule a local

pick-up of the physical gold bar at Digix redemption

center in Singapore

You can currently recast into PoA certificates of

100g (100 DGX) or 1000g (1000 DGX) gold cast bar

denominations

30 JANUARY 2016

(Q) What about the Digix audit processWe have four types of audits at Digix

1 PRIVATE AUDITS Clients are welcome to come to our certified custodial vaults in Singapore to inspect your gold bars in a highly private and secure environment

2 EXTERNAL AUDITS We have engaged Inspectorate Singapore (wwwinspectoratecom) to audit our inventory and match them off with customersrsquo holdings at DGX We will hold such inspections at least twice a year

3 CUSTODIAL AUDITS Our certified custodians will provide a physical certification of proof that your gold bars are stored safely in their vaults They will take photographs of your serialized bars per request basis and have them keyed into their inventory management systems Some of our certified custodiansrsquo reputation are also on the line to provide us with their appraisal and storage services as they have to answer to their shareholders as a publicly listed company in Singapore

4 INTERNAL AUDITS We have patented a certification process called Proof of Asset (PoA) where auditors sign on the existence of Gold in our PoA certificate The digital certificate is then uploaded onto the Ethereum Blockchain

(Q) Are there KYCAML requirementsAll users who wish to redeem PoA certificates or Digix Gold Tokens for physical gold bars will have to go through KYC requirements at the pickup The gold bars will only be available for pick up at our office location in Singapore We must ensure that DigixGlobal and participating organizations are protected from any potential liabilities resulting from government prosecution and asset seizures so we ensure that we comply fully with regulatory requirements for Know your customer (KYC) and Anti-money laundering (AML)

ADDRESS BOOK

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 31

SilentVault is a secure private online wallet for making untraceable p2p payments

Unlike other crypto currency wallets SilentVault wallets support heterogeneous asset types such as fiat dollars euros metals gold and silver and crypto coins bitcoin litecoin SilentVault provides anonymous off blockchain payments made in bitcoin and litecoin It also features an integrated p2p escrow exchange where users can trade anonymously among different asset types with other users such as exchanging bitcoins for silver

The SilentVault Spark client is a fully functional Jabber chat client that is a branded and updated version of Spark Since Spark supports a plugin architecture our wallet client is implemented as a plugin You can obtain the SilentVault Spark client with plugin from this page You can also find the source code for both the plugin and SilentVaults customizations to the Spark source base elsewhere on this site A tutorial on SVSpark is here

The SilentVault wallet webstart client is a stand alone program that you can install from within your browser Like the SilentVault Spark client it communicates with the Voucher Safe payment network using extensions to the XMPP protocol This type of communication makes economic transactions indistinguishable from ordinary encrypted instant messaging traffic and avoids any need to run within an insecure browser environment or rely on web domains All client source code is published on this site and while you can run a prefabricated client you are also invited to build your own from source

You are also invited to develop applications for our integrated marketplaces that appear within SilentVault wallets A full API is available for your use as a development tool Please contact our team for details

The SilentVault technology is based on Voucher Safe which was developed 2008 2011 Voucher Safe is also the core technology of the Digital Cash Alliance

httpssilentvaultcom

32 JANUARY 2016

ldquoI love go-o-o-o-ldrdquo-Austin Powers in Goldmember

Not surprisingly most people feel the same

According to the Wall Street Journal gold prices and safe-haven demand in Asia have been skyrocketing since mid-November (1) proving that you donrsquot have to be a sea-faring pirate or a squire in a kingrsquos castle to enjoy its natural glare beauty and above all its ability to stimulate wealth

Since the days of the California Gold Rush people have enjoyed panning for it selling it and most of

all owning it Long considered one of the planetrsquos most precious and desired metals gold has grown heavily in value over the last several years and it appears more and more are trying to get their hands on it every single day

Something else is growing as wellhellip Bitcoin Often regarded as Americarsquos most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin has jumped heavily in value over the last few months spiking from $230 to nearly $350 Unlike gold which exists in solid physical form Bitcoin exists in ones and zeros binary coding that travels through the blockchain the technology that makes Bitcoin transactions possible between users and respective merchants

BITGOLD A MODERN REVOLUTION IN FINANCEBY NICK MARINOFF

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 33

Itrsquos interesting to witness nearly equal popularity rising for two different things that ultimately serve the same purpose and share similar goals Both are designed to enhance the world of finance Both can rise in value and both have the ability to make someone rich overnighthellip So what if we could combine the two What significant differences could there be if Bitcoin and gold were fused into one entity

Well itrsquos already been done Say hello to BitGold an early startup company stationed in Toronto Canada BitGold aims to offer international services for people and businesses to send payments and hold savings with physical gold (2) The company was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb Both have a long history in the financial sector with Sebag previously serving as the Founder and Managing Principal of Braavos Capital (an international private investment organization) and the Chairman of Natural Resource Holdings an investment company involved with natural resource assets (3) Josh Crumb was previously the Senior Metals Strategist at Goldman Sachs (4)

The company alleges that gold bullion is ldquothe worldrsquos oldest asset class and the centuryrsquos best performing currencyrdquo (5) According to BitGoldrsquos website their mission is

ldquohellipTo make gold accessible and useful in digital payments and secure savingshellip Wersquore advancing the digital payments revolution by helping people securely acquire store and now spend gold with unprecedented simplicity BitGold accounts are free and can be opened in minutes We provide users with a secure vault account to purchase and hold gold the ability to make and receive instant gold payments and a prepaid card for spending gold at traditional points of sale Through our network of ATMs customers can fund their accounts with local-currencyrdquo (4)

Present investors backing BitGold include Dundee Capital Markets GMP Securities and Sandstorm Gold although the initial investor in the company was Soros Brothers Investment which is presently run by Alexander Soros the son of Hungarian business magnate George Soros (2)

2015 has been a big year for the company CNBC has stated that BitGold currently serves over 100000 active customers and the platform stores approximately 276 kilograms of bullion within its walls Thatrsquos nearly $11 million total and over $100 per active user (6) In May BitGold began trading on the TSX Venture exchange in Canada and announced the purchase of GoldMoney worth nearly $52 million in Canadian dollars (7)

In June the company made citizens of the United States very happy with the following announcement

ldquoUS residents can sign up on the BitGold platform and buy sell or redeem gold using BitGoldrsquos Aurum payment and settlement technology US residents will also have access to the BitGold mobile app and a prepaid card when these features launch over the coming weeksrdquo (7)

The platform offers a number of products and services beneficial to any gold-lover across the country As the above quote suggests BitGold offers whatrsquos known as Aurum the gold-settlement technology thatrsquos compliant with several US financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase Wells Fargo Citi Bank of America US Bank Fidelity Capital One and Charles Schwab Users with an account at any one of these nationally-recognized banks can instantly redeem gold or authorize gold deposits The transactions thereby increase in safety and automation Users also receive a bonus in that they are usually able to avoid bank wire fees through the process (7)

Using the BitGold app users may also send and receive gold as payments to and from any other user or seller without paying any transaction fees They can even send gold to non-BitGold users via their mobile phones or through a simple email message The company also issues prepaid debit cards allowing users to spend funds directly from their BitGold accounts The card is compatible with ATMs so that users may withdraw local currency (7)

Lastly the company issues special ten-gram gold cubes worth approximately $380 each at press time Users may redeem these cubes on the BitGold platform and may demand physical delivery when they see fit (7)

34 JANUARY 2016

Vice-president of communications and PR Emily Cornelius explained in an email that they have no ldquostereotypicalrdquo user of the companyrsquos services but that there are predominantly three main use cases

ldquoThe traditional gold investor will gravitate to BitGold because our gold is unprecedentedly priced within 1 of spot price and we offer free storage in a Brinks vault of their choice globallyhellip The second use case is the user who seeks a more stable currency for their national savings outside of their potentially volatile local fiat currencyhellip Gold has gained over 3000 vs the US Dollar which is arguably the worldrsquos strongest fiat money Gold may seem to go up down or sideways but in reality and when viewed over long timescales such as the avg human lifecycle ndash it always riseshellip Gold has been rising against 9 of the worldrsquos most famous and well-known currencies almost every year since 2000hellip Thirdly BitGold is a powerful payments platformhellip BitGold allows a user to send an invoice for your labor to someone else anywhere in the world which the recipient can pay using any traditional payment methodhellip This gold is vaulted anywhere even outside their jurisdictionhellip This is important as it allows users to achieve upward mobility that are otherwise hindered by localized issues that are exogenous to their personal journeyrdquo

Cornelius also explained that the company offers ldquoall the benefits and efficiencies of a service like PayPal and a MasterCard but with a universally accepted more stable store of valuerdquo

Presently regulation over BitGold appears to be fairly non-existent BitGold does not list which regulators hold jurisdiction over its staff and operations nor do they list regulatory information regarding their trade practices (7) In fact co-founder Roy Sebag has stated in the past that he believes BitGold is not a bank nor does it serve as a financial institution in any traditional sense as it does not engage in fractional-reserve banking (2)According to page 20 of the companyrsquos initial public filing BitGold is not

ldquohellipEligible to be registered with the Financial

Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canadahellip There can be no assurance that BitGoldrsquos services or Internet platform will be acceptable to foreign regulatory bodies Foreign governments may seek to restrict access to BitGoldrsquos services block BitGoldrsquos website or impose other restrictions that may affect BitGoldrsquos ability to offer service to new or existing users in those for an extended period of time or indefinitelyrdquo (8)

Despite this it was confirmed in July of 2015 that the company did offer its services under the Canadian Bailment Law (9) This occurs in situations where physical personal property is transferred from one person (the bailor) to another for safekeeping and doing so does not require the binding notion of a written contract (10)

Presently the company employs 26 people including Sebag and Crumb Other notable BitGold personnel include Chief Executive Officer Darrell MacMullin Chief Technology Officer Alessandro Premoli Lead Mobile Engineer Paul Mennega and Team Manager Karman Lee The company also employs several vice-presidents five software engineers and two compliance officers (4)

It can be said that BitGold has accomplished quite a bit in less than two years Itrsquos likely such a volatile company has some big plans waiting in the wings for 2016 but Emily Cornelius isnrsquot dropping any hints as to what they could be

ldquoWe have a number of new features services and products cominghellip Yoursquoll have to wait and seerdquo

BitGold is steadily making its mark It has the backing the funds the technology and above all the drive Put all these items together (and add a touch of flair and public desire) and itrsquos clear that BitGold has what it takes to make the world of finance its own

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 13: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 13

bull A Voucher Publisher (or VP) signs vouchers and clears voucher payments to prevent double-spending While each VP is centralized the protocol supports multiple Publishers This means that payments clear in seconds with no need to wait for transaction confirmations (Note however that a BTC spend to purchase a SBC voucher does require 6 confirmations before the SBC voucher will be issued)

bull Input vouchers are always destroyed in every transaction and replaced with output vouchers bearing fresh unique serial numbers This means that unlike with the blockchain no public transaction history exists balances are private and no ldquotaintrdquo can attach to coins (Taint violates fungibility a fundamental characteristic of sound money) This represents a vast privacy improvement over regular BTC spends and a lesser improvement even over ldquocoin laundryrdquo services

bull A payee must pick up their voucher payment within the 1-7 days designated by the payer If the payee does not do so the payment expires and becomes recoverable by the payer (indefinitely) This makes it impossible to lose value by spending it to a ldquodead walletrdquo

bull Receipts are generated by the payee not by the Publisher This prevents the clearing VP from needing to record transaction history or knowing anything about the private message context accompanying the payment The VP also never sees a user IP address

In short it is much faster more convenient more private and generally much safer to exchange SBC value between SilentVault

wallets than to perform ldquonaked spendsrdquo between BTC wallets on the blockchain (Though naturally it is also more expensive privacy being worth something)

Trading SBCExchanges in and out of SBC fromto BTC are performed via the ldquoExchangesrdquo tab in the SilentVault wallet by buying or selling SBC vouchers respectively These sales and repurchases are carried out with the exchange itself mdash meaning SilentVault is an agent for the Issuer of SBC SBC vouchers can also be traded to other users in exchange for vouchers representing other asset types (eg USD or EUR silver or gold etc) Users can specify the asset types they will accept and offer discounts or demand premiums The SVX (SilentVault Exchange) acts as a third-party escrow agent allowing all trades to be fully anonymous and secure You cannot know with whom you are trading and no KYC of any kind is performable by SilentVault You are your wallet keys period

Fee ScheduleThe fees currently charged by SilentVault are as follows

bull Purchase SBC with BTC 00 (free) minimum quantity 001 BTC

bull Redeem SBC for BTC 00 (free) minimum quantity 002 BTC

bull Make SBC voucher spend 00015 BTCbull Receive SBC voucher spend 00006 BTC

(first one is 00002)bull Escrow exchange 10 of amount

minimum quantity 002 BTC

httpssilentvaultcom

14 JANUARY 2016

YOUR PRIVACY MATTERSEacutelan Turbo VPN This VPN service is bundled with VoIP and private audiovideo calling via SIP plus unlimited bandwidth for surfing and streaming

Our Eacutelan Turbo VPN service is a standard single-hop VPN but with selectable exit proxies in Panama the USA the UK France and onto the Tor network As a subscriber yoursquoll also get an SIP extension that lets you place private audio and video calls to other users Unlike with Skype these calls can be encrypted end-to-end to conceal their content in transit And because yoursquore on our VPN the call metadata is also protected We also supply your own private Mumble server as an inexpensive add-on There are no bandwidth limitations with this package Surf and talk all you want

Eacutelan Max Security VPN This VPN service is bundled with email addresses and aliases 1 GB file storage plus 25 GB of monthly bandwidth

Our Eacutelan Max Security VPN service is a premiere multi-hop VPN which lives up to its name Multi-hop means that traffic flows between multiple points along its route from the entry gateway to the exit nodes something like changing planes a couple of times during an extended trip Inside the network internal routes are varied traffic is mixed alongside that of other users and random delays get inserted to defeat traffic analysis This technique known as ldquoserver cascadesrdquo same features and benefits as provides many of the Tor (Given that the Deep State agencies in various countries are now running most of the Tor exit nodes it might be even better) As a subscriber yoursquoll also get private email addresses and email aliases plus 1 GB of very secure file storage Because of its multi-hop architecture this VPN is less suitable for streaming applications and bandwidth usage is limited to 25 GB per month However you can also buy top-up packs to add more bandwidth

Elegantly Convenient No special hardware required

bull Software-only solutionbull Both individual and multi-user packages are availablebull Simple to install and use

Support for Windows Linux Mac Android and iOS httpelanvpnnet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 15

Wersquore long-time industry professionals with over a combined forty years in the IT industry Wersquore also committed advocates of human liberty and personal privacy With all the global spy networks hacks and data mining in the world today internet privacy is under attack as never beforeWe agree with E C Riegel who wrote

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and self-asserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

16 JANUARY 2016

What does Digix doWe are a Smart Asset company that allows anyone to securely send and receive ownerships of assets for eventual redemption on the blockchain The first asset listed is Gold and other assets such as diamonds will be available in the near future

What are Proof of Asset (PoA) CertificatesProof of Asset (PoA) Certificates prove the existence of gold through the entire chain of custody from the supplier to the custodial vault They are automatically created when a user purchases and stores gold at our participating custodial vaults It consists of 3 digital signatures from 3 independent entities vendor custodian and auditor Through this process a PoA card is issued representing your asset ownership on the blockchain This PoA card can then be sent and received by anyone on the Ethereum Blockchain for eventual redemption PoA certificates can also be sent to a Minter DAE to create DGX Gold tokens for fungibility

What are Digix Gold TokensDigix Gold tokens can only be created when a user sends in their PoA Certificates in exchange for them on a 11 weight basis on the Digix Minter DAE Each Digix Gold token represents 1g of gold For example if a PoA Certificate represents the ownership of a 100g gold bar it can be sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for 100 DGX tokens which will be deposited in your ethereum wallet

How do I know if these tokens or PoA certificates are safe from fraud or duplicationAll tokens and PoA certificates are created on the Ethereum Blockchain a public ledger where information stored can never be manipulated or counterfeited Our smart asset service can only exist because of blockchain technology

Where are the physical gold bars storedPhysical gold is kept with a participating custodian Each PoA Certificate will specify the name and location of the custodian that holds the gold The first participating custodian on the Digix Gold platform is Malca-Amit which maintains a high security storage facility at the Singapore Freeport

Why SingaporeDigixGlobal is incorporated in low crime and politically stable Singapore Investment Precious Metals are exempted from GST locally so you are purchasing gold at the lowest premiums available in the world

bull There are also no permits required to import or export precious metalsbull Singapore also has no jurisdictional relations with USA or Europebull We will only release your personal information by order of the Court of Law in Singapore

Frequently AskedQuestions

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 17

A Sneak Peek at the NewDigixGlobal User Interface

It will be available to the public in January 2016 for multiple operating systems and mobile platforms This software will manage client transactions for PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates Digix Asset Tokens and Ether tokens

DigixGlobal can create a digital asset certificate for any storable physical property Future versions of this software will include additional digital assets such as diamonds

When the interface opens users are presented with the main dashboard menu as shown below Access to all primary services and tools is available from this opening screen

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEVendor Information - Custodian Information - Auditor Information

To ensure quality and authenticity participating gold vendors only sell LBMA approved gold bars Gold purchased from an LBMA certified refinery is globally known for its quality These bullion sources guarantee the authenticity and purity of every single gold bar used on the Digix network Buying gold from the marketplace is the first step in the process of generating a PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificate

18 JANUARY 2016

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEShows gold bullion available for purchase as a digital gold certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 19

20 JANUARY 2016

GOLD TOKENS AND ETHER WALLETFrom this area a user can send Digix Gold Tokens or send Ether

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 21

The transaction hash for a completed certificate purchase is also available with just one click

(see below Raw Transaction Data Transaction Hash)

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets Individual users can create Digix Gold and Asset tokens by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoATM Certificate) to the Minter DAE It is a way to represent gold bars as units of tokens on the Ethereum Blockchain database One Digix Gold token represents 1 gram of gold

(Q) How do I know that there are actual gold bars backing PoA certificates or Digix Gold tokens

All material documents from the Proof of Asset protocol are made available via Swarm - Ethereumrsquos distributed file sharing This would mean that all assaying certificates custodial receipts of deposits and independent auditor documents from the entire chain of custody will be uploaded for public viewing to ascertain the authenticity of all PoA certificates and Digix Gold tokens Each entity in the chain of custody will also digitally sign on our PoA Certificate We only deal with vendors custodians and auditors that have passed our due diligence and that are world renowned with a history of excellence Private audits are also available for added assurance

The Ethereum platform allows users to create applications that run on a decentralized peer-to-peer network of computers without any central control and free from human interruption or corruption Vitalik Buterin invented Ethereum in late 2013 it was formally described by Dr Gavin Wood in 2014 then developed as an open source software project under the GNU Lesser General Public License It was officially launched on July 30 2015 The project is maintained by the Ethereum core developer team (ETHDEV) under the guidance of the non-profit Ethereum Foundation which had raised 31591 Bitcoins during their 2014 crowdsale

22 JANUARY 2016

From this page users may also view the assetrsquos history of trading within the Digix system

GOLD ASSET HISTORY

PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates

are Ethereum smart contracts

that provides a legally and

cryptographically binding

determination of ownership of

physical gold or other assets currently under

the guardianship of a participating custodian on the

Digix decentralized platform It

also certifies the agreement

between the user the vendor the custodian and

the independent auditor

The PoAtrade provides a complete history of the chain of control from the vendor

the custodian and all audit reports This proof guarantees that the purchase of the gold by the user its storage by the

custodian and regular inspection by the auditor has taken place

PoA Certificates can be transferred or sent to any Ethereum account sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or

Gold tokens or redeemed from the Recast DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or Gold

Tokens

Copies of the orignal signed documents are included as a part of the certificatersquos registration in the blockchain

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 23

24 JANUARY 2016

GOLD EXPLORER RECASTER (Above)

The Digix Minter DAE recognizes all valid Digix PoAtrade Certificates and can accept them from a user in exchange for divisible Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens The rules of the Digix platform dictates that only the Digix Minter has the authority through the request of the owner of a Digix PoAtrade certificate to allow that owner to issue their own Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens in exchange for the PoAtrade Certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 25

The interface conveniently walks customers through the online purchase of a Digital Gold PoA Certificate

26 JANUARY 2016

A completed purchase of the digital gold certificate representing this bar

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 27

TOOLS AND SETTINGS

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

28 JANUARY 2016

RESTORE WALLET

In addition to its security features users can configure the Aegis Vault to assign beneficiaries set the time-based distribution of funds or assets and delegate a power of attorney to another individual or a group of people

Digix is committed to bringing Ethereum use to the mainstream and the availability of a secure wallet is essential for realizing this goal

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 29

GENERATE A REDEMPTION KEY

(Q) What is the Digix Recaster Smart Contract

Digix Recaster Smart Contract allows the

conversion of Digix Gold tokens to a PoA card The

PoA card can be sent or received on the blockchain representing an ownership

of an entire gold bar or be used for redemption of

the physical gold bar at our office For example if you have 100 DGX tokens

representing 100g of weight in gold you can exchange

for a PoA card representing a 100g gold cast bar at

Digix This PoA card can be sent and received on the

Ethereum blockchain or be used to schedule a local

pick-up of the physical gold bar at Digix redemption

center in Singapore

You can currently recast into PoA certificates of

100g (100 DGX) or 1000g (1000 DGX) gold cast bar

denominations

30 JANUARY 2016

(Q) What about the Digix audit processWe have four types of audits at Digix

1 PRIVATE AUDITS Clients are welcome to come to our certified custodial vaults in Singapore to inspect your gold bars in a highly private and secure environment

2 EXTERNAL AUDITS We have engaged Inspectorate Singapore (wwwinspectoratecom) to audit our inventory and match them off with customersrsquo holdings at DGX We will hold such inspections at least twice a year

3 CUSTODIAL AUDITS Our certified custodians will provide a physical certification of proof that your gold bars are stored safely in their vaults They will take photographs of your serialized bars per request basis and have them keyed into their inventory management systems Some of our certified custodiansrsquo reputation are also on the line to provide us with their appraisal and storage services as they have to answer to their shareholders as a publicly listed company in Singapore

4 INTERNAL AUDITS We have patented a certification process called Proof of Asset (PoA) where auditors sign on the existence of Gold in our PoA certificate The digital certificate is then uploaded onto the Ethereum Blockchain

(Q) Are there KYCAML requirementsAll users who wish to redeem PoA certificates or Digix Gold Tokens for physical gold bars will have to go through KYC requirements at the pickup The gold bars will only be available for pick up at our office location in Singapore We must ensure that DigixGlobal and participating organizations are protected from any potential liabilities resulting from government prosecution and asset seizures so we ensure that we comply fully with regulatory requirements for Know your customer (KYC) and Anti-money laundering (AML)

ADDRESS BOOK

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 31

SilentVault is a secure private online wallet for making untraceable p2p payments

Unlike other crypto currency wallets SilentVault wallets support heterogeneous asset types such as fiat dollars euros metals gold and silver and crypto coins bitcoin litecoin SilentVault provides anonymous off blockchain payments made in bitcoin and litecoin It also features an integrated p2p escrow exchange where users can trade anonymously among different asset types with other users such as exchanging bitcoins for silver

The SilentVault Spark client is a fully functional Jabber chat client that is a branded and updated version of Spark Since Spark supports a plugin architecture our wallet client is implemented as a plugin You can obtain the SilentVault Spark client with plugin from this page You can also find the source code for both the plugin and SilentVaults customizations to the Spark source base elsewhere on this site A tutorial on SVSpark is here

The SilentVault wallet webstart client is a stand alone program that you can install from within your browser Like the SilentVault Spark client it communicates with the Voucher Safe payment network using extensions to the XMPP protocol This type of communication makes economic transactions indistinguishable from ordinary encrypted instant messaging traffic and avoids any need to run within an insecure browser environment or rely on web domains All client source code is published on this site and while you can run a prefabricated client you are also invited to build your own from source

You are also invited to develop applications for our integrated marketplaces that appear within SilentVault wallets A full API is available for your use as a development tool Please contact our team for details

The SilentVault technology is based on Voucher Safe which was developed 2008 2011 Voucher Safe is also the core technology of the Digital Cash Alliance

httpssilentvaultcom

32 JANUARY 2016

ldquoI love go-o-o-o-ldrdquo-Austin Powers in Goldmember

Not surprisingly most people feel the same

According to the Wall Street Journal gold prices and safe-haven demand in Asia have been skyrocketing since mid-November (1) proving that you donrsquot have to be a sea-faring pirate or a squire in a kingrsquos castle to enjoy its natural glare beauty and above all its ability to stimulate wealth

Since the days of the California Gold Rush people have enjoyed panning for it selling it and most of

all owning it Long considered one of the planetrsquos most precious and desired metals gold has grown heavily in value over the last several years and it appears more and more are trying to get their hands on it every single day

Something else is growing as wellhellip Bitcoin Often regarded as Americarsquos most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin has jumped heavily in value over the last few months spiking from $230 to nearly $350 Unlike gold which exists in solid physical form Bitcoin exists in ones and zeros binary coding that travels through the blockchain the technology that makes Bitcoin transactions possible between users and respective merchants

BITGOLD A MODERN REVOLUTION IN FINANCEBY NICK MARINOFF

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 33

Itrsquos interesting to witness nearly equal popularity rising for two different things that ultimately serve the same purpose and share similar goals Both are designed to enhance the world of finance Both can rise in value and both have the ability to make someone rich overnighthellip So what if we could combine the two What significant differences could there be if Bitcoin and gold were fused into one entity

Well itrsquos already been done Say hello to BitGold an early startup company stationed in Toronto Canada BitGold aims to offer international services for people and businesses to send payments and hold savings with physical gold (2) The company was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb Both have a long history in the financial sector with Sebag previously serving as the Founder and Managing Principal of Braavos Capital (an international private investment organization) and the Chairman of Natural Resource Holdings an investment company involved with natural resource assets (3) Josh Crumb was previously the Senior Metals Strategist at Goldman Sachs (4)

The company alleges that gold bullion is ldquothe worldrsquos oldest asset class and the centuryrsquos best performing currencyrdquo (5) According to BitGoldrsquos website their mission is

ldquohellipTo make gold accessible and useful in digital payments and secure savingshellip Wersquore advancing the digital payments revolution by helping people securely acquire store and now spend gold with unprecedented simplicity BitGold accounts are free and can be opened in minutes We provide users with a secure vault account to purchase and hold gold the ability to make and receive instant gold payments and a prepaid card for spending gold at traditional points of sale Through our network of ATMs customers can fund their accounts with local-currencyrdquo (4)

Present investors backing BitGold include Dundee Capital Markets GMP Securities and Sandstorm Gold although the initial investor in the company was Soros Brothers Investment which is presently run by Alexander Soros the son of Hungarian business magnate George Soros (2)

2015 has been a big year for the company CNBC has stated that BitGold currently serves over 100000 active customers and the platform stores approximately 276 kilograms of bullion within its walls Thatrsquos nearly $11 million total and over $100 per active user (6) In May BitGold began trading on the TSX Venture exchange in Canada and announced the purchase of GoldMoney worth nearly $52 million in Canadian dollars (7)

In June the company made citizens of the United States very happy with the following announcement

ldquoUS residents can sign up on the BitGold platform and buy sell or redeem gold using BitGoldrsquos Aurum payment and settlement technology US residents will also have access to the BitGold mobile app and a prepaid card when these features launch over the coming weeksrdquo (7)

The platform offers a number of products and services beneficial to any gold-lover across the country As the above quote suggests BitGold offers whatrsquos known as Aurum the gold-settlement technology thatrsquos compliant with several US financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase Wells Fargo Citi Bank of America US Bank Fidelity Capital One and Charles Schwab Users with an account at any one of these nationally-recognized banks can instantly redeem gold or authorize gold deposits The transactions thereby increase in safety and automation Users also receive a bonus in that they are usually able to avoid bank wire fees through the process (7)

Using the BitGold app users may also send and receive gold as payments to and from any other user or seller without paying any transaction fees They can even send gold to non-BitGold users via their mobile phones or through a simple email message The company also issues prepaid debit cards allowing users to spend funds directly from their BitGold accounts The card is compatible with ATMs so that users may withdraw local currency (7)

Lastly the company issues special ten-gram gold cubes worth approximately $380 each at press time Users may redeem these cubes on the BitGold platform and may demand physical delivery when they see fit (7)

34 JANUARY 2016

Vice-president of communications and PR Emily Cornelius explained in an email that they have no ldquostereotypicalrdquo user of the companyrsquos services but that there are predominantly three main use cases

ldquoThe traditional gold investor will gravitate to BitGold because our gold is unprecedentedly priced within 1 of spot price and we offer free storage in a Brinks vault of their choice globallyhellip The second use case is the user who seeks a more stable currency for their national savings outside of their potentially volatile local fiat currencyhellip Gold has gained over 3000 vs the US Dollar which is arguably the worldrsquos strongest fiat money Gold may seem to go up down or sideways but in reality and when viewed over long timescales such as the avg human lifecycle ndash it always riseshellip Gold has been rising against 9 of the worldrsquos most famous and well-known currencies almost every year since 2000hellip Thirdly BitGold is a powerful payments platformhellip BitGold allows a user to send an invoice for your labor to someone else anywhere in the world which the recipient can pay using any traditional payment methodhellip This gold is vaulted anywhere even outside their jurisdictionhellip This is important as it allows users to achieve upward mobility that are otherwise hindered by localized issues that are exogenous to their personal journeyrdquo

Cornelius also explained that the company offers ldquoall the benefits and efficiencies of a service like PayPal and a MasterCard but with a universally accepted more stable store of valuerdquo

Presently regulation over BitGold appears to be fairly non-existent BitGold does not list which regulators hold jurisdiction over its staff and operations nor do they list regulatory information regarding their trade practices (7) In fact co-founder Roy Sebag has stated in the past that he believes BitGold is not a bank nor does it serve as a financial institution in any traditional sense as it does not engage in fractional-reserve banking (2)According to page 20 of the companyrsquos initial public filing BitGold is not

ldquohellipEligible to be registered with the Financial

Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canadahellip There can be no assurance that BitGoldrsquos services or Internet platform will be acceptable to foreign regulatory bodies Foreign governments may seek to restrict access to BitGoldrsquos services block BitGoldrsquos website or impose other restrictions that may affect BitGoldrsquos ability to offer service to new or existing users in those for an extended period of time or indefinitelyrdquo (8)

Despite this it was confirmed in July of 2015 that the company did offer its services under the Canadian Bailment Law (9) This occurs in situations where physical personal property is transferred from one person (the bailor) to another for safekeeping and doing so does not require the binding notion of a written contract (10)

Presently the company employs 26 people including Sebag and Crumb Other notable BitGold personnel include Chief Executive Officer Darrell MacMullin Chief Technology Officer Alessandro Premoli Lead Mobile Engineer Paul Mennega and Team Manager Karman Lee The company also employs several vice-presidents five software engineers and two compliance officers (4)

It can be said that BitGold has accomplished quite a bit in less than two years Itrsquos likely such a volatile company has some big plans waiting in the wings for 2016 but Emily Cornelius isnrsquot dropping any hints as to what they could be

ldquoWe have a number of new features services and products cominghellip Yoursquoll have to wait and seerdquo

BitGold is steadily making its mark It has the backing the funds the technology and above all the drive Put all these items together (and add a touch of flair and public desire) and itrsquos clear that BitGold has what it takes to make the world of finance its own

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 14: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

14 JANUARY 2016

YOUR PRIVACY MATTERSEacutelan Turbo VPN This VPN service is bundled with VoIP and private audiovideo calling via SIP plus unlimited bandwidth for surfing and streaming

Our Eacutelan Turbo VPN service is a standard single-hop VPN but with selectable exit proxies in Panama the USA the UK France and onto the Tor network As a subscriber yoursquoll also get an SIP extension that lets you place private audio and video calls to other users Unlike with Skype these calls can be encrypted end-to-end to conceal their content in transit And because yoursquore on our VPN the call metadata is also protected We also supply your own private Mumble server as an inexpensive add-on There are no bandwidth limitations with this package Surf and talk all you want

Eacutelan Max Security VPN This VPN service is bundled with email addresses and aliases 1 GB file storage plus 25 GB of monthly bandwidth

Our Eacutelan Max Security VPN service is a premiere multi-hop VPN which lives up to its name Multi-hop means that traffic flows between multiple points along its route from the entry gateway to the exit nodes something like changing planes a couple of times during an extended trip Inside the network internal routes are varied traffic is mixed alongside that of other users and random delays get inserted to defeat traffic analysis This technique known as ldquoserver cascadesrdquo same features and benefits as provides many of the Tor (Given that the Deep State agencies in various countries are now running most of the Tor exit nodes it might be even better) As a subscriber yoursquoll also get private email addresses and email aliases plus 1 GB of very secure file storage Because of its multi-hop architecture this VPN is less suitable for streaming applications and bandwidth usage is limited to 25 GB per month However you can also buy top-up packs to add more bandwidth

Elegantly Convenient No special hardware required

bull Software-only solutionbull Both individual and multi-user packages are availablebull Simple to install and use

Support for Windows Linux Mac Android and iOS httpelanvpnnet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 15

Wersquore long-time industry professionals with over a combined forty years in the IT industry Wersquore also committed advocates of human liberty and personal privacy With all the global spy networks hacks and data mining in the world today internet privacy is under attack as never beforeWe agree with E C Riegel who wrote

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and self-asserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

16 JANUARY 2016

What does Digix doWe are a Smart Asset company that allows anyone to securely send and receive ownerships of assets for eventual redemption on the blockchain The first asset listed is Gold and other assets such as diamonds will be available in the near future

What are Proof of Asset (PoA) CertificatesProof of Asset (PoA) Certificates prove the existence of gold through the entire chain of custody from the supplier to the custodial vault They are automatically created when a user purchases and stores gold at our participating custodial vaults It consists of 3 digital signatures from 3 independent entities vendor custodian and auditor Through this process a PoA card is issued representing your asset ownership on the blockchain This PoA card can then be sent and received by anyone on the Ethereum Blockchain for eventual redemption PoA certificates can also be sent to a Minter DAE to create DGX Gold tokens for fungibility

What are Digix Gold TokensDigix Gold tokens can only be created when a user sends in their PoA Certificates in exchange for them on a 11 weight basis on the Digix Minter DAE Each Digix Gold token represents 1g of gold For example if a PoA Certificate represents the ownership of a 100g gold bar it can be sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for 100 DGX tokens which will be deposited in your ethereum wallet

How do I know if these tokens or PoA certificates are safe from fraud or duplicationAll tokens and PoA certificates are created on the Ethereum Blockchain a public ledger where information stored can never be manipulated or counterfeited Our smart asset service can only exist because of blockchain technology

Where are the physical gold bars storedPhysical gold is kept with a participating custodian Each PoA Certificate will specify the name and location of the custodian that holds the gold The first participating custodian on the Digix Gold platform is Malca-Amit which maintains a high security storage facility at the Singapore Freeport

Why SingaporeDigixGlobal is incorporated in low crime and politically stable Singapore Investment Precious Metals are exempted from GST locally so you are purchasing gold at the lowest premiums available in the world

bull There are also no permits required to import or export precious metalsbull Singapore also has no jurisdictional relations with USA or Europebull We will only release your personal information by order of the Court of Law in Singapore

Frequently AskedQuestions

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 17

A Sneak Peek at the NewDigixGlobal User Interface

It will be available to the public in January 2016 for multiple operating systems and mobile platforms This software will manage client transactions for PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates Digix Asset Tokens and Ether tokens

DigixGlobal can create a digital asset certificate for any storable physical property Future versions of this software will include additional digital assets such as diamonds

When the interface opens users are presented with the main dashboard menu as shown below Access to all primary services and tools is available from this opening screen

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEVendor Information - Custodian Information - Auditor Information

To ensure quality and authenticity participating gold vendors only sell LBMA approved gold bars Gold purchased from an LBMA certified refinery is globally known for its quality These bullion sources guarantee the authenticity and purity of every single gold bar used on the Digix network Buying gold from the marketplace is the first step in the process of generating a PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificate

18 JANUARY 2016

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEShows gold bullion available for purchase as a digital gold certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 19

20 JANUARY 2016

GOLD TOKENS AND ETHER WALLETFrom this area a user can send Digix Gold Tokens or send Ether

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 21

The transaction hash for a completed certificate purchase is also available with just one click

(see below Raw Transaction Data Transaction Hash)

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets Individual users can create Digix Gold and Asset tokens by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoATM Certificate) to the Minter DAE It is a way to represent gold bars as units of tokens on the Ethereum Blockchain database One Digix Gold token represents 1 gram of gold

(Q) How do I know that there are actual gold bars backing PoA certificates or Digix Gold tokens

All material documents from the Proof of Asset protocol are made available via Swarm - Ethereumrsquos distributed file sharing This would mean that all assaying certificates custodial receipts of deposits and independent auditor documents from the entire chain of custody will be uploaded for public viewing to ascertain the authenticity of all PoA certificates and Digix Gold tokens Each entity in the chain of custody will also digitally sign on our PoA Certificate We only deal with vendors custodians and auditors that have passed our due diligence and that are world renowned with a history of excellence Private audits are also available for added assurance

The Ethereum platform allows users to create applications that run on a decentralized peer-to-peer network of computers without any central control and free from human interruption or corruption Vitalik Buterin invented Ethereum in late 2013 it was formally described by Dr Gavin Wood in 2014 then developed as an open source software project under the GNU Lesser General Public License It was officially launched on July 30 2015 The project is maintained by the Ethereum core developer team (ETHDEV) under the guidance of the non-profit Ethereum Foundation which had raised 31591 Bitcoins during their 2014 crowdsale

22 JANUARY 2016

From this page users may also view the assetrsquos history of trading within the Digix system

GOLD ASSET HISTORY

PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates

are Ethereum smart contracts

that provides a legally and

cryptographically binding

determination of ownership of

physical gold or other assets currently under

the guardianship of a participating custodian on the

Digix decentralized platform It

also certifies the agreement

between the user the vendor the custodian and

the independent auditor

The PoAtrade provides a complete history of the chain of control from the vendor

the custodian and all audit reports This proof guarantees that the purchase of the gold by the user its storage by the

custodian and regular inspection by the auditor has taken place

PoA Certificates can be transferred or sent to any Ethereum account sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or

Gold tokens or redeemed from the Recast DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or Gold

Tokens

Copies of the orignal signed documents are included as a part of the certificatersquos registration in the blockchain

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 23

24 JANUARY 2016

GOLD EXPLORER RECASTER (Above)

The Digix Minter DAE recognizes all valid Digix PoAtrade Certificates and can accept them from a user in exchange for divisible Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens The rules of the Digix platform dictates that only the Digix Minter has the authority through the request of the owner of a Digix PoAtrade certificate to allow that owner to issue their own Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens in exchange for the PoAtrade Certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 25

The interface conveniently walks customers through the online purchase of a Digital Gold PoA Certificate

26 JANUARY 2016

A completed purchase of the digital gold certificate representing this bar

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 27

TOOLS AND SETTINGS

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

28 JANUARY 2016

RESTORE WALLET

In addition to its security features users can configure the Aegis Vault to assign beneficiaries set the time-based distribution of funds or assets and delegate a power of attorney to another individual or a group of people

Digix is committed to bringing Ethereum use to the mainstream and the availability of a secure wallet is essential for realizing this goal

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 29

GENERATE A REDEMPTION KEY

(Q) What is the Digix Recaster Smart Contract

Digix Recaster Smart Contract allows the

conversion of Digix Gold tokens to a PoA card The

PoA card can be sent or received on the blockchain representing an ownership

of an entire gold bar or be used for redemption of

the physical gold bar at our office For example if you have 100 DGX tokens

representing 100g of weight in gold you can exchange

for a PoA card representing a 100g gold cast bar at

Digix This PoA card can be sent and received on the

Ethereum blockchain or be used to schedule a local

pick-up of the physical gold bar at Digix redemption

center in Singapore

You can currently recast into PoA certificates of

100g (100 DGX) or 1000g (1000 DGX) gold cast bar

denominations

30 JANUARY 2016

(Q) What about the Digix audit processWe have four types of audits at Digix

1 PRIVATE AUDITS Clients are welcome to come to our certified custodial vaults in Singapore to inspect your gold bars in a highly private and secure environment

2 EXTERNAL AUDITS We have engaged Inspectorate Singapore (wwwinspectoratecom) to audit our inventory and match them off with customersrsquo holdings at DGX We will hold such inspections at least twice a year

3 CUSTODIAL AUDITS Our certified custodians will provide a physical certification of proof that your gold bars are stored safely in their vaults They will take photographs of your serialized bars per request basis and have them keyed into their inventory management systems Some of our certified custodiansrsquo reputation are also on the line to provide us with their appraisal and storage services as they have to answer to their shareholders as a publicly listed company in Singapore

4 INTERNAL AUDITS We have patented a certification process called Proof of Asset (PoA) where auditors sign on the existence of Gold in our PoA certificate The digital certificate is then uploaded onto the Ethereum Blockchain

(Q) Are there KYCAML requirementsAll users who wish to redeem PoA certificates or Digix Gold Tokens for physical gold bars will have to go through KYC requirements at the pickup The gold bars will only be available for pick up at our office location in Singapore We must ensure that DigixGlobal and participating organizations are protected from any potential liabilities resulting from government prosecution and asset seizures so we ensure that we comply fully with regulatory requirements for Know your customer (KYC) and Anti-money laundering (AML)

ADDRESS BOOK

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 31

SilentVault is a secure private online wallet for making untraceable p2p payments

Unlike other crypto currency wallets SilentVault wallets support heterogeneous asset types such as fiat dollars euros metals gold and silver and crypto coins bitcoin litecoin SilentVault provides anonymous off blockchain payments made in bitcoin and litecoin It also features an integrated p2p escrow exchange where users can trade anonymously among different asset types with other users such as exchanging bitcoins for silver

The SilentVault Spark client is a fully functional Jabber chat client that is a branded and updated version of Spark Since Spark supports a plugin architecture our wallet client is implemented as a plugin You can obtain the SilentVault Spark client with plugin from this page You can also find the source code for both the plugin and SilentVaults customizations to the Spark source base elsewhere on this site A tutorial on SVSpark is here

The SilentVault wallet webstart client is a stand alone program that you can install from within your browser Like the SilentVault Spark client it communicates with the Voucher Safe payment network using extensions to the XMPP protocol This type of communication makes economic transactions indistinguishable from ordinary encrypted instant messaging traffic and avoids any need to run within an insecure browser environment or rely on web domains All client source code is published on this site and while you can run a prefabricated client you are also invited to build your own from source

You are also invited to develop applications for our integrated marketplaces that appear within SilentVault wallets A full API is available for your use as a development tool Please contact our team for details

The SilentVault technology is based on Voucher Safe which was developed 2008 2011 Voucher Safe is also the core technology of the Digital Cash Alliance

httpssilentvaultcom

32 JANUARY 2016

ldquoI love go-o-o-o-ldrdquo-Austin Powers in Goldmember

Not surprisingly most people feel the same

According to the Wall Street Journal gold prices and safe-haven demand in Asia have been skyrocketing since mid-November (1) proving that you donrsquot have to be a sea-faring pirate or a squire in a kingrsquos castle to enjoy its natural glare beauty and above all its ability to stimulate wealth

Since the days of the California Gold Rush people have enjoyed panning for it selling it and most of

all owning it Long considered one of the planetrsquos most precious and desired metals gold has grown heavily in value over the last several years and it appears more and more are trying to get their hands on it every single day

Something else is growing as wellhellip Bitcoin Often regarded as Americarsquos most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin has jumped heavily in value over the last few months spiking from $230 to nearly $350 Unlike gold which exists in solid physical form Bitcoin exists in ones and zeros binary coding that travels through the blockchain the technology that makes Bitcoin transactions possible between users and respective merchants

BITGOLD A MODERN REVOLUTION IN FINANCEBY NICK MARINOFF

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 33

Itrsquos interesting to witness nearly equal popularity rising for two different things that ultimately serve the same purpose and share similar goals Both are designed to enhance the world of finance Both can rise in value and both have the ability to make someone rich overnighthellip So what if we could combine the two What significant differences could there be if Bitcoin and gold were fused into one entity

Well itrsquos already been done Say hello to BitGold an early startup company stationed in Toronto Canada BitGold aims to offer international services for people and businesses to send payments and hold savings with physical gold (2) The company was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb Both have a long history in the financial sector with Sebag previously serving as the Founder and Managing Principal of Braavos Capital (an international private investment organization) and the Chairman of Natural Resource Holdings an investment company involved with natural resource assets (3) Josh Crumb was previously the Senior Metals Strategist at Goldman Sachs (4)

The company alleges that gold bullion is ldquothe worldrsquos oldest asset class and the centuryrsquos best performing currencyrdquo (5) According to BitGoldrsquos website their mission is

ldquohellipTo make gold accessible and useful in digital payments and secure savingshellip Wersquore advancing the digital payments revolution by helping people securely acquire store and now spend gold with unprecedented simplicity BitGold accounts are free and can be opened in minutes We provide users with a secure vault account to purchase and hold gold the ability to make and receive instant gold payments and a prepaid card for spending gold at traditional points of sale Through our network of ATMs customers can fund their accounts with local-currencyrdquo (4)

Present investors backing BitGold include Dundee Capital Markets GMP Securities and Sandstorm Gold although the initial investor in the company was Soros Brothers Investment which is presently run by Alexander Soros the son of Hungarian business magnate George Soros (2)

2015 has been a big year for the company CNBC has stated that BitGold currently serves over 100000 active customers and the platform stores approximately 276 kilograms of bullion within its walls Thatrsquos nearly $11 million total and over $100 per active user (6) In May BitGold began trading on the TSX Venture exchange in Canada and announced the purchase of GoldMoney worth nearly $52 million in Canadian dollars (7)

In June the company made citizens of the United States very happy with the following announcement

ldquoUS residents can sign up on the BitGold platform and buy sell or redeem gold using BitGoldrsquos Aurum payment and settlement technology US residents will also have access to the BitGold mobile app and a prepaid card when these features launch over the coming weeksrdquo (7)

The platform offers a number of products and services beneficial to any gold-lover across the country As the above quote suggests BitGold offers whatrsquos known as Aurum the gold-settlement technology thatrsquos compliant with several US financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase Wells Fargo Citi Bank of America US Bank Fidelity Capital One and Charles Schwab Users with an account at any one of these nationally-recognized banks can instantly redeem gold or authorize gold deposits The transactions thereby increase in safety and automation Users also receive a bonus in that they are usually able to avoid bank wire fees through the process (7)

Using the BitGold app users may also send and receive gold as payments to and from any other user or seller without paying any transaction fees They can even send gold to non-BitGold users via their mobile phones or through a simple email message The company also issues prepaid debit cards allowing users to spend funds directly from their BitGold accounts The card is compatible with ATMs so that users may withdraw local currency (7)

Lastly the company issues special ten-gram gold cubes worth approximately $380 each at press time Users may redeem these cubes on the BitGold platform and may demand physical delivery when they see fit (7)

34 JANUARY 2016

Vice-president of communications and PR Emily Cornelius explained in an email that they have no ldquostereotypicalrdquo user of the companyrsquos services but that there are predominantly three main use cases

ldquoThe traditional gold investor will gravitate to BitGold because our gold is unprecedentedly priced within 1 of spot price and we offer free storage in a Brinks vault of their choice globallyhellip The second use case is the user who seeks a more stable currency for their national savings outside of their potentially volatile local fiat currencyhellip Gold has gained over 3000 vs the US Dollar which is arguably the worldrsquos strongest fiat money Gold may seem to go up down or sideways but in reality and when viewed over long timescales such as the avg human lifecycle ndash it always riseshellip Gold has been rising against 9 of the worldrsquos most famous and well-known currencies almost every year since 2000hellip Thirdly BitGold is a powerful payments platformhellip BitGold allows a user to send an invoice for your labor to someone else anywhere in the world which the recipient can pay using any traditional payment methodhellip This gold is vaulted anywhere even outside their jurisdictionhellip This is important as it allows users to achieve upward mobility that are otherwise hindered by localized issues that are exogenous to their personal journeyrdquo

Cornelius also explained that the company offers ldquoall the benefits and efficiencies of a service like PayPal and a MasterCard but with a universally accepted more stable store of valuerdquo

Presently regulation over BitGold appears to be fairly non-existent BitGold does not list which regulators hold jurisdiction over its staff and operations nor do they list regulatory information regarding their trade practices (7) In fact co-founder Roy Sebag has stated in the past that he believes BitGold is not a bank nor does it serve as a financial institution in any traditional sense as it does not engage in fractional-reserve banking (2)According to page 20 of the companyrsquos initial public filing BitGold is not

ldquohellipEligible to be registered with the Financial

Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canadahellip There can be no assurance that BitGoldrsquos services or Internet platform will be acceptable to foreign regulatory bodies Foreign governments may seek to restrict access to BitGoldrsquos services block BitGoldrsquos website or impose other restrictions that may affect BitGoldrsquos ability to offer service to new or existing users in those for an extended period of time or indefinitelyrdquo (8)

Despite this it was confirmed in July of 2015 that the company did offer its services under the Canadian Bailment Law (9) This occurs in situations where physical personal property is transferred from one person (the bailor) to another for safekeeping and doing so does not require the binding notion of a written contract (10)

Presently the company employs 26 people including Sebag and Crumb Other notable BitGold personnel include Chief Executive Officer Darrell MacMullin Chief Technology Officer Alessandro Premoli Lead Mobile Engineer Paul Mennega and Team Manager Karman Lee The company also employs several vice-presidents five software engineers and two compliance officers (4)

It can be said that BitGold has accomplished quite a bit in less than two years Itrsquos likely such a volatile company has some big plans waiting in the wings for 2016 but Emily Cornelius isnrsquot dropping any hints as to what they could be

ldquoWe have a number of new features services and products cominghellip Yoursquoll have to wait and seerdquo

BitGold is steadily making its mark It has the backing the funds the technology and above all the drive Put all these items together (and add a touch of flair and public desire) and itrsquos clear that BitGold has what it takes to make the world of finance its own

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 15: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 15

Wersquore long-time industry professionals with over a combined forty years in the IT industry Wersquore also committed advocates of human liberty and personal privacy With all the global spy networks hacks and data mining in the world today internet privacy is under attack as never beforeWe agree with E C Riegel who wrote

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and self-asserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

16 JANUARY 2016

What does Digix doWe are a Smart Asset company that allows anyone to securely send and receive ownerships of assets for eventual redemption on the blockchain The first asset listed is Gold and other assets such as diamonds will be available in the near future

What are Proof of Asset (PoA) CertificatesProof of Asset (PoA) Certificates prove the existence of gold through the entire chain of custody from the supplier to the custodial vault They are automatically created when a user purchases and stores gold at our participating custodial vaults It consists of 3 digital signatures from 3 independent entities vendor custodian and auditor Through this process a PoA card is issued representing your asset ownership on the blockchain This PoA card can then be sent and received by anyone on the Ethereum Blockchain for eventual redemption PoA certificates can also be sent to a Minter DAE to create DGX Gold tokens for fungibility

What are Digix Gold TokensDigix Gold tokens can only be created when a user sends in their PoA Certificates in exchange for them on a 11 weight basis on the Digix Minter DAE Each Digix Gold token represents 1g of gold For example if a PoA Certificate represents the ownership of a 100g gold bar it can be sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for 100 DGX tokens which will be deposited in your ethereum wallet

How do I know if these tokens or PoA certificates are safe from fraud or duplicationAll tokens and PoA certificates are created on the Ethereum Blockchain a public ledger where information stored can never be manipulated or counterfeited Our smart asset service can only exist because of blockchain technology

Where are the physical gold bars storedPhysical gold is kept with a participating custodian Each PoA Certificate will specify the name and location of the custodian that holds the gold The first participating custodian on the Digix Gold platform is Malca-Amit which maintains a high security storage facility at the Singapore Freeport

Why SingaporeDigixGlobal is incorporated in low crime and politically stable Singapore Investment Precious Metals are exempted from GST locally so you are purchasing gold at the lowest premiums available in the world

bull There are also no permits required to import or export precious metalsbull Singapore also has no jurisdictional relations with USA or Europebull We will only release your personal information by order of the Court of Law in Singapore

Frequently AskedQuestions

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 17

A Sneak Peek at the NewDigixGlobal User Interface

It will be available to the public in January 2016 for multiple operating systems and mobile platforms This software will manage client transactions for PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates Digix Asset Tokens and Ether tokens

DigixGlobal can create a digital asset certificate for any storable physical property Future versions of this software will include additional digital assets such as diamonds

When the interface opens users are presented with the main dashboard menu as shown below Access to all primary services and tools is available from this opening screen

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEVendor Information - Custodian Information - Auditor Information

To ensure quality and authenticity participating gold vendors only sell LBMA approved gold bars Gold purchased from an LBMA certified refinery is globally known for its quality These bullion sources guarantee the authenticity and purity of every single gold bar used on the Digix network Buying gold from the marketplace is the first step in the process of generating a PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificate

18 JANUARY 2016

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEShows gold bullion available for purchase as a digital gold certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 19

20 JANUARY 2016

GOLD TOKENS AND ETHER WALLETFrom this area a user can send Digix Gold Tokens or send Ether

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 21

The transaction hash for a completed certificate purchase is also available with just one click

(see below Raw Transaction Data Transaction Hash)

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets Individual users can create Digix Gold and Asset tokens by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoATM Certificate) to the Minter DAE It is a way to represent gold bars as units of tokens on the Ethereum Blockchain database One Digix Gold token represents 1 gram of gold

(Q) How do I know that there are actual gold bars backing PoA certificates or Digix Gold tokens

All material documents from the Proof of Asset protocol are made available via Swarm - Ethereumrsquos distributed file sharing This would mean that all assaying certificates custodial receipts of deposits and independent auditor documents from the entire chain of custody will be uploaded for public viewing to ascertain the authenticity of all PoA certificates and Digix Gold tokens Each entity in the chain of custody will also digitally sign on our PoA Certificate We only deal with vendors custodians and auditors that have passed our due diligence and that are world renowned with a history of excellence Private audits are also available for added assurance

The Ethereum platform allows users to create applications that run on a decentralized peer-to-peer network of computers without any central control and free from human interruption or corruption Vitalik Buterin invented Ethereum in late 2013 it was formally described by Dr Gavin Wood in 2014 then developed as an open source software project under the GNU Lesser General Public License It was officially launched on July 30 2015 The project is maintained by the Ethereum core developer team (ETHDEV) under the guidance of the non-profit Ethereum Foundation which had raised 31591 Bitcoins during their 2014 crowdsale

22 JANUARY 2016

From this page users may also view the assetrsquos history of trading within the Digix system

GOLD ASSET HISTORY

PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates

are Ethereum smart contracts

that provides a legally and

cryptographically binding

determination of ownership of

physical gold or other assets currently under

the guardianship of a participating custodian on the

Digix decentralized platform It

also certifies the agreement

between the user the vendor the custodian and

the independent auditor

The PoAtrade provides a complete history of the chain of control from the vendor

the custodian and all audit reports This proof guarantees that the purchase of the gold by the user its storage by the

custodian and regular inspection by the auditor has taken place

PoA Certificates can be transferred or sent to any Ethereum account sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or

Gold tokens or redeemed from the Recast DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or Gold

Tokens

Copies of the orignal signed documents are included as a part of the certificatersquos registration in the blockchain

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 23

24 JANUARY 2016

GOLD EXPLORER RECASTER (Above)

The Digix Minter DAE recognizes all valid Digix PoAtrade Certificates and can accept them from a user in exchange for divisible Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens The rules of the Digix platform dictates that only the Digix Minter has the authority through the request of the owner of a Digix PoAtrade certificate to allow that owner to issue their own Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens in exchange for the PoAtrade Certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 25

The interface conveniently walks customers through the online purchase of a Digital Gold PoA Certificate

26 JANUARY 2016

A completed purchase of the digital gold certificate representing this bar

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 27

TOOLS AND SETTINGS

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

28 JANUARY 2016

RESTORE WALLET

In addition to its security features users can configure the Aegis Vault to assign beneficiaries set the time-based distribution of funds or assets and delegate a power of attorney to another individual or a group of people

Digix is committed to bringing Ethereum use to the mainstream and the availability of a secure wallet is essential for realizing this goal

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 29

GENERATE A REDEMPTION KEY

(Q) What is the Digix Recaster Smart Contract

Digix Recaster Smart Contract allows the

conversion of Digix Gold tokens to a PoA card The

PoA card can be sent or received on the blockchain representing an ownership

of an entire gold bar or be used for redemption of

the physical gold bar at our office For example if you have 100 DGX tokens

representing 100g of weight in gold you can exchange

for a PoA card representing a 100g gold cast bar at

Digix This PoA card can be sent and received on the

Ethereum blockchain or be used to schedule a local

pick-up of the physical gold bar at Digix redemption

center in Singapore

You can currently recast into PoA certificates of

100g (100 DGX) or 1000g (1000 DGX) gold cast bar

denominations

30 JANUARY 2016

(Q) What about the Digix audit processWe have four types of audits at Digix

1 PRIVATE AUDITS Clients are welcome to come to our certified custodial vaults in Singapore to inspect your gold bars in a highly private and secure environment

2 EXTERNAL AUDITS We have engaged Inspectorate Singapore (wwwinspectoratecom) to audit our inventory and match them off with customersrsquo holdings at DGX We will hold such inspections at least twice a year

3 CUSTODIAL AUDITS Our certified custodians will provide a physical certification of proof that your gold bars are stored safely in their vaults They will take photographs of your serialized bars per request basis and have them keyed into their inventory management systems Some of our certified custodiansrsquo reputation are also on the line to provide us with their appraisal and storage services as they have to answer to their shareholders as a publicly listed company in Singapore

4 INTERNAL AUDITS We have patented a certification process called Proof of Asset (PoA) where auditors sign on the existence of Gold in our PoA certificate The digital certificate is then uploaded onto the Ethereum Blockchain

(Q) Are there KYCAML requirementsAll users who wish to redeem PoA certificates or Digix Gold Tokens for physical gold bars will have to go through KYC requirements at the pickup The gold bars will only be available for pick up at our office location in Singapore We must ensure that DigixGlobal and participating organizations are protected from any potential liabilities resulting from government prosecution and asset seizures so we ensure that we comply fully with regulatory requirements for Know your customer (KYC) and Anti-money laundering (AML)

ADDRESS BOOK

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 31

SilentVault is a secure private online wallet for making untraceable p2p payments

Unlike other crypto currency wallets SilentVault wallets support heterogeneous asset types such as fiat dollars euros metals gold and silver and crypto coins bitcoin litecoin SilentVault provides anonymous off blockchain payments made in bitcoin and litecoin It also features an integrated p2p escrow exchange where users can trade anonymously among different asset types with other users such as exchanging bitcoins for silver

The SilentVault Spark client is a fully functional Jabber chat client that is a branded and updated version of Spark Since Spark supports a plugin architecture our wallet client is implemented as a plugin You can obtain the SilentVault Spark client with plugin from this page You can also find the source code for both the plugin and SilentVaults customizations to the Spark source base elsewhere on this site A tutorial on SVSpark is here

The SilentVault wallet webstart client is a stand alone program that you can install from within your browser Like the SilentVault Spark client it communicates with the Voucher Safe payment network using extensions to the XMPP protocol This type of communication makes economic transactions indistinguishable from ordinary encrypted instant messaging traffic and avoids any need to run within an insecure browser environment or rely on web domains All client source code is published on this site and while you can run a prefabricated client you are also invited to build your own from source

You are also invited to develop applications for our integrated marketplaces that appear within SilentVault wallets A full API is available for your use as a development tool Please contact our team for details

The SilentVault technology is based on Voucher Safe which was developed 2008 2011 Voucher Safe is also the core technology of the Digital Cash Alliance

httpssilentvaultcom

32 JANUARY 2016

ldquoI love go-o-o-o-ldrdquo-Austin Powers in Goldmember

Not surprisingly most people feel the same

According to the Wall Street Journal gold prices and safe-haven demand in Asia have been skyrocketing since mid-November (1) proving that you donrsquot have to be a sea-faring pirate or a squire in a kingrsquos castle to enjoy its natural glare beauty and above all its ability to stimulate wealth

Since the days of the California Gold Rush people have enjoyed panning for it selling it and most of

all owning it Long considered one of the planetrsquos most precious and desired metals gold has grown heavily in value over the last several years and it appears more and more are trying to get their hands on it every single day

Something else is growing as wellhellip Bitcoin Often regarded as Americarsquos most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin has jumped heavily in value over the last few months spiking from $230 to nearly $350 Unlike gold which exists in solid physical form Bitcoin exists in ones and zeros binary coding that travels through the blockchain the technology that makes Bitcoin transactions possible between users and respective merchants

BITGOLD A MODERN REVOLUTION IN FINANCEBY NICK MARINOFF

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 33

Itrsquos interesting to witness nearly equal popularity rising for two different things that ultimately serve the same purpose and share similar goals Both are designed to enhance the world of finance Both can rise in value and both have the ability to make someone rich overnighthellip So what if we could combine the two What significant differences could there be if Bitcoin and gold were fused into one entity

Well itrsquos already been done Say hello to BitGold an early startup company stationed in Toronto Canada BitGold aims to offer international services for people and businesses to send payments and hold savings with physical gold (2) The company was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb Both have a long history in the financial sector with Sebag previously serving as the Founder and Managing Principal of Braavos Capital (an international private investment organization) and the Chairman of Natural Resource Holdings an investment company involved with natural resource assets (3) Josh Crumb was previously the Senior Metals Strategist at Goldman Sachs (4)

The company alleges that gold bullion is ldquothe worldrsquos oldest asset class and the centuryrsquos best performing currencyrdquo (5) According to BitGoldrsquos website their mission is

ldquohellipTo make gold accessible and useful in digital payments and secure savingshellip Wersquore advancing the digital payments revolution by helping people securely acquire store and now spend gold with unprecedented simplicity BitGold accounts are free and can be opened in minutes We provide users with a secure vault account to purchase and hold gold the ability to make and receive instant gold payments and a prepaid card for spending gold at traditional points of sale Through our network of ATMs customers can fund their accounts with local-currencyrdquo (4)

Present investors backing BitGold include Dundee Capital Markets GMP Securities and Sandstorm Gold although the initial investor in the company was Soros Brothers Investment which is presently run by Alexander Soros the son of Hungarian business magnate George Soros (2)

2015 has been a big year for the company CNBC has stated that BitGold currently serves over 100000 active customers and the platform stores approximately 276 kilograms of bullion within its walls Thatrsquos nearly $11 million total and over $100 per active user (6) In May BitGold began trading on the TSX Venture exchange in Canada and announced the purchase of GoldMoney worth nearly $52 million in Canadian dollars (7)

In June the company made citizens of the United States very happy with the following announcement

ldquoUS residents can sign up on the BitGold platform and buy sell or redeem gold using BitGoldrsquos Aurum payment and settlement technology US residents will also have access to the BitGold mobile app and a prepaid card when these features launch over the coming weeksrdquo (7)

The platform offers a number of products and services beneficial to any gold-lover across the country As the above quote suggests BitGold offers whatrsquos known as Aurum the gold-settlement technology thatrsquos compliant with several US financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase Wells Fargo Citi Bank of America US Bank Fidelity Capital One and Charles Schwab Users with an account at any one of these nationally-recognized banks can instantly redeem gold or authorize gold deposits The transactions thereby increase in safety and automation Users also receive a bonus in that they are usually able to avoid bank wire fees through the process (7)

Using the BitGold app users may also send and receive gold as payments to and from any other user or seller without paying any transaction fees They can even send gold to non-BitGold users via their mobile phones or through a simple email message The company also issues prepaid debit cards allowing users to spend funds directly from their BitGold accounts The card is compatible with ATMs so that users may withdraw local currency (7)

Lastly the company issues special ten-gram gold cubes worth approximately $380 each at press time Users may redeem these cubes on the BitGold platform and may demand physical delivery when they see fit (7)

34 JANUARY 2016

Vice-president of communications and PR Emily Cornelius explained in an email that they have no ldquostereotypicalrdquo user of the companyrsquos services but that there are predominantly three main use cases

ldquoThe traditional gold investor will gravitate to BitGold because our gold is unprecedentedly priced within 1 of spot price and we offer free storage in a Brinks vault of their choice globallyhellip The second use case is the user who seeks a more stable currency for their national savings outside of their potentially volatile local fiat currencyhellip Gold has gained over 3000 vs the US Dollar which is arguably the worldrsquos strongest fiat money Gold may seem to go up down or sideways but in reality and when viewed over long timescales such as the avg human lifecycle ndash it always riseshellip Gold has been rising against 9 of the worldrsquos most famous and well-known currencies almost every year since 2000hellip Thirdly BitGold is a powerful payments platformhellip BitGold allows a user to send an invoice for your labor to someone else anywhere in the world which the recipient can pay using any traditional payment methodhellip This gold is vaulted anywhere even outside their jurisdictionhellip This is important as it allows users to achieve upward mobility that are otherwise hindered by localized issues that are exogenous to their personal journeyrdquo

Cornelius also explained that the company offers ldquoall the benefits and efficiencies of a service like PayPal and a MasterCard but with a universally accepted more stable store of valuerdquo

Presently regulation over BitGold appears to be fairly non-existent BitGold does not list which regulators hold jurisdiction over its staff and operations nor do they list regulatory information regarding their trade practices (7) In fact co-founder Roy Sebag has stated in the past that he believes BitGold is not a bank nor does it serve as a financial institution in any traditional sense as it does not engage in fractional-reserve banking (2)According to page 20 of the companyrsquos initial public filing BitGold is not

ldquohellipEligible to be registered with the Financial

Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canadahellip There can be no assurance that BitGoldrsquos services or Internet platform will be acceptable to foreign regulatory bodies Foreign governments may seek to restrict access to BitGoldrsquos services block BitGoldrsquos website or impose other restrictions that may affect BitGoldrsquos ability to offer service to new or existing users in those for an extended period of time or indefinitelyrdquo (8)

Despite this it was confirmed in July of 2015 that the company did offer its services under the Canadian Bailment Law (9) This occurs in situations where physical personal property is transferred from one person (the bailor) to another for safekeeping and doing so does not require the binding notion of a written contract (10)

Presently the company employs 26 people including Sebag and Crumb Other notable BitGold personnel include Chief Executive Officer Darrell MacMullin Chief Technology Officer Alessandro Premoli Lead Mobile Engineer Paul Mennega and Team Manager Karman Lee The company also employs several vice-presidents five software engineers and two compliance officers (4)

It can be said that BitGold has accomplished quite a bit in less than two years Itrsquos likely such a volatile company has some big plans waiting in the wings for 2016 but Emily Cornelius isnrsquot dropping any hints as to what they could be

ldquoWe have a number of new features services and products cominghellip Yoursquoll have to wait and seerdquo

BitGold is steadily making its mark It has the backing the funds the technology and above all the drive Put all these items together (and add a touch of flair and public desire) and itrsquos clear that BitGold has what it takes to make the world of finance its own

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 16: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

16 JANUARY 2016

What does Digix doWe are a Smart Asset company that allows anyone to securely send and receive ownerships of assets for eventual redemption on the blockchain The first asset listed is Gold and other assets such as diamonds will be available in the near future

What are Proof of Asset (PoA) CertificatesProof of Asset (PoA) Certificates prove the existence of gold through the entire chain of custody from the supplier to the custodial vault They are automatically created when a user purchases and stores gold at our participating custodial vaults It consists of 3 digital signatures from 3 independent entities vendor custodian and auditor Through this process a PoA card is issued representing your asset ownership on the blockchain This PoA card can then be sent and received by anyone on the Ethereum Blockchain for eventual redemption PoA certificates can also be sent to a Minter DAE to create DGX Gold tokens for fungibility

What are Digix Gold TokensDigix Gold tokens can only be created when a user sends in their PoA Certificates in exchange for them on a 11 weight basis on the Digix Minter DAE Each Digix Gold token represents 1g of gold For example if a PoA Certificate represents the ownership of a 100g gold bar it can be sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for 100 DGX tokens which will be deposited in your ethereum wallet

How do I know if these tokens or PoA certificates are safe from fraud or duplicationAll tokens and PoA certificates are created on the Ethereum Blockchain a public ledger where information stored can never be manipulated or counterfeited Our smart asset service can only exist because of blockchain technology

Where are the physical gold bars storedPhysical gold is kept with a participating custodian Each PoA Certificate will specify the name and location of the custodian that holds the gold The first participating custodian on the Digix Gold platform is Malca-Amit which maintains a high security storage facility at the Singapore Freeport

Why SingaporeDigixGlobal is incorporated in low crime and politically stable Singapore Investment Precious Metals are exempted from GST locally so you are purchasing gold at the lowest premiums available in the world

bull There are also no permits required to import or export precious metalsbull Singapore also has no jurisdictional relations with USA or Europebull We will only release your personal information by order of the Court of Law in Singapore

Frequently AskedQuestions

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 17

A Sneak Peek at the NewDigixGlobal User Interface

It will be available to the public in January 2016 for multiple operating systems and mobile platforms This software will manage client transactions for PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates Digix Asset Tokens and Ether tokens

DigixGlobal can create a digital asset certificate for any storable physical property Future versions of this software will include additional digital assets such as diamonds

When the interface opens users are presented with the main dashboard menu as shown below Access to all primary services and tools is available from this opening screen

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEVendor Information - Custodian Information - Auditor Information

To ensure quality and authenticity participating gold vendors only sell LBMA approved gold bars Gold purchased from an LBMA certified refinery is globally known for its quality These bullion sources guarantee the authenticity and purity of every single gold bar used on the Digix network Buying gold from the marketplace is the first step in the process of generating a PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificate

18 JANUARY 2016

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEShows gold bullion available for purchase as a digital gold certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 19

20 JANUARY 2016

GOLD TOKENS AND ETHER WALLETFrom this area a user can send Digix Gold Tokens or send Ether

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 21

The transaction hash for a completed certificate purchase is also available with just one click

(see below Raw Transaction Data Transaction Hash)

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets Individual users can create Digix Gold and Asset tokens by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoATM Certificate) to the Minter DAE It is a way to represent gold bars as units of tokens on the Ethereum Blockchain database One Digix Gold token represents 1 gram of gold

(Q) How do I know that there are actual gold bars backing PoA certificates or Digix Gold tokens

All material documents from the Proof of Asset protocol are made available via Swarm - Ethereumrsquos distributed file sharing This would mean that all assaying certificates custodial receipts of deposits and independent auditor documents from the entire chain of custody will be uploaded for public viewing to ascertain the authenticity of all PoA certificates and Digix Gold tokens Each entity in the chain of custody will also digitally sign on our PoA Certificate We only deal with vendors custodians and auditors that have passed our due diligence and that are world renowned with a history of excellence Private audits are also available for added assurance

The Ethereum platform allows users to create applications that run on a decentralized peer-to-peer network of computers without any central control and free from human interruption or corruption Vitalik Buterin invented Ethereum in late 2013 it was formally described by Dr Gavin Wood in 2014 then developed as an open source software project under the GNU Lesser General Public License It was officially launched on July 30 2015 The project is maintained by the Ethereum core developer team (ETHDEV) under the guidance of the non-profit Ethereum Foundation which had raised 31591 Bitcoins during their 2014 crowdsale

22 JANUARY 2016

From this page users may also view the assetrsquos history of trading within the Digix system

GOLD ASSET HISTORY

PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates

are Ethereum smart contracts

that provides a legally and

cryptographically binding

determination of ownership of

physical gold or other assets currently under

the guardianship of a participating custodian on the

Digix decentralized platform It

also certifies the agreement

between the user the vendor the custodian and

the independent auditor

The PoAtrade provides a complete history of the chain of control from the vendor

the custodian and all audit reports This proof guarantees that the purchase of the gold by the user its storage by the

custodian and regular inspection by the auditor has taken place

PoA Certificates can be transferred or sent to any Ethereum account sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or

Gold tokens or redeemed from the Recast DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or Gold

Tokens

Copies of the orignal signed documents are included as a part of the certificatersquos registration in the blockchain

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 23

24 JANUARY 2016

GOLD EXPLORER RECASTER (Above)

The Digix Minter DAE recognizes all valid Digix PoAtrade Certificates and can accept them from a user in exchange for divisible Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens The rules of the Digix platform dictates that only the Digix Minter has the authority through the request of the owner of a Digix PoAtrade certificate to allow that owner to issue their own Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens in exchange for the PoAtrade Certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 25

The interface conveniently walks customers through the online purchase of a Digital Gold PoA Certificate

26 JANUARY 2016

A completed purchase of the digital gold certificate representing this bar

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 27

TOOLS AND SETTINGS

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

28 JANUARY 2016

RESTORE WALLET

In addition to its security features users can configure the Aegis Vault to assign beneficiaries set the time-based distribution of funds or assets and delegate a power of attorney to another individual or a group of people

Digix is committed to bringing Ethereum use to the mainstream and the availability of a secure wallet is essential for realizing this goal

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 29

GENERATE A REDEMPTION KEY

(Q) What is the Digix Recaster Smart Contract

Digix Recaster Smart Contract allows the

conversion of Digix Gold tokens to a PoA card The

PoA card can be sent or received on the blockchain representing an ownership

of an entire gold bar or be used for redemption of

the physical gold bar at our office For example if you have 100 DGX tokens

representing 100g of weight in gold you can exchange

for a PoA card representing a 100g gold cast bar at

Digix This PoA card can be sent and received on the

Ethereum blockchain or be used to schedule a local

pick-up of the physical gold bar at Digix redemption

center in Singapore

You can currently recast into PoA certificates of

100g (100 DGX) or 1000g (1000 DGX) gold cast bar

denominations

30 JANUARY 2016

(Q) What about the Digix audit processWe have four types of audits at Digix

1 PRIVATE AUDITS Clients are welcome to come to our certified custodial vaults in Singapore to inspect your gold bars in a highly private and secure environment

2 EXTERNAL AUDITS We have engaged Inspectorate Singapore (wwwinspectoratecom) to audit our inventory and match them off with customersrsquo holdings at DGX We will hold such inspections at least twice a year

3 CUSTODIAL AUDITS Our certified custodians will provide a physical certification of proof that your gold bars are stored safely in their vaults They will take photographs of your serialized bars per request basis and have them keyed into their inventory management systems Some of our certified custodiansrsquo reputation are also on the line to provide us with their appraisal and storage services as they have to answer to their shareholders as a publicly listed company in Singapore

4 INTERNAL AUDITS We have patented a certification process called Proof of Asset (PoA) where auditors sign on the existence of Gold in our PoA certificate The digital certificate is then uploaded onto the Ethereum Blockchain

(Q) Are there KYCAML requirementsAll users who wish to redeem PoA certificates or Digix Gold Tokens for physical gold bars will have to go through KYC requirements at the pickup The gold bars will only be available for pick up at our office location in Singapore We must ensure that DigixGlobal and participating organizations are protected from any potential liabilities resulting from government prosecution and asset seizures so we ensure that we comply fully with regulatory requirements for Know your customer (KYC) and Anti-money laundering (AML)

ADDRESS BOOK

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 31

SilentVault is a secure private online wallet for making untraceable p2p payments

Unlike other crypto currency wallets SilentVault wallets support heterogeneous asset types such as fiat dollars euros metals gold and silver and crypto coins bitcoin litecoin SilentVault provides anonymous off blockchain payments made in bitcoin and litecoin It also features an integrated p2p escrow exchange where users can trade anonymously among different asset types with other users such as exchanging bitcoins for silver

The SilentVault Spark client is a fully functional Jabber chat client that is a branded and updated version of Spark Since Spark supports a plugin architecture our wallet client is implemented as a plugin You can obtain the SilentVault Spark client with plugin from this page You can also find the source code for both the plugin and SilentVaults customizations to the Spark source base elsewhere on this site A tutorial on SVSpark is here

The SilentVault wallet webstart client is a stand alone program that you can install from within your browser Like the SilentVault Spark client it communicates with the Voucher Safe payment network using extensions to the XMPP protocol This type of communication makes economic transactions indistinguishable from ordinary encrypted instant messaging traffic and avoids any need to run within an insecure browser environment or rely on web domains All client source code is published on this site and while you can run a prefabricated client you are also invited to build your own from source

You are also invited to develop applications for our integrated marketplaces that appear within SilentVault wallets A full API is available for your use as a development tool Please contact our team for details

The SilentVault technology is based on Voucher Safe which was developed 2008 2011 Voucher Safe is also the core technology of the Digital Cash Alliance

httpssilentvaultcom

32 JANUARY 2016

ldquoI love go-o-o-o-ldrdquo-Austin Powers in Goldmember

Not surprisingly most people feel the same

According to the Wall Street Journal gold prices and safe-haven demand in Asia have been skyrocketing since mid-November (1) proving that you donrsquot have to be a sea-faring pirate or a squire in a kingrsquos castle to enjoy its natural glare beauty and above all its ability to stimulate wealth

Since the days of the California Gold Rush people have enjoyed panning for it selling it and most of

all owning it Long considered one of the planetrsquos most precious and desired metals gold has grown heavily in value over the last several years and it appears more and more are trying to get their hands on it every single day

Something else is growing as wellhellip Bitcoin Often regarded as Americarsquos most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin has jumped heavily in value over the last few months spiking from $230 to nearly $350 Unlike gold which exists in solid physical form Bitcoin exists in ones and zeros binary coding that travels through the blockchain the technology that makes Bitcoin transactions possible between users and respective merchants

BITGOLD A MODERN REVOLUTION IN FINANCEBY NICK MARINOFF

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 33

Itrsquos interesting to witness nearly equal popularity rising for two different things that ultimately serve the same purpose and share similar goals Both are designed to enhance the world of finance Both can rise in value and both have the ability to make someone rich overnighthellip So what if we could combine the two What significant differences could there be if Bitcoin and gold were fused into one entity

Well itrsquos already been done Say hello to BitGold an early startup company stationed in Toronto Canada BitGold aims to offer international services for people and businesses to send payments and hold savings with physical gold (2) The company was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb Both have a long history in the financial sector with Sebag previously serving as the Founder and Managing Principal of Braavos Capital (an international private investment organization) and the Chairman of Natural Resource Holdings an investment company involved with natural resource assets (3) Josh Crumb was previously the Senior Metals Strategist at Goldman Sachs (4)

The company alleges that gold bullion is ldquothe worldrsquos oldest asset class and the centuryrsquos best performing currencyrdquo (5) According to BitGoldrsquos website their mission is

ldquohellipTo make gold accessible and useful in digital payments and secure savingshellip Wersquore advancing the digital payments revolution by helping people securely acquire store and now spend gold with unprecedented simplicity BitGold accounts are free and can be opened in minutes We provide users with a secure vault account to purchase and hold gold the ability to make and receive instant gold payments and a prepaid card for spending gold at traditional points of sale Through our network of ATMs customers can fund their accounts with local-currencyrdquo (4)

Present investors backing BitGold include Dundee Capital Markets GMP Securities and Sandstorm Gold although the initial investor in the company was Soros Brothers Investment which is presently run by Alexander Soros the son of Hungarian business magnate George Soros (2)

2015 has been a big year for the company CNBC has stated that BitGold currently serves over 100000 active customers and the platform stores approximately 276 kilograms of bullion within its walls Thatrsquos nearly $11 million total and over $100 per active user (6) In May BitGold began trading on the TSX Venture exchange in Canada and announced the purchase of GoldMoney worth nearly $52 million in Canadian dollars (7)

In June the company made citizens of the United States very happy with the following announcement

ldquoUS residents can sign up on the BitGold platform and buy sell or redeem gold using BitGoldrsquos Aurum payment and settlement technology US residents will also have access to the BitGold mobile app and a prepaid card when these features launch over the coming weeksrdquo (7)

The platform offers a number of products and services beneficial to any gold-lover across the country As the above quote suggests BitGold offers whatrsquos known as Aurum the gold-settlement technology thatrsquos compliant with several US financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase Wells Fargo Citi Bank of America US Bank Fidelity Capital One and Charles Schwab Users with an account at any one of these nationally-recognized banks can instantly redeem gold or authorize gold deposits The transactions thereby increase in safety and automation Users also receive a bonus in that they are usually able to avoid bank wire fees through the process (7)

Using the BitGold app users may also send and receive gold as payments to and from any other user or seller without paying any transaction fees They can even send gold to non-BitGold users via their mobile phones or through a simple email message The company also issues prepaid debit cards allowing users to spend funds directly from their BitGold accounts The card is compatible with ATMs so that users may withdraw local currency (7)

Lastly the company issues special ten-gram gold cubes worth approximately $380 each at press time Users may redeem these cubes on the BitGold platform and may demand physical delivery when they see fit (7)

34 JANUARY 2016

Vice-president of communications and PR Emily Cornelius explained in an email that they have no ldquostereotypicalrdquo user of the companyrsquos services but that there are predominantly three main use cases

ldquoThe traditional gold investor will gravitate to BitGold because our gold is unprecedentedly priced within 1 of spot price and we offer free storage in a Brinks vault of their choice globallyhellip The second use case is the user who seeks a more stable currency for their national savings outside of their potentially volatile local fiat currencyhellip Gold has gained over 3000 vs the US Dollar which is arguably the worldrsquos strongest fiat money Gold may seem to go up down or sideways but in reality and when viewed over long timescales such as the avg human lifecycle ndash it always riseshellip Gold has been rising against 9 of the worldrsquos most famous and well-known currencies almost every year since 2000hellip Thirdly BitGold is a powerful payments platformhellip BitGold allows a user to send an invoice for your labor to someone else anywhere in the world which the recipient can pay using any traditional payment methodhellip This gold is vaulted anywhere even outside their jurisdictionhellip This is important as it allows users to achieve upward mobility that are otherwise hindered by localized issues that are exogenous to their personal journeyrdquo

Cornelius also explained that the company offers ldquoall the benefits and efficiencies of a service like PayPal and a MasterCard but with a universally accepted more stable store of valuerdquo

Presently regulation over BitGold appears to be fairly non-existent BitGold does not list which regulators hold jurisdiction over its staff and operations nor do they list regulatory information regarding their trade practices (7) In fact co-founder Roy Sebag has stated in the past that he believes BitGold is not a bank nor does it serve as a financial institution in any traditional sense as it does not engage in fractional-reserve banking (2)According to page 20 of the companyrsquos initial public filing BitGold is not

ldquohellipEligible to be registered with the Financial

Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canadahellip There can be no assurance that BitGoldrsquos services or Internet platform will be acceptable to foreign regulatory bodies Foreign governments may seek to restrict access to BitGoldrsquos services block BitGoldrsquos website or impose other restrictions that may affect BitGoldrsquos ability to offer service to new or existing users in those for an extended period of time or indefinitelyrdquo (8)

Despite this it was confirmed in July of 2015 that the company did offer its services under the Canadian Bailment Law (9) This occurs in situations where physical personal property is transferred from one person (the bailor) to another for safekeeping and doing so does not require the binding notion of a written contract (10)

Presently the company employs 26 people including Sebag and Crumb Other notable BitGold personnel include Chief Executive Officer Darrell MacMullin Chief Technology Officer Alessandro Premoli Lead Mobile Engineer Paul Mennega and Team Manager Karman Lee The company also employs several vice-presidents five software engineers and two compliance officers (4)

It can be said that BitGold has accomplished quite a bit in less than two years Itrsquos likely such a volatile company has some big plans waiting in the wings for 2016 but Emily Cornelius isnrsquot dropping any hints as to what they could be

ldquoWe have a number of new features services and products cominghellip Yoursquoll have to wait and seerdquo

BitGold is steadily making its mark It has the backing the funds the technology and above all the drive Put all these items together (and add a touch of flair and public desire) and itrsquos clear that BitGold has what it takes to make the world of finance its own

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 17: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 17

A Sneak Peek at the NewDigixGlobal User Interface

It will be available to the public in January 2016 for multiple operating systems and mobile platforms This software will manage client transactions for PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates Digix Asset Tokens and Ether tokens

DigixGlobal can create a digital asset certificate for any storable physical property Future versions of this software will include additional digital assets such as diamonds

When the interface opens users are presented with the main dashboard menu as shown below Access to all primary services and tools is available from this opening screen

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEVendor Information - Custodian Information - Auditor Information

To ensure quality and authenticity participating gold vendors only sell LBMA approved gold bars Gold purchased from an LBMA certified refinery is globally known for its quality These bullion sources guarantee the authenticity and purity of every single gold bar used on the Digix network Buying gold from the marketplace is the first step in the process of generating a PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificate

18 JANUARY 2016

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEShows gold bullion available for purchase as a digital gold certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 19

20 JANUARY 2016

GOLD TOKENS AND ETHER WALLETFrom this area a user can send Digix Gold Tokens or send Ether

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 21

The transaction hash for a completed certificate purchase is also available with just one click

(see below Raw Transaction Data Transaction Hash)

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets Individual users can create Digix Gold and Asset tokens by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoATM Certificate) to the Minter DAE It is a way to represent gold bars as units of tokens on the Ethereum Blockchain database One Digix Gold token represents 1 gram of gold

(Q) How do I know that there are actual gold bars backing PoA certificates or Digix Gold tokens

All material documents from the Proof of Asset protocol are made available via Swarm - Ethereumrsquos distributed file sharing This would mean that all assaying certificates custodial receipts of deposits and independent auditor documents from the entire chain of custody will be uploaded for public viewing to ascertain the authenticity of all PoA certificates and Digix Gold tokens Each entity in the chain of custody will also digitally sign on our PoA Certificate We only deal with vendors custodians and auditors that have passed our due diligence and that are world renowned with a history of excellence Private audits are also available for added assurance

The Ethereum platform allows users to create applications that run on a decentralized peer-to-peer network of computers without any central control and free from human interruption or corruption Vitalik Buterin invented Ethereum in late 2013 it was formally described by Dr Gavin Wood in 2014 then developed as an open source software project under the GNU Lesser General Public License It was officially launched on July 30 2015 The project is maintained by the Ethereum core developer team (ETHDEV) under the guidance of the non-profit Ethereum Foundation which had raised 31591 Bitcoins during their 2014 crowdsale

22 JANUARY 2016

From this page users may also view the assetrsquos history of trading within the Digix system

GOLD ASSET HISTORY

PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates

are Ethereum smart contracts

that provides a legally and

cryptographically binding

determination of ownership of

physical gold or other assets currently under

the guardianship of a participating custodian on the

Digix decentralized platform It

also certifies the agreement

between the user the vendor the custodian and

the independent auditor

The PoAtrade provides a complete history of the chain of control from the vendor

the custodian and all audit reports This proof guarantees that the purchase of the gold by the user its storage by the

custodian and regular inspection by the auditor has taken place

PoA Certificates can be transferred or sent to any Ethereum account sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or

Gold tokens or redeemed from the Recast DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or Gold

Tokens

Copies of the orignal signed documents are included as a part of the certificatersquos registration in the blockchain

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 23

24 JANUARY 2016

GOLD EXPLORER RECASTER (Above)

The Digix Minter DAE recognizes all valid Digix PoAtrade Certificates and can accept them from a user in exchange for divisible Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens The rules of the Digix platform dictates that only the Digix Minter has the authority through the request of the owner of a Digix PoAtrade certificate to allow that owner to issue their own Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens in exchange for the PoAtrade Certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 25

The interface conveniently walks customers through the online purchase of a Digital Gold PoA Certificate

26 JANUARY 2016

A completed purchase of the digital gold certificate representing this bar

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 27

TOOLS AND SETTINGS

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

28 JANUARY 2016

RESTORE WALLET

In addition to its security features users can configure the Aegis Vault to assign beneficiaries set the time-based distribution of funds or assets and delegate a power of attorney to another individual or a group of people

Digix is committed to bringing Ethereum use to the mainstream and the availability of a secure wallet is essential for realizing this goal

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 29

GENERATE A REDEMPTION KEY

(Q) What is the Digix Recaster Smart Contract

Digix Recaster Smart Contract allows the

conversion of Digix Gold tokens to a PoA card The

PoA card can be sent or received on the blockchain representing an ownership

of an entire gold bar or be used for redemption of

the physical gold bar at our office For example if you have 100 DGX tokens

representing 100g of weight in gold you can exchange

for a PoA card representing a 100g gold cast bar at

Digix This PoA card can be sent and received on the

Ethereum blockchain or be used to schedule a local

pick-up of the physical gold bar at Digix redemption

center in Singapore

You can currently recast into PoA certificates of

100g (100 DGX) or 1000g (1000 DGX) gold cast bar

denominations

30 JANUARY 2016

(Q) What about the Digix audit processWe have four types of audits at Digix

1 PRIVATE AUDITS Clients are welcome to come to our certified custodial vaults in Singapore to inspect your gold bars in a highly private and secure environment

2 EXTERNAL AUDITS We have engaged Inspectorate Singapore (wwwinspectoratecom) to audit our inventory and match them off with customersrsquo holdings at DGX We will hold such inspections at least twice a year

3 CUSTODIAL AUDITS Our certified custodians will provide a physical certification of proof that your gold bars are stored safely in their vaults They will take photographs of your serialized bars per request basis and have them keyed into their inventory management systems Some of our certified custodiansrsquo reputation are also on the line to provide us with their appraisal and storage services as they have to answer to their shareholders as a publicly listed company in Singapore

4 INTERNAL AUDITS We have patented a certification process called Proof of Asset (PoA) where auditors sign on the existence of Gold in our PoA certificate The digital certificate is then uploaded onto the Ethereum Blockchain

(Q) Are there KYCAML requirementsAll users who wish to redeem PoA certificates or Digix Gold Tokens for physical gold bars will have to go through KYC requirements at the pickup The gold bars will only be available for pick up at our office location in Singapore We must ensure that DigixGlobal and participating organizations are protected from any potential liabilities resulting from government prosecution and asset seizures so we ensure that we comply fully with regulatory requirements for Know your customer (KYC) and Anti-money laundering (AML)

ADDRESS BOOK

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 31

SilentVault is a secure private online wallet for making untraceable p2p payments

Unlike other crypto currency wallets SilentVault wallets support heterogeneous asset types such as fiat dollars euros metals gold and silver and crypto coins bitcoin litecoin SilentVault provides anonymous off blockchain payments made in bitcoin and litecoin It also features an integrated p2p escrow exchange where users can trade anonymously among different asset types with other users such as exchanging bitcoins for silver

The SilentVault Spark client is a fully functional Jabber chat client that is a branded and updated version of Spark Since Spark supports a plugin architecture our wallet client is implemented as a plugin You can obtain the SilentVault Spark client with plugin from this page You can also find the source code for both the plugin and SilentVaults customizations to the Spark source base elsewhere on this site A tutorial on SVSpark is here

The SilentVault wallet webstart client is a stand alone program that you can install from within your browser Like the SilentVault Spark client it communicates with the Voucher Safe payment network using extensions to the XMPP protocol This type of communication makes economic transactions indistinguishable from ordinary encrypted instant messaging traffic and avoids any need to run within an insecure browser environment or rely on web domains All client source code is published on this site and while you can run a prefabricated client you are also invited to build your own from source

You are also invited to develop applications for our integrated marketplaces that appear within SilentVault wallets A full API is available for your use as a development tool Please contact our team for details

The SilentVault technology is based on Voucher Safe which was developed 2008 2011 Voucher Safe is also the core technology of the Digital Cash Alliance

httpssilentvaultcom

32 JANUARY 2016

ldquoI love go-o-o-o-ldrdquo-Austin Powers in Goldmember

Not surprisingly most people feel the same

According to the Wall Street Journal gold prices and safe-haven demand in Asia have been skyrocketing since mid-November (1) proving that you donrsquot have to be a sea-faring pirate or a squire in a kingrsquos castle to enjoy its natural glare beauty and above all its ability to stimulate wealth

Since the days of the California Gold Rush people have enjoyed panning for it selling it and most of

all owning it Long considered one of the planetrsquos most precious and desired metals gold has grown heavily in value over the last several years and it appears more and more are trying to get their hands on it every single day

Something else is growing as wellhellip Bitcoin Often regarded as Americarsquos most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin has jumped heavily in value over the last few months spiking from $230 to nearly $350 Unlike gold which exists in solid physical form Bitcoin exists in ones and zeros binary coding that travels through the blockchain the technology that makes Bitcoin transactions possible between users and respective merchants

BITGOLD A MODERN REVOLUTION IN FINANCEBY NICK MARINOFF

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 33

Itrsquos interesting to witness nearly equal popularity rising for two different things that ultimately serve the same purpose and share similar goals Both are designed to enhance the world of finance Both can rise in value and both have the ability to make someone rich overnighthellip So what if we could combine the two What significant differences could there be if Bitcoin and gold were fused into one entity

Well itrsquos already been done Say hello to BitGold an early startup company stationed in Toronto Canada BitGold aims to offer international services for people and businesses to send payments and hold savings with physical gold (2) The company was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb Both have a long history in the financial sector with Sebag previously serving as the Founder and Managing Principal of Braavos Capital (an international private investment organization) and the Chairman of Natural Resource Holdings an investment company involved with natural resource assets (3) Josh Crumb was previously the Senior Metals Strategist at Goldman Sachs (4)

The company alleges that gold bullion is ldquothe worldrsquos oldest asset class and the centuryrsquos best performing currencyrdquo (5) According to BitGoldrsquos website their mission is

ldquohellipTo make gold accessible and useful in digital payments and secure savingshellip Wersquore advancing the digital payments revolution by helping people securely acquire store and now spend gold with unprecedented simplicity BitGold accounts are free and can be opened in minutes We provide users with a secure vault account to purchase and hold gold the ability to make and receive instant gold payments and a prepaid card for spending gold at traditional points of sale Through our network of ATMs customers can fund their accounts with local-currencyrdquo (4)

Present investors backing BitGold include Dundee Capital Markets GMP Securities and Sandstorm Gold although the initial investor in the company was Soros Brothers Investment which is presently run by Alexander Soros the son of Hungarian business magnate George Soros (2)

2015 has been a big year for the company CNBC has stated that BitGold currently serves over 100000 active customers and the platform stores approximately 276 kilograms of bullion within its walls Thatrsquos nearly $11 million total and over $100 per active user (6) In May BitGold began trading on the TSX Venture exchange in Canada and announced the purchase of GoldMoney worth nearly $52 million in Canadian dollars (7)

In June the company made citizens of the United States very happy with the following announcement

ldquoUS residents can sign up on the BitGold platform and buy sell or redeem gold using BitGoldrsquos Aurum payment and settlement technology US residents will also have access to the BitGold mobile app and a prepaid card when these features launch over the coming weeksrdquo (7)

The platform offers a number of products and services beneficial to any gold-lover across the country As the above quote suggests BitGold offers whatrsquos known as Aurum the gold-settlement technology thatrsquos compliant with several US financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase Wells Fargo Citi Bank of America US Bank Fidelity Capital One and Charles Schwab Users with an account at any one of these nationally-recognized banks can instantly redeem gold or authorize gold deposits The transactions thereby increase in safety and automation Users also receive a bonus in that they are usually able to avoid bank wire fees through the process (7)

Using the BitGold app users may also send and receive gold as payments to and from any other user or seller without paying any transaction fees They can even send gold to non-BitGold users via their mobile phones or through a simple email message The company also issues prepaid debit cards allowing users to spend funds directly from their BitGold accounts The card is compatible with ATMs so that users may withdraw local currency (7)

Lastly the company issues special ten-gram gold cubes worth approximately $380 each at press time Users may redeem these cubes on the BitGold platform and may demand physical delivery when they see fit (7)

34 JANUARY 2016

Vice-president of communications and PR Emily Cornelius explained in an email that they have no ldquostereotypicalrdquo user of the companyrsquos services but that there are predominantly three main use cases

ldquoThe traditional gold investor will gravitate to BitGold because our gold is unprecedentedly priced within 1 of spot price and we offer free storage in a Brinks vault of their choice globallyhellip The second use case is the user who seeks a more stable currency for their national savings outside of their potentially volatile local fiat currencyhellip Gold has gained over 3000 vs the US Dollar which is arguably the worldrsquos strongest fiat money Gold may seem to go up down or sideways but in reality and when viewed over long timescales such as the avg human lifecycle ndash it always riseshellip Gold has been rising against 9 of the worldrsquos most famous and well-known currencies almost every year since 2000hellip Thirdly BitGold is a powerful payments platformhellip BitGold allows a user to send an invoice for your labor to someone else anywhere in the world which the recipient can pay using any traditional payment methodhellip This gold is vaulted anywhere even outside their jurisdictionhellip This is important as it allows users to achieve upward mobility that are otherwise hindered by localized issues that are exogenous to their personal journeyrdquo

Cornelius also explained that the company offers ldquoall the benefits and efficiencies of a service like PayPal and a MasterCard but with a universally accepted more stable store of valuerdquo

Presently regulation over BitGold appears to be fairly non-existent BitGold does not list which regulators hold jurisdiction over its staff and operations nor do they list regulatory information regarding their trade practices (7) In fact co-founder Roy Sebag has stated in the past that he believes BitGold is not a bank nor does it serve as a financial institution in any traditional sense as it does not engage in fractional-reserve banking (2)According to page 20 of the companyrsquos initial public filing BitGold is not

ldquohellipEligible to be registered with the Financial

Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canadahellip There can be no assurance that BitGoldrsquos services or Internet platform will be acceptable to foreign regulatory bodies Foreign governments may seek to restrict access to BitGoldrsquos services block BitGoldrsquos website or impose other restrictions that may affect BitGoldrsquos ability to offer service to new or existing users in those for an extended period of time or indefinitelyrdquo (8)

Despite this it was confirmed in July of 2015 that the company did offer its services under the Canadian Bailment Law (9) This occurs in situations where physical personal property is transferred from one person (the bailor) to another for safekeeping and doing so does not require the binding notion of a written contract (10)

Presently the company employs 26 people including Sebag and Crumb Other notable BitGold personnel include Chief Executive Officer Darrell MacMullin Chief Technology Officer Alessandro Premoli Lead Mobile Engineer Paul Mennega and Team Manager Karman Lee The company also employs several vice-presidents five software engineers and two compliance officers (4)

It can be said that BitGold has accomplished quite a bit in less than two years Itrsquos likely such a volatile company has some big plans waiting in the wings for 2016 but Emily Cornelius isnrsquot dropping any hints as to what they could be

ldquoWe have a number of new features services and products cominghellip Yoursquoll have to wait and seerdquo

BitGold is steadily making its mark It has the backing the funds the technology and above all the drive Put all these items together (and add a touch of flair and public desire) and itrsquos clear that BitGold has what it takes to make the world of finance its own

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 18: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEVendor Information - Custodian Information - Auditor Information

To ensure quality and authenticity participating gold vendors only sell LBMA approved gold bars Gold purchased from an LBMA certified refinery is globally known for its quality These bullion sources guarantee the authenticity and purity of every single gold bar used on the Digix network Buying gold from the marketplace is the first step in the process of generating a PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificate

18 JANUARY 2016

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEShows gold bullion available for purchase as a digital gold certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 19

20 JANUARY 2016

GOLD TOKENS AND ETHER WALLETFrom this area a user can send Digix Gold Tokens or send Ether

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 21

The transaction hash for a completed certificate purchase is also available with just one click

(see below Raw Transaction Data Transaction Hash)

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets Individual users can create Digix Gold and Asset tokens by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoATM Certificate) to the Minter DAE It is a way to represent gold bars as units of tokens on the Ethereum Blockchain database One Digix Gold token represents 1 gram of gold

(Q) How do I know that there are actual gold bars backing PoA certificates or Digix Gold tokens

All material documents from the Proof of Asset protocol are made available via Swarm - Ethereumrsquos distributed file sharing This would mean that all assaying certificates custodial receipts of deposits and independent auditor documents from the entire chain of custody will be uploaded for public viewing to ascertain the authenticity of all PoA certificates and Digix Gold tokens Each entity in the chain of custody will also digitally sign on our PoA Certificate We only deal with vendors custodians and auditors that have passed our due diligence and that are world renowned with a history of excellence Private audits are also available for added assurance

The Ethereum platform allows users to create applications that run on a decentralized peer-to-peer network of computers without any central control and free from human interruption or corruption Vitalik Buterin invented Ethereum in late 2013 it was formally described by Dr Gavin Wood in 2014 then developed as an open source software project under the GNU Lesser General Public License It was officially launched on July 30 2015 The project is maintained by the Ethereum core developer team (ETHDEV) under the guidance of the non-profit Ethereum Foundation which had raised 31591 Bitcoins during their 2014 crowdsale

22 JANUARY 2016

From this page users may also view the assetrsquos history of trading within the Digix system

GOLD ASSET HISTORY

PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates

are Ethereum smart contracts

that provides a legally and

cryptographically binding

determination of ownership of

physical gold or other assets currently under

the guardianship of a participating custodian on the

Digix decentralized platform It

also certifies the agreement

between the user the vendor the custodian and

the independent auditor

The PoAtrade provides a complete history of the chain of control from the vendor

the custodian and all audit reports This proof guarantees that the purchase of the gold by the user its storage by the

custodian and regular inspection by the auditor has taken place

PoA Certificates can be transferred or sent to any Ethereum account sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or

Gold tokens or redeemed from the Recast DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or Gold

Tokens

Copies of the orignal signed documents are included as a part of the certificatersquos registration in the blockchain

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 23

24 JANUARY 2016

GOLD EXPLORER RECASTER (Above)

The Digix Minter DAE recognizes all valid Digix PoAtrade Certificates and can accept them from a user in exchange for divisible Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens The rules of the Digix platform dictates that only the Digix Minter has the authority through the request of the owner of a Digix PoAtrade certificate to allow that owner to issue their own Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens in exchange for the PoAtrade Certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 25

The interface conveniently walks customers through the online purchase of a Digital Gold PoA Certificate

26 JANUARY 2016

A completed purchase of the digital gold certificate representing this bar

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 27

TOOLS AND SETTINGS

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

28 JANUARY 2016

RESTORE WALLET

In addition to its security features users can configure the Aegis Vault to assign beneficiaries set the time-based distribution of funds or assets and delegate a power of attorney to another individual or a group of people

Digix is committed to bringing Ethereum use to the mainstream and the availability of a secure wallet is essential for realizing this goal

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 29

GENERATE A REDEMPTION KEY

(Q) What is the Digix Recaster Smart Contract

Digix Recaster Smart Contract allows the

conversion of Digix Gold tokens to a PoA card The

PoA card can be sent or received on the blockchain representing an ownership

of an entire gold bar or be used for redemption of

the physical gold bar at our office For example if you have 100 DGX tokens

representing 100g of weight in gold you can exchange

for a PoA card representing a 100g gold cast bar at

Digix This PoA card can be sent and received on the

Ethereum blockchain or be used to schedule a local

pick-up of the physical gold bar at Digix redemption

center in Singapore

You can currently recast into PoA certificates of

100g (100 DGX) or 1000g (1000 DGX) gold cast bar

denominations

30 JANUARY 2016

(Q) What about the Digix audit processWe have four types of audits at Digix

1 PRIVATE AUDITS Clients are welcome to come to our certified custodial vaults in Singapore to inspect your gold bars in a highly private and secure environment

2 EXTERNAL AUDITS We have engaged Inspectorate Singapore (wwwinspectoratecom) to audit our inventory and match them off with customersrsquo holdings at DGX We will hold such inspections at least twice a year

3 CUSTODIAL AUDITS Our certified custodians will provide a physical certification of proof that your gold bars are stored safely in their vaults They will take photographs of your serialized bars per request basis and have them keyed into their inventory management systems Some of our certified custodiansrsquo reputation are also on the line to provide us with their appraisal and storage services as they have to answer to their shareholders as a publicly listed company in Singapore

4 INTERNAL AUDITS We have patented a certification process called Proof of Asset (PoA) where auditors sign on the existence of Gold in our PoA certificate The digital certificate is then uploaded onto the Ethereum Blockchain

(Q) Are there KYCAML requirementsAll users who wish to redeem PoA certificates or Digix Gold Tokens for physical gold bars will have to go through KYC requirements at the pickup The gold bars will only be available for pick up at our office location in Singapore We must ensure that DigixGlobal and participating organizations are protected from any potential liabilities resulting from government prosecution and asset seizures so we ensure that we comply fully with regulatory requirements for Know your customer (KYC) and Anti-money laundering (AML)

ADDRESS BOOK

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 31

SilentVault is a secure private online wallet for making untraceable p2p payments

Unlike other crypto currency wallets SilentVault wallets support heterogeneous asset types such as fiat dollars euros metals gold and silver and crypto coins bitcoin litecoin SilentVault provides anonymous off blockchain payments made in bitcoin and litecoin It also features an integrated p2p escrow exchange where users can trade anonymously among different asset types with other users such as exchanging bitcoins for silver

The SilentVault Spark client is a fully functional Jabber chat client that is a branded and updated version of Spark Since Spark supports a plugin architecture our wallet client is implemented as a plugin You can obtain the SilentVault Spark client with plugin from this page You can also find the source code for both the plugin and SilentVaults customizations to the Spark source base elsewhere on this site A tutorial on SVSpark is here

The SilentVault wallet webstart client is a stand alone program that you can install from within your browser Like the SilentVault Spark client it communicates with the Voucher Safe payment network using extensions to the XMPP protocol This type of communication makes economic transactions indistinguishable from ordinary encrypted instant messaging traffic and avoids any need to run within an insecure browser environment or rely on web domains All client source code is published on this site and while you can run a prefabricated client you are also invited to build your own from source

You are also invited to develop applications for our integrated marketplaces that appear within SilentVault wallets A full API is available for your use as a development tool Please contact our team for details

The SilentVault technology is based on Voucher Safe which was developed 2008 2011 Voucher Safe is also the core technology of the Digital Cash Alliance

httpssilentvaultcom

32 JANUARY 2016

ldquoI love go-o-o-o-ldrdquo-Austin Powers in Goldmember

Not surprisingly most people feel the same

According to the Wall Street Journal gold prices and safe-haven demand in Asia have been skyrocketing since mid-November (1) proving that you donrsquot have to be a sea-faring pirate or a squire in a kingrsquos castle to enjoy its natural glare beauty and above all its ability to stimulate wealth

Since the days of the California Gold Rush people have enjoyed panning for it selling it and most of

all owning it Long considered one of the planetrsquos most precious and desired metals gold has grown heavily in value over the last several years and it appears more and more are trying to get their hands on it every single day

Something else is growing as wellhellip Bitcoin Often regarded as Americarsquos most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin has jumped heavily in value over the last few months spiking from $230 to nearly $350 Unlike gold which exists in solid physical form Bitcoin exists in ones and zeros binary coding that travels through the blockchain the technology that makes Bitcoin transactions possible between users and respective merchants

BITGOLD A MODERN REVOLUTION IN FINANCEBY NICK MARINOFF

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 33

Itrsquos interesting to witness nearly equal popularity rising for two different things that ultimately serve the same purpose and share similar goals Both are designed to enhance the world of finance Both can rise in value and both have the ability to make someone rich overnighthellip So what if we could combine the two What significant differences could there be if Bitcoin and gold were fused into one entity

Well itrsquos already been done Say hello to BitGold an early startup company stationed in Toronto Canada BitGold aims to offer international services for people and businesses to send payments and hold savings with physical gold (2) The company was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb Both have a long history in the financial sector with Sebag previously serving as the Founder and Managing Principal of Braavos Capital (an international private investment organization) and the Chairman of Natural Resource Holdings an investment company involved with natural resource assets (3) Josh Crumb was previously the Senior Metals Strategist at Goldman Sachs (4)

The company alleges that gold bullion is ldquothe worldrsquos oldest asset class and the centuryrsquos best performing currencyrdquo (5) According to BitGoldrsquos website their mission is

ldquohellipTo make gold accessible and useful in digital payments and secure savingshellip Wersquore advancing the digital payments revolution by helping people securely acquire store and now spend gold with unprecedented simplicity BitGold accounts are free and can be opened in minutes We provide users with a secure vault account to purchase and hold gold the ability to make and receive instant gold payments and a prepaid card for spending gold at traditional points of sale Through our network of ATMs customers can fund their accounts with local-currencyrdquo (4)

Present investors backing BitGold include Dundee Capital Markets GMP Securities and Sandstorm Gold although the initial investor in the company was Soros Brothers Investment which is presently run by Alexander Soros the son of Hungarian business magnate George Soros (2)

2015 has been a big year for the company CNBC has stated that BitGold currently serves over 100000 active customers and the platform stores approximately 276 kilograms of bullion within its walls Thatrsquos nearly $11 million total and over $100 per active user (6) In May BitGold began trading on the TSX Venture exchange in Canada and announced the purchase of GoldMoney worth nearly $52 million in Canadian dollars (7)

In June the company made citizens of the United States very happy with the following announcement

ldquoUS residents can sign up on the BitGold platform and buy sell or redeem gold using BitGoldrsquos Aurum payment and settlement technology US residents will also have access to the BitGold mobile app and a prepaid card when these features launch over the coming weeksrdquo (7)

The platform offers a number of products and services beneficial to any gold-lover across the country As the above quote suggests BitGold offers whatrsquos known as Aurum the gold-settlement technology thatrsquos compliant with several US financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase Wells Fargo Citi Bank of America US Bank Fidelity Capital One and Charles Schwab Users with an account at any one of these nationally-recognized banks can instantly redeem gold or authorize gold deposits The transactions thereby increase in safety and automation Users also receive a bonus in that they are usually able to avoid bank wire fees through the process (7)

Using the BitGold app users may also send and receive gold as payments to and from any other user or seller without paying any transaction fees They can even send gold to non-BitGold users via their mobile phones or through a simple email message The company also issues prepaid debit cards allowing users to spend funds directly from their BitGold accounts The card is compatible with ATMs so that users may withdraw local currency (7)

Lastly the company issues special ten-gram gold cubes worth approximately $380 each at press time Users may redeem these cubes on the BitGold platform and may demand physical delivery when they see fit (7)

34 JANUARY 2016

Vice-president of communications and PR Emily Cornelius explained in an email that they have no ldquostereotypicalrdquo user of the companyrsquos services but that there are predominantly three main use cases

ldquoThe traditional gold investor will gravitate to BitGold because our gold is unprecedentedly priced within 1 of spot price and we offer free storage in a Brinks vault of their choice globallyhellip The second use case is the user who seeks a more stable currency for their national savings outside of their potentially volatile local fiat currencyhellip Gold has gained over 3000 vs the US Dollar which is arguably the worldrsquos strongest fiat money Gold may seem to go up down or sideways but in reality and when viewed over long timescales such as the avg human lifecycle ndash it always riseshellip Gold has been rising against 9 of the worldrsquos most famous and well-known currencies almost every year since 2000hellip Thirdly BitGold is a powerful payments platformhellip BitGold allows a user to send an invoice for your labor to someone else anywhere in the world which the recipient can pay using any traditional payment methodhellip This gold is vaulted anywhere even outside their jurisdictionhellip This is important as it allows users to achieve upward mobility that are otherwise hindered by localized issues that are exogenous to their personal journeyrdquo

Cornelius also explained that the company offers ldquoall the benefits and efficiencies of a service like PayPal and a MasterCard but with a universally accepted more stable store of valuerdquo

Presently regulation over BitGold appears to be fairly non-existent BitGold does not list which regulators hold jurisdiction over its staff and operations nor do they list regulatory information regarding their trade practices (7) In fact co-founder Roy Sebag has stated in the past that he believes BitGold is not a bank nor does it serve as a financial institution in any traditional sense as it does not engage in fractional-reserve banking (2)According to page 20 of the companyrsquos initial public filing BitGold is not

ldquohellipEligible to be registered with the Financial

Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canadahellip There can be no assurance that BitGoldrsquos services or Internet platform will be acceptable to foreign regulatory bodies Foreign governments may seek to restrict access to BitGoldrsquos services block BitGoldrsquos website or impose other restrictions that may affect BitGoldrsquos ability to offer service to new or existing users in those for an extended period of time or indefinitelyrdquo (8)

Despite this it was confirmed in July of 2015 that the company did offer its services under the Canadian Bailment Law (9) This occurs in situations where physical personal property is transferred from one person (the bailor) to another for safekeeping and doing so does not require the binding notion of a written contract (10)

Presently the company employs 26 people including Sebag and Crumb Other notable BitGold personnel include Chief Executive Officer Darrell MacMullin Chief Technology Officer Alessandro Premoli Lead Mobile Engineer Paul Mennega and Team Manager Karman Lee The company also employs several vice-presidents five software engineers and two compliance officers (4)

It can be said that BitGold has accomplished quite a bit in less than two years Itrsquos likely such a volatile company has some big plans waiting in the wings for 2016 but Emily Cornelius isnrsquot dropping any hints as to what they could be

ldquoWe have a number of new features services and products cominghellip Yoursquoll have to wait and seerdquo

BitGold is steadily making its mark It has the backing the funds the technology and above all the drive Put all these items together (and add a touch of flair and public desire) and itrsquos clear that BitGold has what it takes to make the world of finance its own

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 19: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

DIGIX GOLD MARKETPLACEShows gold bullion available for purchase as a digital gold certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 19

20 JANUARY 2016

GOLD TOKENS AND ETHER WALLETFrom this area a user can send Digix Gold Tokens or send Ether

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 21

The transaction hash for a completed certificate purchase is also available with just one click

(see below Raw Transaction Data Transaction Hash)

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets Individual users can create Digix Gold and Asset tokens by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoATM Certificate) to the Minter DAE It is a way to represent gold bars as units of tokens on the Ethereum Blockchain database One Digix Gold token represents 1 gram of gold

(Q) How do I know that there are actual gold bars backing PoA certificates or Digix Gold tokens

All material documents from the Proof of Asset protocol are made available via Swarm - Ethereumrsquos distributed file sharing This would mean that all assaying certificates custodial receipts of deposits and independent auditor documents from the entire chain of custody will be uploaded for public viewing to ascertain the authenticity of all PoA certificates and Digix Gold tokens Each entity in the chain of custody will also digitally sign on our PoA Certificate We only deal with vendors custodians and auditors that have passed our due diligence and that are world renowned with a history of excellence Private audits are also available for added assurance

The Ethereum platform allows users to create applications that run on a decentralized peer-to-peer network of computers without any central control and free from human interruption or corruption Vitalik Buterin invented Ethereum in late 2013 it was formally described by Dr Gavin Wood in 2014 then developed as an open source software project under the GNU Lesser General Public License It was officially launched on July 30 2015 The project is maintained by the Ethereum core developer team (ETHDEV) under the guidance of the non-profit Ethereum Foundation which had raised 31591 Bitcoins during their 2014 crowdsale

22 JANUARY 2016

From this page users may also view the assetrsquos history of trading within the Digix system

GOLD ASSET HISTORY

PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates

are Ethereum smart contracts

that provides a legally and

cryptographically binding

determination of ownership of

physical gold or other assets currently under

the guardianship of a participating custodian on the

Digix decentralized platform It

also certifies the agreement

between the user the vendor the custodian and

the independent auditor

The PoAtrade provides a complete history of the chain of control from the vendor

the custodian and all audit reports This proof guarantees that the purchase of the gold by the user its storage by the

custodian and regular inspection by the auditor has taken place

PoA Certificates can be transferred or sent to any Ethereum account sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or

Gold tokens or redeemed from the Recast DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or Gold

Tokens

Copies of the orignal signed documents are included as a part of the certificatersquos registration in the blockchain

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 23

24 JANUARY 2016

GOLD EXPLORER RECASTER (Above)

The Digix Minter DAE recognizes all valid Digix PoAtrade Certificates and can accept them from a user in exchange for divisible Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens The rules of the Digix platform dictates that only the Digix Minter has the authority through the request of the owner of a Digix PoAtrade certificate to allow that owner to issue their own Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens in exchange for the PoAtrade Certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 25

The interface conveniently walks customers through the online purchase of a Digital Gold PoA Certificate

26 JANUARY 2016

A completed purchase of the digital gold certificate representing this bar

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 27

TOOLS AND SETTINGS

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

28 JANUARY 2016

RESTORE WALLET

In addition to its security features users can configure the Aegis Vault to assign beneficiaries set the time-based distribution of funds or assets and delegate a power of attorney to another individual or a group of people

Digix is committed to bringing Ethereum use to the mainstream and the availability of a secure wallet is essential for realizing this goal

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 29

GENERATE A REDEMPTION KEY

(Q) What is the Digix Recaster Smart Contract

Digix Recaster Smart Contract allows the

conversion of Digix Gold tokens to a PoA card The

PoA card can be sent or received on the blockchain representing an ownership

of an entire gold bar or be used for redemption of

the physical gold bar at our office For example if you have 100 DGX tokens

representing 100g of weight in gold you can exchange

for a PoA card representing a 100g gold cast bar at

Digix This PoA card can be sent and received on the

Ethereum blockchain or be used to schedule a local

pick-up of the physical gold bar at Digix redemption

center in Singapore

You can currently recast into PoA certificates of

100g (100 DGX) or 1000g (1000 DGX) gold cast bar

denominations

30 JANUARY 2016

(Q) What about the Digix audit processWe have four types of audits at Digix

1 PRIVATE AUDITS Clients are welcome to come to our certified custodial vaults in Singapore to inspect your gold bars in a highly private and secure environment

2 EXTERNAL AUDITS We have engaged Inspectorate Singapore (wwwinspectoratecom) to audit our inventory and match them off with customersrsquo holdings at DGX We will hold such inspections at least twice a year

3 CUSTODIAL AUDITS Our certified custodians will provide a physical certification of proof that your gold bars are stored safely in their vaults They will take photographs of your serialized bars per request basis and have them keyed into their inventory management systems Some of our certified custodiansrsquo reputation are also on the line to provide us with their appraisal and storage services as they have to answer to their shareholders as a publicly listed company in Singapore

4 INTERNAL AUDITS We have patented a certification process called Proof of Asset (PoA) where auditors sign on the existence of Gold in our PoA certificate The digital certificate is then uploaded onto the Ethereum Blockchain

(Q) Are there KYCAML requirementsAll users who wish to redeem PoA certificates or Digix Gold Tokens for physical gold bars will have to go through KYC requirements at the pickup The gold bars will only be available for pick up at our office location in Singapore We must ensure that DigixGlobal and participating organizations are protected from any potential liabilities resulting from government prosecution and asset seizures so we ensure that we comply fully with regulatory requirements for Know your customer (KYC) and Anti-money laundering (AML)

ADDRESS BOOK

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 31

SilentVault is a secure private online wallet for making untraceable p2p payments

Unlike other crypto currency wallets SilentVault wallets support heterogeneous asset types such as fiat dollars euros metals gold and silver and crypto coins bitcoin litecoin SilentVault provides anonymous off blockchain payments made in bitcoin and litecoin It also features an integrated p2p escrow exchange where users can trade anonymously among different asset types with other users such as exchanging bitcoins for silver

The SilentVault Spark client is a fully functional Jabber chat client that is a branded and updated version of Spark Since Spark supports a plugin architecture our wallet client is implemented as a plugin You can obtain the SilentVault Spark client with plugin from this page You can also find the source code for both the plugin and SilentVaults customizations to the Spark source base elsewhere on this site A tutorial on SVSpark is here

The SilentVault wallet webstart client is a stand alone program that you can install from within your browser Like the SilentVault Spark client it communicates with the Voucher Safe payment network using extensions to the XMPP protocol This type of communication makes economic transactions indistinguishable from ordinary encrypted instant messaging traffic and avoids any need to run within an insecure browser environment or rely on web domains All client source code is published on this site and while you can run a prefabricated client you are also invited to build your own from source

You are also invited to develop applications for our integrated marketplaces that appear within SilentVault wallets A full API is available for your use as a development tool Please contact our team for details

The SilentVault technology is based on Voucher Safe which was developed 2008 2011 Voucher Safe is also the core technology of the Digital Cash Alliance

httpssilentvaultcom

32 JANUARY 2016

ldquoI love go-o-o-o-ldrdquo-Austin Powers in Goldmember

Not surprisingly most people feel the same

According to the Wall Street Journal gold prices and safe-haven demand in Asia have been skyrocketing since mid-November (1) proving that you donrsquot have to be a sea-faring pirate or a squire in a kingrsquos castle to enjoy its natural glare beauty and above all its ability to stimulate wealth

Since the days of the California Gold Rush people have enjoyed panning for it selling it and most of

all owning it Long considered one of the planetrsquos most precious and desired metals gold has grown heavily in value over the last several years and it appears more and more are trying to get their hands on it every single day

Something else is growing as wellhellip Bitcoin Often regarded as Americarsquos most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin has jumped heavily in value over the last few months spiking from $230 to nearly $350 Unlike gold which exists in solid physical form Bitcoin exists in ones and zeros binary coding that travels through the blockchain the technology that makes Bitcoin transactions possible between users and respective merchants

BITGOLD A MODERN REVOLUTION IN FINANCEBY NICK MARINOFF

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 33

Itrsquos interesting to witness nearly equal popularity rising for two different things that ultimately serve the same purpose and share similar goals Both are designed to enhance the world of finance Both can rise in value and both have the ability to make someone rich overnighthellip So what if we could combine the two What significant differences could there be if Bitcoin and gold were fused into one entity

Well itrsquos already been done Say hello to BitGold an early startup company stationed in Toronto Canada BitGold aims to offer international services for people and businesses to send payments and hold savings with physical gold (2) The company was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb Both have a long history in the financial sector with Sebag previously serving as the Founder and Managing Principal of Braavos Capital (an international private investment organization) and the Chairman of Natural Resource Holdings an investment company involved with natural resource assets (3) Josh Crumb was previously the Senior Metals Strategist at Goldman Sachs (4)

The company alleges that gold bullion is ldquothe worldrsquos oldest asset class and the centuryrsquos best performing currencyrdquo (5) According to BitGoldrsquos website their mission is

ldquohellipTo make gold accessible and useful in digital payments and secure savingshellip Wersquore advancing the digital payments revolution by helping people securely acquire store and now spend gold with unprecedented simplicity BitGold accounts are free and can be opened in minutes We provide users with a secure vault account to purchase and hold gold the ability to make and receive instant gold payments and a prepaid card for spending gold at traditional points of sale Through our network of ATMs customers can fund their accounts with local-currencyrdquo (4)

Present investors backing BitGold include Dundee Capital Markets GMP Securities and Sandstorm Gold although the initial investor in the company was Soros Brothers Investment which is presently run by Alexander Soros the son of Hungarian business magnate George Soros (2)

2015 has been a big year for the company CNBC has stated that BitGold currently serves over 100000 active customers and the platform stores approximately 276 kilograms of bullion within its walls Thatrsquos nearly $11 million total and over $100 per active user (6) In May BitGold began trading on the TSX Venture exchange in Canada and announced the purchase of GoldMoney worth nearly $52 million in Canadian dollars (7)

In June the company made citizens of the United States very happy with the following announcement

ldquoUS residents can sign up on the BitGold platform and buy sell or redeem gold using BitGoldrsquos Aurum payment and settlement technology US residents will also have access to the BitGold mobile app and a prepaid card when these features launch over the coming weeksrdquo (7)

The platform offers a number of products and services beneficial to any gold-lover across the country As the above quote suggests BitGold offers whatrsquos known as Aurum the gold-settlement technology thatrsquos compliant with several US financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase Wells Fargo Citi Bank of America US Bank Fidelity Capital One and Charles Schwab Users with an account at any one of these nationally-recognized banks can instantly redeem gold or authorize gold deposits The transactions thereby increase in safety and automation Users also receive a bonus in that they are usually able to avoid bank wire fees through the process (7)

Using the BitGold app users may also send and receive gold as payments to and from any other user or seller without paying any transaction fees They can even send gold to non-BitGold users via their mobile phones or through a simple email message The company also issues prepaid debit cards allowing users to spend funds directly from their BitGold accounts The card is compatible with ATMs so that users may withdraw local currency (7)

Lastly the company issues special ten-gram gold cubes worth approximately $380 each at press time Users may redeem these cubes on the BitGold platform and may demand physical delivery when they see fit (7)

34 JANUARY 2016

Vice-president of communications and PR Emily Cornelius explained in an email that they have no ldquostereotypicalrdquo user of the companyrsquos services but that there are predominantly three main use cases

ldquoThe traditional gold investor will gravitate to BitGold because our gold is unprecedentedly priced within 1 of spot price and we offer free storage in a Brinks vault of their choice globallyhellip The second use case is the user who seeks a more stable currency for their national savings outside of their potentially volatile local fiat currencyhellip Gold has gained over 3000 vs the US Dollar which is arguably the worldrsquos strongest fiat money Gold may seem to go up down or sideways but in reality and when viewed over long timescales such as the avg human lifecycle ndash it always riseshellip Gold has been rising against 9 of the worldrsquos most famous and well-known currencies almost every year since 2000hellip Thirdly BitGold is a powerful payments platformhellip BitGold allows a user to send an invoice for your labor to someone else anywhere in the world which the recipient can pay using any traditional payment methodhellip This gold is vaulted anywhere even outside their jurisdictionhellip This is important as it allows users to achieve upward mobility that are otherwise hindered by localized issues that are exogenous to their personal journeyrdquo

Cornelius also explained that the company offers ldquoall the benefits and efficiencies of a service like PayPal and a MasterCard but with a universally accepted more stable store of valuerdquo

Presently regulation over BitGold appears to be fairly non-existent BitGold does not list which regulators hold jurisdiction over its staff and operations nor do they list regulatory information regarding their trade practices (7) In fact co-founder Roy Sebag has stated in the past that he believes BitGold is not a bank nor does it serve as a financial institution in any traditional sense as it does not engage in fractional-reserve banking (2)According to page 20 of the companyrsquos initial public filing BitGold is not

ldquohellipEligible to be registered with the Financial

Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canadahellip There can be no assurance that BitGoldrsquos services or Internet platform will be acceptable to foreign regulatory bodies Foreign governments may seek to restrict access to BitGoldrsquos services block BitGoldrsquos website or impose other restrictions that may affect BitGoldrsquos ability to offer service to new or existing users in those for an extended period of time or indefinitelyrdquo (8)

Despite this it was confirmed in July of 2015 that the company did offer its services under the Canadian Bailment Law (9) This occurs in situations where physical personal property is transferred from one person (the bailor) to another for safekeeping and doing so does not require the binding notion of a written contract (10)

Presently the company employs 26 people including Sebag and Crumb Other notable BitGold personnel include Chief Executive Officer Darrell MacMullin Chief Technology Officer Alessandro Premoli Lead Mobile Engineer Paul Mennega and Team Manager Karman Lee The company also employs several vice-presidents five software engineers and two compliance officers (4)

It can be said that BitGold has accomplished quite a bit in less than two years Itrsquos likely such a volatile company has some big plans waiting in the wings for 2016 but Emily Cornelius isnrsquot dropping any hints as to what they could be

ldquoWe have a number of new features services and products cominghellip Yoursquoll have to wait and seerdquo

BitGold is steadily making its mark It has the backing the funds the technology and above all the drive Put all these items together (and add a touch of flair and public desire) and itrsquos clear that BitGold has what it takes to make the world of finance its own

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

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Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

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Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 20: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

20 JANUARY 2016

GOLD TOKENS AND ETHER WALLETFrom this area a user can send Digix Gold Tokens or send Ether

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 21

The transaction hash for a completed certificate purchase is also available with just one click

(see below Raw Transaction Data Transaction Hash)

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets Individual users can create Digix Gold and Asset tokens by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoATM Certificate) to the Minter DAE It is a way to represent gold bars as units of tokens on the Ethereum Blockchain database One Digix Gold token represents 1 gram of gold

(Q) How do I know that there are actual gold bars backing PoA certificates or Digix Gold tokens

All material documents from the Proof of Asset protocol are made available via Swarm - Ethereumrsquos distributed file sharing This would mean that all assaying certificates custodial receipts of deposits and independent auditor documents from the entire chain of custody will be uploaded for public viewing to ascertain the authenticity of all PoA certificates and Digix Gold tokens Each entity in the chain of custody will also digitally sign on our PoA Certificate We only deal with vendors custodians and auditors that have passed our due diligence and that are world renowned with a history of excellence Private audits are also available for added assurance

The Ethereum platform allows users to create applications that run on a decentralized peer-to-peer network of computers without any central control and free from human interruption or corruption Vitalik Buterin invented Ethereum in late 2013 it was formally described by Dr Gavin Wood in 2014 then developed as an open source software project under the GNU Lesser General Public License It was officially launched on July 30 2015 The project is maintained by the Ethereum core developer team (ETHDEV) under the guidance of the non-profit Ethereum Foundation which had raised 31591 Bitcoins during their 2014 crowdsale

22 JANUARY 2016

From this page users may also view the assetrsquos history of trading within the Digix system

GOLD ASSET HISTORY

PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates

are Ethereum smart contracts

that provides a legally and

cryptographically binding

determination of ownership of

physical gold or other assets currently under

the guardianship of a participating custodian on the

Digix decentralized platform It

also certifies the agreement

between the user the vendor the custodian and

the independent auditor

The PoAtrade provides a complete history of the chain of control from the vendor

the custodian and all audit reports This proof guarantees that the purchase of the gold by the user its storage by the

custodian and regular inspection by the auditor has taken place

PoA Certificates can be transferred or sent to any Ethereum account sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or

Gold tokens or redeemed from the Recast DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or Gold

Tokens

Copies of the orignal signed documents are included as a part of the certificatersquos registration in the blockchain

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 23

24 JANUARY 2016

GOLD EXPLORER RECASTER (Above)

The Digix Minter DAE recognizes all valid Digix PoAtrade Certificates and can accept them from a user in exchange for divisible Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens The rules of the Digix platform dictates that only the Digix Minter has the authority through the request of the owner of a Digix PoAtrade certificate to allow that owner to issue their own Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens in exchange for the PoAtrade Certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 25

The interface conveniently walks customers through the online purchase of a Digital Gold PoA Certificate

26 JANUARY 2016

A completed purchase of the digital gold certificate representing this bar

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 27

TOOLS AND SETTINGS

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

28 JANUARY 2016

RESTORE WALLET

In addition to its security features users can configure the Aegis Vault to assign beneficiaries set the time-based distribution of funds or assets and delegate a power of attorney to another individual or a group of people

Digix is committed to bringing Ethereum use to the mainstream and the availability of a secure wallet is essential for realizing this goal

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 29

GENERATE A REDEMPTION KEY

(Q) What is the Digix Recaster Smart Contract

Digix Recaster Smart Contract allows the

conversion of Digix Gold tokens to a PoA card The

PoA card can be sent or received on the blockchain representing an ownership

of an entire gold bar or be used for redemption of

the physical gold bar at our office For example if you have 100 DGX tokens

representing 100g of weight in gold you can exchange

for a PoA card representing a 100g gold cast bar at

Digix This PoA card can be sent and received on the

Ethereum blockchain or be used to schedule a local

pick-up of the physical gold bar at Digix redemption

center in Singapore

You can currently recast into PoA certificates of

100g (100 DGX) or 1000g (1000 DGX) gold cast bar

denominations

30 JANUARY 2016

(Q) What about the Digix audit processWe have four types of audits at Digix

1 PRIVATE AUDITS Clients are welcome to come to our certified custodial vaults in Singapore to inspect your gold bars in a highly private and secure environment

2 EXTERNAL AUDITS We have engaged Inspectorate Singapore (wwwinspectoratecom) to audit our inventory and match them off with customersrsquo holdings at DGX We will hold such inspections at least twice a year

3 CUSTODIAL AUDITS Our certified custodians will provide a physical certification of proof that your gold bars are stored safely in their vaults They will take photographs of your serialized bars per request basis and have them keyed into their inventory management systems Some of our certified custodiansrsquo reputation are also on the line to provide us with their appraisal and storage services as they have to answer to their shareholders as a publicly listed company in Singapore

4 INTERNAL AUDITS We have patented a certification process called Proof of Asset (PoA) where auditors sign on the existence of Gold in our PoA certificate The digital certificate is then uploaded onto the Ethereum Blockchain

(Q) Are there KYCAML requirementsAll users who wish to redeem PoA certificates or Digix Gold Tokens for physical gold bars will have to go through KYC requirements at the pickup The gold bars will only be available for pick up at our office location in Singapore We must ensure that DigixGlobal and participating organizations are protected from any potential liabilities resulting from government prosecution and asset seizures so we ensure that we comply fully with regulatory requirements for Know your customer (KYC) and Anti-money laundering (AML)

ADDRESS BOOK

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 31

SilentVault is a secure private online wallet for making untraceable p2p payments

Unlike other crypto currency wallets SilentVault wallets support heterogeneous asset types such as fiat dollars euros metals gold and silver and crypto coins bitcoin litecoin SilentVault provides anonymous off blockchain payments made in bitcoin and litecoin It also features an integrated p2p escrow exchange where users can trade anonymously among different asset types with other users such as exchanging bitcoins for silver

The SilentVault Spark client is a fully functional Jabber chat client that is a branded and updated version of Spark Since Spark supports a plugin architecture our wallet client is implemented as a plugin You can obtain the SilentVault Spark client with plugin from this page You can also find the source code for both the plugin and SilentVaults customizations to the Spark source base elsewhere on this site A tutorial on SVSpark is here

The SilentVault wallet webstart client is a stand alone program that you can install from within your browser Like the SilentVault Spark client it communicates with the Voucher Safe payment network using extensions to the XMPP protocol This type of communication makes economic transactions indistinguishable from ordinary encrypted instant messaging traffic and avoids any need to run within an insecure browser environment or rely on web domains All client source code is published on this site and while you can run a prefabricated client you are also invited to build your own from source

You are also invited to develop applications for our integrated marketplaces that appear within SilentVault wallets A full API is available for your use as a development tool Please contact our team for details

The SilentVault technology is based on Voucher Safe which was developed 2008 2011 Voucher Safe is also the core technology of the Digital Cash Alliance

httpssilentvaultcom

32 JANUARY 2016

ldquoI love go-o-o-o-ldrdquo-Austin Powers in Goldmember

Not surprisingly most people feel the same

According to the Wall Street Journal gold prices and safe-haven demand in Asia have been skyrocketing since mid-November (1) proving that you donrsquot have to be a sea-faring pirate or a squire in a kingrsquos castle to enjoy its natural glare beauty and above all its ability to stimulate wealth

Since the days of the California Gold Rush people have enjoyed panning for it selling it and most of

all owning it Long considered one of the planetrsquos most precious and desired metals gold has grown heavily in value over the last several years and it appears more and more are trying to get their hands on it every single day

Something else is growing as wellhellip Bitcoin Often regarded as Americarsquos most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin has jumped heavily in value over the last few months spiking from $230 to nearly $350 Unlike gold which exists in solid physical form Bitcoin exists in ones and zeros binary coding that travels through the blockchain the technology that makes Bitcoin transactions possible between users and respective merchants

BITGOLD A MODERN REVOLUTION IN FINANCEBY NICK MARINOFF

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 33

Itrsquos interesting to witness nearly equal popularity rising for two different things that ultimately serve the same purpose and share similar goals Both are designed to enhance the world of finance Both can rise in value and both have the ability to make someone rich overnighthellip So what if we could combine the two What significant differences could there be if Bitcoin and gold were fused into one entity

Well itrsquos already been done Say hello to BitGold an early startup company stationed in Toronto Canada BitGold aims to offer international services for people and businesses to send payments and hold savings with physical gold (2) The company was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb Both have a long history in the financial sector with Sebag previously serving as the Founder and Managing Principal of Braavos Capital (an international private investment organization) and the Chairman of Natural Resource Holdings an investment company involved with natural resource assets (3) Josh Crumb was previously the Senior Metals Strategist at Goldman Sachs (4)

The company alleges that gold bullion is ldquothe worldrsquos oldest asset class and the centuryrsquos best performing currencyrdquo (5) According to BitGoldrsquos website their mission is

ldquohellipTo make gold accessible and useful in digital payments and secure savingshellip Wersquore advancing the digital payments revolution by helping people securely acquire store and now spend gold with unprecedented simplicity BitGold accounts are free and can be opened in minutes We provide users with a secure vault account to purchase and hold gold the ability to make and receive instant gold payments and a prepaid card for spending gold at traditional points of sale Through our network of ATMs customers can fund their accounts with local-currencyrdquo (4)

Present investors backing BitGold include Dundee Capital Markets GMP Securities and Sandstorm Gold although the initial investor in the company was Soros Brothers Investment which is presently run by Alexander Soros the son of Hungarian business magnate George Soros (2)

2015 has been a big year for the company CNBC has stated that BitGold currently serves over 100000 active customers and the platform stores approximately 276 kilograms of bullion within its walls Thatrsquos nearly $11 million total and over $100 per active user (6) In May BitGold began trading on the TSX Venture exchange in Canada and announced the purchase of GoldMoney worth nearly $52 million in Canadian dollars (7)

In June the company made citizens of the United States very happy with the following announcement

ldquoUS residents can sign up on the BitGold platform and buy sell or redeem gold using BitGoldrsquos Aurum payment and settlement technology US residents will also have access to the BitGold mobile app and a prepaid card when these features launch over the coming weeksrdquo (7)

The platform offers a number of products and services beneficial to any gold-lover across the country As the above quote suggests BitGold offers whatrsquos known as Aurum the gold-settlement technology thatrsquos compliant with several US financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase Wells Fargo Citi Bank of America US Bank Fidelity Capital One and Charles Schwab Users with an account at any one of these nationally-recognized banks can instantly redeem gold or authorize gold deposits The transactions thereby increase in safety and automation Users also receive a bonus in that they are usually able to avoid bank wire fees through the process (7)

Using the BitGold app users may also send and receive gold as payments to and from any other user or seller without paying any transaction fees They can even send gold to non-BitGold users via their mobile phones or through a simple email message The company also issues prepaid debit cards allowing users to spend funds directly from their BitGold accounts The card is compatible with ATMs so that users may withdraw local currency (7)

Lastly the company issues special ten-gram gold cubes worth approximately $380 each at press time Users may redeem these cubes on the BitGold platform and may demand physical delivery when they see fit (7)

34 JANUARY 2016

Vice-president of communications and PR Emily Cornelius explained in an email that they have no ldquostereotypicalrdquo user of the companyrsquos services but that there are predominantly three main use cases

ldquoThe traditional gold investor will gravitate to BitGold because our gold is unprecedentedly priced within 1 of spot price and we offer free storage in a Brinks vault of their choice globallyhellip The second use case is the user who seeks a more stable currency for their national savings outside of their potentially volatile local fiat currencyhellip Gold has gained over 3000 vs the US Dollar which is arguably the worldrsquos strongest fiat money Gold may seem to go up down or sideways but in reality and when viewed over long timescales such as the avg human lifecycle ndash it always riseshellip Gold has been rising against 9 of the worldrsquos most famous and well-known currencies almost every year since 2000hellip Thirdly BitGold is a powerful payments platformhellip BitGold allows a user to send an invoice for your labor to someone else anywhere in the world which the recipient can pay using any traditional payment methodhellip This gold is vaulted anywhere even outside their jurisdictionhellip This is important as it allows users to achieve upward mobility that are otherwise hindered by localized issues that are exogenous to their personal journeyrdquo

Cornelius also explained that the company offers ldquoall the benefits and efficiencies of a service like PayPal and a MasterCard but with a universally accepted more stable store of valuerdquo

Presently regulation over BitGold appears to be fairly non-existent BitGold does not list which regulators hold jurisdiction over its staff and operations nor do they list regulatory information regarding their trade practices (7) In fact co-founder Roy Sebag has stated in the past that he believes BitGold is not a bank nor does it serve as a financial institution in any traditional sense as it does not engage in fractional-reserve banking (2)According to page 20 of the companyrsquos initial public filing BitGold is not

ldquohellipEligible to be registered with the Financial

Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canadahellip There can be no assurance that BitGoldrsquos services or Internet platform will be acceptable to foreign regulatory bodies Foreign governments may seek to restrict access to BitGoldrsquos services block BitGoldrsquos website or impose other restrictions that may affect BitGoldrsquos ability to offer service to new or existing users in those for an extended period of time or indefinitelyrdquo (8)

Despite this it was confirmed in July of 2015 that the company did offer its services under the Canadian Bailment Law (9) This occurs in situations where physical personal property is transferred from one person (the bailor) to another for safekeeping and doing so does not require the binding notion of a written contract (10)

Presently the company employs 26 people including Sebag and Crumb Other notable BitGold personnel include Chief Executive Officer Darrell MacMullin Chief Technology Officer Alessandro Premoli Lead Mobile Engineer Paul Mennega and Team Manager Karman Lee The company also employs several vice-presidents five software engineers and two compliance officers (4)

It can be said that BitGold has accomplished quite a bit in less than two years Itrsquos likely such a volatile company has some big plans waiting in the wings for 2016 but Emily Cornelius isnrsquot dropping any hints as to what they could be

ldquoWe have a number of new features services and products cominghellip Yoursquoll have to wait and seerdquo

BitGold is steadily making its mark It has the backing the funds the technology and above all the drive Put all these items together (and add a touch of flair and public desire) and itrsquos clear that BitGold has what it takes to make the world of finance its own

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 21: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 21

The transaction hash for a completed certificate purchase is also available with just one click

(see below Raw Transaction Data Transaction Hash)

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets Individual users can create Digix Gold and Asset tokens by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoATM Certificate) to the Minter DAE It is a way to represent gold bars as units of tokens on the Ethereum Blockchain database One Digix Gold token represents 1 gram of gold

(Q) How do I know that there are actual gold bars backing PoA certificates or Digix Gold tokens

All material documents from the Proof of Asset protocol are made available via Swarm - Ethereumrsquos distributed file sharing This would mean that all assaying certificates custodial receipts of deposits and independent auditor documents from the entire chain of custody will be uploaded for public viewing to ascertain the authenticity of all PoA certificates and Digix Gold tokens Each entity in the chain of custody will also digitally sign on our PoA Certificate We only deal with vendors custodians and auditors that have passed our due diligence and that are world renowned with a history of excellence Private audits are also available for added assurance

The Ethereum platform allows users to create applications that run on a decentralized peer-to-peer network of computers without any central control and free from human interruption or corruption Vitalik Buterin invented Ethereum in late 2013 it was formally described by Dr Gavin Wood in 2014 then developed as an open source software project under the GNU Lesser General Public License It was officially launched on July 30 2015 The project is maintained by the Ethereum core developer team (ETHDEV) under the guidance of the non-profit Ethereum Foundation which had raised 31591 Bitcoins during their 2014 crowdsale

22 JANUARY 2016

From this page users may also view the assetrsquos history of trading within the Digix system

GOLD ASSET HISTORY

PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates

are Ethereum smart contracts

that provides a legally and

cryptographically binding

determination of ownership of

physical gold or other assets currently under

the guardianship of a participating custodian on the

Digix decentralized platform It

also certifies the agreement

between the user the vendor the custodian and

the independent auditor

The PoAtrade provides a complete history of the chain of control from the vendor

the custodian and all audit reports This proof guarantees that the purchase of the gold by the user its storage by the

custodian and regular inspection by the auditor has taken place

PoA Certificates can be transferred or sent to any Ethereum account sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or

Gold tokens or redeemed from the Recast DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or Gold

Tokens

Copies of the orignal signed documents are included as a part of the certificatersquos registration in the blockchain

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 23

24 JANUARY 2016

GOLD EXPLORER RECASTER (Above)

The Digix Minter DAE recognizes all valid Digix PoAtrade Certificates and can accept them from a user in exchange for divisible Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens The rules of the Digix platform dictates that only the Digix Minter has the authority through the request of the owner of a Digix PoAtrade certificate to allow that owner to issue their own Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens in exchange for the PoAtrade Certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 25

The interface conveniently walks customers through the online purchase of a Digital Gold PoA Certificate

26 JANUARY 2016

A completed purchase of the digital gold certificate representing this bar

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 27

TOOLS AND SETTINGS

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

28 JANUARY 2016

RESTORE WALLET

In addition to its security features users can configure the Aegis Vault to assign beneficiaries set the time-based distribution of funds or assets and delegate a power of attorney to another individual or a group of people

Digix is committed to bringing Ethereum use to the mainstream and the availability of a secure wallet is essential for realizing this goal

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 29

GENERATE A REDEMPTION KEY

(Q) What is the Digix Recaster Smart Contract

Digix Recaster Smart Contract allows the

conversion of Digix Gold tokens to a PoA card The

PoA card can be sent or received on the blockchain representing an ownership

of an entire gold bar or be used for redemption of

the physical gold bar at our office For example if you have 100 DGX tokens

representing 100g of weight in gold you can exchange

for a PoA card representing a 100g gold cast bar at

Digix This PoA card can be sent and received on the

Ethereum blockchain or be used to schedule a local

pick-up of the physical gold bar at Digix redemption

center in Singapore

You can currently recast into PoA certificates of

100g (100 DGX) or 1000g (1000 DGX) gold cast bar

denominations

30 JANUARY 2016

(Q) What about the Digix audit processWe have four types of audits at Digix

1 PRIVATE AUDITS Clients are welcome to come to our certified custodial vaults in Singapore to inspect your gold bars in a highly private and secure environment

2 EXTERNAL AUDITS We have engaged Inspectorate Singapore (wwwinspectoratecom) to audit our inventory and match them off with customersrsquo holdings at DGX We will hold such inspections at least twice a year

3 CUSTODIAL AUDITS Our certified custodians will provide a physical certification of proof that your gold bars are stored safely in their vaults They will take photographs of your serialized bars per request basis and have them keyed into their inventory management systems Some of our certified custodiansrsquo reputation are also on the line to provide us with their appraisal and storage services as they have to answer to their shareholders as a publicly listed company in Singapore

4 INTERNAL AUDITS We have patented a certification process called Proof of Asset (PoA) where auditors sign on the existence of Gold in our PoA certificate The digital certificate is then uploaded onto the Ethereum Blockchain

(Q) Are there KYCAML requirementsAll users who wish to redeem PoA certificates or Digix Gold Tokens for physical gold bars will have to go through KYC requirements at the pickup The gold bars will only be available for pick up at our office location in Singapore We must ensure that DigixGlobal and participating organizations are protected from any potential liabilities resulting from government prosecution and asset seizures so we ensure that we comply fully with regulatory requirements for Know your customer (KYC) and Anti-money laundering (AML)

ADDRESS BOOK

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 31

SilentVault is a secure private online wallet for making untraceable p2p payments

Unlike other crypto currency wallets SilentVault wallets support heterogeneous asset types such as fiat dollars euros metals gold and silver and crypto coins bitcoin litecoin SilentVault provides anonymous off blockchain payments made in bitcoin and litecoin It also features an integrated p2p escrow exchange where users can trade anonymously among different asset types with other users such as exchanging bitcoins for silver

The SilentVault Spark client is a fully functional Jabber chat client that is a branded and updated version of Spark Since Spark supports a plugin architecture our wallet client is implemented as a plugin You can obtain the SilentVault Spark client with plugin from this page You can also find the source code for both the plugin and SilentVaults customizations to the Spark source base elsewhere on this site A tutorial on SVSpark is here

The SilentVault wallet webstart client is a stand alone program that you can install from within your browser Like the SilentVault Spark client it communicates with the Voucher Safe payment network using extensions to the XMPP protocol This type of communication makes economic transactions indistinguishable from ordinary encrypted instant messaging traffic and avoids any need to run within an insecure browser environment or rely on web domains All client source code is published on this site and while you can run a prefabricated client you are also invited to build your own from source

You are also invited to develop applications for our integrated marketplaces that appear within SilentVault wallets A full API is available for your use as a development tool Please contact our team for details

The SilentVault technology is based on Voucher Safe which was developed 2008 2011 Voucher Safe is also the core technology of the Digital Cash Alliance

httpssilentvaultcom

32 JANUARY 2016

ldquoI love go-o-o-o-ldrdquo-Austin Powers in Goldmember

Not surprisingly most people feel the same

According to the Wall Street Journal gold prices and safe-haven demand in Asia have been skyrocketing since mid-November (1) proving that you donrsquot have to be a sea-faring pirate or a squire in a kingrsquos castle to enjoy its natural glare beauty and above all its ability to stimulate wealth

Since the days of the California Gold Rush people have enjoyed panning for it selling it and most of

all owning it Long considered one of the planetrsquos most precious and desired metals gold has grown heavily in value over the last several years and it appears more and more are trying to get their hands on it every single day

Something else is growing as wellhellip Bitcoin Often regarded as Americarsquos most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin has jumped heavily in value over the last few months spiking from $230 to nearly $350 Unlike gold which exists in solid physical form Bitcoin exists in ones and zeros binary coding that travels through the blockchain the technology that makes Bitcoin transactions possible between users and respective merchants

BITGOLD A MODERN REVOLUTION IN FINANCEBY NICK MARINOFF

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 33

Itrsquos interesting to witness nearly equal popularity rising for two different things that ultimately serve the same purpose and share similar goals Both are designed to enhance the world of finance Both can rise in value and both have the ability to make someone rich overnighthellip So what if we could combine the two What significant differences could there be if Bitcoin and gold were fused into one entity

Well itrsquos already been done Say hello to BitGold an early startup company stationed in Toronto Canada BitGold aims to offer international services for people and businesses to send payments and hold savings with physical gold (2) The company was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb Both have a long history in the financial sector with Sebag previously serving as the Founder and Managing Principal of Braavos Capital (an international private investment organization) and the Chairman of Natural Resource Holdings an investment company involved with natural resource assets (3) Josh Crumb was previously the Senior Metals Strategist at Goldman Sachs (4)

The company alleges that gold bullion is ldquothe worldrsquos oldest asset class and the centuryrsquos best performing currencyrdquo (5) According to BitGoldrsquos website their mission is

ldquohellipTo make gold accessible and useful in digital payments and secure savingshellip Wersquore advancing the digital payments revolution by helping people securely acquire store and now spend gold with unprecedented simplicity BitGold accounts are free and can be opened in minutes We provide users with a secure vault account to purchase and hold gold the ability to make and receive instant gold payments and a prepaid card for spending gold at traditional points of sale Through our network of ATMs customers can fund their accounts with local-currencyrdquo (4)

Present investors backing BitGold include Dundee Capital Markets GMP Securities and Sandstorm Gold although the initial investor in the company was Soros Brothers Investment which is presently run by Alexander Soros the son of Hungarian business magnate George Soros (2)

2015 has been a big year for the company CNBC has stated that BitGold currently serves over 100000 active customers and the platform stores approximately 276 kilograms of bullion within its walls Thatrsquos nearly $11 million total and over $100 per active user (6) In May BitGold began trading on the TSX Venture exchange in Canada and announced the purchase of GoldMoney worth nearly $52 million in Canadian dollars (7)

In June the company made citizens of the United States very happy with the following announcement

ldquoUS residents can sign up on the BitGold platform and buy sell or redeem gold using BitGoldrsquos Aurum payment and settlement technology US residents will also have access to the BitGold mobile app and a prepaid card when these features launch over the coming weeksrdquo (7)

The platform offers a number of products and services beneficial to any gold-lover across the country As the above quote suggests BitGold offers whatrsquos known as Aurum the gold-settlement technology thatrsquos compliant with several US financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase Wells Fargo Citi Bank of America US Bank Fidelity Capital One and Charles Schwab Users with an account at any one of these nationally-recognized banks can instantly redeem gold or authorize gold deposits The transactions thereby increase in safety and automation Users also receive a bonus in that they are usually able to avoid bank wire fees through the process (7)

Using the BitGold app users may also send and receive gold as payments to and from any other user or seller without paying any transaction fees They can even send gold to non-BitGold users via their mobile phones or through a simple email message The company also issues prepaid debit cards allowing users to spend funds directly from their BitGold accounts The card is compatible with ATMs so that users may withdraw local currency (7)

Lastly the company issues special ten-gram gold cubes worth approximately $380 each at press time Users may redeem these cubes on the BitGold platform and may demand physical delivery when they see fit (7)

34 JANUARY 2016

Vice-president of communications and PR Emily Cornelius explained in an email that they have no ldquostereotypicalrdquo user of the companyrsquos services but that there are predominantly three main use cases

ldquoThe traditional gold investor will gravitate to BitGold because our gold is unprecedentedly priced within 1 of spot price and we offer free storage in a Brinks vault of their choice globallyhellip The second use case is the user who seeks a more stable currency for their national savings outside of their potentially volatile local fiat currencyhellip Gold has gained over 3000 vs the US Dollar which is arguably the worldrsquos strongest fiat money Gold may seem to go up down or sideways but in reality and when viewed over long timescales such as the avg human lifecycle ndash it always riseshellip Gold has been rising against 9 of the worldrsquos most famous and well-known currencies almost every year since 2000hellip Thirdly BitGold is a powerful payments platformhellip BitGold allows a user to send an invoice for your labor to someone else anywhere in the world which the recipient can pay using any traditional payment methodhellip This gold is vaulted anywhere even outside their jurisdictionhellip This is important as it allows users to achieve upward mobility that are otherwise hindered by localized issues that are exogenous to their personal journeyrdquo

Cornelius also explained that the company offers ldquoall the benefits and efficiencies of a service like PayPal and a MasterCard but with a universally accepted more stable store of valuerdquo

Presently regulation over BitGold appears to be fairly non-existent BitGold does not list which regulators hold jurisdiction over its staff and operations nor do they list regulatory information regarding their trade practices (7) In fact co-founder Roy Sebag has stated in the past that he believes BitGold is not a bank nor does it serve as a financial institution in any traditional sense as it does not engage in fractional-reserve banking (2)According to page 20 of the companyrsquos initial public filing BitGold is not

ldquohellipEligible to be registered with the Financial

Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canadahellip There can be no assurance that BitGoldrsquos services or Internet platform will be acceptable to foreign regulatory bodies Foreign governments may seek to restrict access to BitGoldrsquos services block BitGoldrsquos website or impose other restrictions that may affect BitGoldrsquos ability to offer service to new or existing users in those for an extended period of time or indefinitelyrdquo (8)

Despite this it was confirmed in July of 2015 that the company did offer its services under the Canadian Bailment Law (9) This occurs in situations where physical personal property is transferred from one person (the bailor) to another for safekeeping and doing so does not require the binding notion of a written contract (10)

Presently the company employs 26 people including Sebag and Crumb Other notable BitGold personnel include Chief Executive Officer Darrell MacMullin Chief Technology Officer Alessandro Premoli Lead Mobile Engineer Paul Mennega and Team Manager Karman Lee The company also employs several vice-presidents five software engineers and two compliance officers (4)

It can be said that BitGold has accomplished quite a bit in less than two years Itrsquos likely such a volatile company has some big plans waiting in the wings for 2016 but Emily Cornelius isnrsquot dropping any hints as to what they could be

ldquoWe have a number of new features services and products cominghellip Yoursquoll have to wait and seerdquo

BitGold is steadily making its mark It has the backing the funds the technology and above all the drive Put all these items together (and add a touch of flair and public desire) and itrsquos clear that BitGold has what it takes to make the world of finance its own

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

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Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 22: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

22 JANUARY 2016

From this page users may also view the assetrsquos history of trading within the Digix system

GOLD ASSET HISTORY

PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates

are Ethereum smart contracts

that provides a legally and

cryptographically binding

determination of ownership of

physical gold or other assets currently under

the guardianship of a participating custodian on the

Digix decentralized platform It

also certifies the agreement

between the user the vendor the custodian and

the independent auditor

The PoAtrade provides a complete history of the chain of control from the vendor

the custodian and all audit reports This proof guarantees that the purchase of the gold by the user its storage by the

custodian and regular inspection by the auditor has taken place

PoA Certificates can be transferred or sent to any Ethereum account sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or

Gold tokens or redeemed from the Recast DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or Gold

Tokens

Copies of the orignal signed documents are included as a part of the certificatersquos registration in the blockchain

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 23

24 JANUARY 2016

GOLD EXPLORER RECASTER (Above)

The Digix Minter DAE recognizes all valid Digix PoAtrade Certificates and can accept them from a user in exchange for divisible Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens The rules of the Digix platform dictates that only the Digix Minter has the authority through the request of the owner of a Digix PoAtrade certificate to allow that owner to issue their own Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens in exchange for the PoAtrade Certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 25

The interface conveniently walks customers through the online purchase of a Digital Gold PoA Certificate

26 JANUARY 2016

A completed purchase of the digital gold certificate representing this bar

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 27

TOOLS AND SETTINGS

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

28 JANUARY 2016

RESTORE WALLET

In addition to its security features users can configure the Aegis Vault to assign beneficiaries set the time-based distribution of funds or assets and delegate a power of attorney to another individual or a group of people

Digix is committed to bringing Ethereum use to the mainstream and the availability of a secure wallet is essential for realizing this goal

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 29

GENERATE A REDEMPTION KEY

(Q) What is the Digix Recaster Smart Contract

Digix Recaster Smart Contract allows the

conversion of Digix Gold tokens to a PoA card The

PoA card can be sent or received on the blockchain representing an ownership

of an entire gold bar or be used for redemption of

the physical gold bar at our office For example if you have 100 DGX tokens

representing 100g of weight in gold you can exchange

for a PoA card representing a 100g gold cast bar at

Digix This PoA card can be sent and received on the

Ethereum blockchain or be used to schedule a local

pick-up of the physical gold bar at Digix redemption

center in Singapore

You can currently recast into PoA certificates of

100g (100 DGX) or 1000g (1000 DGX) gold cast bar

denominations

30 JANUARY 2016

(Q) What about the Digix audit processWe have four types of audits at Digix

1 PRIVATE AUDITS Clients are welcome to come to our certified custodial vaults in Singapore to inspect your gold bars in a highly private and secure environment

2 EXTERNAL AUDITS We have engaged Inspectorate Singapore (wwwinspectoratecom) to audit our inventory and match them off with customersrsquo holdings at DGX We will hold such inspections at least twice a year

3 CUSTODIAL AUDITS Our certified custodians will provide a physical certification of proof that your gold bars are stored safely in their vaults They will take photographs of your serialized bars per request basis and have them keyed into their inventory management systems Some of our certified custodiansrsquo reputation are also on the line to provide us with their appraisal and storage services as they have to answer to their shareholders as a publicly listed company in Singapore

4 INTERNAL AUDITS We have patented a certification process called Proof of Asset (PoA) where auditors sign on the existence of Gold in our PoA certificate The digital certificate is then uploaded onto the Ethereum Blockchain

(Q) Are there KYCAML requirementsAll users who wish to redeem PoA certificates or Digix Gold Tokens for physical gold bars will have to go through KYC requirements at the pickup The gold bars will only be available for pick up at our office location in Singapore We must ensure that DigixGlobal and participating organizations are protected from any potential liabilities resulting from government prosecution and asset seizures so we ensure that we comply fully with regulatory requirements for Know your customer (KYC) and Anti-money laundering (AML)

ADDRESS BOOK

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 31

SilentVault is a secure private online wallet for making untraceable p2p payments

Unlike other crypto currency wallets SilentVault wallets support heterogeneous asset types such as fiat dollars euros metals gold and silver and crypto coins bitcoin litecoin SilentVault provides anonymous off blockchain payments made in bitcoin and litecoin It also features an integrated p2p escrow exchange where users can trade anonymously among different asset types with other users such as exchanging bitcoins for silver

The SilentVault Spark client is a fully functional Jabber chat client that is a branded and updated version of Spark Since Spark supports a plugin architecture our wallet client is implemented as a plugin You can obtain the SilentVault Spark client with plugin from this page You can also find the source code for both the plugin and SilentVaults customizations to the Spark source base elsewhere on this site A tutorial on SVSpark is here

The SilentVault wallet webstart client is a stand alone program that you can install from within your browser Like the SilentVault Spark client it communicates with the Voucher Safe payment network using extensions to the XMPP protocol This type of communication makes economic transactions indistinguishable from ordinary encrypted instant messaging traffic and avoids any need to run within an insecure browser environment or rely on web domains All client source code is published on this site and while you can run a prefabricated client you are also invited to build your own from source

You are also invited to develop applications for our integrated marketplaces that appear within SilentVault wallets A full API is available for your use as a development tool Please contact our team for details

The SilentVault technology is based on Voucher Safe which was developed 2008 2011 Voucher Safe is also the core technology of the Digital Cash Alliance

httpssilentvaultcom

32 JANUARY 2016

ldquoI love go-o-o-o-ldrdquo-Austin Powers in Goldmember

Not surprisingly most people feel the same

According to the Wall Street Journal gold prices and safe-haven demand in Asia have been skyrocketing since mid-November (1) proving that you donrsquot have to be a sea-faring pirate or a squire in a kingrsquos castle to enjoy its natural glare beauty and above all its ability to stimulate wealth

Since the days of the California Gold Rush people have enjoyed panning for it selling it and most of

all owning it Long considered one of the planetrsquos most precious and desired metals gold has grown heavily in value over the last several years and it appears more and more are trying to get their hands on it every single day

Something else is growing as wellhellip Bitcoin Often regarded as Americarsquos most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin has jumped heavily in value over the last few months spiking from $230 to nearly $350 Unlike gold which exists in solid physical form Bitcoin exists in ones and zeros binary coding that travels through the blockchain the technology that makes Bitcoin transactions possible between users and respective merchants

BITGOLD A MODERN REVOLUTION IN FINANCEBY NICK MARINOFF

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 33

Itrsquos interesting to witness nearly equal popularity rising for two different things that ultimately serve the same purpose and share similar goals Both are designed to enhance the world of finance Both can rise in value and both have the ability to make someone rich overnighthellip So what if we could combine the two What significant differences could there be if Bitcoin and gold were fused into one entity

Well itrsquos already been done Say hello to BitGold an early startup company stationed in Toronto Canada BitGold aims to offer international services for people and businesses to send payments and hold savings with physical gold (2) The company was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb Both have a long history in the financial sector with Sebag previously serving as the Founder and Managing Principal of Braavos Capital (an international private investment organization) and the Chairman of Natural Resource Holdings an investment company involved with natural resource assets (3) Josh Crumb was previously the Senior Metals Strategist at Goldman Sachs (4)

The company alleges that gold bullion is ldquothe worldrsquos oldest asset class and the centuryrsquos best performing currencyrdquo (5) According to BitGoldrsquos website their mission is

ldquohellipTo make gold accessible and useful in digital payments and secure savingshellip Wersquore advancing the digital payments revolution by helping people securely acquire store and now spend gold with unprecedented simplicity BitGold accounts are free and can be opened in minutes We provide users with a secure vault account to purchase and hold gold the ability to make and receive instant gold payments and a prepaid card for spending gold at traditional points of sale Through our network of ATMs customers can fund their accounts with local-currencyrdquo (4)

Present investors backing BitGold include Dundee Capital Markets GMP Securities and Sandstorm Gold although the initial investor in the company was Soros Brothers Investment which is presently run by Alexander Soros the son of Hungarian business magnate George Soros (2)

2015 has been a big year for the company CNBC has stated that BitGold currently serves over 100000 active customers and the platform stores approximately 276 kilograms of bullion within its walls Thatrsquos nearly $11 million total and over $100 per active user (6) In May BitGold began trading on the TSX Venture exchange in Canada and announced the purchase of GoldMoney worth nearly $52 million in Canadian dollars (7)

In June the company made citizens of the United States very happy with the following announcement

ldquoUS residents can sign up on the BitGold platform and buy sell or redeem gold using BitGoldrsquos Aurum payment and settlement technology US residents will also have access to the BitGold mobile app and a prepaid card when these features launch over the coming weeksrdquo (7)

The platform offers a number of products and services beneficial to any gold-lover across the country As the above quote suggests BitGold offers whatrsquos known as Aurum the gold-settlement technology thatrsquos compliant with several US financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase Wells Fargo Citi Bank of America US Bank Fidelity Capital One and Charles Schwab Users with an account at any one of these nationally-recognized banks can instantly redeem gold or authorize gold deposits The transactions thereby increase in safety and automation Users also receive a bonus in that they are usually able to avoid bank wire fees through the process (7)

Using the BitGold app users may also send and receive gold as payments to and from any other user or seller without paying any transaction fees They can even send gold to non-BitGold users via their mobile phones or through a simple email message The company also issues prepaid debit cards allowing users to spend funds directly from their BitGold accounts The card is compatible with ATMs so that users may withdraw local currency (7)

Lastly the company issues special ten-gram gold cubes worth approximately $380 each at press time Users may redeem these cubes on the BitGold platform and may demand physical delivery when they see fit (7)

34 JANUARY 2016

Vice-president of communications and PR Emily Cornelius explained in an email that they have no ldquostereotypicalrdquo user of the companyrsquos services but that there are predominantly three main use cases

ldquoThe traditional gold investor will gravitate to BitGold because our gold is unprecedentedly priced within 1 of spot price and we offer free storage in a Brinks vault of their choice globallyhellip The second use case is the user who seeks a more stable currency for their national savings outside of their potentially volatile local fiat currencyhellip Gold has gained over 3000 vs the US Dollar which is arguably the worldrsquos strongest fiat money Gold may seem to go up down or sideways but in reality and when viewed over long timescales such as the avg human lifecycle ndash it always riseshellip Gold has been rising against 9 of the worldrsquos most famous and well-known currencies almost every year since 2000hellip Thirdly BitGold is a powerful payments platformhellip BitGold allows a user to send an invoice for your labor to someone else anywhere in the world which the recipient can pay using any traditional payment methodhellip This gold is vaulted anywhere even outside their jurisdictionhellip This is important as it allows users to achieve upward mobility that are otherwise hindered by localized issues that are exogenous to their personal journeyrdquo

Cornelius also explained that the company offers ldquoall the benefits and efficiencies of a service like PayPal and a MasterCard but with a universally accepted more stable store of valuerdquo

Presently regulation over BitGold appears to be fairly non-existent BitGold does not list which regulators hold jurisdiction over its staff and operations nor do they list regulatory information regarding their trade practices (7) In fact co-founder Roy Sebag has stated in the past that he believes BitGold is not a bank nor does it serve as a financial institution in any traditional sense as it does not engage in fractional-reserve banking (2)According to page 20 of the companyrsquos initial public filing BitGold is not

ldquohellipEligible to be registered with the Financial

Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canadahellip There can be no assurance that BitGoldrsquos services or Internet platform will be acceptable to foreign regulatory bodies Foreign governments may seek to restrict access to BitGoldrsquos services block BitGoldrsquos website or impose other restrictions that may affect BitGoldrsquos ability to offer service to new or existing users in those for an extended period of time or indefinitelyrdquo (8)

Despite this it was confirmed in July of 2015 that the company did offer its services under the Canadian Bailment Law (9) This occurs in situations where physical personal property is transferred from one person (the bailor) to another for safekeeping and doing so does not require the binding notion of a written contract (10)

Presently the company employs 26 people including Sebag and Crumb Other notable BitGold personnel include Chief Executive Officer Darrell MacMullin Chief Technology Officer Alessandro Premoli Lead Mobile Engineer Paul Mennega and Team Manager Karman Lee The company also employs several vice-presidents five software engineers and two compliance officers (4)

It can be said that BitGold has accomplished quite a bit in less than two years Itrsquos likely such a volatile company has some big plans waiting in the wings for 2016 but Emily Cornelius isnrsquot dropping any hints as to what they could be

ldquoWe have a number of new features services and products cominghellip Yoursquoll have to wait and seerdquo

BitGold is steadily making its mark It has the backing the funds the technology and above all the drive Put all these items together (and add a touch of flair and public desire) and itrsquos clear that BitGold has what it takes to make the world of finance its own

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 23: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

PoAtrade Digital Ownership Certificates

are Ethereum smart contracts

that provides a legally and

cryptographically binding

determination of ownership of

physical gold or other assets currently under

the guardianship of a participating custodian on the

Digix decentralized platform It

also certifies the agreement

between the user the vendor the custodian and

the independent auditor

The PoAtrade provides a complete history of the chain of control from the vendor

the custodian and all audit reports This proof guarantees that the purchase of the gold by the user its storage by the

custodian and regular inspection by the auditor has taken place

PoA Certificates can be transferred or sent to any Ethereum account sent to the Minter DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or

Gold tokens or redeemed from the Recast DAE in exchange for Digix Asset or Gold

Tokens

Copies of the orignal signed documents are included as a part of the certificatersquos registration in the blockchain

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 23

24 JANUARY 2016

GOLD EXPLORER RECASTER (Above)

The Digix Minter DAE recognizes all valid Digix PoAtrade Certificates and can accept them from a user in exchange for divisible Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens The rules of the Digix platform dictates that only the Digix Minter has the authority through the request of the owner of a Digix PoAtrade certificate to allow that owner to issue their own Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens in exchange for the PoAtrade Certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 25

The interface conveniently walks customers through the online purchase of a Digital Gold PoA Certificate

26 JANUARY 2016

A completed purchase of the digital gold certificate representing this bar

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 27

TOOLS AND SETTINGS

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

28 JANUARY 2016

RESTORE WALLET

In addition to its security features users can configure the Aegis Vault to assign beneficiaries set the time-based distribution of funds or assets and delegate a power of attorney to another individual or a group of people

Digix is committed to bringing Ethereum use to the mainstream and the availability of a secure wallet is essential for realizing this goal

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 29

GENERATE A REDEMPTION KEY

(Q) What is the Digix Recaster Smart Contract

Digix Recaster Smart Contract allows the

conversion of Digix Gold tokens to a PoA card The

PoA card can be sent or received on the blockchain representing an ownership

of an entire gold bar or be used for redemption of

the physical gold bar at our office For example if you have 100 DGX tokens

representing 100g of weight in gold you can exchange

for a PoA card representing a 100g gold cast bar at

Digix This PoA card can be sent and received on the

Ethereum blockchain or be used to schedule a local

pick-up of the physical gold bar at Digix redemption

center in Singapore

You can currently recast into PoA certificates of

100g (100 DGX) or 1000g (1000 DGX) gold cast bar

denominations

30 JANUARY 2016

(Q) What about the Digix audit processWe have four types of audits at Digix

1 PRIVATE AUDITS Clients are welcome to come to our certified custodial vaults in Singapore to inspect your gold bars in a highly private and secure environment

2 EXTERNAL AUDITS We have engaged Inspectorate Singapore (wwwinspectoratecom) to audit our inventory and match them off with customersrsquo holdings at DGX We will hold such inspections at least twice a year

3 CUSTODIAL AUDITS Our certified custodians will provide a physical certification of proof that your gold bars are stored safely in their vaults They will take photographs of your serialized bars per request basis and have them keyed into their inventory management systems Some of our certified custodiansrsquo reputation are also on the line to provide us with their appraisal and storage services as they have to answer to their shareholders as a publicly listed company in Singapore

4 INTERNAL AUDITS We have patented a certification process called Proof of Asset (PoA) where auditors sign on the existence of Gold in our PoA certificate The digital certificate is then uploaded onto the Ethereum Blockchain

(Q) Are there KYCAML requirementsAll users who wish to redeem PoA certificates or Digix Gold Tokens for physical gold bars will have to go through KYC requirements at the pickup The gold bars will only be available for pick up at our office location in Singapore We must ensure that DigixGlobal and participating organizations are protected from any potential liabilities resulting from government prosecution and asset seizures so we ensure that we comply fully with regulatory requirements for Know your customer (KYC) and Anti-money laundering (AML)

ADDRESS BOOK

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 31

SilentVault is a secure private online wallet for making untraceable p2p payments

Unlike other crypto currency wallets SilentVault wallets support heterogeneous asset types such as fiat dollars euros metals gold and silver and crypto coins bitcoin litecoin SilentVault provides anonymous off blockchain payments made in bitcoin and litecoin It also features an integrated p2p escrow exchange where users can trade anonymously among different asset types with other users such as exchanging bitcoins for silver

The SilentVault Spark client is a fully functional Jabber chat client that is a branded and updated version of Spark Since Spark supports a plugin architecture our wallet client is implemented as a plugin You can obtain the SilentVault Spark client with plugin from this page You can also find the source code for both the plugin and SilentVaults customizations to the Spark source base elsewhere on this site A tutorial on SVSpark is here

The SilentVault wallet webstart client is a stand alone program that you can install from within your browser Like the SilentVault Spark client it communicates with the Voucher Safe payment network using extensions to the XMPP protocol This type of communication makes economic transactions indistinguishable from ordinary encrypted instant messaging traffic and avoids any need to run within an insecure browser environment or rely on web domains All client source code is published on this site and while you can run a prefabricated client you are also invited to build your own from source

You are also invited to develop applications for our integrated marketplaces that appear within SilentVault wallets A full API is available for your use as a development tool Please contact our team for details

The SilentVault technology is based on Voucher Safe which was developed 2008 2011 Voucher Safe is also the core technology of the Digital Cash Alliance

httpssilentvaultcom

32 JANUARY 2016

ldquoI love go-o-o-o-ldrdquo-Austin Powers in Goldmember

Not surprisingly most people feel the same

According to the Wall Street Journal gold prices and safe-haven demand in Asia have been skyrocketing since mid-November (1) proving that you donrsquot have to be a sea-faring pirate or a squire in a kingrsquos castle to enjoy its natural glare beauty and above all its ability to stimulate wealth

Since the days of the California Gold Rush people have enjoyed panning for it selling it and most of

all owning it Long considered one of the planetrsquos most precious and desired metals gold has grown heavily in value over the last several years and it appears more and more are trying to get their hands on it every single day

Something else is growing as wellhellip Bitcoin Often regarded as Americarsquos most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin has jumped heavily in value over the last few months spiking from $230 to nearly $350 Unlike gold which exists in solid physical form Bitcoin exists in ones and zeros binary coding that travels through the blockchain the technology that makes Bitcoin transactions possible between users and respective merchants

BITGOLD A MODERN REVOLUTION IN FINANCEBY NICK MARINOFF

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 33

Itrsquos interesting to witness nearly equal popularity rising for two different things that ultimately serve the same purpose and share similar goals Both are designed to enhance the world of finance Both can rise in value and both have the ability to make someone rich overnighthellip So what if we could combine the two What significant differences could there be if Bitcoin and gold were fused into one entity

Well itrsquos already been done Say hello to BitGold an early startup company stationed in Toronto Canada BitGold aims to offer international services for people and businesses to send payments and hold savings with physical gold (2) The company was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb Both have a long history in the financial sector with Sebag previously serving as the Founder and Managing Principal of Braavos Capital (an international private investment organization) and the Chairman of Natural Resource Holdings an investment company involved with natural resource assets (3) Josh Crumb was previously the Senior Metals Strategist at Goldman Sachs (4)

The company alleges that gold bullion is ldquothe worldrsquos oldest asset class and the centuryrsquos best performing currencyrdquo (5) According to BitGoldrsquos website their mission is

ldquohellipTo make gold accessible and useful in digital payments and secure savingshellip Wersquore advancing the digital payments revolution by helping people securely acquire store and now spend gold with unprecedented simplicity BitGold accounts are free and can be opened in minutes We provide users with a secure vault account to purchase and hold gold the ability to make and receive instant gold payments and a prepaid card for spending gold at traditional points of sale Through our network of ATMs customers can fund their accounts with local-currencyrdquo (4)

Present investors backing BitGold include Dundee Capital Markets GMP Securities and Sandstorm Gold although the initial investor in the company was Soros Brothers Investment which is presently run by Alexander Soros the son of Hungarian business magnate George Soros (2)

2015 has been a big year for the company CNBC has stated that BitGold currently serves over 100000 active customers and the platform stores approximately 276 kilograms of bullion within its walls Thatrsquos nearly $11 million total and over $100 per active user (6) In May BitGold began trading on the TSX Venture exchange in Canada and announced the purchase of GoldMoney worth nearly $52 million in Canadian dollars (7)

In June the company made citizens of the United States very happy with the following announcement

ldquoUS residents can sign up on the BitGold platform and buy sell or redeem gold using BitGoldrsquos Aurum payment and settlement technology US residents will also have access to the BitGold mobile app and a prepaid card when these features launch over the coming weeksrdquo (7)

The platform offers a number of products and services beneficial to any gold-lover across the country As the above quote suggests BitGold offers whatrsquos known as Aurum the gold-settlement technology thatrsquos compliant with several US financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase Wells Fargo Citi Bank of America US Bank Fidelity Capital One and Charles Schwab Users with an account at any one of these nationally-recognized banks can instantly redeem gold or authorize gold deposits The transactions thereby increase in safety and automation Users also receive a bonus in that they are usually able to avoid bank wire fees through the process (7)

Using the BitGold app users may also send and receive gold as payments to and from any other user or seller without paying any transaction fees They can even send gold to non-BitGold users via their mobile phones or through a simple email message The company also issues prepaid debit cards allowing users to spend funds directly from their BitGold accounts The card is compatible with ATMs so that users may withdraw local currency (7)

Lastly the company issues special ten-gram gold cubes worth approximately $380 each at press time Users may redeem these cubes on the BitGold platform and may demand physical delivery when they see fit (7)

34 JANUARY 2016

Vice-president of communications and PR Emily Cornelius explained in an email that they have no ldquostereotypicalrdquo user of the companyrsquos services but that there are predominantly three main use cases

ldquoThe traditional gold investor will gravitate to BitGold because our gold is unprecedentedly priced within 1 of spot price and we offer free storage in a Brinks vault of their choice globallyhellip The second use case is the user who seeks a more stable currency for their national savings outside of their potentially volatile local fiat currencyhellip Gold has gained over 3000 vs the US Dollar which is arguably the worldrsquos strongest fiat money Gold may seem to go up down or sideways but in reality and when viewed over long timescales such as the avg human lifecycle ndash it always riseshellip Gold has been rising against 9 of the worldrsquos most famous and well-known currencies almost every year since 2000hellip Thirdly BitGold is a powerful payments platformhellip BitGold allows a user to send an invoice for your labor to someone else anywhere in the world which the recipient can pay using any traditional payment methodhellip This gold is vaulted anywhere even outside their jurisdictionhellip This is important as it allows users to achieve upward mobility that are otherwise hindered by localized issues that are exogenous to their personal journeyrdquo

Cornelius also explained that the company offers ldquoall the benefits and efficiencies of a service like PayPal and a MasterCard but with a universally accepted more stable store of valuerdquo

Presently regulation over BitGold appears to be fairly non-existent BitGold does not list which regulators hold jurisdiction over its staff and operations nor do they list regulatory information regarding their trade practices (7) In fact co-founder Roy Sebag has stated in the past that he believes BitGold is not a bank nor does it serve as a financial institution in any traditional sense as it does not engage in fractional-reserve banking (2)According to page 20 of the companyrsquos initial public filing BitGold is not

ldquohellipEligible to be registered with the Financial

Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canadahellip There can be no assurance that BitGoldrsquos services or Internet platform will be acceptable to foreign regulatory bodies Foreign governments may seek to restrict access to BitGoldrsquos services block BitGoldrsquos website or impose other restrictions that may affect BitGoldrsquos ability to offer service to new or existing users in those for an extended period of time or indefinitelyrdquo (8)

Despite this it was confirmed in July of 2015 that the company did offer its services under the Canadian Bailment Law (9) This occurs in situations where physical personal property is transferred from one person (the bailor) to another for safekeeping and doing so does not require the binding notion of a written contract (10)

Presently the company employs 26 people including Sebag and Crumb Other notable BitGold personnel include Chief Executive Officer Darrell MacMullin Chief Technology Officer Alessandro Premoli Lead Mobile Engineer Paul Mennega and Team Manager Karman Lee The company also employs several vice-presidents five software engineers and two compliance officers (4)

It can be said that BitGold has accomplished quite a bit in less than two years Itrsquos likely such a volatile company has some big plans waiting in the wings for 2016 but Emily Cornelius isnrsquot dropping any hints as to what they could be

ldquoWe have a number of new features services and products cominghellip Yoursquoll have to wait and seerdquo

BitGold is steadily making its mark It has the backing the funds the technology and above all the drive Put all these items together (and add a touch of flair and public desire) and itrsquos clear that BitGold has what it takes to make the world of finance its own

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 24: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

24 JANUARY 2016

GOLD EXPLORER RECASTER (Above)

The Digix Minter DAE recognizes all valid Digix PoAtrade Certificates and can accept them from a user in exchange for divisible Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens The rules of the Digix platform dictates that only the Digix Minter has the authority through the request of the owner of a Digix PoAtrade certificate to allow that owner to issue their own Digix Gold or Digix Asset tokens in exchange for the PoAtrade Certificate

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 25

The interface conveniently walks customers through the online purchase of a Digital Gold PoA Certificate

26 JANUARY 2016

A completed purchase of the digital gold certificate representing this bar

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 27

TOOLS AND SETTINGS

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

28 JANUARY 2016

RESTORE WALLET

In addition to its security features users can configure the Aegis Vault to assign beneficiaries set the time-based distribution of funds or assets and delegate a power of attorney to another individual or a group of people

Digix is committed to bringing Ethereum use to the mainstream and the availability of a secure wallet is essential for realizing this goal

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 29

GENERATE A REDEMPTION KEY

(Q) What is the Digix Recaster Smart Contract

Digix Recaster Smart Contract allows the

conversion of Digix Gold tokens to a PoA card The

PoA card can be sent or received on the blockchain representing an ownership

of an entire gold bar or be used for redemption of

the physical gold bar at our office For example if you have 100 DGX tokens

representing 100g of weight in gold you can exchange

for a PoA card representing a 100g gold cast bar at

Digix This PoA card can be sent and received on the

Ethereum blockchain or be used to schedule a local

pick-up of the physical gold bar at Digix redemption

center in Singapore

You can currently recast into PoA certificates of

100g (100 DGX) or 1000g (1000 DGX) gold cast bar

denominations

30 JANUARY 2016

(Q) What about the Digix audit processWe have four types of audits at Digix

1 PRIVATE AUDITS Clients are welcome to come to our certified custodial vaults in Singapore to inspect your gold bars in a highly private and secure environment

2 EXTERNAL AUDITS We have engaged Inspectorate Singapore (wwwinspectoratecom) to audit our inventory and match them off with customersrsquo holdings at DGX We will hold such inspections at least twice a year

3 CUSTODIAL AUDITS Our certified custodians will provide a physical certification of proof that your gold bars are stored safely in their vaults They will take photographs of your serialized bars per request basis and have them keyed into their inventory management systems Some of our certified custodiansrsquo reputation are also on the line to provide us with their appraisal and storage services as they have to answer to their shareholders as a publicly listed company in Singapore

4 INTERNAL AUDITS We have patented a certification process called Proof of Asset (PoA) where auditors sign on the existence of Gold in our PoA certificate The digital certificate is then uploaded onto the Ethereum Blockchain

(Q) Are there KYCAML requirementsAll users who wish to redeem PoA certificates or Digix Gold Tokens for physical gold bars will have to go through KYC requirements at the pickup The gold bars will only be available for pick up at our office location in Singapore We must ensure that DigixGlobal and participating organizations are protected from any potential liabilities resulting from government prosecution and asset seizures so we ensure that we comply fully with regulatory requirements for Know your customer (KYC) and Anti-money laundering (AML)

ADDRESS BOOK

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 31

SilentVault is a secure private online wallet for making untraceable p2p payments

Unlike other crypto currency wallets SilentVault wallets support heterogeneous asset types such as fiat dollars euros metals gold and silver and crypto coins bitcoin litecoin SilentVault provides anonymous off blockchain payments made in bitcoin and litecoin It also features an integrated p2p escrow exchange where users can trade anonymously among different asset types with other users such as exchanging bitcoins for silver

The SilentVault Spark client is a fully functional Jabber chat client that is a branded and updated version of Spark Since Spark supports a plugin architecture our wallet client is implemented as a plugin You can obtain the SilentVault Spark client with plugin from this page You can also find the source code for both the plugin and SilentVaults customizations to the Spark source base elsewhere on this site A tutorial on SVSpark is here

The SilentVault wallet webstart client is a stand alone program that you can install from within your browser Like the SilentVault Spark client it communicates with the Voucher Safe payment network using extensions to the XMPP protocol This type of communication makes economic transactions indistinguishable from ordinary encrypted instant messaging traffic and avoids any need to run within an insecure browser environment or rely on web domains All client source code is published on this site and while you can run a prefabricated client you are also invited to build your own from source

You are also invited to develop applications for our integrated marketplaces that appear within SilentVault wallets A full API is available for your use as a development tool Please contact our team for details

The SilentVault technology is based on Voucher Safe which was developed 2008 2011 Voucher Safe is also the core technology of the Digital Cash Alliance

httpssilentvaultcom

32 JANUARY 2016

ldquoI love go-o-o-o-ldrdquo-Austin Powers in Goldmember

Not surprisingly most people feel the same

According to the Wall Street Journal gold prices and safe-haven demand in Asia have been skyrocketing since mid-November (1) proving that you donrsquot have to be a sea-faring pirate or a squire in a kingrsquos castle to enjoy its natural glare beauty and above all its ability to stimulate wealth

Since the days of the California Gold Rush people have enjoyed panning for it selling it and most of

all owning it Long considered one of the planetrsquos most precious and desired metals gold has grown heavily in value over the last several years and it appears more and more are trying to get their hands on it every single day

Something else is growing as wellhellip Bitcoin Often regarded as Americarsquos most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin has jumped heavily in value over the last few months spiking from $230 to nearly $350 Unlike gold which exists in solid physical form Bitcoin exists in ones and zeros binary coding that travels through the blockchain the technology that makes Bitcoin transactions possible between users and respective merchants

BITGOLD A MODERN REVOLUTION IN FINANCEBY NICK MARINOFF

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 33

Itrsquos interesting to witness nearly equal popularity rising for two different things that ultimately serve the same purpose and share similar goals Both are designed to enhance the world of finance Both can rise in value and both have the ability to make someone rich overnighthellip So what if we could combine the two What significant differences could there be if Bitcoin and gold were fused into one entity

Well itrsquos already been done Say hello to BitGold an early startup company stationed in Toronto Canada BitGold aims to offer international services for people and businesses to send payments and hold savings with physical gold (2) The company was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb Both have a long history in the financial sector with Sebag previously serving as the Founder and Managing Principal of Braavos Capital (an international private investment organization) and the Chairman of Natural Resource Holdings an investment company involved with natural resource assets (3) Josh Crumb was previously the Senior Metals Strategist at Goldman Sachs (4)

The company alleges that gold bullion is ldquothe worldrsquos oldest asset class and the centuryrsquos best performing currencyrdquo (5) According to BitGoldrsquos website their mission is

ldquohellipTo make gold accessible and useful in digital payments and secure savingshellip Wersquore advancing the digital payments revolution by helping people securely acquire store and now spend gold with unprecedented simplicity BitGold accounts are free and can be opened in minutes We provide users with a secure vault account to purchase and hold gold the ability to make and receive instant gold payments and a prepaid card for spending gold at traditional points of sale Through our network of ATMs customers can fund their accounts with local-currencyrdquo (4)

Present investors backing BitGold include Dundee Capital Markets GMP Securities and Sandstorm Gold although the initial investor in the company was Soros Brothers Investment which is presently run by Alexander Soros the son of Hungarian business magnate George Soros (2)

2015 has been a big year for the company CNBC has stated that BitGold currently serves over 100000 active customers and the platform stores approximately 276 kilograms of bullion within its walls Thatrsquos nearly $11 million total and over $100 per active user (6) In May BitGold began trading on the TSX Venture exchange in Canada and announced the purchase of GoldMoney worth nearly $52 million in Canadian dollars (7)

In June the company made citizens of the United States very happy with the following announcement

ldquoUS residents can sign up on the BitGold platform and buy sell or redeem gold using BitGoldrsquos Aurum payment and settlement technology US residents will also have access to the BitGold mobile app and a prepaid card when these features launch over the coming weeksrdquo (7)

The platform offers a number of products and services beneficial to any gold-lover across the country As the above quote suggests BitGold offers whatrsquos known as Aurum the gold-settlement technology thatrsquos compliant with several US financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase Wells Fargo Citi Bank of America US Bank Fidelity Capital One and Charles Schwab Users with an account at any one of these nationally-recognized banks can instantly redeem gold or authorize gold deposits The transactions thereby increase in safety and automation Users also receive a bonus in that they are usually able to avoid bank wire fees through the process (7)

Using the BitGold app users may also send and receive gold as payments to and from any other user or seller without paying any transaction fees They can even send gold to non-BitGold users via their mobile phones or through a simple email message The company also issues prepaid debit cards allowing users to spend funds directly from their BitGold accounts The card is compatible with ATMs so that users may withdraw local currency (7)

Lastly the company issues special ten-gram gold cubes worth approximately $380 each at press time Users may redeem these cubes on the BitGold platform and may demand physical delivery when they see fit (7)

34 JANUARY 2016

Vice-president of communications and PR Emily Cornelius explained in an email that they have no ldquostereotypicalrdquo user of the companyrsquos services but that there are predominantly three main use cases

ldquoThe traditional gold investor will gravitate to BitGold because our gold is unprecedentedly priced within 1 of spot price and we offer free storage in a Brinks vault of their choice globallyhellip The second use case is the user who seeks a more stable currency for their national savings outside of their potentially volatile local fiat currencyhellip Gold has gained over 3000 vs the US Dollar which is arguably the worldrsquos strongest fiat money Gold may seem to go up down or sideways but in reality and when viewed over long timescales such as the avg human lifecycle ndash it always riseshellip Gold has been rising against 9 of the worldrsquos most famous and well-known currencies almost every year since 2000hellip Thirdly BitGold is a powerful payments platformhellip BitGold allows a user to send an invoice for your labor to someone else anywhere in the world which the recipient can pay using any traditional payment methodhellip This gold is vaulted anywhere even outside their jurisdictionhellip This is important as it allows users to achieve upward mobility that are otherwise hindered by localized issues that are exogenous to their personal journeyrdquo

Cornelius also explained that the company offers ldquoall the benefits and efficiencies of a service like PayPal and a MasterCard but with a universally accepted more stable store of valuerdquo

Presently regulation over BitGold appears to be fairly non-existent BitGold does not list which regulators hold jurisdiction over its staff and operations nor do they list regulatory information regarding their trade practices (7) In fact co-founder Roy Sebag has stated in the past that he believes BitGold is not a bank nor does it serve as a financial institution in any traditional sense as it does not engage in fractional-reserve banking (2)According to page 20 of the companyrsquos initial public filing BitGold is not

ldquohellipEligible to be registered with the Financial

Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canadahellip There can be no assurance that BitGoldrsquos services or Internet platform will be acceptable to foreign regulatory bodies Foreign governments may seek to restrict access to BitGoldrsquos services block BitGoldrsquos website or impose other restrictions that may affect BitGoldrsquos ability to offer service to new or existing users in those for an extended period of time or indefinitelyrdquo (8)

Despite this it was confirmed in July of 2015 that the company did offer its services under the Canadian Bailment Law (9) This occurs in situations where physical personal property is transferred from one person (the bailor) to another for safekeeping and doing so does not require the binding notion of a written contract (10)

Presently the company employs 26 people including Sebag and Crumb Other notable BitGold personnel include Chief Executive Officer Darrell MacMullin Chief Technology Officer Alessandro Premoli Lead Mobile Engineer Paul Mennega and Team Manager Karman Lee The company also employs several vice-presidents five software engineers and two compliance officers (4)

It can be said that BitGold has accomplished quite a bit in less than two years Itrsquos likely such a volatile company has some big plans waiting in the wings for 2016 but Emily Cornelius isnrsquot dropping any hints as to what they could be

ldquoWe have a number of new features services and products cominghellip Yoursquoll have to wait and seerdquo

BitGold is steadily making its mark It has the backing the funds the technology and above all the drive Put all these items together (and add a touch of flair and public desire) and itrsquos clear that BitGold has what it takes to make the world of finance its own

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 25: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 25

The interface conveniently walks customers through the online purchase of a Digital Gold PoA Certificate

26 JANUARY 2016

A completed purchase of the digital gold certificate representing this bar

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 27

TOOLS AND SETTINGS

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

28 JANUARY 2016

RESTORE WALLET

In addition to its security features users can configure the Aegis Vault to assign beneficiaries set the time-based distribution of funds or assets and delegate a power of attorney to another individual or a group of people

Digix is committed to bringing Ethereum use to the mainstream and the availability of a secure wallet is essential for realizing this goal

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 29

GENERATE A REDEMPTION KEY

(Q) What is the Digix Recaster Smart Contract

Digix Recaster Smart Contract allows the

conversion of Digix Gold tokens to a PoA card The

PoA card can be sent or received on the blockchain representing an ownership

of an entire gold bar or be used for redemption of

the physical gold bar at our office For example if you have 100 DGX tokens

representing 100g of weight in gold you can exchange

for a PoA card representing a 100g gold cast bar at

Digix This PoA card can be sent and received on the

Ethereum blockchain or be used to schedule a local

pick-up of the physical gold bar at Digix redemption

center in Singapore

You can currently recast into PoA certificates of

100g (100 DGX) or 1000g (1000 DGX) gold cast bar

denominations

30 JANUARY 2016

(Q) What about the Digix audit processWe have four types of audits at Digix

1 PRIVATE AUDITS Clients are welcome to come to our certified custodial vaults in Singapore to inspect your gold bars in a highly private and secure environment

2 EXTERNAL AUDITS We have engaged Inspectorate Singapore (wwwinspectoratecom) to audit our inventory and match them off with customersrsquo holdings at DGX We will hold such inspections at least twice a year

3 CUSTODIAL AUDITS Our certified custodians will provide a physical certification of proof that your gold bars are stored safely in their vaults They will take photographs of your serialized bars per request basis and have them keyed into their inventory management systems Some of our certified custodiansrsquo reputation are also on the line to provide us with their appraisal and storage services as they have to answer to their shareholders as a publicly listed company in Singapore

4 INTERNAL AUDITS We have patented a certification process called Proof of Asset (PoA) where auditors sign on the existence of Gold in our PoA certificate The digital certificate is then uploaded onto the Ethereum Blockchain

(Q) Are there KYCAML requirementsAll users who wish to redeem PoA certificates or Digix Gold Tokens for physical gold bars will have to go through KYC requirements at the pickup The gold bars will only be available for pick up at our office location in Singapore We must ensure that DigixGlobal and participating organizations are protected from any potential liabilities resulting from government prosecution and asset seizures so we ensure that we comply fully with regulatory requirements for Know your customer (KYC) and Anti-money laundering (AML)

ADDRESS BOOK

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 31

SilentVault is a secure private online wallet for making untraceable p2p payments

Unlike other crypto currency wallets SilentVault wallets support heterogeneous asset types such as fiat dollars euros metals gold and silver and crypto coins bitcoin litecoin SilentVault provides anonymous off blockchain payments made in bitcoin and litecoin It also features an integrated p2p escrow exchange where users can trade anonymously among different asset types with other users such as exchanging bitcoins for silver

The SilentVault Spark client is a fully functional Jabber chat client that is a branded and updated version of Spark Since Spark supports a plugin architecture our wallet client is implemented as a plugin You can obtain the SilentVault Spark client with plugin from this page You can also find the source code for both the plugin and SilentVaults customizations to the Spark source base elsewhere on this site A tutorial on SVSpark is here

The SilentVault wallet webstart client is a stand alone program that you can install from within your browser Like the SilentVault Spark client it communicates with the Voucher Safe payment network using extensions to the XMPP protocol This type of communication makes economic transactions indistinguishable from ordinary encrypted instant messaging traffic and avoids any need to run within an insecure browser environment or rely on web domains All client source code is published on this site and while you can run a prefabricated client you are also invited to build your own from source

You are also invited to develop applications for our integrated marketplaces that appear within SilentVault wallets A full API is available for your use as a development tool Please contact our team for details

The SilentVault technology is based on Voucher Safe which was developed 2008 2011 Voucher Safe is also the core technology of the Digital Cash Alliance

httpssilentvaultcom

32 JANUARY 2016

ldquoI love go-o-o-o-ldrdquo-Austin Powers in Goldmember

Not surprisingly most people feel the same

According to the Wall Street Journal gold prices and safe-haven demand in Asia have been skyrocketing since mid-November (1) proving that you donrsquot have to be a sea-faring pirate or a squire in a kingrsquos castle to enjoy its natural glare beauty and above all its ability to stimulate wealth

Since the days of the California Gold Rush people have enjoyed panning for it selling it and most of

all owning it Long considered one of the planetrsquos most precious and desired metals gold has grown heavily in value over the last several years and it appears more and more are trying to get their hands on it every single day

Something else is growing as wellhellip Bitcoin Often regarded as Americarsquos most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin has jumped heavily in value over the last few months spiking from $230 to nearly $350 Unlike gold which exists in solid physical form Bitcoin exists in ones and zeros binary coding that travels through the blockchain the technology that makes Bitcoin transactions possible between users and respective merchants

BITGOLD A MODERN REVOLUTION IN FINANCEBY NICK MARINOFF

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 33

Itrsquos interesting to witness nearly equal popularity rising for two different things that ultimately serve the same purpose and share similar goals Both are designed to enhance the world of finance Both can rise in value and both have the ability to make someone rich overnighthellip So what if we could combine the two What significant differences could there be if Bitcoin and gold were fused into one entity

Well itrsquos already been done Say hello to BitGold an early startup company stationed in Toronto Canada BitGold aims to offer international services for people and businesses to send payments and hold savings with physical gold (2) The company was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb Both have a long history in the financial sector with Sebag previously serving as the Founder and Managing Principal of Braavos Capital (an international private investment organization) and the Chairman of Natural Resource Holdings an investment company involved with natural resource assets (3) Josh Crumb was previously the Senior Metals Strategist at Goldman Sachs (4)

The company alleges that gold bullion is ldquothe worldrsquos oldest asset class and the centuryrsquos best performing currencyrdquo (5) According to BitGoldrsquos website their mission is

ldquohellipTo make gold accessible and useful in digital payments and secure savingshellip Wersquore advancing the digital payments revolution by helping people securely acquire store and now spend gold with unprecedented simplicity BitGold accounts are free and can be opened in minutes We provide users with a secure vault account to purchase and hold gold the ability to make and receive instant gold payments and a prepaid card for spending gold at traditional points of sale Through our network of ATMs customers can fund their accounts with local-currencyrdquo (4)

Present investors backing BitGold include Dundee Capital Markets GMP Securities and Sandstorm Gold although the initial investor in the company was Soros Brothers Investment which is presently run by Alexander Soros the son of Hungarian business magnate George Soros (2)

2015 has been a big year for the company CNBC has stated that BitGold currently serves over 100000 active customers and the platform stores approximately 276 kilograms of bullion within its walls Thatrsquos nearly $11 million total and over $100 per active user (6) In May BitGold began trading on the TSX Venture exchange in Canada and announced the purchase of GoldMoney worth nearly $52 million in Canadian dollars (7)

In June the company made citizens of the United States very happy with the following announcement

ldquoUS residents can sign up on the BitGold platform and buy sell or redeem gold using BitGoldrsquos Aurum payment and settlement technology US residents will also have access to the BitGold mobile app and a prepaid card when these features launch over the coming weeksrdquo (7)

The platform offers a number of products and services beneficial to any gold-lover across the country As the above quote suggests BitGold offers whatrsquos known as Aurum the gold-settlement technology thatrsquos compliant with several US financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase Wells Fargo Citi Bank of America US Bank Fidelity Capital One and Charles Schwab Users with an account at any one of these nationally-recognized banks can instantly redeem gold or authorize gold deposits The transactions thereby increase in safety and automation Users also receive a bonus in that they are usually able to avoid bank wire fees through the process (7)

Using the BitGold app users may also send and receive gold as payments to and from any other user or seller without paying any transaction fees They can even send gold to non-BitGold users via their mobile phones or through a simple email message The company also issues prepaid debit cards allowing users to spend funds directly from their BitGold accounts The card is compatible with ATMs so that users may withdraw local currency (7)

Lastly the company issues special ten-gram gold cubes worth approximately $380 each at press time Users may redeem these cubes on the BitGold platform and may demand physical delivery when they see fit (7)

34 JANUARY 2016

Vice-president of communications and PR Emily Cornelius explained in an email that they have no ldquostereotypicalrdquo user of the companyrsquos services but that there are predominantly three main use cases

ldquoThe traditional gold investor will gravitate to BitGold because our gold is unprecedentedly priced within 1 of spot price and we offer free storage in a Brinks vault of their choice globallyhellip The second use case is the user who seeks a more stable currency for their national savings outside of their potentially volatile local fiat currencyhellip Gold has gained over 3000 vs the US Dollar which is arguably the worldrsquos strongest fiat money Gold may seem to go up down or sideways but in reality and when viewed over long timescales such as the avg human lifecycle ndash it always riseshellip Gold has been rising against 9 of the worldrsquos most famous and well-known currencies almost every year since 2000hellip Thirdly BitGold is a powerful payments platformhellip BitGold allows a user to send an invoice for your labor to someone else anywhere in the world which the recipient can pay using any traditional payment methodhellip This gold is vaulted anywhere even outside their jurisdictionhellip This is important as it allows users to achieve upward mobility that are otherwise hindered by localized issues that are exogenous to their personal journeyrdquo

Cornelius also explained that the company offers ldquoall the benefits and efficiencies of a service like PayPal and a MasterCard but with a universally accepted more stable store of valuerdquo

Presently regulation over BitGold appears to be fairly non-existent BitGold does not list which regulators hold jurisdiction over its staff and operations nor do they list regulatory information regarding their trade practices (7) In fact co-founder Roy Sebag has stated in the past that he believes BitGold is not a bank nor does it serve as a financial institution in any traditional sense as it does not engage in fractional-reserve banking (2)According to page 20 of the companyrsquos initial public filing BitGold is not

ldquohellipEligible to be registered with the Financial

Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canadahellip There can be no assurance that BitGoldrsquos services or Internet platform will be acceptable to foreign regulatory bodies Foreign governments may seek to restrict access to BitGoldrsquos services block BitGoldrsquos website or impose other restrictions that may affect BitGoldrsquos ability to offer service to new or existing users in those for an extended period of time or indefinitelyrdquo (8)

Despite this it was confirmed in July of 2015 that the company did offer its services under the Canadian Bailment Law (9) This occurs in situations where physical personal property is transferred from one person (the bailor) to another for safekeeping and doing so does not require the binding notion of a written contract (10)

Presently the company employs 26 people including Sebag and Crumb Other notable BitGold personnel include Chief Executive Officer Darrell MacMullin Chief Technology Officer Alessandro Premoli Lead Mobile Engineer Paul Mennega and Team Manager Karman Lee The company also employs several vice-presidents five software engineers and two compliance officers (4)

It can be said that BitGold has accomplished quite a bit in less than two years Itrsquos likely such a volatile company has some big plans waiting in the wings for 2016 but Emily Cornelius isnrsquot dropping any hints as to what they could be

ldquoWe have a number of new features services and products cominghellip Yoursquoll have to wait and seerdquo

BitGold is steadily making its mark It has the backing the funds the technology and above all the drive Put all these items together (and add a touch of flair and public desire) and itrsquos clear that BitGold has what it takes to make the world of finance its own

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 26: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

26 JANUARY 2016

A completed purchase of the digital gold certificate representing this bar

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 27

TOOLS AND SETTINGS

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

28 JANUARY 2016

RESTORE WALLET

In addition to its security features users can configure the Aegis Vault to assign beneficiaries set the time-based distribution of funds or assets and delegate a power of attorney to another individual or a group of people

Digix is committed to bringing Ethereum use to the mainstream and the availability of a secure wallet is essential for realizing this goal

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 29

GENERATE A REDEMPTION KEY

(Q) What is the Digix Recaster Smart Contract

Digix Recaster Smart Contract allows the

conversion of Digix Gold tokens to a PoA card The

PoA card can be sent or received on the blockchain representing an ownership

of an entire gold bar or be used for redemption of

the physical gold bar at our office For example if you have 100 DGX tokens

representing 100g of weight in gold you can exchange

for a PoA card representing a 100g gold cast bar at

Digix This PoA card can be sent and received on the

Ethereum blockchain or be used to schedule a local

pick-up of the physical gold bar at Digix redemption

center in Singapore

You can currently recast into PoA certificates of

100g (100 DGX) or 1000g (1000 DGX) gold cast bar

denominations

30 JANUARY 2016

(Q) What about the Digix audit processWe have four types of audits at Digix

1 PRIVATE AUDITS Clients are welcome to come to our certified custodial vaults in Singapore to inspect your gold bars in a highly private and secure environment

2 EXTERNAL AUDITS We have engaged Inspectorate Singapore (wwwinspectoratecom) to audit our inventory and match them off with customersrsquo holdings at DGX We will hold such inspections at least twice a year

3 CUSTODIAL AUDITS Our certified custodians will provide a physical certification of proof that your gold bars are stored safely in their vaults They will take photographs of your serialized bars per request basis and have them keyed into their inventory management systems Some of our certified custodiansrsquo reputation are also on the line to provide us with their appraisal and storage services as they have to answer to their shareholders as a publicly listed company in Singapore

4 INTERNAL AUDITS We have patented a certification process called Proof of Asset (PoA) where auditors sign on the existence of Gold in our PoA certificate The digital certificate is then uploaded onto the Ethereum Blockchain

(Q) Are there KYCAML requirementsAll users who wish to redeem PoA certificates or Digix Gold Tokens for physical gold bars will have to go through KYC requirements at the pickup The gold bars will only be available for pick up at our office location in Singapore We must ensure that DigixGlobal and participating organizations are protected from any potential liabilities resulting from government prosecution and asset seizures so we ensure that we comply fully with regulatory requirements for Know your customer (KYC) and Anti-money laundering (AML)

ADDRESS BOOK

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 31

SilentVault is a secure private online wallet for making untraceable p2p payments

Unlike other crypto currency wallets SilentVault wallets support heterogeneous asset types such as fiat dollars euros metals gold and silver and crypto coins bitcoin litecoin SilentVault provides anonymous off blockchain payments made in bitcoin and litecoin It also features an integrated p2p escrow exchange where users can trade anonymously among different asset types with other users such as exchanging bitcoins for silver

The SilentVault Spark client is a fully functional Jabber chat client that is a branded and updated version of Spark Since Spark supports a plugin architecture our wallet client is implemented as a plugin You can obtain the SilentVault Spark client with plugin from this page You can also find the source code for both the plugin and SilentVaults customizations to the Spark source base elsewhere on this site A tutorial on SVSpark is here

The SilentVault wallet webstart client is a stand alone program that you can install from within your browser Like the SilentVault Spark client it communicates with the Voucher Safe payment network using extensions to the XMPP protocol This type of communication makes economic transactions indistinguishable from ordinary encrypted instant messaging traffic and avoids any need to run within an insecure browser environment or rely on web domains All client source code is published on this site and while you can run a prefabricated client you are also invited to build your own from source

You are also invited to develop applications for our integrated marketplaces that appear within SilentVault wallets A full API is available for your use as a development tool Please contact our team for details

The SilentVault technology is based on Voucher Safe which was developed 2008 2011 Voucher Safe is also the core technology of the Digital Cash Alliance

httpssilentvaultcom

32 JANUARY 2016

ldquoI love go-o-o-o-ldrdquo-Austin Powers in Goldmember

Not surprisingly most people feel the same

According to the Wall Street Journal gold prices and safe-haven demand in Asia have been skyrocketing since mid-November (1) proving that you donrsquot have to be a sea-faring pirate or a squire in a kingrsquos castle to enjoy its natural glare beauty and above all its ability to stimulate wealth

Since the days of the California Gold Rush people have enjoyed panning for it selling it and most of

all owning it Long considered one of the planetrsquos most precious and desired metals gold has grown heavily in value over the last several years and it appears more and more are trying to get their hands on it every single day

Something else is growing as wellhellip Bitcoin Often regarded as Americarsquos most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin has jumped heavily in value over the last few months spiking from $230 to nearly $350 Unlike gold which exists in solid physical form Bitcoin exists in ones and zeros binary coding that travels through the blockchain the technology that makes Bitcoin transactions possible between users and respective merchants

BITGOLD A MODERN REVOLUTION IN FINANCEBY NICK MARINOFF

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 33

Itrsquos interesting to witness nearly equal popularity rising for two different things that ultimately serve the same purpose and share similar goals Both are designed to enhance the world of finance Both can rise in value and both have the ability to make someone rich overnighthellip So what if we could combine the two What significant differences could there be if Bitcoin and gold were fused into one entity

Well itrsquos already been done Say hello to BitGold an early startup company stationed in Toronto Canada BitGold aims to offer international services for people and businesses to send payments and hold savings with physical gold (2) The company was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb Both have a long history in the financial sector with Sebag previously serving as the Founder and Managing Principal of Braavos Capital (an international private investment organization) and the Chairman of Natural Resource Holdings an investment company involved with natural resource assets (3) Josh Crumb was previously the Senior Metals Strategist at Goldman Sachs (4)

The company alleges that gold bullion is ldquothe worldrsquos oldest asset class and the centuryrsquos best performing currencyrdquo (5) According to BitGoldrsquos website their mission is

ldquohellipTo make gold accessible and useful in digital payments and secure savingshellip Wersquore advancing the digital payments revolution by helping people securely acquire store and now spend gold with unprecedented simplicity BitGold accounts are free and can be opened in minutes We provide users with a secure vault account to purchase and hold gold the ability to make and receive instant gold payments and a prepaid card for spending gold at traditional points of sale Through our network of ATMs customers can fund their accounts with local-currencyrdquo (4)

Present investors backing BitGold include Dundee Capital Markets GMP Securities and Sandstorm Gold although the initial investor in the company was Soros Brothers Investment which is presently run by Alexander Soros the son of Hungarian business magnate George Soros (2)

2015 has been a big year for the company CNBC has stated that BitGold currently serves over 100000 active customers and the platform stores approximately 276 kilograms of bullion within its walls Thatrsquos nearly $11 million total and over $100 per active user (6) In May BitGold began trading on the TSX Venture exchange in Canada and announced the purchase of GoldMoney worth nearly $52 million in Canadian dollars (7)

In June the company made citizens of the United States very happy with the following announcement

ldquoUS residents can sign up on the BitGold platform and buy sell or redeem gold using BitGoldrsquos Aurum payment and settlement technology US residents will also have access to the BitGold mobile app and a prepaid card when these features launch over the coming weeksrdquo (7)

The platform offers a number of products and services beneficial to any gold-lover across the country As the above quote suggests BitGold offers whatrsquos known as Aurum the gold-settlement technology thatrsquos compliant with several US financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase Wells Fargo Citi Bank of America US Bank Fidelity Capital One and Charles Schwab Users with an account at any one of these nationally-recognized banks can instantly redeem gold or authorize gold deposits The transactions thereby increase in safety and automation Users also receive a bonus in that they are usually able to avoid bank wire fees through the process (7)

Using the BitGold app users may also send and receive gold as payments to and from any other user or seller without paying any transaction fees They can even send gold to non-BitGold users via their mobile phones or through a simple email message The company also issues prepaid debit cards allowing users to spend funds directly from their BitGold accounts The card is compatible with ATMs so that users may withdraw local currency (7)

Lastly the company issues special ten-gram gold cubes worth approximately $380 each at press time Users may redeem these cubes on the BitGold platform and may demand physical delivery when they see fit (7)

34 JANUARY 2016

Vice-president of communications and PR Emily Cornelius explained in an email that they have no ldquostereotypicalrdquo user of the companyrsquos services but that there are predominantly three main use cases

ldquoThe traditional gold investor will gravitate to BitGold because our gold is unprecedentedly priced within 1 of spot price and we offer free storage in a Brinks vault of their choice globallyhellip The second use case is the user who seeks a more stable currency for their national savings outside of their potentially volatile local fiat currencyhellip Gold has gained over 3000 vs the US Dollar which is arguably the worldrsquos strongest fiat money Gold may seem to go up down or sideways but in reality and when viewed over long timescales such as the avg human lifecycle ndash it always riseshellip Gold has been rising against 9 of the worldrsquos most famous and well-known currencies almost every year since 2000hellip Thirdly BitGold is a powerful payments platformhellip BitGold allows a user to send an invoice for your labor to someone else anywhere in the world which the recipient can pay using any traditional payment methodhellip This gold is vaulted anywhere even outside their jurisdictionhellip This is important as it allows users to achieve upward mobility that are otherwise hindered by localized issues that are exogenous to their personal journeyrdquo

Cornelius also explained that the company offers ldquoall the benefits and efficiencies of a service like PayPal and a MasterCard but with a universally accepted more stable store of valuerdquo

Presently regulation over BitGold appears to be fairly non-existent BitGold does not list which regulators hold jurisdiction over its staff and operations nor do they list regulatory information regarding their trade practices (7) In fact co-founder Roy Sebag has stated in the past that he believes BitGold is not a bank nor does it serve as a financial institution in any traditional sense as it does not engage in fractional-reserve banking (2)According to page 20 of the companyrsquos initial public filing BitGold is not

ldquohellipEligible to be registered with the Financial

Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canadahellip There can be no assurance that BitGoldrsquos services or Internet platform will be acceptable to foreign regulatory bodies Foreign governments may seek to restrict access to BitGoldrsquos services block BitGoldrsquos website or impose other restrictions that may affect BitGoldrsquos ability to offer service to new or existing users in those for an extended period of time or indefinitelyrdquo (8)

Despite this it was confirmed in July of 2015 that the company did offer its services under the Canadian Bailment Law (9) This occurs in situations where physical personal property is transferred from one person (the bailor) to another for safekeeping and doing so does not require the binding notion of a written contract (10)

Presently the company employs 26 people including Sebag and Crumb Other notable BitGold personnel include Chief Executive Officer Darrell MacMullin Chief Technology Officer Alessandro Premoli Lead Mobile Engineer Paul Mennega and Team Manager Karman Lee The company also employs several vice-presidents five software engineers and two compliance officers (4)

It can be said that BitGold has accomplished quite a bit in less than two years Itrsquos likely such a volatile company has some big plans waiting in the wings for 2016 but Emily Cornelius isnrsquot dropping any hints as to what they could be

ldquoWe have a number of new features services and products cominghellip Yoursquoll have to wait and seerdquo

BitGold is steadily making its mark It has the backing the funds the technology and above all the drive Put all these items together (and add a touch of flair and public desire) and itrsquos clear that BitGold has what it takes to make the world of finance its own

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

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Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 27: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 27

TOOLS AND SETTINGS

The Digix Aegis Vault is a smart contract enabled digital Ethereum wallet that features several unique features that set it apart from other digital crypto wallets including multi-signature control air gapped cold storage configurable daily withdrawal limits and two-factor authentication to name a few It is designed in a way so that nobody not even Digix its employees its corporate officers government authorities or anyone else would be able to spend or control its funds and assets

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

28 JANUARY 2016

RESTORE WALLET

In addition to its security features users can configure the Aegis Vault to assign beneficiaries set the time-based distribution of funds or assets and delegate a power of attorney to another individual or a group of people

Digix is committed to bringing Ethereum use to the mainstream and the availability of a secure wallet is essential for realizing this goal

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 29

GENERATE A REDEMPTION KEY

(Q) What is the Digix Recaster Smart Contract

Digix Recaster Smart Contract allows the

conversion of Digix Gold tokens to a PoA card The

PoA card can be sent or received on the blockchain representing an ownership

of an entire gold bar or be used for redemption of

the physical gold bar at our office For example if you have 100 DGX tokens

representing 100g of weight in gold you can exchange

for a PoA card representing a 100g gold cast bar at

Digix This PoA card can be sent and received on the

Ethereum blockchain or be used to schedule a local

pick-up of the physical gold bar at Digix redemption

center in Singapore

You can currently recast into PoA certificates of

100g (100 DGX) or 1000g (1000 DGX) gold cast bar

denominations

30 JANUARY 2016

(Q) What about the Digix audit processWe have four types of audits at Digix

1 PRIVATE AUDITS Clients are welcome to come to our certified custodial vaults in Singapore to inspect your gold bars in a highly private and secure environment

2 EXTERNAL AUDITS We have engaged Inspectorate Singapore (wwwinspectoratecom) to audit our inventory and match them off with customersrsquo holdings at DGX We will hold such inspections at least twice a year

3 CUSTODIAL AUDITS Our certified custodians will provide a physical certification of proof that your gold bars are stored safely in their vaults They will take photographs of your serialized bars per request basis and have them keyed into their inventory management systems Some of our certified custodiansrsquo reputation are also on the line to provide us with their appraisal and storage services as they have to answer to their shareholders as a publicly listed company in Singapore

4 INTERNAL AUDITS We have patented a certification process called Proof of Asset (PoA) where auditors sign on the existence of Gold in our PoA certificate The digital certificate is then uploaded onto the Ethereum Blockchain

(Q) Are there KYCAML requirementsAll users who wish to redeem PoA certificates or Digix Gold Tokens for physical gold bars will have to go through KYC requirements at the pickup The gold bars will only be available for pick up at our office location in Singapore We must ensure that DigixGlobal and participating organizations are protected from any potential liabilities resulting from government prosecution and asset seizures so we ensure that we comply fully with regulatory requirements for Know your customer (KYC) and Anti-money laundering (AML)

ADDRESS BOOK

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 31

SilentVault is a secure private online wallet for making untraceable p2p payments

Unlike other crypto currency wallets SilentVault wallets support heterogeneous asset types such as fiat dollars euros metals gold and silver and crypto coins bitcoin litecoin SilentVault provides anonymous off blockchain payments made in bitcoin and litecoin It also features an integrated p2p escrow exchange where users can trade anonymously among different asset types with other users such as exchanging bitcoins for silver

The SilentVault Spark client is a fully functional Jabber chat client that is a branded and updated version of Spark Since Spark supports a plugin architecture our wallet client is implemented as a plugin You can obtain the SilentVault Spark client with plugin from this page You can also find the source code for both the plugin and SilentVaults customizations to the Spark source base elsewhere on this site A tutorial on SVSpark is here

The SilentVault wallet webstart client is a stand alone program that you can install from within your browser Like the SilentVault Spark client it communicates with the Voucher Safe payment network using extensions to the XMPP protocol This type of communication makes economic transactions indistinguishable from ordinary encrypted instant messaging traffic and avoids any need to run within an insecure browser environment or rely on web domains All client source code is published on this site and while you can run a prefabricated client you are also invited to build your own from source

You are also invited to develop applications for our integrated marketplaces that appear within SilentVault wallets A full API is available for your use as a development tool Please contact our team for details

The SilentVault technology is based on Voucher Safe which was developed 2008 2011 Voucher Safe is also the core technology of the Digital Cash Alliance

httpssilentvaultcom

32 JANUARY 2016

ldquoI love go-o-o-o-ldrdquo-Austin Powers in Goldmember

Not surprisingly most people feel the same

According to the Wall Street Journal gold prices and safe-haven demand in Asia have been skyrocketing since mid-November (1) proving that you donrsquot have to be a sea-faring pirate or a squire in a kingrsquos castle to enjoy its natural glare beauty and above all its ability to stimulate wealth

Since the days of the California Gold Rush people have enjoyed panning for it selling it and most of

all owning it Long considered one of the planetrsquos most precious and desired metals gold has grown heavily in value over the last several years and it appears more and more are trying to get their hands on it every single day

Something else is growing as wellhellip Bitcoin Often regarded as Americarsquos most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin has jumped heavily in value over the last few months spiking from $230 to nearly $350 Unlike gold which exists in solid physical form Bitcoin exists in ones and zeros binary coding that travels through the blockchain the technology that makes Bitcoin transactions possible between users and respective merchants

BITGOLD A MODERN REVOLUTION IN FINANCEBY NICK MARINOFF

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 33

Itrsquos interesting to witness nearly equal popularity rising for two different things that ultimately serve the same purpose and share similar goals Both are designed to enhance the world of finance Both can rise in value and both have the ability to make someone rich overnighthellip So what if we could combine the two What significant differences could there be if Bitcoin and gold were fused into one entity

Well itrsquos already been done Say hello to BitGold an early startup company stationed in Toronto Canada BitGold aims to offer international services for people and businesses to send payments and hold savings with physical gold (2) The company was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb Both have a long history in the financial sector with Sebag previously serving as the Founder and Managing Principal of Braavos Capital (an international private investment organization) and the Chairman of Natural Resource Holdings an investment company involved with natural resource assets (3) Josh Crumb was previously the Senior Metals Strategist at Goldman Sachs (4)

The company alleges that gold bullion is ldquothe worldrsquos oldest asset class and the centuryrsquos best performing currencyrdquo (5) According to BitGoldrsquos website their mission is

ldquohellipTo make gold accessible and useful in digital payments and secure savingshellip Wersquore advancing the digital payments revolution by helping people securely acquire store and now spend gold with unprecedented simplicity BitGold accounts are free and can be opened in minutes We provide users with a secure vault account to purchase and hold gold the ability to make and receive instant gold payments and a prepaid card for spending gold at traditional points of sale Through our network of ATMs customers can fund their accounts with local-currencyrdquo (4)

Present investors backing BitGold include Dundee Capital Markets GMP Securities and Sandstorm Gold although the initial investor in the company was Soros Brothers Investment which is presently run by Alexander Soros the son of Hungarian business magnate George Soros (2)

2015 has been a big year for the company CNBC has stated that BitGold currently serves over 100000 active customers and the platform stores approximately 276 kilograms of bullion within its walls Thatrsquos nearly $11 million total and over $100 per active user (6) In May BitGold began trading on the TSX Venture exchange in Canada and announced the purchase of GoldMoney worth nearly $52 million in Canadian dollars (7)

In June the company made citizens of the United States very happy with the following announcement

ldquoUS residents can sign up on the BitGold platform and buy sell or redeem gold using BitGoldrsquos Aurum payment and settlement technology US residents will also have access to the BitGold mobile app and a prepaid card when these features launch over the coming weeksrdquo (7)

The platform offers a number of products and services beneficial to any gold-lover across the country As the above quote suggests BitGold offers whatrsquos known as Aurum the gold-settlement technology thatrsquos compliant with several US financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase Wells Fargo Citi Bank of America US Bank Fidelity Capital One and Charles Schwab Users with an account at any one of these nationally-recognized banks can instantly redeem gold or authorize gold deposits The transactions thereby increase in safety and automation Users also receive a bonus in that they are usually able to avoid bank wire fees through the process (7)

Using the BitGold app users may also send and receive gold as payments to and from any other user or seller without paying any transaction fees They can even send gold to non-BitGold users via their mobile phones or through a simple email message The company also issues prepaid debit cards allowing users to spend funds directly from their BitGold accounts The card is compatible with ATMs so that users may withdraw local currency (7)

Lastly the company issues special ten-gram gold cubes worth approximately $380 each at press time Users may redeem these cubes on the BitGold platform and may demand physical delivery when they see fit (7)

34 JANUARY 2016

Vice-president of communications and PR Emily Cornelius explained in an email that they have no ldquostereotypicalrdquo user of the companyrsquos services but that there are predominantly three main use cases

ldquoThe traditional gold investor will gravitate to BitGold because our gold is unprecedentedly priced within 1 of spot price and we offer free storage in a Brinks vault of their choice globallyhellip The second use case is the user who seeks a more stable currency for their national savings outside of their potentially volatile local fiat currencyhellip Gold has gained over 3000 vs the US Dollar which is arguably the worldrsquos strongest fiat money Gold may seem to go up down or sideways but in reality and when viewed over long timescales such as the avg human lifecycle ndash it always riseshellip Gold has been rising against 9 of the worldrsquos most famous and well-known currencies almost every year since 2000hellip Thirdly BitGold is a powerful payments platformhellip BitGold allows a user to send an invoice for your labor to someone else anywhere in the world which the recipient can pay using any traditional payment methodhellip This gold is vaulted anywhere even outside their jurisdictionhellip This is important as it allows users to achieve upward mobility that are otherwise hindered by localized issues that are exogenous to their personal journeyrdquo

Cornelius also explained that the company offers ldquoall the benefits and efficiencies of a service like PayPal and a MasterCard but with a universally accepted more stable store of valuerdquo

Presently regulation over BitGold appears to be fairly non-existent BitGold does not list which regulators hold jurisdiction over its staff and operations nor do they list regulatory information regarding their trade practices (7) In fact co-founder Roy Sebag has stated in the past that he believes BitGold is not a bank nor does it serve as a financial institution in any traditional sense as it does not engage in fractional-reserve banking (2)According to page 20 of the companyrsquos initial public filing BitGold is not

ldquohellipEligible to be registered with the Financial

Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canadahellip There can be no assurance that BitGoldrsquos services or Internet platform will be acceptable to foreign regulatory bodies Foreign governments may seek to restrict access to BitGoldrsquos services block BitGoldrsquos website or impose other restrictions that may affect BitGoldrsquos ability to offer service to new or existing users in those for an extended period of time or indefinitelyrdquo (8)

Despite this it was confirmed in July of 2015 that the company did offer its services under the Canadian Bailment Law (9) This occurs in situations where physical personal property is transferred from one person (the bailor) to another for safekeeping and doing so does not require the binding notion of a written contract (10)

Presently the company employs 26 people including Sebag and Crumb Other notable BitGold personnel include Chief Executive Officer Darrell MacMullin Chief Technology Officer Alessandro Premoli Lead Mobile Engineer Paul Mennega and Team Manager Karman Lee The company also employs several vice-presidents five software engineers and two compliance officers (4)

It can be said that BitGold has accomplished quite a bit in less than two years Itrsquos likely such a volatile company has some big plans waiting in the wings for 2016 but Emily Cornelius isnrsquot dropping any hints as to what they could be

ldquoWe have a number of new features services and products cominghellip Yoursquoll have to wait and seerdquo

BitGold is steadily making its mark It has the backing the funds the technology and above all the drive Put all these items together (and add a touch of flair and public desire) and itrsquos clear that BitGold has what it takes to make the world of finance its own

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 28: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

28 JANUARY 2016

RESTORE WALLET

In addition to its security features users can configure the Aegis Vault to assign beneficiaries set the time-based distribution of funds or assets and delegate a power of attorney to another individual or a group of people

Digix is committed to bringing Ethereum use to the mainstream and the availability of a secure wallet is essential for realizing this goal

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 29

GENERATE A REDEMPTION KEY

(Q) What is the Digix Recaster Smart Contract

Digix Recaster Smart Contract allows the

conversion of Digix Gold tokens to a PoA card The

PoA card can be sent or received on the blockchain representing an ownership

of an entire gold bar or be used for redemption of

the physical gold bar at our office For example if you have 100 DGX tokens

representing 100g of weight in gold you can exchange

for a PoA card representing a 100g gold cast bar at

Digix This PoA card can be sent and received on the

Ethereum blockchain or be used to schedule a local

pick-up of the physical gold bar at Digix redemption

center in Singapore

You can currently recast into PoA certificates of

100g (100 DGX) or 1000g (1000 DGX) gold cast bar

denominations

30 JANUARY 2016

(Q) What about the Digix audit processWe have four types of audits at Digix

1 PRIVATE AUDITS Clients are welcome to come to our certified custodial vaults in Singapore to inspect your gold bars in a highly private and secure environment

2 EXTERNAL AUDITS We have engaged Inspectorate Singapore (wwwinspectoratecom) to audit our inventory and match them off with customersrsquo holdings at DGX We will hold such inspections at least twice a year

3 CUSTODIAL AUDITS Our certified custodians will provide a physical certification of proof that your gold bars are stored safely in their vaults They will take photographs of your serialized bars per request basis and have them keyed into their inventory management systems Some of our certified custodiansrsquo reputation are also on the line to provide us with their appraisal and storage services as they have to answer to their shareholders as a publicly listed company in Singapore

4 INTERNAL AUDITS We have patented a certification process called Proof of Asset (PoA) where auditors sign on the existence of Gold in our PoA certificate The digital certificate is then uploaded onto the Ethereum Blockchain

(Q) Are there KYCAML requirementsAll users who wish to redeem PoA certificates or Digix Gold Tokens for physical gold bars will have to go through KYC requirements at the pickup The gold bars will only be available for pick up at our office location in Singapore We must ensure that DigixGlobal and participating organizations are protected from any potential liabilities resulting from government prosecution and asset seizures so we ensure that we comply fully with regulatory requirements for Know your customer (KYC) and Anti-money laundering (AML)

ADDRESS BOOK

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 31

SilentVault is a secure private online wallet for making untraceable p2p payments

Unlike other crypto currency wallets SilentVault wallets support heterogeneous asset types such as fiat dollars euros metals gold and silver and crypto coins bitcoin litecoin SilentVault provides anonymous off blockchain payments made in bitcoin and litecoin It also features an integrated p2p escrow exchange where users can trade anonymously among different asset types with other users such as exchanging bitcoins for silver

The SilentVault Spark client is a fully functional Jabber chat client that is a branded and updated version of Spark Since Spark supports a plugin architecture our wallet client is implemented as a plugin You can obtain the SilentVault Spark client with plugin from this page You can also find the source code for both the plugin and SilentVaults customizations to the Spark source base elsewhere on this site A tutorial on SVSpark is here

The SilentVault wallet webstart client is a stand alone program that you can install from within your browser Like the SilentVault Spark client it communicates with the Voucher Safe payment network using extensions to the XMPP protocol This type of communication makes economic transactions indistinguishable from ordinary encrypted instant messaging traffic and avoids any need to run within an insecure browser environment or rely on web domains All client source code is published on this site and while you can run a prefabricated client you are also invited to build your own from source

You are also invited to develop applications for our integrated marketplaces that appear within SilentVault wallets A full API is available for your use as a development tool Please contact our team for details

The SilentVault technology is based on Voucher Safe which was developed 2008 2011 Voucher Safe is also the core technology of the Digital Cash Alliance

httpssilentvaultcom

32 JANUARY 2016

ldquoI love go-o-o-o-ldrdquo-Austin Powers in Goldmember

Not surprisingly most people feel the same

According to the Wall Street Journal gold prices and safe-haven demand in Asia have been skyrocketing since mid-November (1) proving that you donrsquot have to be a sea-faring pirate or a squire in a kingrsquos castle to enjoy its natural glare beauty and above all its ability to stimulate wealth

Since the days of the California Gold Rush people have enjoyed panning for it selling it and most of

all owning it Long considered one of the planetrsquos most precious and desired metals gold has grown heavily in value over the last several years and it appears more and more are trying to get their hands on it every single day

Something else is growing as wellhellip Bitcoin Often regarded as Americarsquos most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin has jumped heavily in value over the last few months spiking from $230 to nearly $350 Unlike gold which exists in solid physical form Bitcoin exists in ones and zeros binary coding that travels through the blockchain the technology that makes Bitcoin transactions possible between users and respective merchants

BITGOLD A MODERN REVOLUTION IN FINANCEBY NICK MARINOFF

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 33

Itrsquos interesting to witness nearly equal popularity rising for two different things that ultimately serve the same purpose and share similar goals Both are designed to enhance the world of finance Both can rise in value and both have the ability to make someone rich overnighthellip So what if we could combine the two What significant differences could there be if Bitcoin and gold were fused into one entity

Well itrsquos already been done Say hello to BitGold an early startup company stationed in Toronto Canada BitGold aims to offer international services for people and businesses to send payments and hold savings with physical gold (2) The company was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb Both have a long history in the financial sector with Sebag previously serving as the Founder and Managing Principal of Braavos Capital (an international private investment organization) and the Chairman of Natural Resource Holdings an investment company involved with natural resource assets (3) Josh Crumb was previously the Senior Metals Strategist at Goldman Sachs (4)

The company alleges that gold bullion is ldquothe worldrsquos oldest asset class and the centuryrsquos best performing currencyrdquo (5) According to BitGoldrsquos website their mission is

ldquohellipTo make gold accessible and useful in digital payments and secure savingshellip Wersquore advancing the digital payments revolution by helping people securely acquire store and now spend gold with unprecedented simplicity BitGold accounts are free and can be opened in minutes We provide users with a secure vault account to purchase and hold gold the ability to make and receive instant gold payments and a prepaid card for spending gold at traditional points of sale Through our network of ATMs customers can fund their accounts with local-currencyrdquo (4)

Present investors backing BitGold include Dundee Capital Markets GMP Securities and Sandstorm Gold although the initial investor in the company was Soros Brothers Investment which is presently run by Alexander Soros the son of Hungarian business magnate George Soros (2)

2015 has been a big year for the company CNBC has stated that BitGold currently serves over 100000 active customers and the platform stores approximately 276 kilograms of bullion within its walls Thatrsquos nearly $11 million total and over $100 per active user (6) In May BitGold began trading on the TSX Venture exchange in Canada and announced the purchase of GoldMoney worth nearly $52 million in Canadian dollars (7)

In June the company made citizens of the United States very happy with the following announcement

ldquoUS residents can sign up on the BitGold platform and buy sell or redeem gold using BitGoldrsquos Aurum payment and settlement technology US residents will also have access to the BitGold mobile app and a prepaid card when these features launch over the coming weeksrdquo (7)

The platform offers a number of products and services beneficial to any gold-lover across the country As the above quote suggests BitGold offers whatrsquos known as Aurum the gold-settlement technology thatrsquos compliant with several US financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase Wells Fargo Citi Bank of America US Bank Fidelity Capital One and Charles Schwab Users with an account at any one of these nationally-recognized banks can instantly redeem gold or authorize gold deposits The transactions thereby increase in safety and automation Users also receive a bonus in that they are usually able to avoid bank wire fees through the process (7)

Using the BitGold app users may also send and receive gold as payments to and from any other user or seller without paying any transaction fees They can even send gold to non-BitGold users via their mobile phones or through a simple email message The company also issues prepaid debit cards allowing users to spend funds directly from their BitGold accounts The card is compatible with ATMs so that users may withdraw local currency (7)

Lastly the company issues special ten-gram gold cubes worth approximately $380 each at press time Users may redeem these cubes on the BitGold platform and may demand physical delivery when they see fit (7)

34 JANUARY 2016

Vice-president of communications and PR Emily Cornelius explained in an email that they have no ldquostereotypicalrdquo user of the companyrsquos services but that there are predominantly three main use cases

ldquoThe traditional gold investor will gravitate to BitGold because our gold is unprecedentedly priced within 1 of spot price and we offer free storage in a Brinks vault of their choice globallyhellip The second use case is the user who seeks a more stable currency for their national savings outside of their potentially volatile local fiat currencyhellip Gold has gained over 3000 vs the US Dollar which is arguably the worldrsquos strongest fiat money Gold may seem to go up down or sideways but in reality and when viewed over long timescales such as the avg human lifecycle ndash it always riseshellip Gold has been rising against 9 of the worldrsquos most famous and well-known currencies almost every year since 2000hellip Thirdly BitGold is a powerful payments platformhellip BitGold allows a user to send an invoice for your labor to someone else anywhere in the world which the recipient can pay using any traditional payment methodhellip This gold is vaulted anywhere even outside their jurisdictionhellip This is important as it allows users to achieve upward mobility that are otherwise hindered by localized issues that are exogenous to their personal journeyrdquo

Cornelius also explained that the company offers ldquoall the benefits and efficiencies of a service like PayPal and a MasterCard but with a universally accepted more stable store of valuerdquo

Presently regulation over BitGold appears to be fairly non-existent BitGold does not list which regulators hold jurisdiction over its staff and operations nor do they list regulatory information regarding their trade practices (7) In fact co-founder Roy Sebag has stated in the past that he believes BitGold is not a bank nor does it serve as a financial institution in any traditional sense as it does not engage in fractional-reserve banking (2)According to page 20 of the companyrsquos initial public filing BitGold is not

ldquohellipEligible to be registered with the Financial

Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canadahellip There can be no assurance that BitGoldrsquos services or Internet platform will be acceptable to foreign regulatory bodies Foreign governments may seek to restrict access to BitGoldrsquos services block BitGoldrsquos website or impose other restrictions that may affect BitGoldrsquos ability to offer service to new or existing users in those for an extended period of time or indefinitelyrdquo (8)

Despite this it was confirmed in July of 2015 that the company did offer its services under the Canadian Bailment Law (9) This occurs in situations where physical personal property is transferred from one person (the bailor) to another for safekeeping and doing so does not require the binding notion of a written contract (10)

Presently the company employs 26 people including Sebag and Crumb Other notable BitGold personnel include Chief Executive Officer Darrell MacMullin Chief Technology Officer Alessandro Premoli Lead Mobile Engineer Paul Mennega and Team Manager Karman Lee The company also employs several vice-presidents five software engineers and two compliance officers (4)

It can be said that BitGold has accomplished quite a bit in less than two years Itrsquos likely such a volatile company has some big plans waiting in the wings for 2016 but Emily Cornelius isnrsquot dropping any hints as to what they could be

ldquoWe have a number of new features services and products cominghellip Yoursquoll have to wait and seerdquo

BitGold is steadily making its mark It has the backing the funds the technology and above all the drive Put all these items together (and add a touch of flair and public desire) and itrsquos clear that BitGold has what it takes to make the world of finance its own

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 29: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

GENERATE A NEW WALLET

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 29

GENERATE A REDEMPTION KEY

(Q) What is the Digix Recaster Smart Contract

Digix Recaster Smart Contract allows the

conversion of Digix Gold tokens to a PoA card The

PoA card can be sent or received on the blockchain representing an ownership

of an entire gold bar or be used for redemption of

the physical gold bar at our office For example if you have 100 DGX tokens

representing 100g of weight in gold you can exchange

for a PoA card representing a 100g gold cast bar at

Digix This PoA card can be sent and received on the

Ethereum blockchain or be used to schedule a local

pick-up of the physical gold bar at Digix redemption

center in Singapore

You can currently recast into PoA certificates of

100g (100 DGX) or 1000g (1000 DGX) gold cast bar

denominations

30 JANUARY 2016

(Q) What about the Digix audit processWe have four types of audits at Digix

1 PRIVATE AUDITS Clients are welcome to come to our certified custodial vaults in Singapore to inspect your gold bars in a highly private and secure environment

2 EXTERNAL AUDITS We have engaged Inspectorate Singapore (wwwinspectoratecom) to audit our inventory and match them off with customersrsquo holdings at DGX We will hold such inspections at least twice a year

3 CUSTODIAL AUDITS Our certified custodians will provide a physical certification of proof that your gold bars are stored safely in their vaults They will take photographs of your serialized bars per request basis and have them keyed into their inventory management systems Some of our certified custodiansrsquo reputation are also on the line to provide us with their appraisal and storage services as they have to answer to their shareholders as a publicly listed company in Singapore

4 INTERNAL AUDITS We have patented a certification process called Proof of Asset (PoA) where auditors sign on the existence of Gold in our PoA certificate The digital certificate is then uploaded onto the Ethereum Blockchain

(Q) Are there KYCAML requirementsAll users who wish to redeem PoA certificates or Digix Gold Tokens for physical gold bars will have to go through KYC requirements at the pickup The gold bars will only be available for pick up at our office location in Singapore We must ensure that DigixGlobal and participating organizations are protected from any potential liabilities resulting from government prosecution and asset seizures so we ensure that we comply fully with regulatory requirements for Know your customer (KYC) and Anti-money laundering (AML)

ADDRESS BOOK

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 31

SilentVault is a secure private online wallet for making untraceable p2p payments

Unlike other crypto currency wallets SilentVault wallets support heterogeneous asset types such as fiat dollars euros metals gold and silver and crypto coins bitcoin litecoin SilentVault provides anonymous off blockchain payments made in bitcoin and litecoin It also features an integrated p2p escrow exchange where users can trade anonymously among different asset types with other users such as exchanging bitcoins for silver

The SilentVault Spark client is a fully functional Jabber chat client that is a branded and updated version of Spark Since Spark supports a plugin architecture our wallet client is implemented as a plugin You can obtain the SilentVault Spark client with plugin from this page You can also find the source code for both the plugin and SilentVaults customizations to the Spark source base elsewhere on this site A tutorial on SVSpark is here

The SilentVault wallet webstart client is a stand alone program that you can install from within your browser Like the SilentVault Spark client it communicates with the Voucher Safe payment network using extensions to the XMPP protocol This type of communication makes economic transactions indistinguishable from ordinary encrypted instant messaging traffic and avoids any need to run within an insecure browser environment or rely on web domains All client source code is published on this site and while you can run a prefabricated client you are also invited to build your own from source

You are also invited to develop applications for our integrated marketplaces that appear within SilentVault wallets A full API is available for your use as a development tool Please contact our team for details

The SilentVault technology is based on Voucher Safe which was developed 2008 2011 Voucher Safe is also the core technology of the Digital Cash Alliance

httpssilentvaultcom

32 JANUARY 2016

ldquoI love go-o-o-o-ldrdquo-Austin Powers in Goldmember

Not surprisingly most people feel the same

According to the Wall Street Journal gold prices and safe-haven demand in Asia have been skyrocketing since mid-November (1) proving that you donrsquot have to be a sea-faring pirate or a squire in a kingrsquos castle to enjoy its natural glare beauty and above all its ability to stimulate wealth

Since the days of the California Gold Rush people have enjoyed panning for it selling it and most of

all owning it Long considered one of the planetrsquos most precious and desired metals gold has grown heavily in value over the last several years and it appears more and more are trying to get their hands on it every single day

Something else is growing as wellhellip Bitcoin Often regarded as Americarsquos most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin has jumped heavily in value over the last few months spiking from $230 to nearly $350 Unlike gold which exists in solid physical form Bitcoin exists in ones and zeros binary coding that travels through the blockchain the technology that makes Bitcoin transactions possible between users and respective merchants

BITGOLD A MODERN REVOLUTION IN FINANCEBY NICK MARINOFF

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 33

Itrsquos interesting to witness nearly equal popularity rising for two different things that ultimately serve the same purpose and share similar goals Both are designed to enhance the world of finance Both can rise in value and both have the ability to make someone rich overnighthellip So what if we could combine the two What significant differences could there be if Bitcoin and gold were fused into one entity

Well itrsquos already been done Say hello to BitGold an early startup company stationed in Toronto Canada BitGold aims to offer international services for people and businesses to send payments and hold savings with physical gold (2) The company was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb Both have a long history in the financial sector with Sebag previously serving as the Founder and Managing Principal of Braavos Capital (an international private investment organization) and the Chairman of Natural Resource Holdings an investment company involved with natural resource assets (3) Josh Crumb was previously the Senior Metals Strategist at Goldman Sachs (4)

The company alleges that gold bullion is ldquothe worldrsquos oldest asset class and the centuryrsquos best performing currencyrdquo (5) According to BitGoldrsquos website their mission is

ldquohellipTo make gold accessible and useful in digital payments and secure savingshellip Wersquore advancing the digital payments revolution by helping people securely acquire store and now spend gold with unprecedented simplicity BitGold accounts are free and can be opened in minutes We provide users with a secure vault account to purchase and hold gold the ability to make and receive instant gold payments and a prepaid card for spending gold at traditional points of sale Through our network of ATMs customers can fund their accounts with local-currencyrdquo (4)

Present investors backing BitGold include Dundee Capital Markets GMP Securities and Sandstorm Gold although the initial investor in the company was Soros Brothers Investment which is presently run by Alexander Soros the son of Hungarian business magnate George Soros (2)

2015 has been a big year for the company CNBC has stated that BitGold currently serves over 100000 active customers and the platform stores approximately 276 kilograms of bullion within its walls Thatrsquos nearly $11 million total and over $100 per active user (6) In May BitGold began trading on the TSX Venture exchange in Canada and announced the purchase of GoldMoney worth nearly $52 million in Canadian dollars (7)

In June the company made citizens of the United States very happy with the following announcement

ldquoUS residents can sign up on the BitGold platform and buy sell or redeem gold using BitGoldrsquos Aurum payment and settlement technology US residents will also have access to the BitGold mobile app and a prepaid card when these features launch over the coming weeksrdquo (7)

The platform offers a number of products and services beneficial to any gold-lover across the country As the above quote suggests BitGold offers whatrsquos known as Aurum the gold-settlement technology thatrsquos compliant with several US financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase Wells Fargo Citi Bank of America US Bank Fidelity Capital One and Charles Schwab Users with an account at any one of these nationally-recognized banks can instantly redeem gold or authorize gold deposits The transactions thereby increase in safety and automation Users also receive a bonus in that they are usually able to avoid bank wire fees through the process (7)

Using the BitGold app users may also send and receive gold as payments to and from any other user or seller without paying any transaction fees They can even send gold to non-BitGold users via their mobile phones or through a simple email message The company also issues prepaid debit cards allowing users to spend funds directly from their BitGold accounts The card is compatible with ATMs so that users may withdraw local currency (7)

Lastly the company issues special ten-gram gold cubes worth approximately $380 each at press time Users may redeem these cubes on the BitGold platform and may demand physical delivery when they see fit (7)

34 JANUARY 2016

Vice-president of communications and PR Emily Cornelius explained in an email that they have no ldquostereotypicalrdquo user of the companyrsquos services but that there are predominantly three main use cases

ldquoThe traditional gold investor will gravitate to BitGold because our gold is unprecedentedly priced within 1 of spot price and we offer free storage in a Brinks vault of their choice globallyhellip The second use case is the user who seeks a more stable currency for their national savings outside of their potentially volatile local fiat currencyhellip Gold has gained over 3000 vs the US Dollar which is arguably the worldrsquos strongest fiat money Gold may seem to go up down or sideways but in reality and when viewed over long timescales such as the avg human lifecycle ndash it always riseshellip Gold has been rising against 9 of the worldrsquos most famous and well-known currencies almost every year since 2000hellip Thirdly BitGold is a powerful payments platformhellip BitGold allows a user to send an invoice for your labor to someone else anywhere in the world which the recipient can pay using any traditional payment methodhellip This gold is vaulted anywhere even outside their jurisdictionhellip This is important as it allows users to achieve upward mobility that are otherwise hindered by localized issues that are exogenous to their personal journeyrdquo

Cornelius also explained that the company offers ldquoall the benefits and efficiencies of a service like PayPal and a MasterCard but with a universally accepted more stable store of valuerdquo

Presently regulation over BitGold appears to be fairly non-existent BitGold does not list which regulators hold jurisdiction over its staff and operations nor do they list regulatory information regarding their trade practices (7) In fact co-founder Roy Sebag has stated in the past that he believes BitGold is not a bank nor does it serve as a financial institution in any traditional sense as it does not engage in fractional-reserve banking (2)According to page 20 of the companyrsquos initial public filing BitGold is not

ldquohellipEligible to be registered with the Financial

Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canadahellip There can be no assurance that BitGoldrsquos services or Internet platform will be acceptable to foreign regulatory bodies Foreign governments may seek to restrict access to BitGoldrsquos services block BitGoldrsquos website or impose other restrictions that may affect BitGoldrsquos ability to offer service to new or existing users in those for an extended period of time or indefinitelyrdquo (8)

Despite this it was confirmed in July of 2015 that the company did offer its services under the Canadian Bailment Law (9) This occurs in situations where physical personal property is transferred from one person (the bailor) to another for safekeeping and doing so does not require the binding notion of a written contract (10)

Presently the company employs 26 people including Sebag and Crumb Other notable BitGold personnel include Chief Executive Officer Darrell MacMullin Chief Technology Officer Alessandro Premoli Lead Mobile Engineer Paul Mennega and Team Manager Karman Lee The company also employs several vice-presidents five software engineers and two compliance officers (4)

It can be said that BitGold has accomplished quite a bit in less than two years Itrsquos likely such a volatile company has some big plans waiting in the wings for 2016 but Emily Cornelius isnrsquot dropping any hints as to what they could be

ldquoWe have a number of new features services and products cominghellip Yoursquoll have to wait and seerdquo

BitGold is steadily making its mark It has the backing the funds the technology and above all the drive Put all these items together (and add a touch of flair and public desire) and itrsquos clear that BitGold has what it takes to make the world of finance its own

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

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Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

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Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

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ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 30: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

30 JANUARY 2016

(Q) What about the Digix audit processWe have four types of audits at Digix

1 PRIVATE AUDITS Clients are welcome to come to our certified custodial vaults in Singapore to inspect your gold bars in a highly private and secure environment

2 EXTERNAL AUDITS We have engaged Inspectorate Singapore (wwwinspectoratecom) to audit our inventory and match them off with customersrsquo holdings at DGX We will hold such inspections at least twice a year

3 CUSTODIAL AUDITS Our certified custodians will provide a physical certification of proof that your gold bars are stored safely in their vaults They will take photographs of your serialized bars per request basis and have them keyed into their inventory management systems Some of our certified custodiansrsquo reputation are also on the line to provide us with their appraisal and storage services as they have to answer to their shareholders as a publicly listed company in Singapore

4 INTERNAL AUDITS We have patented a certification process called Proof of Asset (PoA) where auditors sign on the existence of Gold in our PoA certificate The digital certificate is then uploaded onto the Ethereum Blockchain

(Q) Are there KYCAML requirementsAll users who wish to redeem PoA certificates or Digix Gold Tokens for physical gold bars will have to go through KYC requirements at the pickup The gold bars will only be available for pick up at our office location in Singapore We must ensure that DigixGlobal and participating organizations are protected from any potential liabilities resulting from government prosecution and asset seizures so we ensure that we comply fully with regulatory requirements for Know your customer (KYC) and Anti-money laundering (AML)

ADDRESS BOOK

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 31

SilentVault is a secure private online wallet for making untraceable p2p payments

Unlike other crypto currency wallets SilentVault wallets support heterogeneous asset types such as fiat dollars euros metals gold and silver and crypto coins bitcoin litecoin SilentVault provides anonymous off blockchain payments made in bitcoin and litecoin It also features an integrated p2p escrow exchange where users can trade anonymously among different asset types with other users such as exchanging bitcoins for silver

The SilentVault Spark client is a fully functional Jabber chat client that is a branded and updated version of Spark Since Spark supports a plugin architecture our wallet client is implemented as a plugin You can obtain the SilentVault Spark client with plugin from this page You can also find the source code for both the plugin and SilentVaults customizations to the Spark source base elsewhere on this site A tutorial on SVSpark is here

The SilentVault wallet webstart client is a stand alone program that you can install from within your browser Like the SilentVault Spark client it communicates with the Voucher Safe payment network using extensions to the XMPP protocol This type of communication makes economic transactions indistinguishable from ordinary encrypted instant messaging traffic and avoids any need to run within an insecure browser environment or rely on web domains All client source code is published on this site and while you can run a prefabricated client you are also invited to build your own from source

You are also invited to develop applications for our integrated marketplaces that appear within SilentVault wallets A full API is available for your use as a development tool Please contact our team for details

The SilentVault technology is based on Voucher Safe which was developed 2008 2011 Voucher Safe is also the core technology of the Digital Cash Alliance

httpssilentvaultcom

32 JANUARY 2016

ldquoI love go-o-o-o-ldrdquo-Austin Powers in Goldmember

Not surprisingly most people feel the same

According to the Wall Street Journal gold prices and safe-haven demand in Asia have been skyrocketing since mid-November (1) proving that you donrsquot have to be a sea-faring pirate or a squire in a kingrsquos castle to enjoy its natural glare beauty and above all its ability to stimulate wealth

Since the days of the California Gold Rush people have enjoyed panning for it selling it and most of

all owning it Long considered one of the planetrsquos most precious and desired metals gold has grown heavily in value over the last several years and it appears more and more are trying to get their hands on it every single day

Something else is growing as wellhellip Bitcoin Often regarded as Americarsquos most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin has jumped heavily in value over the last few months spiking from $230 to nearly $350 Unlike gold which exists in solid physical form Bitcoin exists in ones and zeros binary coding that travels through the blockchain the technology that makes Bitcoin transactions possible between users and respective merchants

BITGOLD A MODERN REVOLUTION IN FINANCEBY NICK MARINOFF

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 33

Itrsquos interesting to witness nearly equal popularity rising for two different things that ultimately serve the same purpose and share similar goals Both are designed to enhance the world of finance Both can rise in value and both have the ability to make someone rich overnighthellip So what if we could combine the two What significant differences could there be if Bitcoin and gold were fused into one entity

Well itrsquos already been done Say hello to BitGold an early startup company stationed in Toronto Canada BitGold aims to offer international services for people and businesses to send payments and hold savings with physical gold (2) The company was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb Both have a long history in the financial sector with Sebag previously serving as the Founder and Managing Principal of Braavos Capital (an international private investment organization) and the Chairman of Natural Resource Holdings an investment company involved with natural resource assets (3) Josh Crumb was previously the Senior Metals Strategist at Goldman Sachs (4)

The company alleges that gold bullion is ldquothe worldrsquos oldest asset class and the centuryrsquos best performing currencyrdquo (5) According to BitGoldrsquos website their mission is

ldquohellipTo make gold accessible and useful in digital payments and secure savingshellip Wersquore advancing the digital payments revolution by helping people securely acquire store and now spend gold with unprecedented simplicity BitGold accounts are free and can be opened in minutes We provide users with a secure vault account to purchase and hold gold the ability to make and receive instant gold payments and a prepaid card for spending gold at traditional points of sale Through our network of ATMs customers can fund their accounts with local-currencyrdquo (4)

Present investors backing BitGold include Dundee Capital Markets GMP Securities and Sandstorm Gold although the initial investor in the company was Soros Brothers Investment which is presently run by Alexander Soros the son of Hungarian business magnate George Soros (2)

2015 has been a big year for the company CNBC has stated that BitGold currently serves over 100000 active customers and the platform stores approximately 276 kilograms of bullion within its walls Thatrsquos nearly $11 million total and over $100 per active user (6) In May BitGold began trading on the TSX Venture exchange in Canada and announced the purchase of GoldMoney worth nearly $52 million in Canadian dollars (7)

In June the company made citizens of the United States very happy with the following announcement

ldquoUS residents can sign up on the BitGold platform and buy sell or redeem gold using BitGoldrsquos Aurum payment and settlement technology US residents will also have access to the BitGold mobile app and a prepaid card when these features launch over the coming weeksrdquo (7)

The platform offers a number of products and services beneficial to any gold-lover across the country As the above quote suggests BitGold offers whatrsquos known as Aurum the gold-settlement technology thatrsquos compliant with several US financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase Wells Fargo Citi Bank of America US Bank Fidelity Capital One and Charles Schwab Users with an account at any one of these nationally-recognized banks can instantly redeem gold or authorize gold deposits The transactions thereby increase in safety and automation Users also receive a bonus in that they are usually able to avoid bank wire fees through the process (7)

Using the BitGold app users may also send and receive gold as payments to and from any other user or seller without paying any transaction fees They can even send gold to non-BitGold users via their mobile phones or through a simple email message The company also issues prepaid debit cards allowing users to spend funds directly from their BitGold accounts The card is compatible with ATMs so that users may withdraw local currency (7)

Lastly the company issues special ten-gram gold cubes worth approximately $380 each at press time Users may redeem these cubes on the BitGold platform and may demand physical delivery when they see fit (7)

34 JANUARY 2016

Vice-president of communications and PR Emily Cornelius explained in an email that they have no ldquostereotypicalrdquo user of the companyrsquos services but that there are predominantly three main use cases

ldquoThe traditional gold investor will gravitate to BitGold because our gold is unprecedentedly priced within 1 of spot price and we offer free storage in a Brinks vault of their choice globallyhellip The second use case is the user who seeks a more stable currency for their national savings outside of their potentially volatile local fiat currencyhellip Gold has gained over 3000 vs the US Dollar which is arguably the worldrsquos strongest fiat money Gold may seem to go up down or sideways but in reality and when viewed over long timescales such as the avg human lifecycle ndash it always riseshellip Gold has been rising against 9 of the worldrsquos most famous and well-known currencies almost every year since 2000hellip Thirdly BitGold is a powerful payments platformhellip BitGold allows a user to send an invoice for your labor to someone else anywhere in the world which the recipient can pay using any traditional payment methodhellip This gold is vaulted anywhere even outside their jurisdictionhellip This is important as it allows users to achieve upward mobility that are otherwise hindered by localized issues that are exogenous to their personal journeyrdquo

Cornelius also explained that the company offers ldquoall the benefits and efficiencies of a service like PayPal and a MasterCard but with a universally accepted more stable store of valuerdquo

Presently regulation over BitGold appears to be fairly non-existent BitGold does not list which regulators hold jurisdiction over its staff and operations nor do they list regulatory information regarding their trade practices (7) In fact co-founder Roy Sebag has stated in the past that he believes BitGold is not a bank nor does it serve as a financial institution in any traditional sense as it does not engage in fractional-reserve banking (2)According to page 20 of the companyrsquos initial public filing BitGold is not

ldquohellipEligible to be registered with the Financial

Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canadahellip There can be no assurance that BitGoldrsquos services or Internet platform will be acceptable to foreign regulatory bodies Foreign governments may seek to restrict access to BitGoldrsquos services block BitGoldrsquos website or impose other restrictions that may affect BitGoldrsquos ability to offer service to new or existing users in those for an extended period of time or indefinitelyrdquo (8)

Despite this it was confirmed in July of 2015 that the company did offer its services under the Canadian Bailment Law (9) This occurs in situations where physical personal property is transferred from one person (the bailor) to another for safekeeping and doing so does not require the binding notion of a written contract (10)

Presently the company employs 26 people including Sebag and Crumb Other notable BitGold personnel include Chief Executive Officer Darrell MacMullin Chief Technology Officer Alessandro Premoli Lead Mobile Engineer Paul Mennega and Team Manager Karman Lee The company also employs several vice-presidents five software engineers and two compliance officers (4)

It can be said that BitGold has accomplished quite a bit in less than two years Itrsquos likely such a volatile company has some big plans waiting in the wings for 2016 but Emily Cornelius isnrsquot dropping any hints as to what they could be

ldquoWe have a number of new features services and products cominghellip Yoursquoll have to wait and seerdquo

BitGold is steadily making its mark It has the backing the funds the technology and above all the drive Put all these items together (and add a touch of flair and public desire) and itrsquos clear that BitGold has what it takes to make the world of finance its own

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 31: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 31

SilentVault is a secure private online wallet for making untraceable p2p payments

Unlike other crypto currency wallets SilentVault wallets support heterogeneous asset types such as fiat dollars euros metals gold and silver and crypto coins bitcoin litecoin SilentVault provides anonymous off blockchain payments made in bitcoin and litecoin It also features an integrated p2p escrow exchange where users can trade anonymously among different asset types with other users such as exchanging bitcoins for silver

The SilentVault Spark client is a fully functional Jabber chat client that is a branded and updated version of Spark Since Spark supports a plugin architecture our wallet client is implemented as a plugin You can obtain the SilentVault Spark client with plugin from this page You can also find the source code for both the plugin and SilentVaults customizations to the Spark source base elsewhere on this site A tutorial on SVSpark is here

The SilentVault wallet webstart client is a stand alone program that you can install from within your browser Like the SilentVault Spark client it communicates with the Voucher Safe payment network using extensions to the XMPP protocol This type of communication makes economic transactions indistinguishable from ordinary encrypted instant messaging traffic and avoids any need to run within an insecure browser environment or rely on web domains All client source code is published on this site and while you can run a prefabricated client you are also invited to build your own from source

You are also invited to develop applications for our integrated marketplaces that appear within SilentVault wallets A full API is available for your use as a development tool Please contact our team for details

The SilentVault technology is based on Voucher Safe which was developed 2008 2011 Voucher Safe is also the core technology of the Digital Cash Alliance

httpssilentvaultcom

32 JANUARY 2016

ldquoI love go-o-o-o-ldrdquo-Austin Powers in Goldmember

Not surprisingly most people feel the same

According to the Wall Street Journal gold prices and safe-haven demand in Asia have been skyrocketing since mid-November (1) proving that you donrsquot have to be a sea-faring pirate or a squire in a kingrsquos castle to enjoy its natural glare beauty and above all its ability to stimulate wealth

Since the days of the California Gold Rush people have enjoyed panning for it selling it and most of

all owning it Long considered one of the planetrsquos most precious and desired metals gold has grown heavily in value over the last several years and it appears more and more are trying to get their hands on it every single day

Something else is growing as wellhellip Bitcoin Often regarded as Americarsquos most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin has jumped heavily in value over the last few months spiking from $230 to nearly $350 Unlike gold which exists in solid physical form Bitcoin exists in ones and zeros binary coding that travels through the blockchain the technology that makes Bitcoin transactions possible between users and respective merchants

BITGOLD A MODERN REVOLUTION IN FINANCEBY NICK MARINOFF

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 33

Itrsquos interesting to witness nearly equal popularity rising for two different things that ultimately serve the same purpose and share similar goals Both are designed to enhance the world of finance Both can rise in value and both have the ability to make someone rich overnighthellip So what if we could combine the two What significant differences could there be if Bitcoin and gold were fused into one entity

Well itrsquos already been done Say hello to BitGold an early startup company stationed in Toronto Canada BitGold aims to offer international services for people and businesses to send payments and hold savings with physical gold (2) The company was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb Both have a long history in the financial sector with Sebag previously serving as the Founder and Managing Principal of Braavos Capital (an international private investment organization) and the Chairman of Natural Resource Holdings an investment company involved with natural resource assets (3) Josh Crumb was previously the Senior Metals Strategist at Goldman Sachs (4)

The company alleges that gold bullion is ldquothe worldrsquos oldest asset class and the centuryrsquos best performing currencyrdquo (5) According to BitGoldrsquos website their mission is

ldquohellipTo make gold accessible and useful in digital payments and secure savingshellip Wersquore advancing the digital payments revolution by helping people securely acquire store and now spend gold with unprecedented simplicity BitGold accounts are free and can be opened in minutes We provide users with a secure vault account to purchase and hold gold the ability to make and receive instant gold payments and a prepaid card for spending gold at traditional points of sale Through our network of ATMs customers can fund their accounts with local-currencyrdquo (4)

Present investors backing BitGold include Dundee Capital Markets GMP Securities and Sandstorm Gold although the initial investor in the company was Soros Brothers Investment which is presently run by Alexander Soros the son of Hungarian business magnate George Soros (2)

2015 has been a big year for the company CNBC has stated that BitGold currently serves over 100000 active customers and the platform stores approximately 276 kilograms of bullion within its walls Thatrsquos nearly $11 million total and over $100 per active user (6) In May BitGold began trading on the TSX Venture exchange in Canada and announced the purchase of GoldMoney worth nearly $52 million in Canadian dollars (7)

In June the company made citizens of the United States very happy with the following announcement

ldquoUS residents can sign up on the BitGold platform and buy sell or redeem gold using BitGoldrsquos Aurum payment and settlement technology US residents will also have access to the BitGold mobile app and a prepaid card when these features launch over the coming weeksrdquo (7)

The platform offers a number of products and services beneficial to any gold-lover across the country As the above quote suggests BitGold offers whatrsquos known as Aurum the gold-settlement technology thatrsquos compliant with several US financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase Wells Fargo Citi Bank of America US Bank Fidelity Capital One and Charles Schwab Users with an account at any one of these nationally-recognized banks can instantly redeem gold or authorize gold deposits The transactions thereby increase in safety and automation Users also receive a bonus in that they are usually able to avoid bank wire fees through the process (7)

Using the BitGold app users may also send and receive gold as payments to and from any other user or seller without paying any transaction fees They can even send gold to non-BitGold users via their mobile phones or through a simple email message The company also issues prepaid debit cards allowing users to spend funds directly from their BitGold accounts The card is compatible with ATMs so that users may withdraw local currency (7)

Lastly the company issues special ten-gram gold cubes worth approximately $380 each at press time Users may redeem these cubes on the BitGold platform and may demand physical delivery when they see fit (7)

34 JANUARY 2016

Vice-president of communications and PR Emily Cornelius explained in an email that they have no ldquostereotypicalrdquo user of the companyrsquos services but that there are predominantly three main use cases

ldquoThe traditional gold investor will gravitate to BitGold because our gold is unprecedentedly priced within 1 of spot price and we offer free storage in a Brinks vault of their choice globallyhellip The second use case is the user who seeks a more stable currency for their national savings outside of their potentially volatile local fiat currencyhellip Gold has gained over 3000 vs the US Dollar which is arguably the worldrsquos strongest fiat money Gold may seem to go up down or sideways but in reality and when viewed over long timescales such as the avg human lifecycle ndash it always riseshellip Gold has been rising against 9 of the worldrsquos most famous and well-known currencies almost every year since 2000hellip Thirdly BitGold is a powerful payments platformhellip BitGold allows a user to send an invoice for your labor to someone else anywhere in the world which the recipient can pay using any traditional payment methodhellip This gold is vaulted anywhere even outside their jurisdictionhellip This is important as it allows users to achieve upward mobility that are otherwise hindered by localized issues that are exogenous to their personal journeyrdquo

Cornelius also explained that the company offers ldquoall the benefits and efficiencies of a service like PayPal and a MasterCard but with a universally accepted more stable store of valuerdquo

Presently regulation over BitGold appears to be fairly non-existent BitGold does not list which regulators hold jurisdiction over its staff and operations nor do they list regulatory information regarding their trade practices (7) In fact co-founder Roy Sebag has stated in the past that he believes BitGold is not a bank nor does it serve as a financial institution in any traditional sense as it does not engage in fractional-reserve banking (2)According to page 20 of the companyrsquos initial public filing BitGold is not

ldquohellipEligible to be registered with the Financial

Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canadahellip There can be no assurance that BitGoldrsquos services or Internet platform will be acceptable to foreign regulatory bodies Foreign governments may seek to restrict access to BitGoldrsquos services block BitGoldrsquos website or impose other restrictions that may affect BitGoldrsquos ability to offer service to new or existing users in those for an extended period of time or indefinitelyrdquo (8)

Despite this it was confirmed in July of 2015 that the company did offer its services under the Canadian Bailment Law (9) This occurs in situations where physical personal property is transferred from one person (the bailor) to another for safekeeping and doing so does not require the binding notion of a written contract (10)

Presently the company employs 26 people including Sebag and Crumb Other notable BitGold personnel include Chief Executive Officer Darrell MacMullin Chief Technology Officer Alessandro Premoli Lead Mobile Engineer Paul Mennega and Team Manager Karman Lee The company also employs several vice-presidents five software engineers and two compliance officers (4)

It can be said that BitGold has accomplished quite a bit in less than two years Itrsquos likely such a volatile company has some big plans waiting in the wings for 2016 but Emily Cornelius isnrsquot dropping any hints as to what they could be

ldquoWe have a number of new features services and products cominghellip Yoursquoll have to wait and seerdquo

BitGold is steadily making its mark It has the backing the funds the technology and above all the drive Put all these items together (and add a touch of flair and public desire) and itrsquos clear that BitGold has what it takes to make the world of finance its own

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

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Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

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Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 32: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

32 JANUARY 2016

ldquoI love go-o-o-o-ldrdquo-Austin Powers in Goldmember

Not surprisingly most people feel the same

According to the Wall Street Journal gold prices and safe-haven demand in Asia have been skyrocketing since mid-November (1) proving that you donrsquot have to be a sea-faring pirate or a squire in a kingrsquos castle to enjoy its natural glare beauty and above all its ability to stimulate wealth

Since the days of the California Gold Rush people have enjoyed panning for it selling it and most of

all owning it Long considered one of the planetrsquos most precious and desired metals gold has grown heavily in value over the last several years and it appears more and more are trying to get their hands on it every single day

Something else is growing as wellhellip Bitcoin Often regarded as Americarsquos most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin has jumped heavily in value over the last few months spiking from $230 to nearly $350 Unlike gold which exists in solid physical form Bitcoin exists in ones and zeros binary coding that travels through the blockchain the technology that makes Bitcoin transactions possible between users and respective merchants

BITGOLD A MODERN REVOLUTION IN FINANCEBY NICK MARINOFF

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 33

Itrsquos interesting to witness nearly equal popularity rising for two different things that ultimately serve the same purpose and share similar goals Both are designed to enhance the world of finance Both can rise in value and both have the ability to make someone rich overnighthellip So what if we could combine the two What significant differences could there be if Bitcoin and gold were fused into one entity

Well itrsquos already been done Say hello to BitGold an early startup company stationed in Toronto Canada BitGold aims to offer international services for people and businesses to send payments and hold savings with physical gold (2) The company was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb Both have a long history in the financial sector with Sebag previously serving as the Founder and Managing Principal of Braavos Capital (an international private investment organization) and the Chairman of Natural Resource Holdings an investment company involved with natural resource assets (3) Josh Crumb was previously the Senior Metals Strategist at Goldman Sachs (4)

The company alleges that gold bullion is ldquothe worldrsquos oldest asset class and the centuryrsquos best performing currencyrdquo (5) According to BitGoldrsquos website their mission is

ldquohellipTo make gold accessible and useful in digital payments and secure savingshellip Wersquore advancing the digital payments revolution by helping people securely acquire store and now spend gold with unprecedented simplicity BitGold accounts are free and can be opened in minutes We provide users with a secure vault account to purchase and hold gold the ability to make and receive instant gold payments and a prepaid card for spending gold at traditional points of sale Through our network of ATMs customers can fund their accounts with local-currencyrdquo (4)

Present investors backing BitGold include Dundee Capital Markets GMP Securities and Sandstorm Gold although the initial investor in the company was Soros Brothers Investment which is presently run by Alexander Soros the son of Hungarian business magnate George Soros (2)

2015 has been a big year for the company CNBC has stated that BitGold currently serves over 100000 active customers and the platform stores approximately 276 kilograms of bullion within its walls Thatrsquos nearly $11 million total and over $100 per active user (6) In May BitGold began trading on the TSX Venture exchange in Canada and announced the purchase of GoldMoney worth nearly $52 million in Canadian dollars (7)

In June the company made citizens of the United States very happy with the following announcement

ldquoUS residents can sign up on the BitGold platform and buy sell or redeem gold using BitGoldrsquos Aurum payment and settlement technology US residents will also have access to the BitGold mobile app and a prepaid card when these features launch over the coming weeksrdquo (7)

The platform offers a number of products and services beneficial to any gold-lover across the country As the above quote suggests BitGold offers whatrsquos known as Aurum the gold-settlement technology thatrsquos compliant with several US financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase Wells Fargo Citi Bank of America US Bank Fidelity Capital One and Charles Schwab Users with an account at any one of these nationally-recognized banks can instantly redeem gold or authorize gold deposits The transactions thereby increase in safety and automation Users also receive a bonus in that they are usually able to avoid bank wire fees through the process (7)

Using the BitGold app users may also send and receive gold as payments to and from any other user or seller without paying any transaction fees They can even send gold to non-BitGold users via their mobile phones or through a simple email message The company also issues prepaid debit cards allowing users to spend funds directly from their BitGold accounts The card is compatible with ATMs so that users may withdraw local currency (7)

Lastly the company issues special ten-gram gold cubes worth approximately $380 each at press time Users may redeem these cubes on the BitGold platform and may demand physical delivery when they see fit (7)

34 JANUARY 2016

Vice-president of communications and PR Emily Cornelius explained in an email that they have no ldquostereotypicalrdquo user of the companyrsquos services but that there are predominantly three main use cases

ldquoThe traditional gold investor will gravitate to BitGold because our gold is unprecedentedly priced within 1 of spot price and we offer free storage in a Brinks vault of their choice globallyhellip The second use case is the user who seeks a more stable currency for their national savings outside of their potentially volatile local fiat currencyhellip Gold has gained over 3000 vs the US Dollar which is arguably the worldrsquos strongest fiat money Gold may seem to go up down or sideways but in reality and when viewed over long timescales such as the avg human lifecycle ndash it always riseshellip Gold has been rising against 9 of the worldrsquos most famous and well-known currencies almost every year since 2000hellip Thirdly BitGold is a powerful payments platformhellip BitGold allows a user to send an invoice for your labor to someone else anywhere in the world which the recipient can pay using any traditional payment methodhellip This gold is vaulted anywhere even outside their jurisdictionhellip This is important as it allows users to achieve upward mobility that are otherwise hindered by localized issues that are exogenous to their personal journeyrdquo

Cornelius also explained that the company offers ldquoall the benefits and efficiencies of a service like PayPal and a MasterCard but with a universally accepted more stable store of valuerdquo

Presently regulation over BitGold appears to be fairly non-existent BitGold does not list which regulators hold jurisdiction over its staff and operations nor do they list regulatory information regarding their trade practices (7) In fact co-founder Roy Sebag has stated in the past that he believes BitGold is not a bank nor does it serve as a financial institution in any traditional sense as it does not engage in fractional-reserve banking (2)According to page 20 of the companyrsquos initial public filing BitGold is not

ldquohellipEligible to be registered with the Financial

Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canadahellip There can be no assurance that BitGoldrsquos services or Internet platform will be acceptable to foreign regulatory bodies Foreign governments may seek to restrict access to BitGoldrsquos services block BitGoldrsquos website or impose other restrictions that may affect BitGoldrsquos ability to offer service to new or existing users in those for an extended period of time or indefinitelyrdquo (8)

Despite this it was confirmed in July of 2015 that the company did offer its services under the Canadian Bailment Law (9) This occurs in situations where physical personal property is transferred from one person (the bailor) to another for safekeeping and doing so does not require the binding notion of a written contract (10)

Presently the company employs 26 people including Sebag and Crumb Other notable BitGold personnel include Chief Executive Officer Darrell MacMullin Chief Technology Officer Alessandro Premoli Lead Mobile Engineer Paul Mennega and Team Manager Karman Lee The company also employs several vice-presidents five software engineers and two compliance officers (4)

It can be said that BitGold has accomplished quite a bit in less than two years Itrsquos likely such a volatile company has some big plans waiting in the wings for 2016 but Emily Cornelius isnrsquot dropping any hints as to what they could be

ldquoWe have a number of new features services and products cominghellip Yoursquoll have to wait and seerdquo

BitGold is steadily making its mark It has the backing the funds the technology and above all the drive Put all these items together (and add a touch of flair and public desire) and itrsquos clear that BitGold has what it takes to make the world of finance its own

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 33: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 33

Itrsquos interesting to witness nearly equal popularity rising for two different things that ultimately serve the same purpose and share similar goals Both are designed to enhance the world of finance Both can rise in value and both have the ability to make someone rich overnighthellip So what if we could combine the two What significant differences could there be if Bitcoin and gold were fused into one entity

Well itrsquos already been done Say hello to BitGold an early startup company stationed in Toronto Canada BitGold aims to offer international services for people and businesses to send payments and hold savings with physical gold (2) The company was founded in 2014 by entrepreneurs Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb Both have a long history in the financial sector with Sebag previously serving as the Founder and Managing Principal of Braavos Capital (an international private investment organization) and the Chairman of Natural Resource Holdings an investment company involved with natural resource assets (3) Josh Crumb was previously the Senior Metals Strategist at Goldman Sachs (4)

The company alleges that gold bullion is ldquothe worldrsquos oldest asset class and the centuryrsquos best performing currencyrdquo (5) According to BitGoldrsquos website their mission is

ldquohellipTo make gold accessible and useful in digital payments and secure savingshellip Wersquore advancing the digital payments revolution by helping people securely acquire store and now spend gold with unprecedented simplicity BitGold accounts are free and can be opened in minutes We provide users with a secure vault account to purchase and hold gold the ability to make and receive instant gold payments and a prepaid card for spending gold at traditional points of sale Through our network of ATMs customers can fund their accounts with local-currencyrdquo (4)

Present investors backing BitGold include Dundee Capital Markets GMP Securities and Sandstorm Gold although the initial investor in the company was Soros Brothers Investment which is presently run by Alexander Soros the son of Hungarian business magnate George Soros (2)

2015 has been a big year for the company CNBC has stated that BitGold currently serves over 100000 active customers and the platform stores approximately 276 kilograms of bullion within its walls Thatrsquos nearly $11 million total and over $100 per active user (6) In May BitGold began trading on the TSX Venture exchange in Canada and announced the purchase of GoldMoney worth nearly $52 million in Canadian dollars (7)

In June the company made citizens of the United States very happy with the following announcement

ldquoUS residents can sign up on the BitGold platform and buy sell or redeem gold using BitGoldrsquos Aurum payment and settlement technology US residents will also have access to the BitGold mobile app and a prepaid card when these features launch over the coming weeksrdquo (7)

The platform offers a number of products and services beneficial to any gold-lover across the country As the above quote suggests BitGold offers whatrsquos known as Aurum the gold-settlement technology thatrsquos compliant with several US financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase Wells Fargo Citi Bank of America US Bank Fidelity Capital One and Charles Schwab Users with an account at any one of these nationally-recognized banks can instantly redeem gold or authorize gold deposits The transactions thereby increase in safety and automation Users also receive a bonus in that they are usually able to avoid bank wire fees through the process (7)

Using the BitGold app users may also send and receive gold as payments to and from any other user or seller without paying any transaction fees They can even send gold to non-BitGold users via their mobile phones or through a simple email message The company also issues prepaid debit cards allowing users to spend funds directly from their BitGold accounts The card is compatible with ATMs so that users may withdraw local currency (7)

Lastly the company issues special ten-gram gold cubes worth approximately $380 each at press time Users may redeem these cubes on the BitGold platform and may demand physical delivery when they see fit (7)

34 JANUARY 2016

Vice-president of communications and PR Emily Cornelius explained in an email that they have no ldquostereotypicalrdquo user of the companyrsquos services but that there are predominantly three main use cases

ldquoThe traditional gold investor will gravitate to BitGold because our gold is unprecedentedly priced within 1 of spot price and we offer free storage in a Brinks vault of their choice globallyhellip The second use case is the user who seeks a more stable currency for their national savings outside of their potentially volatile local fiat currencyhellip Gold has gained over 3000 vs the US Dollar which is arguably the worldrsquos strongest fiat money Gold may seem to go up down or sideways but in reality and when viewed over long timescales such as the avg human lifecycle ndash it always riseshellip Gold has been rising against 9 of the worldrsquos most famous and well-known currencies almost every year since 2000hellip Thirdly BitGold is a powerful payments platformhellip BitGold allows a user to send an invoice for your labor to someone else anywhere in the world which the recipient can pay using any traditional payment methodhellip This gold is vaulted anywhere even outside their jurisdictionhellip This is important as it allows users to achieve upward mobility that are otherwise hindered by localized issues that are exogenous to their personal journeyrdquo

Cornelius also explained that the company offers ldquoall the benefits and efficiencies of a service like PayPal and a MasterCard but with a universally accepted more stable store of valuerdquo

Presently regulation over BitGold appears to be fairly non-existent BitGold does not list which regulators hold jurisdiction over its staff and operations nor do they list regulatory information regarding their trade practices (7) In fact co-founder Roy Sebag has stated in the past that he believes BitGold is not a bank nor does it serve as a financial institution in any traditional sense as it does not engage in fractional-reserve banking (2)According to page 20 of the companyrsquos initial public filing BitGold is not

ldquohellipEligible to be registered with the Financial

Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canadahellip There can be no assurance that BitGoldrsquos services or Internet platform will be acceptable to foreign regulatory bodies Foreign governments may seek to restrict access to BitGoldrsquos services block BitGoldrsquos website or impose other restrictions that may affect BitGoldrsquos ability to offer service to new or existing users in those for an extended period of time or indefinitelyrdquo (8)

Despite this it was confirmed in July of 2015 that the company did offer its services under the Canadian Bailment Law (9) This occurs in situations where physical personal property is transferred from one person (the bailor) to another for safekeeping and doing so does not require the binding notion of a written contract (10)

Presently the company employs 26 people including Sebag and Crumb Other notable BitGold personnel include Chief Executive Officer Darrell MacMullin Chief Technology Officer Alessandro Premoli Lead Mobile Engineer Paul Mennega and Team Manager Karman Lee The company also employs several vice-presidents five software engineers and two compliance officers (4)

It can be said that BitGold has accomplished quite a bit in less than two years Itrsquos likely such a volatile company has some big plans waiting in the wings for 2016 but Emily Cornelius isnrsquot dropping any hints as to what they could be

ldquoWe have a number of new features services and products cominghellip Yoursquoll have to wait and seerdquo

BitGold is steadily making its mark It has the backing the funds the technology and above all the drive Put all these items together (and add a touch of flair and public desire) and itrsquos clear that BitGold has what it takes to make the world of finance its own

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 34: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

34 JANUARY 2016

Vice-president of communications and PR Emily Cornelius explained in an email that they have no ldquostereotypicalrdquo user of the companyrsquos services but that there are predominantly three main use cases

ldquoThe traditional gold investor will gravitate to BitGold because our gold is unprecedentedly priced within 1 of spot price and we offer free storage in a Brinks vault of their choice globallyhellip The second use case is the user who seeks a more stable currency for their national savings outside of their potentially volatile local fiat currencyhellip Gold has gained over 3000 vs the US Dollar which is arguably the worldrsquos strongest fiat money Gold may seem to go up down or sideways but in reality and when viewed over long timescales such as the avg human lifecycle ndash it always riseshellip Gold has been rising against 9 of the worldrsquos most famous and well-known currencies almost every year since 2000hellip Thirdly BitGold is a powerful payments platformhellip BitGold allows a user to send an invoice for your labor to someone else anywhere in the world which the recipient can pay using any traditional payment methodhellip This gold is vaulted anywhere even outside their jurisdictionhellip This is important as it allows users to achieve upward mobility that are otherwise hindered by localized issues that are exogenous to their personal journeyrdquo

Cornelius also explained that the company offers ldquoall the benefits and efficiencies of a service like PayPal and a MasterCard but with a universally accepted more stable store of valuerdquo

Presently regulation over BitGold appears to be fairly non-existent BitGold does not list which regulators hold jurisdiction over its staff and operations nor do they list regulatory information regarding their trade practices (7) In fact co-founder Roy Sebag has stated in the past that he believes BitGold is not a bank nor does it serve as a financial institution in any traditional sense as it does not engage in fractional-reserve banking (2)According to page 20 of the companyrsquos initial public filing BitGold is not

ldquohellipEligible to be registered with the Financial

Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canadahellip There can be no assurance that BitGoldrsquos services or Internet platform will be acceptable to foreign regulatory bodies Foreign governments may seek to restrict access to BitGoldrsquos services block BitGoldrsquos website or impose other restrictions that may affect BitGoldrsquos ability to offer service to new or existing users in those for an extended period of time or indefinitelyrdquo (8)

Despite this it was confirmed in July of 2015 that the company did offer its services under the Canadian Bailment Law (9) This occurs in situations where physical personal property is transferred from one person (the bailor) to another for safekeeping and doing so does not require the binding notion of a written contract (10)

Presently the company employs 26 people including Sebag and Crumb Other notable BitGold personnel include Chief Executive Officer Darrell MacMullin Chief Technology Officer Alessandro Premoli Lead Mobile Engineer Paul Mennega and Team Manager Karman Lee The company also employs several vice-presidents five software engineers and two compliance officers (4)

It can be said that BitGold has accomplished quite a bit in less than two years Itrsquos likely such a volatile company has some big plans waiting in the wings for 2016 but Emily Cornelius isnrsquot dropping any hints as to what they could be

ldquoWe have a number of new features services and products cominghellip Yoursquoll have to wait and seerdquo

BitGold is steadily making its mark It has the backing the funds the technology and above all the drive Put all these items together (and add a touch of flair and public desire) and itrsquos clear that BitGold has what it takes to make the world of finance its own

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 35: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 35

Classes in Data Security amp Communications Privacy

One of the key elements of your individual sovereignty is your ability to have private information and either keep it private or communicate it privately to other people In order to have effective data security and communications privacy you need to understand a significant array of technologies Fortunately we have teachers well versed in these matters who are available to help In addition we are helping to organize a series of seminars throughout the year 2016 at different locations around the world so that our people can help you make the most of these techniques

Our comprehensive course is regularly $500 but for a limited time (through 31 May 2016) readers of this magazine can purchase the course for $399

The comprehensive course is intended to provide a detailed review of information and communications security technologies that are

suited to your business operations or personal needs It includes a review of the following areas

bull E-mail encryption using Open PGP systemsbull Web mail encryption using Mailvelope and similarbull Computer operating systems and open source choicesbull Encrypted root data storagebull Deleting versus over-writingbull Keeping encrypted back-upsbull Computer software systems proprietary and open sourcebull Connectivity choices including VPN tunneling multi-hop VPNs TORbull Encrypted voice over IPbull Encrypted text chatbull Encrypted video conferencingbull Crypto-currencies as payment methods and their limitationsbull Secure multi-currency digital wallet choices

We also offer customized courses that are designed to provide the best results for your particular business or personal needs We also offer individual courses in each one of the above areas of technology for only $49 per course

We have the ability to accept payment in various forms Among the payment choices we currently like are check money order cash silver coins gold coins Bitcoin and Silent Bitcoin Please contact us for further details or to arrange payment

Individual Sovereign University Association wwwindsovuorg2040 West 31st Street Suite G169Lawrence KS 66046 +1-913-538-5597

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

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Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 36: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

36 JANUARY 2016

There are 3 modular processes at Digix - Proof of Asset (PoA) Certification to create PoA Asset cards Minter DAE to create DGX tokens Recaster DAE to convert DGX tokens back into PoA Asset cards

Proof of Asset certification consists of

1 The digital signatures from our chain of custody (Supplier Custodian Independent Auditor2 Documentation and proof of receipts from each of these entities that are uploaded for

verification

The above allows the creation of PoA Asset cards

Each PoA asset card represents your ownership of Gold bars kept at our participating custodial vaults

PoA Asset cards in themselves can be sent and received on the Ethereum Blockchain

To make these assets fungible and divisible into DGX Gold tokens you can move on to the next 2 autonomous services that we have created at Digix

These 2 services would be the Minter and Recaster DAE DAE stands for ldquoDecentralized Autonomous Entitiesrdquo They are open sourced smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain

These smart contracts perform the autonomous role of accepting PoA Asset cards and converting them into fungible divisible DGX tokens

For instance if you send a PoA Asset card representing a 100g gold bar to the Minter DAE it will in return issue you with 100000 DGX tokens (where each DGX tokens represents 0001g of gold) to your Ethereum Wallet Each of these DGX tokens are backed by the amount of gold in the DGX network pool which is owned by the users of the smart contract Minter DAE

To convert DGX Tokens back into a PoA Asset card or gold bar for redemption simply use the Recaster DAE by sending the requisite amount of DGX tokens (on a weight basis) to the Recaster smart contract Due to AML laws we will KYC individuals who wish to do any physical delivery of gold bars at this stage

THE DIGIX ASSETTOKENIZATION PROCESS

Digix Gold and Asset tokens can be issued by individual users by giving ownership of a physical asset (PoAtrade Certificate) to the Minter DAE One Digix Gold token represents a 1 gram share of a physical gold bar under the control of the Minter DAE

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

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Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 37: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 37

Continued from page 10

Copies of the book in hard cover were still available from Spencerrsquos the Heather Foundation the last I heard I very strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic of money Here is a brief excerpt

ldquoTo desire freedom is an instinct To secure it requires intelligence It must be comprehended and selfmdashasserted To petition for it is to stultify oneself for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority for there is no tyranny but ignorance to be conscious of onersquos powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny Self-government is not a remote aim It is an intimate and inescapable fact To govern oneself is a natural imperative and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of itrdquo

You see Irsquom not the only one being harsh If you feel you arenrsquot free whose fault is that Who is responsible for your freedom Irsquom responsible for my freedom You should take responsibility for yours

If you donrsquot like the Federal Reserve why do you keep using Federal Reserve notes Are you afraid Do you hope that the powers that be have some of the omnipotence they pretend is theirs Or are you simply unwilling to do anything to change your economic situation because you risk losing something in the transition What if I told you that you risk losing everything if you donrsquot transition

Denationalisation of Money Brings FreedomAnother author who wrote extensively on the topic of money was FA Hayek Hayek is widely known as the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974 for his ldquopioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuationsrdquo In my opinion Hayekrsquos greatest contribution to economics was his 1976 (and subsequently revised through 1990) book Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Refined An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent CurrenciesAgain if you really want to understand money who

should issue it and what damage is done by having governments issue money you should read Hayekrsquos book The paperback used from Amazonrsquos network of resellers might set you back $3 or more

Here is a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavourThe truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract It becomes thus in certain circumstances a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context lsquoin substituting for the free operation of voluntary contract and a law which simply enforces the performance of such contracts an artificial construction of contracts such as would never occur to the parties unless forced upon them by an arbitrary law

Hayek is correct Legal tender is a scam But so is every other aspect of government imposed by coercion Without your explicit consent government is just bullying Perhaps you should stop being bullied

Hayek went on to write in the same book

ldquoIt seems to me to be fairly certain that

ldquo(a) a money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use itldquo(b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no risk by depreciating his moneyldquo(c) the issuing institution could achieve this result by regulating the quantity of its issue andldquo(d) such a regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all possible purposesrdquo

Issue MoneyThere is an old saying that when it becomes time to steamboat yoursquoll find many people building and

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 38: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

38 JANUARY 2016

operating steamboats The same seems to be true of other inventions such as railroads Until then it may be possible but it wonrsquot gain widespread acceptance So the fact that more than one group is now offering the opportunity for competing currencies in the same wallet seems to suggest that the era of competing currencies has begin

Two particular new developments in this area are from Kevin Wilkerson and Chris Odom Wilkerson is the mind behind the Voucher-Safe technology and has recently announced the Digital Cash Alliance to promote private anonymous digital cash Odom is the mind behind Open Transactions and has recently announced Stash Crypto Both of these systems allow for different companies non-profits and even individuals to issue their own currencies

At roughly the same time there are dozens of new crypto-currencies a trend which was begun by Satoshi Nakamoto with the Bitcoin white paper Among the many other similar currencies are Litecoin Dogecoin Dash MaidSafeCoin Peercoin and more than 600 others The same technology built into Bitcoin the ldquoblock chainrdquo is also being used for domain name ownership real estate ownership and publication of facts of various kinds

Where does all this new currency activity come from and where is it going Also to the extent that many of these new currencies represent mathematical computation power such as solving hashing algorithms to what extent are these ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo better or worse than national currencies issued by central banks or governments

Origins in CryptographyThe origins of digital cash and digital currencies go back to 1982 David Chaum a cryptographer published a paper on anonymous communications in 1981 A year later he put together the ideas on blind signatures which form the basis for digital cash His paper ldquoBlind Signatures for Untraceable Paymentsrdquo was accepted for publication at Advances in Cryptology in 1982

Chaum went even further founding a company in Amsterdam in 1990 to purse his digital cash concepts The company Digi-Cash eventually put

forth a web site and a system of payments involving the Mark Twain bank in the USA and Deutsche Bank in Germany I remember visiting the Mark Twain bank web site around 1995 and being impressed with the availability of Digi-Cash for micro-payments However it seems only a few thousand customers ever came forward

The Mark Twain bank was purchased by another banking company near the turn of the century It may be partly due to the fact that the purchasing bank was involved in credit card payment processing or it may be the rather small number of customers involved but for whatever reason by 1999 Mark Twain bank was no longer involved Digi-Cash closed its doors about that time

Another important development about this time was the work of James Turk Turk had been involved in the mainstream banking sector was very concerned about some of the risks implied by a 1974 market crash and had a longstanding interest in the use of gold as money He received a bachelorrsquos degree in international economics in 1969 and worked for Chase bank for a time He moved to the United Arab Emirates in 1983 and worked as manager of the commodity department of the Abu Dhabi investment authority He resigned from there in 1987 and about the same time began writing for his Free Market Gold and Money Report newsletter By at least June of 1995 and possibly earlier Turk had applied for and received a patent on the concept of a digital gold currency I found reference to the June 1995 date on this site httppatentsjustiacominventorjames-j-turk

So it is clear to me that within about a decade of the invention of digital cash and within about five years of the first business creating digital cash (Digi-Cash started by Chaum roughly 1990) an inveterate gold bug had come along to figure out how to create digital gold However it would be several more years before the gold enthusiast Jim Turk established a business to capitalize on his patented idea

Digital Gold CurrenciesThere is a lot to say about the era of digital gold currencies and I have been involved in saying quite a bit of it You can find a 2004 industry report on my

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 39: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 39

Indomitusnet website for example which goes over my direct personal experiences meeting various people involved in this industry It also details the amounts of gold silver and other precious metals in storage and where published the numbers of accounts and volume of economic transactions taking place in the various currencies

This phase of activity in the digital cash arena runs from 1996 to 2007 Doug Jackson founded e-goldcom in 1996 Bernard von NotHaus founded the Liberty Dollar in 1998 Jim and Pam Fayed built e-Bullioncom which went online in 2000 Zeno Dahinden created the e-dinar in 2000 which was initially a variation of e-gold and worked directly with the e-gold site GoldMoney was founded by James Turk and Clifford Press in 2001 JP May started ldquoone more digital currencyrdquo or 1MDC in 2001 Sidd Davis brought Pecunixcom online in 2002 There were several others including a Phoenix Dollar made of silver a Loom on which gold coffee and other assets were traded and a truly excellent Gold Global all of which came a little later

If you want to read the story of this industry perhaps one day I might be encouraged to write it Recently I learned from my friend Carl Mullan that he is writing a book about digital currencies which given his involvement in digital gold suggests quite a bit of the story is going to be available soon In any event it is a long story though and quite beyond the scope of this essay My own involvement in digital gold began in December 1998 and has not yet ended

During that time I met or corresponded with extensively every single one of the founders of the various companies mentioned two paragraphs ago with the exception of Clifford Press I met Doug Jackson and Pam

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 40: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

40 JANUARY 2016

Fayed at a conference in Atlanta in April 2002 I met Jim Turk at one of the conferences founded by the late Jim Blanchard in New Orleans later that same year Over the years I also went to events deliberately to meet investors merchants and key players in the industry

What happened Well the FBI decided to destroy e-gold in my opinion and did so very thoroughly in April 2007 Doug Jackson ended up being advised as I understand it to plead guilty to a federal crime involving money laundering and I think that was pretty much the end of e-gold It wrapped up within a few years of this plea with people who were willing to claim the contents of their accounts going through a process to identify their claim and have it fulfilled The death of e-gold in 2007 was also the death of 1MDC as far as I can tell By way of contrast Dahinden and associates chose to separate from e-gold roughly July 2004 and became an independent payment system

The same agency decided to destroy the Liberty Dollar in September 2007 in my opinion and did so Bernard von NotHaus did not enter into any sort of plea agreement and was convicted in a court in Statesville North Carolina quite a few years later and later still eventually sentenced to some months of house arrest as I understand it I have several friends who have identified their claims to various Liberty Dollar warehouse receipts e-Liberty Dollars digital warehouse receipts silver rounds copper rounds and so forth Based on what Irsquom told they have each been informed that their property was improperly seized and is to be returned to them and again in each case they have not received any of their property

The e-Bullion story came to a very dramatic close when Jim Fayed hired a killer to murder his wife Pam Jim Fayed has since been convicted and was I believe sentenced to death for the murder Since these events took place in California which isnrsquot currently executing anyone it seems likely that hersquoll spend the rest of his life in prison

One good story that has not ended is c-gold a system based in Malaysia which is eerily similar to the old e-gold site The c-gold system has a fairly small

user base with gold in audited and secure long term storage

As well the GoldMoney story hasnrsquot ended GoldMoney became a publicly traded stock not long ago and was recently purchased (2015) by bitGold

It isnrsquot clear whether the Pecunix story has ended or not Rumors abound and I have no clear understanding of what if anything is going to happen with Pecunix in the future But the end of e-gold in 2007 combined with the end of the Liberty Dollar that same year was definitely a setback to many of the people involved in the digital gold industry

Blockchain CurrenciesThe next phase of activity began in 2008 Two important projects got started that year One of them Bitcoin has since risen to a great deal of fame some really stunning currency valuations and seems to be a strong currency today The other Voucher-Safe took a bit longer to develop and is just now stretching its legs Other important currencies and ideas in this space include Litecoin and the Open Transactions system

Earlier I mentioned the original white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto Nobody seems to be quite sure who this fellow Satoshi Nakamoto actually is but it is widely believed that the name is a pseudonym I gather from some people who have analyzed the name that satoshi is a Japanese word for wise or quick-witted The word naka means inside The word moto means foundation or origin So perhaps the author is claiming to be clever an insider and original

The white paper itself describes a process for extending then-known cryptographic protocols to create a digital currency software system Very soon after the white paper was published a group of software developers put together the original Bitcoin Core protocol which is the basis of the entire Bitcoin industry

It took only a few years for the idea to catch on and become as we say about ideas on the Internet ldquoviralrdquo By summer 2011 the price of a bitcoin had grown from nearly nothing to about $25 each

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 41: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 41

DONATE WITH ANONYMITYFROM THE

DIGITAL CASHALLIANCE

What is the Digital Cash Alliance

The Digital Cash Alliance exists to move the world toward digital cash Our alliance consists of individuals and companies committed to a future which includes greater freedom for everyone Cash has long been the sine qua non of privacy anonymity and individual liberty Places where cash may be used to make purchases and where cash may be accepted to make sales tend to be places where people are more free to choose than places where cash is forbidden We believe that the global marketplaces online which seek to provide for individual liberty privacy and anonymity would be greatly improved with digital cash Accordingly we seek to promote publicise and encourage the use of digital cash We hope yoursquoll join us

How does DCSpark work

Our XMPP client is both a robust Jabber chat client (based on Spark 271) and a secure p2p wallet client The wallet client is implemented as a Spark plugin Other plugins provide OTR (off-the-record) for end-to-end chat encryption real time language translation and a host of other features

The XMPP servers operated by the DCA sit behind PageKite gateways so that they do not need any public-facing IP addresses In addition to increased security this means that while connected to our server you can only chat with other users of our client Our server allows you to log in anonymously or with a specific username for either 1-on-1 chats or in multi-user chatrooms You can only access your wallet through our private XMPP network

Who is the Digital Cash Alliance

Our founder is Kevin Wilkerson He is a systems architect software developer and author Other team members include Tyrone Johnson and Justin Turrell Our advisors are Paul Rosenberg Jim Davidson and Bruno Delpeucrsquoh Everyone on our team is committed to individual liberty and economic privacy

How do I get digital cash

Once you download and install the DCSpark wallet you can move bitcoin or litecoin into your wallet within about an hour (to allow for confirmations) Our multi-currency wallet also supports silver gold and token-backed currencies We want you to issue your own money or build an in-wallet merchant app or start an exchange agency and bring your user community to work with ours

DIGITAL CASH IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND PRIVACY

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 42: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

42 JANUARY 2016

Throughout the industry generally and in this paper Bitcoin is capitalized when referring to the concept or the currency itself The use of lowercase ldquobitcoinrdquo refers to an individual unit of the currency or the price of something measured in the currency

At the start of 2013 it was about $13 Due to excitement market mania and the use of bitcoin at a large number of online retailers the price spiked to over $1000 by the end of 2013 During 2014 the price dropped very substantially with many mainstream reports that it would soon be of no value once again However those gloomy predictions have not come to pass and bitcoin is currently trading above $290 as I write this paper in late October 2015

Bitcoin today is involved in something considerably in excess of $27 billion per year in economic transactions That fact makes the bitcoin economy larger than the economies of about 80 nations including familiar places like Estonia Afghanistan Haiti Honduras and Mongolia to name a few

Naturally with all things open source there are a great many variations on the theme Bitcoin has inspired about 635 similar ldquocrypto-currenciesrdquo or currencies as they might be envisioned by cryptography experts Perhaps the most important of these alternatives second only to Bitcoin in market capitalisation is Litecoin

Litecoin was developed as a variation of Bitcoin differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time increased maximum number of coins different hashing algorithm and a slightly modified graphical user interface It was intended that each litecoin be less valuable since there would be many more of them Transaction timing was intended to be much faster and transaction fees have prevented some types of high volume low value transaction attacksCompeting Currency WalletsSay what you please about Bitcoin whether it is great (and doing over $27 billion a year in transactions suggests it is great to many people) or whether it is awful (since it is based on nothing but mathematics not a tangible good like gold or silver) But it isnrsquot your currency It is the invention of Satoshi

Nakamoto and it is maintained by the committee in charge of the Bitcoin protocol

Moreover it has some serious privacy limitations Every transaction is made part of a permanent record a record which has grown in size and scope to include something near 40 gigabytes of data

You might not want your transactions to be recorded on that blockchain Then again other forms of money have their own limitations Credit card money and checking accounts are particularly compromised with respect to your privacy and they can be leveed at any moment to make your funds accessible only to the tax authorities Little wonder then that Voucher-Safe wallets have provision for Bitcoin and its major competitor Litecoin

What Voucher-Safe provides for is the opportunity for people to not only issue money but to transact with others using money of their own choice in complete privacy The Voucher-Safe system creates and destroys vouchers with every transaction and does so in a fashion that cannot be monitored It canrsquot be monitored because it isnrsquot based on a central server keeping accounts and recording each transaction that occurs You can keep track of transactions in your own individual wallet or delete records or even refuse to allow transaction records to be created

Best of all the system uses XMPP the messaging protocol that was designed for the Jabber chat system Users of Jabber know that it includes encrypted messaging called OTR or ldquoOff the Recordrdquo The Voucher-Safe system doesnrsquot use the web except for getting a copy of the open source wallet client to your computer So you donrsquot have to wonder about the numerous security holes gaping holes judging by recent experiences in the so-called ldquosecure web sitesrdquo you visit Because XMPP is a protocol that is designed to be extensible applications can be added to your Voucher-Safe wallet to make all kinds of activities I gather that a simple gambling game based on coin flips has been demonstrated as a prototype

Whatrsquos the CatchThe catch of course is that it costs money If you want to begin issuing your own currency there are fees to pay There are costs collected from wallet

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 43: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 43

users transaction fees In other words it isnrsquot free It is not so expensive that any company able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars or having profits in that range or any non-profit with similar finances or any new group of people choosing to work together couldnrsquot become currency issuers And of course as with all new technologies it is logical to suppose that over time the price of being a currency issuer may come down ndash after all electronic pocket calculators in 1971 cost around hundreds of dollars and today are just as effective for about $5

But you have free money from the government right Yoursquove seen what it costs you to use the dollar or the euro in terms of a loss of freedom (ask the Greek people how they like being part of the euro today) in terms of taxes and in terms of the not-so-hidden tax of inflation If you donrsquot want to pay for issuing your own currency you certainly donrsquot need to do so

There are also opportunities not only for people who would like to issue their own currencies but also for those who wish to be agents including exchange service operators people who wish to be merchants and people who simply like the idea of freedom to choose In fact there is an entire network being developed to promote digital cash in all of its splendor At various levels of participation members get access to a virtual privacy network that is among the very best in the world So your web browsing e-mail and all other online activities can take place within an encrypted ldquotunnelrdquo to secure servers The new group is called the Digital Cash Alliance

You can reach them at digitalcashto which gives a good overview of the alliance its team members advisers and plans The link you want is to their secure site at httpsdigitalcashto Note that they use a self-signed security certificate of course for all the numerous reasons that certificate ldquoauthorityrdquo security certs are to be avoided so your browser is likely to warn you about the connection

The Open Transactions system which is used by Monetas in commercial applications also offers a multi-currency wallet approach through Stash Crypto It seems likely that other competitors are going to arise in this sector as well

Why MeWhy am I interested in digital cash Quite simply because things are not okay the way they are If the future I was taught to expect were here I would have a flying car and be taking frequent vacations beyond the Moon There would not be a giant military-industrial-financial complex gaming the people for more debt-fueled wars destroying privacy and freedom and enhancing the wealth of the richest one-tenth of one percent There would rather be freedom Look around you

If you would seek reasons to have digital cash look about you Look all over You wonrsquot find freedom you wonrsquot find progress you wonrsquot find prosperity you wonrsquot find peace you wonrsquot find anything resembling justice anywhere you look If you want those things you are going to have to build them

And if you want to build things so very radical as freedom progress prosperity peace and justice yoursquoll need tools like digital cash So thatrsquos why me

If you want the global economy to be owned and operated by national governments central banks and their cronies at enormous banks and multinational corporations you have no need of digital cash except perhaps for some marginal savings over the costs involved in the wire transfer system But if you want meaningful change if you are not willing to beg the governments to change their policies if you want the Federal Reserve to cease to be relevant if you donrsquot actually expect people in politics to do anything to change a system that seems to serve them very well perhaps you should look into digital cash I think yoursquoll like what you find

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 44: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

44 JANUARY 2016

Develop your professional skills and earn a degree at a price you can afford

Welcome to New World University We offer degree and certificate programmes in professional studies at a cost that students in low and middle income countries can afford We have a deep seated commitment to your success because when you join us yoursquore not just enrolling at university yoursquore joining the international community to make higher education accessible to everyone who can benefit from it

New World Near Youbull Abuja Nigeriabull Kumasi Ghanabull Lagos Nigeriabull Port Harcourt Nigeria

Our flagship programme is in International Business Leadership Several qualifications are available single year certificates two year diplomas and three year Bachelor of Science degrees If you live in a city with one of our learning centres you may study in a classroom setting If not we also offer all of our subjects through guided independent study and through structured online learning

We also offer research fellowships and other scholarly opportunities for new and established educators and researchers

All of our programmes are designed specifically with students from low and middle income countries in mind For example our programmes all emphasise the importance of entrepreneurship and strategic thinking which are the mindsets and techniques that will help you become the most successful professional you can be This does not mean that what you learn at New World University wonrsquot apply anywhere in the world it simply means that we make every effort to address the unique challenges and opportunities found in emerging countries

In addition to keep your costs even lower we sponsor the Free Curricula Centre which is dedicated to eliminating the high costs of textbooks At New World University yoursquoll never need to pay extra for the course materials you need not textbooks lecture notes or anything else If we can answer any questions please contact us

NEW WORLD UNIVERSITY CORNER OF OLD AND CHURCH STREETS

ROSEAU COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA WEST INDIES

infonewworldac httpnewworldac

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 45: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 45

Requirements for WME Purse owners (Natural Persons)In accordance with the legislation of the European Union the WME Guarantor has the following requirements for WME Purse holders

1 User Details and Age RestrictionsThe WME purse holder must provide hisher name surname date of birth and full residential address (user location) including country of residenceThe WME purse holder must be at least 18 years of age if heshe resides within the European Economic Area (EEA) or at least 14 years old if heshe is residing outside the EEA and is of legal age in their country of residence

EEA countries include Austria Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Gibraltar Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden and the UK

2 Restricted CountriesResidents of the following countries are not permitted to use a WME purse American Samoa Afghanistan Algeria Angola Ecuador Guam Guyana Indonesia Iran Iraq Laos Libya Mali Mauritania Myanmar North Korea Northern Mariana Islands Panama Papua New Guinea Somalia Sudan Syria Yemen Uganda and the USA

3 Thresholds and Document Requirements31 It is not required to submit identity documents if the total deposits during one calendar year to all WME purses registered to one WM Passport do not exceed 2500 WME32 If the total deposits made to WME purses exceed 2500 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit the following documents- A valid national passport or other ID document- Proof of residential address eg bank statement or utility bill no older than 3 months (mobile telephone bills will not be accepted)33 If the total deposits made to all WME purses belonging to one passport exceed 15000 WME during one calendar year it is necessary to submit a bank statement or other documents confirming the source of fundsScanned copies of the required documents should be uploaded to the WebMoney Passport websiteIn case a WME purse holder does not satisfy the above requirements andor their identity document validity period has expired hisher WME user rights may be restricted (purses may be blocked) for both incoming and outgoing transactions

Date of requirement entry into force ndash 15072015The total WME balance on purses belonging to the same passport at the time of entry of the requirements into force will count towards the incoming transactions total as per Section 3 of the above requirements

httpwikiwmtransfercomprojects

New EU License for WebMoney Brings New Requirements for WME Purse Holders

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 46: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

46 JANUARY 2016

By design Internet digital currency circulates online unable to be deposited into a conventional bank It is not

possible to stride down to the local Wells Fargo and deposit a kilo Proof of Asset Digital Gold Certificate or those extra Satoshis your spouse has been saving on her smartphone

The value represented by digital currency units often backed by gold quietly moves around the world outside of the conventional banks These private Internet payments serve the needs of many people previously excluded from online business because of their lack of access to expensive highly regulated banks

These digital currency users located in every country on earth are just beginning to understand the great benefits derived from using transferable digital assets The ability to freely conduct an instant secure online transfer of value such as precious metal outside of the century-old banking cabal leads us all to a place of greater financial freedom

There are numerous benefits of using digital currency over conventional banks and old consumer products like credit cards

As this more purposeful use of digital assets expands throughout the world the benefits to individuals and the business world are easily recognized and can also be conveniently measured

Each time a new digital payment system emerges a different group and industry segment develops around this new technology In the late 1990s after the Russian bank collapse WebMoney Transfer digital currency rose to meet the challenges of a new cash-based Russian economy Whether it was paying the local cellphone bill monthly cable TV charge or simply transferring funds online WebMoney filled the gap in

consumer financial services left behind by the failed banks In this early market it was clearly Russian consumers that benefited from this new financial technology

As todayrsquos blockchain grows and further expands through new resources such as Ethereum many people are asking ldquoWho will be the next group to benefit clearly from digital assets and these emerging methods of decentralized value transferrdquo Everyone wants to know which group will be next to use distributed digital assets and penetrate new markets with global digital currency expansion Clearly online gambling and sportsbook services have vastly expanded through the Internet Adopting digital currency has revolutionized online gambling

Who is next Will it be the merchants bitcoinists or the bankers

In the early days of digital currency many brand new users ldquoinvestedrdquo funds in digital gold currency strictly because it was a convenient and inexpensive method of buying gold Even in 2015 digital gold is still a practical and economical way to invest in precious metal Owning digital gold assets gives a user the ability to store value in gold bullion without having to take delivery or arrange storage Itrsquos a highly effective solution for the age-old question ldquoWhere do we keep our goldrdquo

MerchantsDuring the late 1990s as the convenience of storing value in digital gold became more widely available merchants around the globe began to realize the true efficiency of online transactions using digital gold currency New digital gold currency transactions began moving effortlessly across international borders at all times of the day and night unrestricted by banking hours weekends or holidays

WHAT GROUP WILL SOON BE ENJOYINGTHE BENEFITS OF DIGITAL CURRENCY

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 47: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 47

Since both the sender and receiver exchange digital gold units denominated by weight there is never an expensive currency conversion interrupting the merchantrsquos cash flow Digital gold transactions clear instantly and 100 percent of the transferrsquos value is available at that moment for the merchantrsquos use Since there is no credit card fraud in digital currency transactions there is also no reason to hold back a merchant reserve fund to cover fraudulent card transactions

Merchants are clearly one of the largest benefactors of new digital currency innovation A great example of digital currencyrsquos merchant advantage can be illustrated by a successful Web hosting company in Egypt Because charging interest and borrowing money are not a part of the local business in this region credit cards have never been popular in Egypt or the Middle East This situation also includes those ubiquitous western PayPal accounts

However owning gold and using gold as money is widely accepted and appreciated throughout this region Using gold in the Middle East region dates back through centuries in the region Consequently using new digital gold currency technology was well accepted by the population in Egypt Products such as e-gold and e-dinar became everyday tools of commerce These new Internet methods of payment took the place of credit cards Digital gold currency in this case filled the gap left behind by unacceptable western banking products In fact much of the business accepted through this Egyptian Web hosting company a decade ago was paid for using digital gold currency

Merchants around the world understand that their ability to accept payments outside of conventional banking institutions is a real gift This group especially appreciates the concept of no charge-backs Both online and offline merchants can greatly benefit from the adoption of digital currency innovation

As the digital currency market further develops will merchants be the next segment to take advantage of these new digital currency benefits

Or are the merchants waiting on consumers

When credit cards first expanded in America that wave of new technology was not powered by the merchantrsquos desire to add a new method of payment Credit card expansion grew from consumer demand It is important to understand what drives the adoption of new financial products

Just as new demand for new credit card technology was fueled by consumerrsquos use of the plastic cards it is most likely to be US consumers not merchants whose adoption will signal the mass commercial use of digital currency in America

Yes merchants greatly benefit from using digital currency over conventional bank tools However without consumer digital currency spending the fruit of this new technology may die on the vine

BitcoinistHow about all of the new ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo will they be the benefactor of this new digital currency revolution Will it be the millions of tech-savvy enthusiastic cryptocurrency users from a younger generation who canrsquot get enough of those cool Satoshis Will it be the ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo to exploit digital currencyrsquos new major advantages Starting with political donations and ending with the corner bakery ldquoBitcoinistsrdquo are focused on expanding the use of digital currency Bitcoin has been a launching pad for ideas for this group of users

From circumventing currency controls in places like Greece Argentina and Venezuela to opening up commercial markets across the dark Web these users have leveraged digital currency and brought financial access to every part of the world There is no debating it the Bitcoinists have led the growth of cryptocurrency and benefited from the expansion

What could be brewing for these innovative bitcoin fans and is the US financial world headed for a bitcoin event horizon as so many Bitcoinists believe

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 48: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

48 JANUARY 2016

BankersThe absolute least enthusiastic groups of potential digital currency users are the banks and bankers Included in this list are the money men and those financial service professionals around the world closely aligned with conventional banking institutions This group of licensed and regulated individuals around the world move money into and out of government regulated financial products This group holds the keys to the front door and the back door of the banking industry A shift in attitude within this group could signal the widespread adoption of digital currency not only in America but around the globe

Bankers and their powerful Associates are no strangers to the limitations of international financial markets Each day they wade neck deep through US regulations and pass on their accumulated high fees to clients From the list of potential new users it appears the group with the most to gain from adopting digital currency are the bankers and financial agents of the world

What could power millions of financial service professionals and bankers to change lanes and adopt digital currency over conventional bank products

Profit Security and Consumer DemandBanks and financial companies run on profits The structure of commercial banking operations is arranged to generate profits However promoting digital currency to financial professionals as ldquothe future of moneyrdquo is an idea worth forgetting Furthermore any attempt at touting cryptocurrency as a new less expensive banking product is also likely to be a complete failure

Looking back to the fist ATM cards in America adoption was driven by consumer convenience At first the new cards were considered risky and expensive However the idea of accessing cash from anywhere in the state or across the country proved to be persuasive consumer argument and the cards eventually flourished

Removing the risk or perceived risk from any

digital asset should be step one In the digital gold market Digix Global seems to have conquered this task through the use of Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificates By creating legal ownership to physical gold bullion and storing that ownership on the blockchain using Ethereum Smart Contracts Digix has designed a convenient secure and insured way to own gold bullion

Todayrsquos financial professionals are driven by high profits Brokerage firms banks and financial companies tell their employees to sell products that make the most commission If a stockbroker working through the branch office of a commercial bank has the option to sell customers either the in-house mutual fund paying a high commission or an overseas mutual fund earning the same rate of return but paying a tiny commission nine out of 10 times the client receives the higher commission in-house product

Offering comparable higher commission digital assets and transactions in place of older less profitable bank products could begin to turn the tide for digital currency across the financial world Because the new technology behind digital assets is much less expensive than conventional bank products this task is considerably easier than it sounds Creating profitable digital currency products for banks and financial companies could fuel a move away from conventional bank transactions and into digital currency

This process should not be confused with the idea of offering a simple fee comparison between digital currency transactions and a credit card or bank transfer fees Pointing out to consumers which financial transaction has the lowest fee is not likely to change anything Just ask e-goldrsquos co-creator Douglas Jackson In early 2000 he placed an interactive credit card fee calculator that helped visitors understand the annual savings in e-gold transaction fees over credit card fees httpswebarchiveorgweb20000815053908httpwwwe-goldcomnewshtml

That was 15 years ago Saving a few bucks to give up the convenience of those little plastic

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo

Page 49: Digital Gold Magazine January 2016

DIGITALGOLDMONEY 49

cards didnrsquot work in 2000 and it wonrsquot work in 2015

However providing a higher commission to financial agents for selling digital currency instead of age-old bank products will almost guarantee a larger digital currency market share Creating comparable digital asset products that pay competitive sales commission dollars will result in greater institutional participation

Competing with the century-old network of conventional banks requires padding the wallets of financial representatives Natural predators always migrate to locations where there are good supplies of food and no one ever conquered Wall Street without paying the brokers Digital currency will not interrupt global banking institutions without a profitable incentive for the bankers

The costs of buying selling and storing digital assets is much cheaper and convenient than anything offered by conventional banks This margin should create the extra commission sought by brokers and bankers It appears that digital currencyrsquos entry point into the banking and financial world is through agentsrsquo wallets

If a financial representative needs to purchase a kilo of gold for a client and his London metals desk offers him either a 04 commission on a local gold buy (plus storage) or a 16 percent commission on the purchase of a Proof of Asset (PoAtrade) Digital Ownership Certificate the brokerrsquos choice becomes very clear A kilo of gold is the same as a kilo of digital gold and the broker would choose the higher commission

As comparable digital currency products become available it appears that the bankers and financial services have the most to gain from the integration of digital assets and digital currencyWith a little incentive it may be the bankers and the money men that are the next group to take full advantage of digital currencyrsquos expansion

Legal NoticeDisclaimer Articles and advertisements in this digital publication are not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to sell any investment All material in this issue is based on information obtained from sources believed to be reliable but which have not been independently verified Digital Gold Magazine the editor and contributors make no guarantee representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness Expression of opinion are those of contributors only amp individual views are subject to change without notice Digital Gold Magazine and contributors assume no warranty liability and offer no guarantee of the current relevance correctness or completeness of any information provided by this publication and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein Furthermore Digital Gold Magazine assumes no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or in particular for lost profit which may be incurred as a result of the use and existence of the information provided within this publication As for any product or service advertised promoted or which appears in this publication readers are advised to ldquoUse At Your Riskrdquo