I just found out that e-gold has introduced outgoing/incoming spending limits. The spend limit varies according to what country you live in, with some specific countries $0 spend limit, which means nobody from that country can send money in and out of the e-gold system! For a complete spend limit table see the following link:
http://www.e-gold.com/countrylevels.html
These spend limits will no doubt kill the e-currency exchanger business. $3000 incoming/outgoing per month is not enough to conduct regular business as an exchanger. I am not sure whether these limitations are permanent or not. From what I can gather from the e-gold blog, it appears that although these spending limits imposed on ENTIRE countries are temporary in nature the spending – or “throughput” as they put it – limits are an integral part of a the new “Customer Due Diligence and risk-based Transaction Monitoring capabilities e-gold is urgently continuing to develop.” What this means is that most likely spending limits are here to stay in some shape or form. Perhaps later on they will apply only to specific accounts. At this point it’s too early to tell, so we will have to wait for official news from e-gold itself.
Now coming back to the subject of exchangers, apparently “e-gold will be promulgating requirements for the regulation of exchange services, which will include a combination of government licensing requirements plus e-gold’s own Enhanced Due Diligence for exchangers.” This is not necessarily a bad thing, unless whatever government license is required happens to be cost prohibitive enough that it pushes the “small” exchanger out of the market. I would imagine these licensing requirements vary by country with some countries not requiring any licenses whatsoever, in which case someone wishing to open up an e-currency exchange business would only have to go through e-gold’s due diligence process.
Checkout this posting on the official e-gold blog for more details:
http://blog.e-gold.com/2008/11/e-gold-update-t.html
I’ll keep you all posted on the latest, for now though if you wish to discuss this topic and other e-currency topics I invite you all to visit the e-currency section of my forum at:
http://www.moneyguruforum.com/forumdisplay.php?f=11
Cheers,
Alan
http://alansmoneyblog.com