Another sign of the increasing maturity of the DGC ("Digital Gold Currency") sector is in this article over on the Gold Economy blog/news site. The hallmark of a mature sector - independent analysis of the things the Issuers would rather keep mum about!
With a sample of 2000 independent exchange provider fraud reports, it was possible to graph where most of the fraud was. e-gold leads with 82% which is probably due to its massive lead in number of transactions. eBullion comes second, with 7%, indicating many transactions as well, possibly.
What is less easily explainable is goldmoney's position - they are down in the noise level, with Pecunix at 1% total. As goldmoney is now the star mover in this field (recently confirmed as on track growth of 4xpa), this is a surprisingly low figure. See the relative bar chart in red.
I don't think it's to do with goldmoney's technical systems. I more think it is to do with their consistent and aggressive positioning from their very first days - they couched themselves as having a zero tolerance for frauds, even to the extent of suggesting that they would break the accepted norms of the highly libertarian DGC society if they had to - privacy, sanctity of contracts etc.
Now it is paying off with lower fraud activity, and thus lower costs.
PS: originally this entry referred to a diffferent article on a dispute between two issuers. It only referred glancingly to the fraud figures. New article, linked above is more focused.
Posted by iang at January 18, 2004 09:44 AM | TrackBackThe chart may be misleading because it shows total reported complaints.
The fact that Pecunix has 1% and GoldMoney has 1% of the total doesn't mean much unless you consider that GoldMoney appears to have ten times the gold that Pecunix does. Does GM have ten times the number of transactions? If it does then Pecunix has a ten times higher rate of fraud complaints. But that might be because Pecunix was one of the data sources, but GoldMoney was not.
Likewise, e-Bullion has seven times as many reported bad accounts as GoldMoney. Their gold reserve is about the same, but I suspect e-Bullion has more accounts and more transactions...
The chart is rather poor because the data sample was rather limited. Don't draw too many conclusions from the chart.
Posted by: Ken Griffith at January 18, 2004 12:29 PM