Just curious: how does this work when the gold is in a vault outside US jurisdiction? Are there mutual assistance treaties under which the other government will seize the property of the innocent? Does the US government force the e-gold founders to sign withdrawal orders? Do the vault operators have to accept a coerced withdrawal order, or an order that's not on behalf of the real owners?

What would a Swiss vault operator do if a foreign government suddenly said "we are now the rightful owners of bars 124, 672, and 823"? Would the answer depend on whether the vault operator had interests in the US?

If I have a deposit in a bank that gets accused of money laundering, can that money be confiscated? Not that the case is really parallel, since with the bank it's a creditor/debtor relationship instead of a bailor/bailee relationship.

Are there any legit e-gold accounts big enough that the accountholder could sue the government?

Why is Western Union still in business given that the exact characteristics the government complained of in e-gold (anonymous receipt, irreversible transactions, preference by criminals) apply to WU?

These aren't rhetorical questions, I'm genuinely feeling underinformed.

Think the U.S must mind there own business they think they OWN the world and the world must listen to them??? my god please not let them think they are number 1 in reality not they never saw a thing of the world, lol just think F.B.I must stay in there own damn U.s Shit country and putting egold down, second attempt will put many websites out of business.

Fred, that's a tall order, but here are some guesses. It is pretty much speculation, as we are now into deep dispute resolution, and it is difficult by definition. If it was easy we wouldn't be here :)

If the US Govt. wins the case, and the court orders forfeiture, then it has to go to Nevis and take control of the company. If it achieves that, then it can legally organise the servers. The trustees are the owners of the gold, and they are in Bermuda trust, so maybe off to Bermuda courts to get the Trust under control, and therefore the gold, etc.

However, if it controls the servers, it can do whatever it likes with them. This is easier because the servers are (and always were) in the US. So it can ignore the Nevis / Bermuda angles *unless seeking legal* control of the gold. The problem with this approach is that if everyone deserts e-gold (stops using it) then the value of e-gold collapses, and the servers are just a historical record of some stuff. The gold is elsewhere.

In terms of the gold disposals, there is an escrow agent, a 5PM party who stops an insider from just selling off the gold. This is a separate individual. This person should also sign for disposals of the gold from the vault.

Possible problem here is that the person may be (probably is) in the US, so will happily sign to avoid being charged with ML, etc. Or the person could have resigned before the case and not been replaced. In which case, he simply refuses to sign anything, because to do so would incur very complicated liability.

The Swiss vault operator would examine the contract, presumably, and that says e-gold and the escrow agent have to sign, presumably. Alternatively, the MLAT between Switzerland and US may allow certain crimes to override the contract. If however any user ("owner of e-gold") came along and contested, then it could enter the Swiss courts and presumably be blocked. Don't know, it gets messy there...

Deposits in banks: an easy one :) The money isn't yours, so you have less say. By law, a deposit is the money of the bank, not the account holder. You could go to court and contest an ML seizure, but this is hard because you have to show the money was completely legit, with no questions possible, under total removal of all privacy (which is the problem, really, as the tool makes money guilty-until-proven-innocent, and strips the essential privacy away). Normally however we would expect the bank to freeze the money and then ask you to explain what it is.

Legitimate e-gold accounts: unknown! The nature of customers is something that marketing people have asked many times. Some people say it is 100% ponzis, others say there are legit businesses but won't say what they are ... there are no reliable stats, just opinions. Many large account holders are (apparently) exchangers or insiders, and these people by their nature are caught up in the case.

Why is WU still in business? Because it is "inside" and "regulated" and it is the largest player. Those who are regulated expect those outside to be shut down. Those who are large encourage regulations (licences, etc) as that is costly and it reduces competition. We would generally expect that the largest player would have a hand in writing the licensing laws, to that end.

As I say, we are into domain of speculation here. The design of an FC system is such that it should not enter this space ... but if it does, it should at least be clear what the process is. The problem with e-gold is that they didn't implement the design cleanly. Now they -- and their customers -- find out whether their choices were efficacious.

Ian,

Thank you. My head hurts, and it's clear that you have more than earned every penny you've billed while consulting on these things.

Followup question: was one of the mistakes you saw in e-gold related to the ownership of the bars of barbarous relic? You said the trustees are the owners, but the e-gold literature made it sound (to me anyway) like the account holder was the owner and e-gold was a storage service.

(Apropos of very little, have you read Neal Stephenson's Baroque cycle of novels? He has a lot of fun with the definition of money).

Fred:

The ownership of the gold in the e-gold system (and others like it) is always a tricky issue. e-gold originally had the contract you described, in that the account holder owned the gold. Then, around October 2000, e-gold unilaterally imposed a new contract that took the gold from the account holder and placed it in a trust formed under Bermuda laws. This means that for many purposes the gold was "owned" by the trustee, or more technically the title was kept by the trustee for the benefit of account holders.

The reason for this was never fully understandable to me. DJ said "it is stronger" and that it was advised by the advisors of the time. I never heard a reason why it was stronger, myself.

It is easy to speculate on the "down" side of this act: easier ability to shift the gold behind the curtain, or escaping from US jurisdiction in some sense, or escaping from certain patent technical difficulties. I don't know whether any of these are sustainable, this is all speculation, and without some more clues it is difficult to even speculate.

Hence, I can't say it was a mistake. And, frankly, the trustee arrangement is still reasonably strong, it is still holding up for the benefit of the account holders, which is the primary goal of the design. That which was there before would probably have collapsed already.

What were mistakes: failing to implement the full 5PM, retaining all the power in the hands of the founders, keeping most of the physical elements (servers, managers/founders, exchange, support, ...) in a single jurisdiction, etc.

These were all very conscious acts, these things were well discussed at the time, so we would also need to look at the institutional factors that led to good advice being ignored and bad advice being paid for. Perhaps the Founder Paradox, click on link for a recent description of that, but perhaps not!

You seem to be overlooking the true intent of why the U.S. government would want "ownership" of e-gold's assets. They have no intent upon stealing millions of dollars from millions of account holders, rather the intent is to potentially place the company into receivership in order to protect the consumer while the government works to eradicate the targeted illegal activity.

Can anyone think of one example of the U.S. government shutting down a financial institution of any kind, legal or otherwise, and telling innocent account holders that they're up a creek? I think you'll find the answer to this is a big "NO." The injunction allows e-gold Ltd. to continue funding exchanges using "frozen" funds. Had the intent been to shutdown the system they could have easily performed a complete freeze to prevent exchanges or gone even further to take the servers offline.

Please stop drinking the Koolaid!

Think again Jeffrey. Who's been drinking the Koolaid now?

"The Rape of Russia" Any ideas as to when we'll be able to read her book, "Contagion: The Betrayal of Liberty, Russia, and the United States in the 1990s"?

Dismissing one property tradition (Russian) as inferior to another (Western, English, etc.) is a gross over-simplification (albeit very common post-cold-war triumphalism).

These things are far more complicated and difficult to understand without having a good understanding of the underlying economics. Property system A is objectively better than property system B, if value is continually being transfered from B to A.

As evidenced by the stories so eloquently described in "Raping Russia", western (and particularly English) tradition demonstrated some advantages over the Russian tradition with the massive flight of capital from Russia to the West, given the opportunity.

However, there is a reason why property is treated the way it is in Russia and that system also has certain advantages, as evidenced by the current flow of value backwards and the success of things like allofmp3.com and wmtransfer.com, which both uphold the Russian view on property the roots of which I try to explain below.

In the large, open steppes with a harsh cimate, as well is in the taiga, the key to success for individual producers was not to efficiently grow as much as possible on a given patch of land (land has not really been a scarce resource), but to make sure that one can reap what one has sown; that it won't be forcibly taken by someone else. Thus, protection has always taken precedence before production.

It was also in the interest of producers not to stick out as excessively affluent, attractive targets for violent expropriation of their wealth or excessively hard-working, attractive targets for violent exploitation (recall that the English word "slave" comes from "slav"; the very people inhabiting most of Russia). Hiding one's wealth and capacity for production has been (and remains) essential in Russia. Formally registering property makes it actually more difficult to defend in some cases. Institutions, including legal tradition, evolved according to these needs. The costs of defense in huge, open plains are much higher than those on islands or in the mountains.

The recurring need for rapid mobilization of resources for defensive purposes, in order to maintain access to finite, but not very scarce resources resulted (among other things) in a view of property that exists in Russia today.

It also has its merits and there are some resources (e.g. information) to which this approach may actually be more appropriate.