Everyone knows who PayPal is. Do you know who competes against PayPal (and I use this term very loosely, since they dominate the market)? I did a search just a few minutes to see who’s in business still, and which ones have gone by the wayside. It’s a volatile market - very few companies that start up in that space are reputable, or if they are they aren’t well funded enough to stay in business until they gain traction.
In fact, most of them are so obscure or little known that the closes thing to a list post of PayPal alternatives here at Mashable is a post Pete put out back in 2006, where he re-published a list of banned eBay alternative payment methods (imagine that - a list we haven’t done yet!). One company that has stood the test of time in this space is E-Gold - at least up until now.
PC World is reporting that the founders of the company are facing serious jail time due to “design flaws†in the e-Gold system. E-Gold was an odd system, even by the measure of Internet pay systems. It required you to purchase actual gold and have it stored in an e-Gold certified vault. From there, you could spend and accept e-Gold currency as you wished with other participating vendors.
Unfortunately for e-Gold, due to the PayPal/eBay stranglehold on the Internet marketplace, it was next to impossible to propogate usage through legitimate business development means. When multi-level marketeers and their cousins the ponzis schemers started using e-Gold for their business ventures, e-Gold apparently turned a blind eye for as long as they could.
Read the Entire Story…
Source: Mashable
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