Lessons From the First Digital Gold Boom

With cryptocurrencies having catching everyone’s imagination, we often forget that the digital gold boom of the 2000s was the first digital currency insurgency. Jackson’s initial success with e-gold encouraged a swarm of copycats: GoldMoney, eBullion, OSGold, INTGold, Pecunix, 1mdc, and multifarious. These currencies were swapped on hundreds of digital gold exchanges located around the globe. The industry composed had its own magazine, DGC Magazine, and trade association, the Global Digital Currency Association. At its peak in 2005, e-gold had around 1.2 million accounts with doings totalling $1.5 billion. It was almost as large as PayPal.