:: Black Market Gold News ::

:: Thrusday, December 16, 2004 ::

Ode To The Falling FRN.

Or, why US taxpayers should stop worrying and learn to love their agents' rapidly plummeting fiat currency unit.

~snip~

"First, while I have never recommended buying a gold stock in my life, gold’s now in a long-term bull market as rich taxpayers (who pay tribute to agents who are not US agetns) figure out the US agents' real game plan and flee the US Federal Reserve Note fiat currency unit for the yellow metal. My favorite: Newmont Mining, the biggest and the best, with the cheapest finding costs. I’d make it a core position for any portfolio given that I think gold could go to 600 US Federal Reserve Note fiat currency units per troy ounce over the next three years (late last week, it was at about 450 US Federal Reserve Note fiat currency units per troy ounce). Gold’s a nice hedge against 'more and more US Federal Reserve Note fiat currency units entering into circulation over time', something that typically flares for all taxpayers whose agents have favored a weaker fiat currency unit as the answer to their 'short-term problems.' I’d buy Newmont hold it for the next four years."

~snip~

"Short term, the US Federal Reserve Note fiat currency unit has fallen so much that it wouldn’t surprise me if we got a bit of what we on Wall Street call a dead-cat bounce. Long term, though, I think the US Federal Reserve Note fiat currency unit can fall another 25 percent against the Euro fiat currency unit and the Yen fiat currency unit before it finds terra firma. So, if you are a US taxpayer dwelling on the landmass called USA get in your last trip to the landmass called Europe, before it becomes too expensive for all but the most profligate."


:: Black Leprecon :: goldlink ::
...

Interview with Denis Semenov, CEO of Eldev LLC.

Interview with Mr. Denis A. Semenov, CEO of Eldev LLC (www.eldev.com), conducted by Greg Horn, editor - Black Market Gold News (BMGN). Email Greg for questions or to suggest an interview: auto17703@hushmail.com.

BMGN: Today, Black Market Gold News is pleased to interview Mr. Denis A. Semenov, CEO of Eldev LLC. Eldev is a company specializing in the development of e-commerce payment systems software with solutions specifically tailored to the needs of online merchants accepting Digital Gold Currencies (DGCs) as a form of payment for their goods and services.

BMGN: Welcome, Mr. Semenov. Thank you for making time to participate in this interview.

Mr. Semenov: Greg, thank you for the opportunity to be interviewed by BMGN.

BMGN: Please start by giving our BMGN readers a brief overview of your company. What percentage of your total revenues are generated from the sales of DGC -based payment systems, what percentage of your total revenues are generated from the sales of Fiat Currency Unit -based payment systems and/or other services? Please talk about the markets your are selling your payment systems to.

Mr. Semenov: Eldev LLC was formed in 2003 by leaders of PHP Strike (www.gold-php.com.ru) - a team of programmers which has been in the e-currency industry for the last 3 years. Under the name PHP Strike , there were several e-currency products released: an e-currency shopping cart, a mass payment solution for e-gold, and an e-currency exchange software product. At the start of 2004, we released Digital Cambist (www.dgc-soft.com) under the name of Eldev LLC. Digital Cambist is for those people who wish to run their own e-currency exchange service on the Internet. That is our main market for Digital Cambist. Approximately 40% of our total revenue is generated from our programming services are related to DGC systems.

BMGN: Where does the remaining approximately 60% balance of the total Eldev revenue come from? And, just to clarify, on the 40% total revenue related to DGC systems that you speak of, is that just the Eldev Digital Cambist product and services, or, does that include the products and services sold through the PHP Strike website?

Mr. Semenov: The remaining 60% is a sum revenue from our IT/Business Process (BP) outsourcing activities. We are nearly finished with our new IT/BP outsourcing portal that will be available at our main site at www.eldev.com and will bring some actual innovations into global software outsourcing model. We are concentrated on the development of a Digital Cambist automated e-currency platform, as well as on some new e-currency related products such as a powerful e-currency shopping cart and non-automated e-currency exchange software.

BMGN: From what I have read on your websites (www.eldev.com and www.dgc-soft.com) and from talking to you now, I see that you have a strong vision for "e-commerce/m-commerce" enabling web-entrepreneurs. Please speak about your vision.

Mr. Semenov: Yes, we consider that electronic commerce is actively growing and evolving year by year - especially in the mobile commerce market segment. At the present moment, using WAP sites is the only way to get information from the Internet to any place on the earth with help of a mobile phone. Thus, we make a strong play in WAP site development as well as on sites for PDA users. I think in the very near future, if a company doesn't have a WAP website site and a PDA website site available to their customers, this could be considered as unprofessional. Following this point, in March 2004, Eldev LLC released a Content Management System (CMS) used for easy creation and administrating of WAP sites.

BMGN: Two years ago, in August 2002, in an interview with Planetgold.com, the marketing manager, Stefan, of The Gold Casino (www.thegoldcasino.com) remarked,

"As you probably know, most commercial activity on the internet is online gambling. The internet is online casinos, and then email, and then 'porn', and then AOL, see? Also there are a few other sites such as e-trade. A joke. The usual joke in the business."

What do your sources tell you are the top 3 to 5 commercial activities are on the internet today?

Mr. Semenov: I agree with Stefan, but think he forgot to mention such things as e-commerce and news media. I see "porn" as prevailing over all other activities. The adult industry is the king in the Internet.

BMGN: As an additional recourse to our readers, what are some of the accepted ways to measure the size of the DGC economy? Are there some 'analysts' tracking, say, "how many grams worth of DGCs are being exchanged per day"? Is there an online resource that you could point the readers of Black Market Gold News to that track the DGC economy?

Mr. Semenov: The DGC economy today is developing in very slowly. I like the main principles on which DGC is based, but absolutely do not like how the most part of DGC systems function. I'm very skeptical about new DGC systems that claim they are 'backed by gold.' I know only 3-4 systems really backed by gold, proven in time and reliable. All other systems seem to be a scam or have not any perspectives due to weak marketing and less than professional financial management. Also, one needs to remember that DGC systems are not truly legal* and are not regulated by international nor USA law*. This causes a lot of scam cases and money laundering, unfortunately.

*Note from Greg to BMGN Readers: Regarding "legal" and "regulatory" issues, I am planning to have this as a theme for another interview where we can explore these issues in depth. My current position and understanding is that a DGC system (e.g. www.e-gold.com) is a hybrid warehouse/hawala system which specializes in warehousing gold and other precious metals (where the warehouse is physically located in the basement vault of a "regulated bank" and operated by the said bank's well-established "warehouse division") and which issues digital receipts instead of paper receipts to the customers and allows for electronic online real-time visability of said receipts and allows its members to exchange the receipts electronically instead of by more manual means. The upcoming interview regarding "legal" and "regulatory" issues of DGC systems will also explain the differences and simalarities of "warehousing", "hawala", and "banking", and tackle that oh-so dirty term "money laundering".

Mr. Semenov: One of the most popular and interesting sources of information on the DGC economy is GoldEconomy.com with excellent editions by Ken Griffith. Another is Gold-Pages.net launched by Mark Herpel, who is well known as a true enthusiast in promoting e-currency and the DGC economy. Also, the interviews published at PlanetGold.com are very interesting and still accessible but the last interview was done in 2002. The PlanetGold.com editor, Ragnar Danneskjold, is now a full-time DGC Cambist [for Goldage.net]. And of course, the e-gold.com list (http://www.e-gold.com/unsecure/lists.html) is number one in providing the most information on news and events in the DGC economy. This is a community where all possible rumors are born; it doesn't matter if they are true or not, but they keep you in touch with the pulse of the industry.

BMGN: Of the 3 to 4 systems that you speak of which are "really backed by gold, proven in time and reliable", I say that e-gold.com is one of them. Which are the other 2 to 3 systems that you speak of?

Mr. Semenov: Those are GoldMoney.com, E-Bullion.com, and Pecunix.com.

BMGN: The number of online adult content providers is huge - not to mention their margins. They seem to exclusively use the following systems to accept orders: Pay by credit card, pay by phone, pay by check, and pay by snail mail using money order/cash. Today, I have not found one adult content provider that will accept DGCs. In my opinion, "paying by DGC" is the same as "paying by snail mail" in the sense that they both are non-recurring methods of payment. What do see as the top 3 to 5 reasons adult content provides are not willing to accept payments via DGCs?

Mr. Semenov: One of the world's most successful adult webmasters is a good friend of mine, thus I can tell you the exact reason why porn and DGC are like fire and water... As a rule, people buy access to adult sites using their credit cards (80%) only because they are driven by desire to get it immediately, without waiting too long. And using credit card is undoubtedly the fastest way.

BMGN: With their high margins, I would think that adult content providers would want to "give back" to the netizens that are their customers by doing some "public service" by promoting "freedom" in a small section of their websites. And, talking about and accepting DGCs would be a good way to do that.

Mr. Semenov: I think if and when the DGC economy will rock, it will really stimulate adult content providers to begin to accept gold currencies on their sites. But as I said before, the DGC economy is yet too weak...

BMGN: Which types of businesses do you see integrating PDA and/or WAP websites into their overall online presence?

Mr. Semenov: I think this is mostly large corporate web sites, news sites, and web shops. Even so, for small companies, the cost is reasonable to create, organize, and support PDA/WAP websites.

BMGN: Which types of businesses do you see integrating and accepting cell-phone-based micro-payments into their overall payment acceptance systems?

Mr. Semenov: Phone-based micro-payments are already used by a lot of web content providers (by the way, some adult content providers too), some mailing lists, and some news sites. Cell-phone-based micro-payments are suitable for selling mobile content (ring tones, logos). To learn more about such trend I recommend you to visit PaidContent.Org. Great site, very useful in my opinion.

BMGN: In the web-based internet economy of today, "instant access to web content for sale" is defined by the credit card - as we touched upon above. I am thinking that, as an interim first step to making DGCs universally accepted as a form of payment on the web, there could be an "anonymous debit card with a well know credit card logo" that could be instantly recharged via e-gold. In other words, the "anonymous debit card with a well know credit card logo" that I speak of would have a traditional fiat currency interface that would naturally interface with the merchants, and, that would have an e-gold interface for instant recharge ("I 'spend' to my own debit card as needed to recharge it"). Is there anyone that you know of who is tinkering with such a product/system?

Mr. Semenov: There is a big essential problem here. Today DGC is recognized as a risky phenomenon. Too risky. This is caused by its offshoreness, irrevocableness and low regulatory by law structures. Traditional banking systems are afraid of issuing such cards as well as afraid of the DGC phenomenon in general due to a lot of claims related to DGC in the Internet (scams, fraud, money laundering). Even independent companies afraid to work with DGC (ePassporte.com, for example, refused all relations with e-currency cambists)... Unfortunately, there is no good solution today... But anyway, I hope that soon, even very soon, we will see global changes in the DGC economy, since this phenomenon is becoming more known day-by-day and nobody can stop it... Because this phenomenon is a global phenomenon.

BMGN: Thank you Mr. Semenov. I wish you, your employees, and your shareholders much success!

BMGN: This concludes our interview with Denis Semenov, CEO of Eldev LLC. If you have any questions regarding this interview or would like to suggest an interview, please contact Greg Horn at auto17703@hushmail.com.


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