Digital Currency.

The question comes up about digital currency. What are digital currencies? Well, they are just like paper currency but in cyberspace. They come in a couple of flavors though, unlike most paper ones.

The first type of digital currency is one based on hard assets: gold, silver, platinum, and palladium. In order for you to have anything in your account to spend, you first sent them some form of paper currency such as Dollars, Pounds, or Euros, in the form of paper bills, credit card payment, etc, and they purchased hard metal for you at the current market rates and place it in their storage system. Your account then has so many grams or ounces of the metal you chose to buy into. If you paid in Euros and the value of the Euro falls, your account does not loose value from that. It still has the same weight of metal in it. Only the price fluctuations of that metal, and account fees charged by the system, affect your account in such a manner. Fees vary from site to site, so check them. Some of the better ones are

The second type usually are little more than a few bits stored in a computer somewhere(website), that signify that the account holder had a certain amount of value stored in their account that they could spend. You spent it by telling the website owner to send some of it to a specified person or company. If you did not have enough of a ballance in your account to cover it, the system reached into a bank account of yours that you had previously given information about and a grabbed the remainder. The system has evolved a bit and now you can use credit cards, multiple banking accounts and more. They tend to have a flaw in them: They are tied to the conventional banking system and you are at their mercy when it comes to chargebacks and currency devaluations. They are controled to a large extent by the credit card companies that they interact with when it comes to chargebacks to your account. If you get a charge back they, being tied to your bank, can reach in and take it, even if it causes an over draft for you. The one that has the most complaints lodged against it is Paypal. There are even many websites sprung up to rant against them, here are some places where you can research on them

We have no beef with Paypal, but with so many complaints floating around out there we can not recommend them to our visitors.

What does all this mean to you, and to offshore banking, or investing? Simple. The ones based on hard metals are fairly safe, and provide a faily safe means of discretely moving money offshore. You put money into their system, and then send it to a bank or other recipient offshore, and it is not nearly as noticable as you directly sending it from your account. If you fill in all the proper paperwork required by your government, don't try to use it for money laundering, etc, and it can be a fairly safe means of moving money around the globe.

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