Interview With Daniel Morin Founder of iGolder.com

For the past few months, I have been keeping tabs on a potential new digital gold company. Each week we have looked in on their progress, their preparations for launch and learned about some of the commerce tools offered through their software.

Today is the big day, iGolder.com is officially open for business. For the next month, we will be putting their software to the test, trying out features in real time, buying, selling and reporting on our success or failure.

Using an odd combination of Skype IM, email and posting text questions to various domains and waiting for the answers….I have finally completed my interview with the hardest working man on the Internet, system creator Mr. Daniel Morin.

You can read the full interview in this month´s DGCmagazine (April) which will be out early next week. In the mean time, here is a quick half dozen questions for a preview.

Q. I have Daniel Morin on Skype live with me. Daniel can you tell us your position with the company?

A. I am the co-founder and president of iGolder.com. I work with my brother who is also a professional software developer.

Q: What kind of background and work experience do you bring with you to iGolder?

A: My brother and I are professional software developers with extensive experience in eCommerce. iGolder is the outcome of our overall dissatisfaction with the payment industry. Somehow, I was naïvely hoping for the payment industry to improve over time, however my hopes have been in vain. After years of waiting for obvious online security features, we decided to jump into a new adventure - creating the world´s finest payment system. iGolder is not another run-of-the-mill; we have numerous innovative features to make online transactions safe and easy.

Q: Great so you are NOT one of the ´old school´ digital gold guys?

A: We are new to the digital gold industry. I have always been fascinated with economics. My thirst for a better understanding of economics lead me to discover the writings of Mises and Rothbard in 2000. For the first time, I learned the proper definition of free trade and the nature of money. I started educating myself by reading www.mises.org and purchased books related to the Austrian School of Economics. Unlike the economic theories I learned at University, the Austrian School of Economics was making sense to me. Soon, I became a hardcore defender of the free market and, for lack of a better word, a "gold bug".

I believe gold remains money, no matter how hard governments try to "demonitize" it, using anti-gold propaganda and/or making gold ownership illegal. Every fiat currency (paper money) is doomed to collapse and will eventually return to its intrinsic value: zero. Any industrialized society requires a reliable medium of exchange for trade – why not gold?

Using iGolder, people get the best of both worlds: they may transfer ownership of electronic gold without having to physically handle or ship the yellow metal, or they may exchange their electronic gold into physical gold bullion or coins.

Q: How long have you been creating the software and testing the program before opening today?

A: We started iGolder in January 2008, and we have been working full time since then. Because iGolder has numerous features, we have been testing iGolder for several months, making sure there are no security leaks.

Q: Are you prepared and do you have strong defenses in place to defend against those pesky Liberty Reserve hackers?

A: We designed iGolder with security in mind. For instance, a distinctive feature is our First Transaction Protection Delay which shields your account from an unauthorized transaction. Depending on the amount transferred, the recipient has to wait from 24 hours to 72 hours for the transfer to clear. You also receive an email notification each time a transfer is done on your account, and you always have the option to stop the payment if you deem unauthorized. To further enhance our security, we developed the iGolder Bot, capable to analyze activity patterns. For instance, a large transfer initiated from a new IP address to a new account raises suspicion, and may trigger an email confirmation message. Having a protection delay gives us time to notice suspicious activities, such as repeated failed logins prior a large transfer, and freeze the account for further investigation. Also, we do not allow Anonymous Members to trade with each other, and our Identified Members are limited to a maximum of 100 grams of gold per month. Only our Verified Members have no transaction limit, yet still subject to the First Transaction Protection Delay. There would have been no such fraud if Liberty Reserve had those security features in place. For more details, visit www.iGolder.com/faq...

Q: What features of iGolder that you created, are you especially proud of and you feel will be well received by users?

A: I believe the prominent feature will be our Safetransit tool protecting both the buyer and seller. I suppose our members will also enjoy our lowering adaptive fees - the longer you are a member and the more transactions you make, the lower are your fees. As a Verified Member, your transfer fees range from 3.0% to 0.1% (assuming no demerit point).

Our feedback reputation system gives our members an opportunity to build a genuine reputation on the Internet. A member may disclose on his public profile the feedback comments received from his trading partners, thus increasing his trustworthiness to potential (and existing) customers. iGolder also provides a mechanism to fairly resolve disputes and resume business operations. Our competitors simply do not care about disputes, or they hire the cheapest labor for customer service and dispute resolutions. Since filing a dispute is free, there is no incentive for our competitors to hire professional experts to resolve disputes. As a result, you get your money´s worth - a lousy service with a brainless unfair ruling. At iGolder, we want all disputes to be resolved fairly. By having a dispute fee, we greatly reduce frivolous claims while dispensing the dispute fee to hire an impartial expert to resolve the dispute. The parties may also elect their arbitrator to resolve their disputes; the arbitrator may be specified in a clause of the contract, or at the very moment a dispute arise. If a dispute arise and both parties are unable to agree on an arbitrator, then iGolder will resolve the dispute if the case is small, or appoint an arbitration specialist to resolve a larger dispute.

With iGolder, you may issue as many refunds as you wish. We also refund the transaction fee at pro rata. If a transaction is in dispute, you may submit proposals to your trade partner, such as suggesting a different amount or changing the Safetransit time. There is no limit on the number of proposals you may send, and when both parties agree on a new proposal, the transaction automatically resumes in Safetransit.

To facilitate purchasing and selling gold, iGolder offers a directory of independent exchangers. You select the currency and payment method you wish to purchase gold, and iGolder displays you a list of exchangers, sorted by lowest fees and highest reputation. In the near future, we will add a directory for gold redemption, that is to exchange electronic gold to physical gold bullion, plus another directory for purchasing ATM debit cards from independent card providers. Later, we will provide a mechanism for our members to list themselves into our business directory, by category and by searchable keywords.

Finally, every account may include an unlimited number of sub-accounts.

April 1st look for DGCmagazine.com and read the full interview.