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The GoldAge Saga - Something Interesting
Ecurrency Thoughts, Exchangers, EcurrencyTags: E gold, GDCA, GoldAge.
With all thanks and grace to Lucki, I was allowed to post this in our blog, note that this isn’t official from GDCA, but just a response to Lucki on the situation that GoldAge is facing.
As of now, if you access GoldAge’s site, they have temporarily suspended their business.
I got in touch with one of my contacts within the GDCA about this arrest yesterday and this was his reply
Dear Lucki,
> What far reaching effects do you think this GoldAge arrest is going to
> have?None. There are only a couple of exchangers left in the US anyway. The NYAG went after GoldAge because the NYAG likes to go after any and everyone they can. Read the press releases with a grain of salt, because like the ones that circulate about e-gold in December they are filled with half-truths and deliberate distortions, such as:
“GoldAge charges fees of 6-10%”
Utter nonsense. GoldAge’s fees are posted publicly on their website.“6-10% is a surefire indicator of criminal activity”
Um, then you’d better start arresting people who use Western Union, since that’s about what it costs to send a WU
“GoldAge is run out of these two dudes’ apartments”
Utter hogwash — GoldAge has an office in Brooklyn, and contractors and employees in three US states and three countries outside of the US — and those are just the ones of which I am aware. It is “run from their apartment” in the strictest sense definable, inasmuch as both Ragnar
(Vladimir Kats) and Arthur are young, successful entreprenuers who have their hands in all kinds of stuff in the US and abroad, in the gold economy and out of it, and both of them indeed work from home … but that’s not the impression I get from the AG’s statement. It sounds like
he’s trying to make GoldAge seem like some kind of shyster operation.Anyway, there’s only a couple of serious exchangers left in the US anyway, and none of them seem at all scared or bothered by the incident, to judge from things they’ve said since. (As you can imagine, all of the major exchangers are talking about this incident.)
There are a few implications for the digital currency economy overall, since Vlad and Arthur were involved with so many “name brand” companies — way more than most people realise . Will they all shut down? Are they all going up for sale? Nobody knows, because nobody’s answering the phone at any of them. So there may be a slight shaking out, but I don’t think it will register as much more than a blip on the radar.
Regards
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The New York Attorney’s office is simply making the digital currency exchange arena much tougher to monitor and supervise, since pushing clients to exchangers that are outside the U.S. (and NY), puts all sorts of questionable transactions outside the reach of U.S. investigators. Not only that, their actions create a demand for decentralized systems where instead of one “GoldAge” doing many exchanges, you will have one hundred people doing exchanges with each other all over the states (much more difficult if not impossible to monitor).
In addition, the nearsightedness and hubris of the State to think that they have done any lasting damage or had any lasting effect on this burgeoning industry is amazing. All they have done is created more demand, and taken the ability to see and control and to learn about the industry out of their own hands, a disservice to the people they have been entrusted to protect. All they see is a feather in their cap for making arrests and possibly getting convictions (see Nifong and the Duke case).
From now on, if they wish to know about a particular customers’ activities, they can try sending a subpoena to some exchanger in Panama or Africa or Indonesia, and see how far they get…