Although I am tempted to paraphrase what is written on the E-Gold website, I think it would be much easier for you to understand if I explain it in the simplest way I can.
E-Gold is a kind of online payment system where the money used is called gold (the E-Gold website says it is actually backed by Gold). So instead of paying for things in, say, dollars, you pay for them in gold.
To use E-Gold, you must have an E-Gold account. (To open one is free; we’ll get to that soon). So let’s say you want to pay for something with E-Gold. What you do is purchase an amount of gold equivalent to the currency you want to use, e.g you may purchase $100 worth of gold from a gold seller and send this amount of gold to the person you are paying who will the sell it to a buyer to retrieve his/her funds.
Because E-Gold is a very common means of payment and also because there are companies who trade daily in buying/selling gold, one does not necessarily have to convert gold to cash all the time.
Having gold in your E-Gold account means that you can pay money securely online at anytime to anybody who has an E-Gold account. In a very real way, E-Gold might just be emerging as the new universal currency on the web.
So let’s say that you want to add funds to your Marketiva trading account, all you need to do is to first make sure you have the equivalent in gold in your E-Gold account because you will pay directly to Marketiva’s E-Gold account via the form that will be presented to you when you click on the “Deposit by E-Gold” link.
The steps to withdrawing funds using E-Gold are similar to those for making deposits but this time Marketiva is sending money to your E-Gold account. For this service, a small once-only transaction fee is charged by Marketiva (Note that E-Gold exchanges also have transaction fees involved). Note also: For security reasons, Marketiva will not pay to an E-Gold account unless it has previously been used to deposit money into the trading account. More help on this can be found in the help section of the Marketiva website.
