The Unbankable Crowd Meets Digital Money
Everyday I come into contact with people who don’t have a bank account. For whatever reason, they are Off The Banking Grid and I call them the ‘unbankable’ crowd. Except for the past few years, the entire Internet marketplace seemed to totally ignore this crowd. However, in recent years online retailers have realized that the Internet is becoming more competitive and in order to expand future sales, they will need to target new customers. Offering alternative payment solutions other then credit cards is now in vogue. In just the past few years, alternate payment systems and digital currency have enabled our ‘unbankable’ crowd to become a happy group of online shoppers and bill payers.
The two big problems which previously have kept digital currency out of the mainstream were: (1) the need to convert digital money into green money whenever you wanted to pay a bill or cover a simple daily expense (2) the fact that not many online retail webs accepted digital currencies. Everyone accepts Visa and MC, but no large online stores were willing to part with merchandise in exchange for digital gold currency or Webmoney? Certainly a few, but not mainstream outlets.
In the past two years, multiple online shopping solutions for digital currency have been created and are now in widespread use. Each week more & more creative new businesses are appearing to help integrate digital currency into everyday life. The emergence of these new tools allows our unbankable crowd the ease of using digital currency instead of a mainstream bank for their daily expenses.
Online Billpay With Digital Currency
One popular service which illustrates the expanded use of digital currency in everyday life comes from xgold.ca. This exchange agent and financial web allows Canadian users of Pecunix and e-gold digital currency to pay most of their daily bills through an online biller network. They offer direct bill pay using digital currency for over 2300 Canadian payees. Using xgold.ca there is no need for a user to convert his digital money to script and no need to send a money order or write a check (if they even had one). An online bill pay operation for US residents is rumored to be opening soon which I’m told will provide over 50,000 payees for everyday payment using digital currency. This should please our ‘unbankable’ crowd and most of them will no longer have to visit the check cashing store.
New Options For The Unbankable Crowd
A second, example of how online shopping is now available to DGC users is illustrated by the number of webs now offering virtual credit cards. In past years, more webs did offer a DGC reloadable ‘virtual’ Visa card until Visa cracked down early last year citing something about the KYC rules. Now many webs offer the prepaid one time use virtual Visa or MasterCard accounts. DGC users simply spend digital money at the web and receive a $25, $50, $100 or $500 virtual Visa or MC card. The user provides personal details online and the account is set up using the information they specify. This ‘virtual card’ works for the AVS system and card accounts are issued complete with CVV numbers. Any US address will work and the accounts are usually are set up in just minutes.
If your favorite online store does not accept payment in e-gold, Webmoney, Pecunix, 1MDC, e-bullion, 1MDC or GoldMoney you can first complain to the management, then simply visit one of these virtual credit card webs and get a working credit card. No need to have a bank account or a Capital One Card. These webs are providing a dynamic service to digital currency users and expanding the online shopping experience for our ‘unbankable’ crowd. Again I say, “Banks? ‘We don’t need no stinking banks.’ We Have Digital Money!“.
Incidentally, these virtual credit cards work very well for PayPal and eBay account verification thus including our ‘unbankable’ crowd in more online activities than ever before! Some webs even sell $5 cards just for such a purpose.
Other not so popular set ups for shopping online with digital currency include, ’shopping by proxy’. This is a web offering mainstream shopping and goods where the operator accepts digital currency and makes the separate purchase with their credit card on behalf of the customer. The merchandise is then shipped directly to the client. This was especially popular outside of the US where foreign buyers without a US credit card could purchase US products and have them shipped overseas. I suspect that ’shopping by proxy’ is on the decline.
You can do more today using digital currency than ever before and its my hope that later this year our daily routines will include online DGC billpay.
