DX Gold - The original "gold backed" worldwide e-currency exchange - Total scam or good intention gone bad?

In this post I'd like to share something called DX Gold based on my extremely short-lived career in exchanging ecurrencies as a DX Merchant.

The system was very complex and my memory of the exact details a little bit sketchy so if there are any fellow ex DX Merchants here at Steemit please chime in with any comments.

Sometime in early 2004 I got involved with a business opportunity that was promoted as the world's first gold backed e-currency exchange.

It was operated from Vanuatu by a company called GDT which was supposedly the company that held the patent to the original retina scanner that was going to be the next big thing in financial transaction security.

Looking back, it's doubtful the system was ever gold backed and I wasn't there long before it came apart leaving individual exchangers like me with frozen accounts and broken dreams.

I'm not sure how I got into this, I think it was through the TalkGold forum but I signed up and after slight learning curve was making some nice bonuses as an e-currency exchanger.

This the DX Gold Digot...

I believe it's correct to say that the Digot was to DX Gold what Steem is to Steemit, the base unit of value in the system.

One difference is that we know how Steem is created and valued, something that was not known about the Digot.

The complexity of the system and the range of products that it offered make it difficult to believe even today that it was a Ponzi scheme and designed for the sole purpose to be a scam from the start.

The core of the opportunity consisted of your DX portfolio and the DX Merchant Console.

You held gold digots, which were pegged 1 to 1 with the U.S. dollar. The portfolio was your core account within the system and you had several options what you could do with the funds for example leave them there and make interest or you could fund what was known as the DX Merchant Console.

This is where the real fun started.

People that had consoles also had to have accounts with every e-currency that they wanted to trade.

Moving funds from one of the external e-currency accounts INTO the DX system via the console was called an INexchange.

Moving funds from the console to one of the external e-currency accounts was called and OUTexchange.

Commissions were made from doing OUTexchanges.

As you can see in the left hand panel, we had a wide range of e-currencies to work with including Pay Pal in the beginning.

Each e-currency had a different "claim rate" which was basically the commission for doing the exchange. I assumed the different rates were based at least in part on the liquidity of each individual e-currency. The blue arrow is pointing to a commission made from doing one OUTexchange.

At the height of the system a console would process many OUTexchanges every day. The photo above shows some typical commissions for OUTexchanges.

There was a lot of excitement around this company.

To get funds out of the system you would list an OUTexchange to the external e-currency of your choice and another DX Merchant would process it. The funds would come out of your console and and arrive in your external e-currency account.

Slowly over time, the OUTexchanges started taking longer to process until eventually the DX system came to a standstill.

At the time of the shutdown, this is what my portfolio looked like...

For a long time the DX community hoped and believed the OUTexchanges (getting money out of the system) would start back up again but it never happened.

There was actually a learning curve to operating a console, it's not something that you just started doing. Any former DX Merchant reading this will know exactly what I'm talking about. To this day the complexity of the DX System makes it difficult to believe the whole thing was designed just to be a scam.

I knew going into this that there was risk so I chalked it up as a learning experience.

Anyone else have experience with DX Gold?