A bunch of different people have sent me a link to the new PayPal alternative, Revolution MoneyExchange, and a couple people asked for my opinion on it. I was originally sent a link to it via the guy from Cryptogon, who I tried to sign up under for an account, so he’d get a kickback (it’s one of those things, yeah, like everything else on the adwebs these days). Anyway, I went through the process, signed up, gave my Social Security number and address and everything else and then got a thing saying my signup didn’t work and they would email me why. A few days later I got an automated email saying they needed to verify my address. So far, none of this is really any different from PayPal - back when I signed up years and years ago. They verify addresses and ask for your SS# just the same. Anyway, through all the rigamaroll, I just decided I didn’t really care anymore. I stopped using PayPal after my suspicious account freezing a couple months ago, and so far I’ve seen nothing to distinguish Revolution MoneyExchange itself from PayPal - aside from maybe a difference in fees. But I didn’t research it very deeply, because the fees are not necessarily the problem in a service like this becoming worthwhile and reliable to me. I no longer trust whatsoever an online service to adminster funds for me, to collect or transfer them. It’s all just too easy for anyone with a nose for snooping to look at what I’m doing and with who. Having become essentially a “Public Domain Personality”, I have nothing to hide, but neither do I see the need to make it easy for everything I have to be suddenly stopped or seized by some corporate or other body for totally arbitrary reasons which never get explained or really reconciled to my satisfaction. Revolution MoneyExchange may be a perfectly great service, but I’m starting to think centralized online payment systems are just not the way to go. I’m envisioning a future where trading of currency and other units of value runs more like anonymous FTP sites back in the old days, or some kind of distributed and encrypted BitTorrent client… and this is where my terminology starts to break down. It’s an area which is over-ripe for real innovation, but one which will be slow going and potentially hazardous for the people who really get things going in a way which can’t be tracked or controlled.