Revolution MoneyExchange
April 29th, 2008UPDATE: I Have Earned the Maximum Commission from Signups
Fifty Cryptogon readers signed up for accounts within about 12 hours of this post going live. I’ve earned the maximum allowable commission of $500! Thank you to each of you who signed up.
They are still paying $25 just for signing up.
— End Update —
I’m very happy to report that there is now a FREE alternative to PayPal available to U.S. bank account holders. Revolution MoneyExchange allows money transfers between members for free; no fees at all to make or receive electronic payments. Believe it or not (I didn’t at first), it’s true.
PayPal skims off about 4% of your Cryptogon contributions in fees (so does Amazon Honor System). Anyone who uses PayPal for transaction clearing just shrugs this off as a cost of doing business…
With MoneyExchange, I receive 100% of what you send. If you run a website, or sell things on eBay or through some other venue, you will receive 100% of the money that your MoneyExchange readers or customers send you.
MoneyExchange is perfect for Cryptogon readers who refuse to use PayPal under any circumstances and/or refuse to use credit cards.
If you sign up for a MoneyExchange account right now, they’ll give you $25. That’s $25 that you can withdraw into your bank account to spend as you please. Again, believe it or not, it’s true.
Check it out: revolutionmoneyexchange.com
If you decide that you would like to get $25 for signing up, you can sign up via Cryptogon and they’ll credit me with a $10 commission. (That’s $25 to you and $10 to me.) If that sounds good to you, just click the button below to get started.
Hint: There are lots of individuals and organizations out there who are doing very good work and could use $25. Revolution MoneyExchange is backed by billionaires and venture capital firms who are willing to pay out this money in an attempt to take on PayPal. For the moment, you can get $25 from these people for essentially no effort on your part, and re-purpose that money for some good purpose. I know, most people will buy gas or food for themselves, because those things are getting more expensive by the day. But, if you’re so inclined, consider seeking out and sending some or all of your free $25 to people who are doing things to reduce our dependence on gasoline and industrial agriculture.
Signed up.
I think this is great, I’ve yielded some steady revenues to PayPal over the past year or two. But I have to wonder, what’s their business model?
Thanks!
It might be carry trade related. The accounts are FDIC insured, so they must be hoping that people will eventually grow to trust/like the service and leave a positive balance on their accounts. The firm can then pool the cash on hand (across millions of accounts) and use “positive roll” in the FOREX markets to earn interest in higher yielding currencies.
That’s just a wild ass guess as to how they plan on making money with this, but it’s the best I could come up with. I could be off by a thousand percent. I have no idea what their actual plans entail.
That’s a more intelligent and specific articulation of the hypothesis I put down in my obligatory sign-up-to-net-me-cash blog post.
Arbitrage, one of the most beautiful and disgusting words in the english language.
” …Hint: There are lots of individuals and organizations out there who are doing very good work and could use $25. … ”
yeah ? and i can think of no one better.
– cybele
@pdugan
Is it arbitrage? I’m not an expert, but I wouldn’t call this arbitrage because they’d have to hold to get the juice off positive roll. Arbitrage exploits inefficiencies across markets in pricing an asset…As far as I’ve come to understand the term.
The scenario I guessed at would be much riskier to the firm than arbitrage, because they’d be holding. But this area is very weird and complicated. I really don’t understand some of the stuff that the hedge funds are doing.
Hmm.
Maybe we should just ask them? They might provide some hints. I looked at the people behind this and I’m quite sure that I couldn’t begin to imagine what those guys have come up with. This isn’t a couple of dudes in a garage with a few linux boxes… It’s big, big money.
Check it:
https://www.revolutionmoneyexchange.com/WebSite/AboutUs.aspx
@ dagobaz
😉
If you look at the Company Info page, it basically says their business model is to datamine user’s transaction information and sell it to the banks and merchants for marketing purposes. Which is fine with me, but I wish they’d offer, say, a separate flat-fee schedule that allowed users to opt-out of the information sharing end. All in all, I’ve never really understood how profitable selling customer information really is, but obviously it must be fairly profitable because every financial institution tries to sell as much as they can. Ultimately, though, the path to power and riches lies in controlling the manufacture and/or the distribution of a resource, and that’s all financial transaction processing is: the distribution of resources.
I’m heartened, however, that Steve Case is heading this up. I’ve long posited a theory that when Case/AOL took over Time-Warner that it sent a pulse of heart-stopping fear throughout the old-guard business establishment as they realized “this internet revolution is really going to overwhelm our kind, and could take us all down”. After all, companies that didn’t even exist a few years before were suddenly commanding multi-billion dollar market caps…giving virtual nobodies in the world of Power the ability to seize the reigns of whatever industry they had the creativity to reinvent. Meanwhile, established firms were realizing they didn’t have the beginning of a clue about how to reinvent themselves in such a way as to participate.
I imagine that scared a lot of old-money, because in the last couple years of the ’90’s there was intense pressure on the Fed to gut the money supply — although the Fed seemed intent to wait until after Y2K-fears were off the radar. Because it was in the first week of 2000 they started soaking up liquidity in an unprecedented manner. I believe they were dead-set on taking-down the revolution before it could claim more 1st-tier victims. The internet “bubble” may have been a bubble, but the Fed had been unintentionally fueling it with their “open-faucet” policy. They could have deflated slowly if they’d desired, and we’d have had a prolongation of the amazing business/cultural/technical revolution that short era was bringing into being. But instead they cut it off at the knees, and thousands of ideas very much like Revolution MoneyExchange were broken before they could establish themselves.
So notice how quickly after the internet bubble was burst that AOL was ousted from Time-Warner. It makes me wonder if Steve Case might have a bitter axe to grind with the old-guard business culture. And I certainly hope that’s the case. Having worked in the investment/finance industry for a lot of years I’ve come to hate it with an informed passion. It’s a highly sophisticated form of slavery. And as a merchant nowadays, the monopolized credit card processing industry is a bitter pill I’m being forced to swallow. Anything that might help take it down is welcome, in my book.
Kevin–I’ve copied the link location for your button and posted it to a couple of forums I enjoy. Seemed like an easy way to kick a few more dollars your direction, and only fair since you tipped me (and all that I tip thereafter) off to the deal. Cheers!
they make money with arbs in a sense they arb the capital for higher income bearing securities netting the difference. depending on the business model they good be aggressive with the capital.
reading the privacy policy they plan to cold call high income members from their own trust co. this means the trust will pound your phone then all their friends they sell the list too will call “even if you opt out”. i suggest a number from grandcentral.com for this. they plan to sell all your info. there is huge money in this. huge money even from the accounts the trust opens to manage. this is a great post kevin. ty
Count me in.
How much does Amazon skim off of my contributions?
Anyhozs, I started signing up while at work and thought the better of it.
Manana!
Good find Kevin, and duh, I’m with Dagobaz. Guess whose going to get my $25? That’s a big Duh!
@Seattle Shortbus
If by, “I’ve copied the link location for your button and posted it to a couple of forums I enjoy,” you mean that you link back to Cryptogon, thanks, I appreciate it.
But if you’re copying and pasting my affiliate links around, that’s not ok.
@Eileen
Amazon charges fees to clear the transaction. These fees are taken out of the amount sent. The average Amazon Honor System fee for Cryptogon payments comes to about 4%, all up.
Quote:
Amazon Honor System fees
The Amazon Honor System charges minimal transaction fees. The fee schedule is very simple. The person making a payment is not charged any fees at all. The person receiving a payment is assessed 2.9% of the total payment per transaction plus $0.30.
Read the privacy statements for both PayPal and MoneyExchange.
I don’t see either as better or worse than the other in this area. With PayPal, though, I lose about 4% of my earnings.
PayPal:
https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/gen/ua/policy_privacy-outside
MoneyExchange:
https://www.revolutionmoneyexchange.com/WebSite/PrivacyPolicy.aspx
@Kevin: when are you going to update your Support Cryptogon page with a Revolution MoneyExchange link? 🙂
In all seriousness, this is fascinating, especially from the Steve Case plus people from the financial sector and even a former Treasury Secretary vs PayPal angle.
@lagavulin: the bubble wasn’t sustainable, but it was fun while it lasted to pretend that the world could really be different than it was. Unfortunately new money tends to act like old money once it gets real power, it just wears newer suits.
“when are you going to update your Support Cryptogon page with a Revolution MoneyExchange link?”
I’ll have it updated within a day.
As one of those who avoids paypal I thank you for putting me onto this but there’s a problem: revolutionmoneyexchange doesn’t like my yahoo.com.au email address (“email address not in valid format. Please re-enter (i.e. joe@revolution.com).”) possibly because it’s not a U.S. domain. I’m contacting them to find out what’s up.