It was centered around e-gold (a system for trading digital gold) and it involved billions of dollars per year in transactions. It was also a magnificent adventure.

Below you'll find a passage from the forward to Carl Mullan's book on e-gold, called Better Money. (At Carl's gracious request, I wrote that forward.) But before I do, I want everyone interested in silver and gold to know that their metals could be the doorway to excitement and prosperity… right away and not someday. It was done then and it could easily be done again.

Now, here's that passage:

I am one of the lucky few who stumbled upon e-gold in the late 1990s, as it was bursting upon the world, empowering small commerce, allowing person-to-person international transactions and creating, for lack of a better description, a planet-wide party for the motivated but unprivileged.

The e-gold economy led me to bands of brothers – talented, fascinating and often wise bands of brothers – secretly meeting on tiny Croatian islands, in the back rooms of bars, in glitzy hotels and in dark corners of the Internet. e-gold led me to raw, potent and invigorating business deals and dealers. It brought me into a wide variety of international experiences, for both better and worse, that I wouldn't have imagined otherwise.

The e-gold era was, to me, the life of high adventure, and I loved nearly every minute of it.

I am a thoroughly committed Bitcoin advocate: I want it to be used everywhere and all the time, starting yesterday. But that doesn't mean I dislike gold and silver, or that I want them to do badly. On the contrary, silver and gold are decentralized money, which I love; my only complaint is that most of their advocates never actually use them.

Apocalypse Money Isn't Good Enough

Let's be honest and admit that a huge percentage of gold and silver advocates are frozen in place, waiting for an apocalypse of one sort or another. That's when they plan on using their metals, and not before.