DigiGold issue contracts in four precious metals. Each is a currency contract, where each unit is redeemable, with a gram for gram, with metal from e-gold.com. Both Digigold and Omnipay claim to offer this service, with differing conditions.
Each contract is denominated in grams as the unit of account, however, the underlying contracts use milligrams as their unit of contract.
WebFunds shows grams and puts the trailing milligrams in decimal form. This is just like most other modern currencies, and any accounting program that shows dollars as units and puts cents after the decimal point. The Ricardian contract includes hints in the currency section on how to display the values.
The live DigiGold.net contracts (also see their site):
| Metal | Periodic Symbol | Contract | Server | Balance Sheet | Reserve Account | LaVella |
| Gold |
79 |
DigiGold_AUG_2000.asc | .loc | Sheet | primary (105310) and manager (104982) accounts | M |
| Silver |
47 |
DigiGold_AGG_2000.asc | .loc | Sheet | primary (105310) and manager (104982) accounts | M |
| Palladium |
46 | DigiGold_PDG_2000.asc | .loc | Sheet | primary (105310) and manager (104982) accounts | M |
| Platinum |
78 |
DigiGold_PTG_2000.asc | .loc | Sheet | primary (105310) and manager (104982) accounts | M |
| Old Gold |
79 |
DigiGold_AUG.asc | .loc | Sheet | primary (105310) and manager (104982) accounts |
The ricardian contracts that are issued by DigiGold have the additional benefit of dynamic publication of reserves, see above. With both total reserves and total issue (or float), as published information, it is possible to monitor the reserve ratio in real time.
To calculate the reserve ratio, take the reserves of e-gold and divide by the credit float (that is, negative mint minus the named manager's account).
Should be an automated way of calculating this...
If you wish to go further and audit the e-gold system, check out their Examiner Page. There, you can see the amount of reserve metal held in the Toronto vaults of ScotiaMocatta, and the outstanding issued e-metal. As long as the circulation is less than the reserves, e-gold Ltd has met its obligation to be 100% reserved, in accordance with the bailment agreement that users have.
The only piece in this puzzle that is currently missing is how to audit the actual amount of metal that ScotiaMocatta holds in the Toronto vaults of the Bank of Nova Scotia (owner of ScotiaMocatta). Whilst the bank maintains its legacy conservatism and its nominal web site, there is little to be done as yet, but pressure is on for them to come to the party and display their reserve vault in realtime. Hopefully with a webcam !
Note that DigiGold has issued two gold contracts. The "Old Gold" one is the deprecated x.509 variety, whereas the newer contracts use signature based upon OpenPGP, the PKI system that is capable of doing financial trust. Also note that as the two gold contracts share the same reserve account, they also share the same reserves.
People holding Old Gold are encouraged to swap it for the new, generally by going to omnipay at hushmail.com or somewhere else listed in the contracts. The Old Gold currency will be run for as long as needed, so its value is maintained, but newer applications will not deal with it. That currency peaked at 4000 grams of issuance, and you can see how much is left of that in circulation by looking at the Balance Sheet.