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by shobith 2635 days ago
For the purposes of fraud prevention, payment processors can be viewed as an escrow service (along with other things, of course). This can still be programmed on top of bitcoin, someone like amazon/eBay can build this escrow system and charge a fee.
1 comments

Several people have built escrow systems for Bitcoin. Whether you trust those people is another matter.
Using escrow systems also detracts from a core appeal of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies - being able to exchange money online with little trust in a third party intermediary.

There are still the monetary policy trust issues that Bitcoin resolves (not having to trust a central bank) if you are particularly libertarian or whatever, but I don't think that's really a driving cause for any sort of adoption in any other countries other than Venezuela and maybe Cyprus 5 years ago?

The Bitcoin script language allows you to create escrow systems without any trust in a third party intermediary.

A working example of this is the lightning protocol which is implemented on top of Bitcoin script. It uses time-based escrow written in Bitcoin script to eliminate the need for trust or third party intermediaries.

This is an important benefit that isn't very well known.