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by pyalot2 4587 days ago
@RyanZAG

Please look into what escrow means. Of course you can do business with an entity you're not sure is legit. The assumption is that you trust the escrow provider, and the Escrow provider is trusted by the merchant. So, the critera of trust for the escrow provider, is quite a bit higher than a random online store.

If carefully select the escrow provider, check their business registration, make sure there's a legitimate entity behind them, this makes dealing with possibly fraudulent entities as safe as with fiat.
2 comments
RyanZAG 4586 days ago
You're going to use escrow for all of your transactions? There is no way the general public is going to do that. I think even those who are more paranoid would give up the attempt after using escrow to do transactions after a few months and just use regular money. Or more likely, just stop using escrow and use bitcoins anyway, and then complain when they get stolen.
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pyalot2 4586 days ago
You're using escrow already when you use a bank account, CC processor, paypal, google wallet etc.

You don't really get a choice, and you carry the mandatory cost because merchants roll the cost of chargeback fraud, CC fees and banking fees over into your purchase price, no matter if you think you'll need the added service or not.

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sp332 4586 days ago
Why not? People use credit cards now.
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ptrinh 4587 days ago
I think Bitcoin can be serve as a money transport protocol and Escrow services can be built on top of it. Think about buiding HTTPS on top of HTTP protocol.
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pyalot2 4586 days ago
There different ways to implement escrow with bitcoin.

1) You could ignore all technicalities and simply send the coins to a third party which releases it back to you or forward to the merchant. That's probably the least recommendable way, but is the easiest to explain.

2) A smarter way to do it is to use bitcoins transaction script that can process multi signature transactions, which can work in a way that if A wants to send B money, he can setup an address that can only withdraw coins from if C also signs the transaction. This method is supported by Electrum and by the Blockchain.info wallet.

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