I have a suggestion for future 'pre-order' funds management.
I really love this idea.
Presumably people would prove they own the address, and agree to the particular terms by signing those terms using a Bitcoin 'sign message' facility.
More generally - this seems like a form of 'layaway' (or lay-by as it's known here in Australia)
I'd like to see a little lay-by management tool for merchants & customers to view their agreement terms and balances.
..but how could we prevent someone using the same funds as part of deals with multiple merchants where the amounts happen to match?
(some people may just reserve way more resources than they are ever going to be able to pay - negatively affecting the utility of the system for merchants)
I like the simplicity of your proposal.. but some further script magic would seem to be required?
I guess I would say 'so what' if people did multiple pre-orders from the same addy? For one, the address is public so if the merchant decided to give a shit he might be able to detect doubled-up pre-orders, but why should he care, for one, and more importantly...
The idea would be that the merchant only honors the queue position from the documented address. If that gets spent it automatically drops out of the queue and the next guy in line gets his chance.
If merchants start using such a mechanism (which I doubt since pre-orders generally are a bit corner-case) it is unlikely that two merchants would have exactly the same notional value for a pre-ordered item, and if they did, they could avoid a collision...unless one of them wanted a collision for some reason I suppose...
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An interesting artifact would be that being #500 in a queue of 300 ASIC chips (for instance) still gives one a decent chance of getting the item anyway.
An interesting fallout from the above in monetary science terms would be that a fair amount of money could be tied up in queues and not used in circulation. Most mainstream economists would think this is not such a great thing. I'm not so sure. In any event, again, pre-orders are likely to be an unusual thing generally.
But as you allude to in your post, the general idea could probably be used for similar sorts of problems with a bit of scripting and perhaps a tool provided by someone for managing such a thing.