Topic: Bitcointalk Escrows - Trade Safely! - page 11. (Read 108329 times)

As you are a new member and don't have much of a history here, I would recommend establishing yourself in the community. There are reputable members here, but best of luck to you and your company.

We now offer bitcoin escrow service. We charge a 1% transaction fee.

Our url - https://thesatoshimarketplace.com/our-services/escrow

Thanks
The Satoshi Marketplace Staff

Can someone trusted who is online now contact me, I require help from someone to do a loan.

I'm astonished it is not pinned actually. I think a couple of requests were made already. Maybe a new round of requests from reputable escrows is in place.

The watch list is not so very helpful because over a bitcointalkuserlife it will be filled quite good.

I like the idea of pinning, but you can also just "watch" this thread and thus you will have it always in your watch list and it will be easier to find for you.

I feel this thread should be Pinned in first page of the specific sections (Service, Goods, Digital Goods). I am searching for this thread since last 2 hours. but it was gone in deep deep down. I request a moderator to pin this thread. then we can easily find an escrow whenever we need someone for a transaction or trade..

By terminated, I meant force the transaction to be completed.

Thanks for reading.

There's no automated way to do so, but with a signed instruction from the sender I would have no objections to provably burning the coins (e.g. sending them to OP_RETURN ). If that becomes a popular request, I can add a "burn escrow" feature =)

Hi - I don't read this thread every day and have just worked backwards to your first post.  It sounds like you have an automated version of the one way method I suggested a few pages back involving part public keys and generating a "vanity" wallet address that the payer and payee drop their funds into (if involving crypto)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=855778.msg14337441;topicseen#msg14337441

Am reading through your thread too.


My version coins would be "lost" if the transaction is never completed, so all parties would be made aware of this.  I'm sure your site would have has suitable disclaimers (only stating the obvious).


My only question (so far) is on the website, it says the escrow period can be extended for a year via email;


can it also be terminated immediately?  (Sorry if this has been asked already)

Good luck, I hope it works.

Correct! Because there is no such thing as "automated" arbiters. They are always human or manually processed.

So human escrows will never run out of a job, they'll just be relegated to the expensive transactions.

As SebastianJu is very aware, a transaction of 700+ BTC for ten thousand chips needed a human.
I believe OgNasty does large miners and physical coins and other stuff.
And TookDk, hmmm. I saw something about a new alt-coin, I forgot which one. (Or sorry, maybe it was someone else?)

I did my share of ICOs before. (They died a natural death, but at least not due to being scammed.)

The additional friction of needing a trustworthy human to look over the deal is part of the price you pay.


It also depends on what kind of transaction. If you are just sending 100 BTC to exchange it for 5000 LTC, for example, so long as the site says it has the funds, and you believe it to be a trustworthy site, you can go with that kind of automated transaction; (I'm talking about shapeshift in this example.)

In a similar way, if you are sending 100 BTC to a mixer, it spits out 99 or 98 BTC back to you from unconnected addresses, either immediately or after a few hours, depending on what you asked it to do.

If you are buying 100 BTC worth of mining equipment from a manufacturer directly, they sometimes do not use escrow at all, because they are considered a merchant and want you to trust them to deliver the goods. Most merchants think this way, especially those who accept fiat payments, traditionally with credit cards or bank checks/wires

If you are buying 100 BTC worth of equipment from an individual on these forums, you might want to consider a human escrow.

I've set my minimums such that I don't see requests for escrows of smaller than 3 BTC. (I might bump that up a little higher.)


I don't know about everyone else, but to me, one bitcoin transaction is the same as another bitcoin transaction, only some variables change, and the value. That is why it is easy for me to isolate myself from the transaction, whether it's 1 BTC or 100 BTC.

But the amount of work that goes into checking stuff, verifying, handling, especially with ICOs and GroupBuys and dealing with online accounts, or shipping tracking stuff ... It's just too much work for too little pay, and I can see now why some old-timers quit doing it, and whether or not you understand what's going on, I'd rather not deal with small transactions unless you are willing to pay the minimum.

To put it into perspective, how much is insurance for shipping stuff by courier? How much is insurance for your car? (I hear $500 a month for brand new drivers in North America.) How much is a fire alarm or fire extinguisher that needs to be tested and replaced every year? How much is tuition for school, and if you pay double the price do you get a guarantee of a degree or diploma?

You're definitely right, but let's not let perfect be the enemy of good. The vast majority of transactions that should have been done through an escrow-like service are not. For instance, I recently sold MoneyPot (for several times your 20 BTC example) with no escrow or non-repudiation. The buyer was 100% at my mercy to act honestly. Of course, like the vast majority of deals it went through smoothly, but I'm sure the buyer would have been better off protecting themselves using escrow; but it was never done because of the additional friction. That's the problem that bithra tries to solve, it's a light-weight, low-friction escrow. It's not perfect, it's never going to replace having a human arbitrate, but I strongly believe it's a net positive to the community.

In my opinion: its really not about trusting the escrow agent to simply "hold" your coins until the point of release, its about trusting the escrow to arbitrate and make an objective ruling in case of a dispute.

I believe there are different requirement for the escrow service depending on the type of trade.
Trusting 0.1 to an automated site with no one to arbitrate? Sure I will consider that.
Trusting 20 BTC to an automated site with no one to arbitrate? Never.

In the later example, I would carefully consider which escrow I can use that will be able to facilitate a dispute objective and fair. The fee (lets say 1%) is well spend, as the fee you pay will reduce the overall risk of your trade. The quality of an escrow service is really only shown when there is a problem.

Bottom line, you get what you pay for.

He has said specifically that he is not going to arbitrate any disputes, so most of the time when he is contacted with an issue, he will not be able to help

Basically, RHavar is an escrow agent, using a website he created to automatically do the job for him. 99% of the time, no one is going to bother him, therefore he can choose to not charge a fee.

Once in a while, someone is going to email him about a problem with his site ...

I didn't notice the point that it is free. Which is an advantage for sure since all the other automated escrow sites have fees, as far as I know...

Yeah, all fair points. I think the point of automated escrow is to replace *not using escrow*. Pretty much every day someone on bustabit complains to me about getting scammed, and while escrow wouldn't help in all cases (e.g. delayed paypal reversals) the main reason people send money directly without using escrow is:
* Escrow is too complicated or technical (e.g. multisig)
* Escrow is too slow or too much friction (dealing with a person)
* No one wants to pay the escrow fee

so bithra is (in-my-biased-opinion) a great solution for the above. However, it will never and doesn't try to replace trustless or human-arbitrated escrow.

Yeah, sounds like a standard escrow transaction though through a website. Of course it means the website would have to be trusted, the escrow, the website code, hosting and so on.

Generally I'm not so much a friend of normally automated escrow services because in case of moderation it is often too late to speak about precautions that should be taken. Moderation then might not be possible anymore really.

From what I can understand, it allows the buyer to fund an escrow account, and release the escrowed coins to the seller upon receipt of the goods, digital or physical.

The seller can see the funds, so he knows when to deliver the items. He should not deliver if he doesn't see payment.

The buyer then must release the funds to the seller.

Since there is no arbitration, the funds move one way. The buyer can not get back his funds, he can only release it. So the seller should not deliver the goods until he sees the funds in escrow.

Since the funds can only move one way, there are only two possible bad things that can happen:

1. The buyer refuses to release the escrow. The seller doesn't get his money, but the buyer can't get a refund either.
2. The seller refuses to deliver. Same result, buyer can't get back his money.

The seller should never deliver until he sees the escrow, otherwise, that's his fault.
The buyer should release the escrow when he gets his stuff. If he gets a defective item, he should return it. Seller should send a good replacement.

If buyer wants a refund, he will have to release the escrow and hope the seller sends back the payment; or force Ryan to do arbitration.

It is basically doing 90% of the traditional bitcoin escrow's job.

It's expressly not. It has very similar characteristics from a traders perspective as 2-of-2 multisig though (e.g. no outside arbitration) but is much easier to use, as you noted, no public key sharing and signing release transactions. =)

Without public keys how can it be a multisig? And when your site is for escrow then where is the third key? Either you create multisig with a trader but then the other trader is missing or the traders do it on their own. But then what is your service for?