Escrow, as I see it, works like this:
- A company wants to run a signature campaign, but they are to busy to do it themself, so a campaign manager is hired.
- This campaign manager will be given BTC to payout the participants in the signature campaign at the end of every cycle (monthly, weekly, etc).
- Some people may not trust the person doing the signature campaign, so they ask them to do escrow.
- The person doing escrow will hold an amount of BTC to cover for +- one payment cycle
- If something goes wrong in the campaign (manager disappears, funds are gone, etc), the person doing escrow will use the BTC that has been escrowed to pay out the people in the signature campaign.
In an ideal world, the person doing escrow would hold onto the
BTC until the signature campaign is over. But more often than not the
BTC is returned after a few successful cycles.
However, seeing that this isn't always the case (devthedev paying out for dadice) I'm
considering to put signature campaigns as escrowed if the person paying isn't the same as the person managing the campaign, has some decent trust on this forum and isn't affiliated with the company itself. So the dadice campaign would be soon as escrowed, but the Bit-X wouldn't be, because marcotheminer both manages the campaign and pays the participants.
Opinions about this are welcome.
First, let us define escrow:
DEFINITION OF 'ESCROW'
A financial instrument held by a third party on behalf of the other two parties in a transaction. The funds are held by the escrow service until it receives the appropriate written or oral instructions or until obligations have been fulfilled. Securities, funds and other assets can be held in escrow.
Source:
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/escrow.aspThe system dadice uses can be covered under this.
Working:
Bitcoins that cover more than maximum payment, including bonus and escrow fee, rounded up, amounts to 8
BTC, which will be held by escrow at any point of time (excluding the brief gap between payment and refilling). Once the posts are counted, the payment amount, along with username and address are sent to devthedev, the escrow (which is also reflected in the spreadsheet on the third tab), who then releases the funds to the participants of the signature campaign.
I think what most campaigns use is a similar but kind of a more efficient system. There is a little more work of sending payments that escrow got to do. But 3% fee covers that part.
In addition, there is a campaign manager, co-manager, and an escrow. If you still consider that the same as a situation in which I control everything, it would really be weird..
In an ideal world, the person doing escrow would hold onto the BTC until the signature campaign is over.
It is almost the same. Only the until the campaign is over part is split into weekly ones and the escrow directly releases the funds to the parties.
Yeah, I support the view. You may consider dadice campaign as escrowed, since there is already 3 parties involved and I, bf4btc or devthedev are not affiliated to dadice.
Thanks