At Bitcoin 2013 there was a fair bit of talk about the need for a distributed escrow. While it would be a great technical achievement, I didn't hear much talk about how it would actually be used. I have a concept that I am thinking of working on, that could add such functionality. But I am interested in what use-cases you guys envision? What do you think the key use-cases would be?
Recently I was part of a group buy and was thinking of ways to automate things. This led to the following rough outline:
- an organization employing a number of escrow agents who's qualifications are advertised.
- a 'job' would assign one of the escrow agents and he/she would work closely with the client (project owner) to obtain identity information and familiarity with the task.
- project participants (who cough up funds) would fund individual green addresses which
they retain access to. They could withdraw their support at any time by withdrawing funds (making this an unusual escrow...'youscrow' and 'yescrow' and 'mescrow' domains were taken
Communications about participation and decisions would be understood by simply evaluating the funding level green addresses.
- The project owner would propose a funding need by a vote and the results would be weighted in relation to how much funding each participant had.
- Funding would be obtained from the participants account by a scripted operation. The escrow agent would evaluate the votes and execute the script to transfer funds.
- The escrow agent would probably have to obtain cooperation from another escrow agent at the 'office' in order to execute the script. A reasonable number of escrow agents could execute scripts absent the primary agent (to avoid hit-by-a-bus accidents.)
- The addresses would probably exist on a very secure system where only script execution was allowed (no logins, for instance.)
- The entire escrow company would be backed by a bond which was sufficient to cover the costs of accidents to any one of the underway projects (loss of secure machine or some such.)
Such an elaborate setup would probably be overkill except for expensive and complex projects. The project I had in mind was related to commissioning the development, production, and delivery of a new piece of hardware. If anyone wants to steal the idea, or parts of it, please do. I'm much more interested in using such a solution than in working on development of it.