There's a lovely line in the original BitCoin paper which says:
> Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers from fraud, and routine escrow mechanisms could easily be implemented to protect buyers.
The word "easily" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there! Escrow is a difficult problem to solve. There is no infallible smart-contract which can protect both buyers and sellers. There's just a lot of messy human interaction which - if the stakes are high enough - can only be resolved in court.
Are PayPal's protections sloppy? Probably. Is Facebook Marketplace a cess-pit? Mostly. Can technology solve a cultural problem? I think we all know the answer to that!
There have been routine escrow mechanisms on bitcoin for 10 years?
Its a very lucrative side business to operate those?
They involve humans, they also involve multisignature accounts and smart contracts just like the white paper inspired or imagined 15 years ago. Its been one of the biggest boons for crypto native commerce, even when automated by the marketplace when the local government doesnt like a website they no longer have been able to seize the funds found in the server because buyer and seller just invalidate the escrow account from the multisig and reconcile money deposited/in transit.
These services are far cheaper than escrow agents I’ve seen on marketplaces that dont involve paypal, far faster than those and paypal, and about comparable in cost to paypal goods and service but mostly cheaper at around 1% instead of 2.89-3.49%. But thats mainly from lack of competition.
Given that paypal offers crypto merchant services, this decade, its far more likely that paypal will get in the crypto escrow game too
and maybe next decade HN collective conscious will catch up to a point that these kinds of comments wont appear in HN threads at all, in favor of people showing us their escrow contract just like they do for their random libraries and products in the rest of the tech space
Cryptocurrency is kind of the opposite if escrow. Especially the complex stuff like smart contracts. It is more “technical wizard who hacks it takes all!” with zero recourse.
Many people don't realize the bitcoin protocol allows for multisignature transactions, making escrow much simpler to implement (e.g. you can make a 2of3 keypair or 3of5 or anything you want to pay for blockchain space to transact).
> Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers from fraud, and routine escrow mechanisms could easily be implemented to protect buyers.
The word "easily" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there! Escrow is a difficult problem to solve. There is no infallible smart-contract which can protect both buyers and sellers. There's just a lot of messy human interaction which - if the stakes are high enough - can only be resolved in court.
Are PayPal's protections sloppy? Probably. Is Facebook Marketplace a cess-pit? Mostly. Can technology solve a cultural problem? I think we all know the answer to that!