On Mon, Jul 01, 2013 at 06:35:25PM -0400, Andrew Miller wrote:
> Absent the licensed public escrow professionals, how would two
> strangers be able to find a mutually trustworthy agent to act as the
> mediator? I anticipate you'll suggest something like that they can
> choose a third party based on some public reputation. The problem is
> that it's impossible for public reputations to distinguish between an
> effective escrow and one that sometimes colludes with one of the
> parties to rip-off the other. The reason again is that if two parties
> accuse each other of lying, the mediator has to piss off one or the
> other. So any escrow's reputation is going to consist of good reviews
> from whoever it favors, and bad reviews from whoever it doesn't.

It is possible to have a reputation system where the impact level of
a good/bad review (in case of escrow service) would be influenced also by
both sides's reputation (buyer / seller) -> review/feedback of reputable buyer
would have a bigger impact than a review of seller with no reputation and
vice versa. So this will be some kind of accumulated review and can be probably
better used for escrow services. Everyone in this system would have some
"virual karma" of his/her honesty :-)

BTW, are now any real problems with escrow services (like SilkRoad?) or
we are trying to solve purely hypothetical problems? :)
--
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