The same approach would work for a patient con man. Real credibility has to be tied to a physical body. Some thing at risk. Real credibility has to be tied to assets. The credibility is equivalent to the amount of assets at risk. In a positive reputation system, the asset is reputation capital, it is the respect granted by others. It embodied in the settings of their sorters that order your messages before those of other people. In the farther-out world of nanotech with duplicate bodies and backups, having a body at risk is worthless because bodies would be cheap :-) If the operators of an escrow service are anonymous, then either their accessible assets had better be enough that you can recover losses if they walk with your goods, or their opportunity cost of defecting on their clients had better be high enough (in terms of lost revenue, lost opportunity on outstanding customer goodwill, name recognition, channels, etc.) that they are sufficiently unlikely to that you will take the risk. Scary prospect, and one which many people will estimate wrongly, so the simplest strategy would be to only use escrow companies with an accessible person responsible for them. dean