The obvious problem I see with anonymous escrow agents is that it is much harder for them to become and stay trustworthy. With an identified (non-anonymous) agency, you can have a lot of information on which to base your judgement. You can look at its assets, at its employees and hiring procedures, at its record. You look at the jurisdiction in which it operates and judge what protection the legal system may offer. You can look at other agencies in that jurisdiction and what their track record has been.
Why this dichotomy? A cyberspatial entity is somebody who owns a secret key. If said entity wants to maximize its anonymity it will reveal nothing about itself. If said entity wants establish the strongest possible reputation, it will reveal all (and lock itself into doing so ahead of time). Since it is enourmously difficult to deal with an entity with no reputation and since it requires a substantial amount of effort to establish certified facts about the nature of a cyberspatial entity, one would expect most (if not all) to exist somewhere in between the two extremes.
I would guess that most of that information would not be available from an anonymous escrow agent, at least not in a validated form. Perhaps some of it could be done with credentials (a blinded statement from a reputable accounting firm that (this?) escrow agency has assets of $X). But generally thinking I think it will be very difficult to get nearly as much high-quality information about an anonymous escrow agent.
Agreed. The forms of information that one might need certified are so varied that the cyberspatial infrastructure needed to support this system would be massive. But in the mean time, I would expect insurance to pick up the slack. Under any such scheme the customer doesn't bother looking at the entity's credentials... it just looks at the insurance contract given by the insurance company to the customers of the entity via a blind signature.
This leaves the possibility of using its public record to judge trustworthiness. It may be able to offer certified statements (again, credentials of a sort) from earlier customers to show that it behaved honestly. Tim has suggested "pinging" such businesses, performing various dummy transactions to make sure that they are still behaving honestly. All this can help establish a record, but how well can this be extrapolated into the future?
The problem with reputations of this form is that it is difficult to verify that the customer's opinions were not pre-selected. Otherwise a business could work under several different pseudonyms, combine only those pseudonyms receiving rave reviews, and leave you with the impression that they never had a displeased customer. Of course this happens to a degree in the real world today.
The problem with this is that keys are not people. People, and businesses, have a certain continuity, a certain predictability. Keys do not. A key may change its personality, literally overnight, and you will not have any warning about this.
That sounds an awful lot like a person to me.
In an identified business, if it changes hands, acquires new management, or has some other change which might lead to new behavior, you generally have some warning (especially if it is a business which is selling trustworthiness, in which case it will probably provide customers with an unusual degree of access to the business's internals.) But with an anonymous business this is not the case. An escrow agent who has been as steady as the sunrise for years may, without any warning, become totally dishonest. Hidden behind the shield of anonymity there is no way for its customers to discover the change.
I strongly refute the notion that anything other than federal regulations prevent this situation from existing in the real world today... And federal regulations can be replaced by cybergovernments.
What are the motivations for an anonymous escrow agency to stay in business, to not take the money and run? Legal sanctions would presumably be ineffective. One proposal is that as long as the expected future stream of income is worth more than the current value of all contracts being held by the agent, it is worthwhile for it to be honest.
This is easy, prevent the agent from taking the money without the agreement of a set of other parties. Hold money in escrow from the escrow.
Again, with an identity-based business these kinds of changes will be monitored closely by customers.
A key IS an identity. In terms of dealings with corporations there is no situation in which the official name of the corporation is any more useful than the key. When dealing with humans, yes a system which prevents an individual from every changing names can be very valuable, but such a system is difficult to maintain and requires of high level of physical realm support. JWS