Besides the question of trustworthiness, another problem I see with anonymous escrow agents applies more generally to any form of anonymous business. Anonymity makes sense to me for the individual. Each person manages his own affairs and he can keep secret or reveal what he wants. But at the business level it is going to be much harder to keep the same level of secrecy. It is hard for me to see how a business larger than two or three people can really expect to operate with the kind of anonymity we are talking about here. These escrow agents will need significant assets to be useful, and probably staffs of at least dozens or hundreds of actuaries and other professionals who will judge the safety and appropriateness of the various deals the agency is offered. How can you expect to keep the location and true identities of the business principals secret? It is said that no more than three people can keep a secret; can we really expect a staff of hundreds not to reveal that they actually work for the mysterious XYZ escrow agency, accessible only through Blacknet? Even with the Mafia, everyone knows who works there (judging from the newspapers). Can we really expect more secrecy for these anonymous businesses? I think that it is really impossible for a business of any significant size to be anonymous in the same way that an individual can. The idea of an escrow agency that retains its anonymity seems impractical to me. Hal