Having not read the FAQ, I foolishly jump in... Timothy May wrote,

At 2:38 AM 9/3/95, MONTY HARDER wrote:

...

But if the escrow agent is anonymous, we simply recurse, moving now to the question of whether anyone can trust the Anonymous Escrow Agency not to take the money and run.

Well, at one level, everything is always recursive. [snip] And, of course, it is possible to structure things so that the escrow agent cannot "take the money and run," because the money is not accessible to them.

This is analogous to an escrow agent in the real world holding a check from Alice to Bob until Bob completes some set of conditions. The escrow agent--call her Essie--cannot cash the check herself. She can of course renege on the deal, even if Bob does his part of the bargain, but there is little incentive for her to do so.

For example, the money exchanger or bank can allow an exchange option that packages up the new money for some AND/OR list of package openers, certify what it is and then seal it up & send it to the escrow agent. As mentioned by Timothy and Monty this just pushes the question down to whether anyone can trust the bank. Timothy claims evidence that there will be entities such as banks that do not scam customers. I observe that from a few trusted entities a great amount of trust can be created--bubbling up that same recursion. In the above example, the trust of the Anonymous Escrow Agency is increased by the mechanism that does not allow the agency to get at the cash. This uses the trust of the bank, but does not decrease the trust of the bank. Perhaps trust formal transfer mechanisms can evolve so that almost everybody can become almost as trustworthy as the most trustworthy entity in the commerce. Dar (who knows he should have checked the FAQ) =========================================================== Dar Scott Home phone: +1 505 299 9497 Dar Scott Consulting Voice: +1 505 299 5790 <--- 8637 Horacio Place NE Email: darscott@aol.com Albuquerque, NM 87111 dsc@swcp.com Fax: +1 505 898 6525 http://www.swcp.com/~correspo/DSC/DarScott.html My preference for attached files are in this order: AOL, Mime, Binhex4, PGP, UUencode ===========================================================