Escrow agents

[Tim May]

At 3:15 AM +0300 4/16/01, Sampo Syreeni wrote:
>On Sun, 15 Apr 2001, Tim May wrote:
>
>>But the "paving stone," or touch stone, I want to bring up is this:
>>the role of third party escrow agents.
>
>Escrow is practically useless unless Esther can verify that both parties
>have kept to their promise. If the data Esther keeps is encrypted, this will
>not, barring ZKPs, be possible. In an anonymous economy, having the data in
>a usable form will give Esther an incentive to use up the tradeable goods
>escrowed by Bob. Anonymity also gives her a real possibility to do that,
>unlike with traditional escrow. Of course there are a host of nasty
>complications, like how different sorts of tradeable items might be
>protected from this sort of conduct (e.g. anonymous cash probably could be
>protected from Esther, while sensitive corporate memos being sold to a
>competitor perhaps couldn't), and the possibility of linking Esther to the
>damage done to Bob in different kinds of transactions. Nevertheless, I think
>this is a valid objection.

The canonical example is of an escrow agent handling a deposit by a 
buyer of an untraceable killing. When the killer presents the 
appropriate form of evidence that this happened, and that he or she 
was "there" (*), the escrow holder pays.

"You slay, we pay!"

(Details of what the evidence might be are for the market to shake out.)

(I have been using this example since 1988. Not as an advocacy of 
contract killings, but as an illustration of the issue. This scheme 
is different from AP, which is a lottery form.)


Can the buyer of the hit renege? The  escrow agent already holds the 
digital cash. (This assumes nonrepudiable digital cash.)

--Tim May
-- 
Timothy C. May         tcmay at got.net        Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns