Escrow agents

[Tim May]

At 12:09 PM +0300 4/16/01, Sampo Syreeni wrote:
>On Sun, 15 Apr 2001, Tim May wrote:
>
>>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.
>
>True. This is a case where Esther *can* verify that Bob's goods aren't
>tainted:  there's a body and it's common knowledge. Try this in case the hit
>must be kept a secret. And how about trade in KP, and other sensitive
>information? Since anonymous cash is likely to develop online, if at all, I
>think infotrade is an important part of the picture.
>

Sure, I agree that information trade (bits, not bodies) is important. 
I gave the example I did to show how in at least some cases it is 
easy to see how a third party escrow agent can work and still 
maintain mutual untraceability between Alice, Bob, and Esther.

For information trading, there are many kinds of information.

In some cases, the information _might_ be so valuable as to induce 
Esther to defect (i.e., to steal). I think this is the case you 
presented, where the escrow agent should not be able to see the 
plaintext of the information being traded, which means Bob the Buyer 
may _claim_ that what he received from Alice was junk and Esther 
cannot decide whether to release the funds.

However, many other forms of information sales are amenable to 
straightforward escrow use. The credit data base example. To first 
(and probably second, third) order, it doesn't matter if Esther can 
see specific credit queries, as she cannot build up the complete data 
base from isolated queries. That is, the bought information has 
presumably value for Bob the Buyer, but not much for Esther.

(As in all escrow or surety bond calculations, the issue is whether a 
particular transaction is worth it for Esther to defect, to skip out 
and "burn" her own reputation. Between Esther not being able to cash 
the digital check and sparseness issues, and her estimated long term 
revenue stream, these all enter into the equation.)

As I have said, the precise form the protocols will take for various 
kinds of information markets is not fruitful at this time. Structures 
will evolve. What's important is to realize that the means already 
exist (Blacknet showed this, trivially) to move transactions into 
cypherspace.

Details will evolve.


--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