Hacker News Reader

Comment by tlrobinson | Hacker News Reader

So why haven't markets that utilize Bitcoin escrow transactions taken off yet?

"The site gained users’ trust by offering a feature known as “multi-signature transactions,” designed to prevent exactly the sort of bitcoin theft its administrators are now accused of."

Seems like the site's differentiating feature was multiparty escrow transactions but weren't used often due to hassle?

Pretty much, yeah. It was available but not very many people used it.

Evolution did use escrow, except that they were the middle man between buyer and seller. Even with escrow you still have to put your trust in someone else.

Even with escrow you still have to put your trust in someone else.

Not with Bitcoin. With multi-sig transactions you don't have to trust the escrow agent to not steal your money (assuming you're confident the escrow agent is not also the other party in the transaction): https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts#Example_2:_Escrow_and_d...

As dshankar pointed out, Evolution supported these types of transactions but they were not widely used, presumably because they are more difficult than normal transactions.

They had some scheme where you had to give them all your coins first then they used their own software to gen multi-sig http://www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/comments/24vio2/z/chc...

Probably because no bitcoin clients that aren't 3rd party (blockchain.info wallets) offer multi sig in an easy to use UI so nobody could figure it out and just trusted the admins of Evo.

You still need to find a trustworthy 3rd party "mediator" or escrow agent, whom still holds the ability to collude with either seller or buyer for a share of the funds withheld.

That is a good question. The Marketplace/TMP introduced full multisig support, but while admired for this, the users never materialized. For a while now, the trend has been against multisig, if anything; it seems that for all the moaning about exit scams, using multisig in Electrum is just too darn inconvenient compared to a centralized escrow market.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com