

ClearCoin  safer  bitcoin transactions - TuxPirate
https://clearcoin.appspot.com/
This site is ran by Gavin Andresen, technical lead of the bitcoin project.<p>If you are buying something using bitcoins, ClearCoin makes your transaction much safer.<p>Create an escrow transaction, and then instead of sending bitcoins directly to the seller, send them to ClearCoin.<p>Then show the seller that the bitcoins are secure by sending them a link to the transaction's status page, and wait for them to send you the product or provide the service.<p>After you've received the product or service, one click will release the bitcoins and complete the transaction.<p>If you don't receive the product or service, or if you're unhappy with it and the seller can't fix the problem, then don't release them. When the transaction expires, the bitcoins will either be refunded to you or donated to charity (you can choose which when you create a transaction).
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zhoutong
It's clearly a brilliant idea to set up a charity escrow service. The buyers
and sellers have no incentives to cheat after all as they can't gain anything
from fraudulent transactions.

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a1k0n
As an aside, there are currently 6221100 bitcoins in circulation (not counting
ones that were lost, I suppose) and they are currently trading at around
$7.50, which means Bitcoin has an implied market capitalization of around $46
million.

Not enough to take over any banking systems anytime soon, but that is an awful
lot of momentum for a weird crazy open source P2P thing.

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kiba
This escrow service is developed by Gavin Andresen, the lead developer of
bitcoin.

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hallowtech
Why do we need 'safer options'? Shouldn't the original method just be updated
if it needs to be?

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rudiger
It's about layers of abstraction. The Bitcoin architecture provides an
abstract, lower-level interface for higher-level functionality to be built
upon [1].

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_layer>

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mike-cardwell
Which is exactly the way it should be.

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coconutrandom
So this give the option of chargebacks? This seems to be much less safe for
merchants.

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epscylonb
seems to work for paypal

in a large mainstream bitcoin economy there would be multiple escrow services,
both the consumer and merchant can decide what services they will use

clearcoin has the option of donating the money to charity if there is a
dispute, seems like an interesting innovation to me

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rfugger
Paypal, credit cards, etc. have dispute resolution services. They don't just
allow the buyer to renege arbitrarily. To be useful, it seems to me that an
escrow service needs to offer a more robust dispute resolution mechanism,
which will cost money.

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epscylonb
not sure what your point is, my point is that in a bitcoin economy you would
have choice

for a large purchase either the merchant or the customer may insist on an
expensive escrow service that deals with disputes robustly

for small purchases this might not be so important

I saw a comment on HN recently asking why startups never challenge the
VISA/MasterCard hegemony, with a response saying it is simply to expensive to
enter the market with a low ROI

widespread bitcoin use would lower the barriers for this kind thing, unless
you like monopolies and cartels, I can't see how anybody would argue this is a
bad thing (regardless of whether you think bitcoin is good, will suceed,
whaterver)

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tedreed
So, under "For Buyers", it says that if you don't release the funds, it gets
refunded to you.

Under "For Sellers", it says that you get the funds unless they specifically
block it.

WTF?

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pbreit
And so the process begins to make bitcoin as user friendly as credit cards.

Escrow has never worked well for consumer commerce because sellers dont like
it.

