Bitcoin Forum

I apologize if this is obvious or someone else mentioned this already... but I just realized that Bitcoin allows for reversible transactions!

As Bitcoin's critics sometimes mention, charge-backs can be viewed as a good thing that protect consumers. Whatever your views are on credit card companies, certainly there are use-cases when you want the customer, rather than the merchant, to have more leverage/power/comfort/trust by being able to reverse the transaction.

You can do this by being your own mediator. You send bitcoins from address A to address B with address A as a mediator (ABA). Then based on whether you are satisfied with the outcome, you confirm (or reverse) your own transaction.

Thoughts?

Escrow is used fairly regularly for bitcoin transactions, but bitcoin itself is not reversible - you're using a third party to send your coins back to you, not actually reversing the transaction.

I think the OP was meaning that the purchaser acts as their own Escrow (more like A B C where the purchaser owns both the A and C addresses).

The problem is that I doubt that many vendors would be interested in having purchasers being their own Escrow (except for perhaps services such as a VPN or VPS or some other "account" that can be easily shut down if the tx isn't finally confirmed).

In the case of such "account" type services I guess this could be a somewhat useful "try before you buy" option.

If you can reverse the payment it's no different to just not making it in the first place. If you want to prove to a merchant that you do have the money, you can sign a nonce they provide with some of your keys then show the merchant the unspent transactions.

Credit card chargebacks are really just a specialized case of dispute mediation in which the buyer always wins. Bitcoin can do better and more nuanced dispute mediation than that, but nobody built the infrastructure for it yet. It'll come with time.

My upcoming system will cover this bitcoins-r-us.com.
Check it out, I also have a small video I made to preview it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4nAPAyKRAE&feature=youtu.be

On the portuguese section there was a guy with a similar idea, he have a website https://www.bitcointoyou.com/broker/Home.aspx (https://www.bitcointoyou.com/broker/Home.aspx)