Bitcoin Forum

Hey i understand the meaning of escrow and how do they work. But how do you know to trust them? Are they approved by the forum or anyone else?

First: this is the wrong board.

The forum doesn't approve or disapprove escrows, the community does. You can only base your trust on their past actions, so check their feedback (including "untrusted" feedback) and make your own judgement whether or not you trust someone.
I would advise not to use someone without escrow experience as an escrow.

+1 for LoyceV's comment...

I just wanted to add that even dealing with an account with massive positive trust and a long line of escrow experience doesn't protect you 100%... I clearly remember the master-p fiasco... Luckily i was one of the members that did use him in the past, but didn't have any active trades using his services at the time he went full scam.

If you want extra security, you can always use multiple trusted escrows using a multi signature wallet (but even then, no 100% guarantee). But if you use, for example, 4 highly trusted escrows that are not connected, and create a 4 out of 6 multi sig wallet (one key generated by each escrow, one for the buyer and one for the seller), the odds of being scammed become really, really, really small

Using an escrow just boils down to having more trust in a well-known, positive trusted, long time member than in a newbie offering a potential-scam deal... Sure, the newbie *can* be legit and the well-known, postitive trusted, long time member *can* be pulling a long con, but the odds of the situation being exactly the oposite are far greater. A well-known, positive trusted, long time member also has something to lose: he/she usually invested years into his account, building up his trust... Usually he/she won't throw away all this work to steal a couple hundred bucks worth of BTC...

OP while you are banging you head against the wall, if you are in need of an escrow then feel free to go with any of the provider from this list:
Few Trusted Escrow Provider (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5047302.0)

All of these users are proven to provide their service and some of them even holding 500BTC for the forum such as DarkStar_  and OgNasty.

Good luck

They get the most convincing approval of all - the experiences of the people who've used them.

That's far more powerful than one forum mod checking them over for a couple of minutes and then ticking a box.

You can't fake a track record, or it would be extremely hard to do, so you can draw on what everyone else reports.

It's not foolproof but it's one hell of a lot better than some random website with some bought reviews.

You cant, honestly speaking.
Not paranoid here though.

We have seen ecsrow agents gone rouge too in this forum more than once but currently there are several members who have been trusted by several bitcointalk members and you can be at ease trusting your valuable with them. The top few of them are "trusted by the community". No involvement with the forum administration here. They are two different groups.

Use an escrow at your own risk. Be wise enough to check both on forum and personal DMs that it is the same person. We have impersonator scams happening too.

@coinmallio: what happens if you turn out to be a scam?
Sure, the trusted escrows don't have access to the funds, but YOU do....

Good question!

1. We're a public company whose founders are not pseudonymous, and are located in civilized countries where theft of funds would result in us going to prison
2. We've been operating since Q1 2017 and have facilitated hundreds of successful sales already, so there's a successful track record without any hiccups or mismanagement of funds
3. We've poured a lot of money and time into realizing CoinMall. It'd be foolish to waste all of that and burn our reputation in the process

No one has guarantee of trustworthyness of any person, especially online on forums but here is another thing, these persons gained trust among people because of their good story, we have to risk and trust someone sometimes, that's how others risked in past and what we get now as a result.
For example Ognasty was carrying forum treasure, a lot of bitcoins for years which he returned recently.
Forum escrows trustworthyness are similar of bitcoin mixers.

Escrow isn't approved by forum staff. I'd rather say they are approved by community. Basically, if people trust in that person, they choose to use their escow services. If you look at escroe services compilation and theirvtrust ratings, you will see who is who here. But despite everything, nobody can guarantee that you're 100% safe. Basically, you have to deal with unknown person which you haven't saw face to face, who is thousands kilometers away and we saw examples when even persons with perfect reputation become scammers later.

Theres no such thing as approval to be an escrow and only the community would be the judge if you would be trusted or not and as said
above the basis of it will vary on your past transactions or simply your history on escrowing funds.Building up reputation wont really be that simple
specially on initial phase which i do believe that would be the hardest part or simply getting your first customer wont really be a piece a cake.

I've been reading some of these escrow threads and I'm confused about something:

Is it really true that the most popular kind of escrow on Bitcointalk involves the buyer just sending the funds to a normal Bitcoin address owned by the escrow agent, and not sending it to a 2-of-3 multisig address? When I see arbitrators offering their services it seems like they're expecting to have full control of the funds. Or am I misunderstanding?

If I'm right that people here usually just trust the escrow agent with the funds, why do they choose to do that when they could instead of 2 of 3 multisig? Is multisig just too much trouble?

@go1111111: yes, every time i used an escrow on this forum, the escrow process involved funding an address generated by the escrow agent, and not creating a 2 to 3 multisig wallet. That does NOT mean your assumption is wrong tough... It would probably be safer to use a 2/3 multisig so the escrow agent can't just run away with the funds... He can still conspire with one of the involved parties to steal the funds together, but at least he can't just run away without help from either the buyer or the seller.

As for the reason why: my best guess would be it has something to do with the technical experience of the average user. An escrow agent has a lot of responsibility and has to deal with inexperienced users asking "newbie" questions all the time. I wouldn't be surprised if most escrow agents had issues with people not understanding the basics of crypto currencies and starting to make a fuss because they did not understand what was happening. If you'd add a step to your escrow process that involved creating a multisig wallet, inexperienced buyers would just lose their minds... But again, this is my gut feeling... If i were an escrow, i'd rather just skip the hassle of getting a newbie to the point where he/she can co-create a multisig wallet, and just let him/her fund an address i completely controll.

Even the escrow on localbitcoins (which I love) is in fact a trust of localbitcoins. I have been bitten once by it. Bought some, sent the money, and the guy launched a dispute and I had to go through a whole long process. I won, but the bitcoin should have been mine and it was stuck in escrow for so long.

So however it works for escrow, a guy, a company, you still got to trust them based on the community feedback for them.

Multisignature wallets are not advisable for the newbie so they prefer escrow who were someone got reputation in thos forum and won't ruin it by stealing few of your bucks while doing trading but we can't trust anyone for huge amount of transaction like 100BTC,simply go with multi sig for huge amounts.

I can see this being an issue if the users had to construct the multisig address themselves. Why don't people use Bitrated though? Do people not trust that it's constructing the 2 of 3 correctly? Or is it still too complicated? Or do people just trust the arbitrators on bitcointalk so much that they don't see the value in having even more security?


Sure, if you use localbitcoins then you have to use them as the arbitrator. But let's say you use something like Bitrated -- then you can choose anyone as the arbitrator, so you can just use the same people who already get used as arbitrators on bitcointalk. It just makes it impossible for them to steal the money without the cooperation of the seller too.

I guess it just blows my mind that after all this time we still aren't seeing people use what I think is one of the coolest features of Bitcoin (2 of 3 multisig) when it looks to me like people should have a clear incentive to use it.

I have never heared about bitrated, so i don't really know how they work... But trusting a thirth party to generate a 2/3 multisig wallet seems unsecure to me... What if bitrated records all keys? Every party would think they're secure, but bitrated would still be able to run away with all the funds... Unless the keys are generated 100% client side, but like i said: i don't know bitrated...

Let me explain how to trust an escrow in less than 100% way ;D. Risking only at affordable level on the event of unexpected events is basic thumb rule of trading which is applicable for using escrow services too. Using multiple escrow services or transacting in multiple times for smaller amounts are few general solutions to eliminate the risks involved with using escrows.

MasterP's exit scam was the only event I could remember, still guiding newbies to be cautious must be a very much needed one.

Instead of trusting a stranger, we are having a protecting layer in the name of escrow, it may still have its own risks. Act wisely and responsibly as this forum does not moderate scam and trust.

If you are not trusting people who provide escrow service, maybe you can use an escrow service by this projects  (https://escrow.kleros.io/new/payment) (working with ETH only),  you can create a smart contract with your buyer/seller and making disputes if you are not happy with what you get. Please make sure to do your own research before you start to use this service.

I would have zero idea where to start with something like that and I've been around for an age.

Can you point to any threads where these have been used for that purpose? I'm not so sure I've ever seen one myself.

Looks like it’s just an normal escrow intermediated by this « Kleros team » but with a smartcontract in the middle (why?) in the middle. I’m not sure what is « decentralized » about this since a team decides who is right and who is wrong.



From https://kleros.io/escrow/

always , use little money for exchange or something don't use large amount
also, you must make research ( review in twitter and yotube and bitcointalk) about escrow
whatever ( site exchange or ico.....) because there is lot site or people scammer in the internet

This might sound a bit off-topic, but don't you guys think that some of the other online business escrow services could start including Bitcoin? Such as for example Escrow.com. They have a good reputation and a service like theirs could add up some more income from Bitcoin escrow deals.

It depends on their recent transactions have, we can base on that trust issue. If you are outside of this forum you can use another service of escrow but if here in the forum I would rather choose those trusted people and already held thousands of bitcoin as an escrow service. On the internet, it is really hard to trust 3rd party people that you can trust to hold a fund, unless if they had a good feedback and very popular in this forum. There are a lot of trustworthy users here that we may use as an escrow as what had given link escrow list on the first page.