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Title: Escrow Service for Non-BTC Merchants Post by: Stephen Gornick on August 24, 2011, 06:11:14 PM Right now there are so few options for escrow in the typical ecommerce space, such as for an eBay transaction or for the Craigslist buyer.
Escrow.com, for example, charges a minimum of $25 per transaction so using escrow.com for an $80 purchase is prohibitively expensive. Here is their fee chart: - http://escrow.com/support/calculator.asp And Escrow.com is seen as one of the "least expensive" escrow providers as well. The reasons escrow is so expensive include the fact that the escrow organization is pricing in chargeback risk and that there are extensive regulations regarding escrow service providers. While we do now have several Bitcoin-supporting escrow services offering a service similar to escrow.com, the problem is that not very many merchants can make use of those services as they do not (yet) accept bitcoin for payment. I wonder if there would be an opportunity for an escrow service to accept bitcoin as payment, immediately convert that payment to USD (or whatever currency is used for the purchase), and then to escrow that government currency amount until either the escrow is released or the payment goes to arbitration (or whatever happens after non-completion). That way the customer deals in bitcoins and the merchant benefits by needing to make no changes to their systems other than perhaps the equivalent of using the escrow service as the "Bill To", and then shipping to the customer once the escrow service has received payment. Title: Re: Escrow Service for Non-BTC Merchants Post by: BTCrow on August 26, 2011, 12:13:49 PM this is exactly on what we are working. We integrate payment converter in our merchant tools and will soon start to contact non bitcoin business and bitcoin business about the possibility of accepting secured bitcoin payment.
The main problem is I am alone to code and it take lot of time to complete everything. I'll try to speedup, but I keep security in mind so need to do code audits and pentesting in the same time which is time consuming. If you are a talented coder, very aware of security and you're interested to work with me, drop me a PM I'll be happy to work faster on this. Thanks Jules |