As I have said, I do not think you have enough information for the fair resolution of disputes. I do not like the uncertainty of guessing whose side you are going to take in dispute.
It is all much simpler with the automatic system where both sides have to reach the agreement or the money goes to charity.

In fact I could not find anyone mentioning eptiv escorow anywhere. So I can not verify if that service works as it is supposed to, or even find proof that it does work at all.


This sounds like a really good idea to me. Because currently I see your option to you only have a very limited information about the delivered items. Currently you may  see a confirmation that the package has been delivered, but you can not know whether the ordered items have been delivered, therefore I do not think that your dispute solving can provide much protection, instead it may only add uncertainty.

Since clearcoin is closed now, I have tried to find some alternatives.
There are two escrow services listed on bitcoin wiki https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade

1) Bitcoin Escrow http://eptiv.com/
2) BTCrow http://www.btcrow.com/

BTCrow is a new escrow service which makes an attempt to do provide the conflict resolution, which may or may not be a good idea. Now there is an active thread related to it.

eptiv.com seems to be an automatic  escrow service like the clearcoin. Among the diffrences from the clearcoin are

1) The higher fee 1% ( 0.5 % at clearcoin)
2) Any refund address can be chosen

The last option seems very interesting to me. It allows to copy the functionality of clearcoin - sending money back to seller or sending money to the charity of choice. But it may also be possible to send money to some trusted third party to resolve dispute.

The problem is that there is almost no information about the site and it's operators. The about section is very brief and does not answer most of the questions that I have.

Also, I was not able to find any mention of people using this service on the forum.

That is why I would like to ask you, which escrows are you going to use instead of clearcoin? What kind of experience did you have using them? Do you know any other bitcoin escrow services other then the two that I've mentioned?

My old password 50 characters long, completely random. I also provided my LR account. Still got rejected.

Sounds like a good idea to me. I think we need a security part of forum. I see a bunch of topics about hacked accounts or stolen bitcoins pop up  every day. We need people to learn about security and for protecting yourself it may be useful to have some understanding of the possible attacks. So this security  board could have the hacking part as well as some vital information about protecting your wallet and your information in general.
 

That's really too bad, I was going to start selling stuff using clearcoin.

Escrow operated by someone trusted by community, is really important for bitcoin economy development.
Open sourcing the escrow would be a great contribution to community. But even with the open source, building users' trust will take time.

They said they are installing new systems. I guess they took this time to test things without having to care about the uptime too much since there is no trade going on now.

Just curious. How are you going to ensure the transaction safety. How are you going to ensure that you do receive an iPod and your counterpart receives their bitcoins.
Are you going to use clearcoin or some other escrow?

I disagree. Now, after bitcoin exchange rate has dropped it is a great time to get some bitcoins really cheap. The market confidence is at the all time low, so after mtgox opens people who lost faith in bitcoin will be dumping their bitcoins which will drive the price low.
I have got my first bitcoins for about $6 and I only regret not buying enough. So to fix that mistake, I will be buying now because as the confidence gets slowly restored the prices will get back up.

For all of you who did not notice, mtgox has now announced opening of the claim page for the account recovery.
So just go there and claim your account.

https://claim.mtgox.com/

Thank you for your contribution to community. I was looking forward for such tool.

But there is one problem.  Call me paranoid, but I have trouble trusting the  application unless I can see it's  source code. For what I know, it could leak my wallet.dat or the mtgox password. The risk is just too high.

Would you mind open sourcing your tool, so people would be able to see for themselves that there is nothing malicious going on behind the scenes and maybe contribute some improvements to the code.

Do not take my suspicions personally. I really appreciate you work!