Experiment: A signed offer to buy BTC that one may accept by sending the BTC

[casascius]

Courts? It's an escrow service...you are the judge

If it's for a serious amount - like $50k or $500k for example - it most definitely doesn't work that way.  If I ran an escrow service and sent a large amount of funds the wrong way for the unlawful reason of my choice, I would expect to be sued and my actions scrutinized by a court.  Breach of the written contract would be the grounds for bringing it to court.

That's not a bad thing: having a backstop to ensure there's recourse when bad things happen adds confidence that people desire in order to participate in the market.  There are MANY people who would buy lots of BTC today if it weren't for having to wire money to Japan and worry that one of many things could happen with nothing they could do about it.

For a $20 buy-in, or someone trading some xbox games, then yeah sure, I'm the judge.  But this escrow solution is meant to evolve into something viable for the high rollers as well.

[1714053971]

1714053971

[1714053971]

1714053971

[casascius]

I have updated GitHub and my alpha version with my initial draft of a real 3-party escrow generator that actually works.

It is NOT COMPLETE... but from the looks of it, it DOES WORK.

NOT COMPLETE refers to me not having added functionality to save or print the escrow codes, but you can still copy them off the clipboard and experiment with them.  There are save and print buttons that do nothing.  It's good enough to play with for 0.01 BTC, but do not use this for any real amounts of money!

https://casascius.com/btcaddress-alpha.zip

Simply run, and click: Tools -> Escrow Tools

The instructions are in there, plus three screens to let you play any of three escrow roles: Payer, Payee, and Escrow Agent, and then finally a redemption screen that lets you cash out (get the private key) when an escrow is released in your favor.

As an Escrow Agent, you can generate an Escrow Invitation to give to two others.  (You get two codes, and give only one to each)  They can do a transaction and you'll be the agent.

As a Payee, you generate a Payment Invitation and a bitcoin address after having been given an Escrow Invitation by somebody else.  You give the Payment Invitation and the bitcoin address to the person that should be paying you bitcoins.

As a Payer, you can confirm that a Bitcoin address is really under control of an escrow arrangement, by pasting the Escrow Invitation and Payment Invitation and verifying you get the same address.

In order to release the escrow, you simply give all the invitations you've got to the person you're releasing to.  The person with all 3 pieces of the invitation gets the private key and the bitcoins!