I'm making three points (for those who see a tl;dr coming with the size of this post):
1: Escrow tends to add cost without really adding value.
2: Escrow is only useful when you really, really distrust the other side of the sale (or just mistrust in general).
3: Escrow requires a centralized trust for cash flow.
And now for the justifications of these two points:
The cost of maintaining an escrow account is pretty straightforward: at a bank, you pay a fee plus a percentage of the transaction amounts on a regular basis (which can vary depending on the amounts). In the BTC world, there isn't necessarily a built-in or "standard" cost.
We can't verify how much is attached to any particular BTC address.
If you scam someone here, you pretty much can't do business again--it's just not wise to piss off the community.
And for the final point: you are asking for centralized trust in a decentralized system. Once you pay, the money goes out. If it goes to the wrong address, you have no means of verifying or validating. But the real power here is the social one: you might make a BTC with a sale, but if it's less than about £1000 in value (7-8 BTC as I write this), it is really worth risking ever being able to do business again?
Lots of people hide behind the anonymity of the forum, but in reality a theft online is still a theft, and can be reported as such. The system breaks down when we don't invest trust, which is why the system works the way it does: it's no longer impersonal. You are dealing direct with someone, instead of using bankers as intermediaries.
Is it really worth devaluating everyone's investments into this system to make a couple hundred pounds/euros/dollars? That's why trust is important.
Escrow... it breaks some of the core ideas of decentralization. And while I can sympathize with both sides of this (buyers and sellers both, who want to ensure that things go through), someone who is new to the community (like myself) doesn't know enough about who's who in order to say that anyone is or isn't trustworthy. But what I can say is that human trust is as much of an investment as the finances involved. But unlike BTC (or any cryptocurrency, fiat currency, or commmodity), you can't escrow trust: either you invest it, or you don't.
If someone really wants to escrow something, consider the total result of doing it, not just the finances involved. It hurts the community to require it, and it hurts the community to break trust. THAT is why the 'scammer' tag is really important. It's a way of establishing that someone cannot be trusted. If someone has been around a few months or years, has a well-established account with a few dozen posts and doesn't have the scammer tag, why then can they not be trusted to sell something which isn't really going to do harm to anyone?
The ONLY rule in finance: never implicate more than you can afford to lose.
If you can't afford to lose it, don't risk it, period.EDIT: Found this in another thread (locked) and thought it was actually decent:
HOW TO TRADE:
1. You give me first the half of the money(1k$ in btc)
2. I give you account infos for BFL
3. You go in and check/change infos/pw/etc
4. You give me other half of the BTC
5. I give you all my other infos (copy from passport, ID, Driving licence, ETC)
6. We stay in contact till device will come.
