Will multisig escrowing be Bitcoin's "killer feature"?

[oakpacific]

I don't see it being advertised a lot, neither is it given a lot of love(we still can't do it in the GUI),  but I definitely see a market for such  a feature, there are a lot of transactions for which both parties involved would not want to put the escrowed funds in the hands of a third-party, in fact they may not even want any third-party to be aware of the transaction. So it seems that multisig can at least solve such a problem for a lot of these people.

What do you think?

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[Abdussamad]

Not anytime soon. Somebody has to develop a user friendly interface to it. I mean a web service with a top notch UI.

Also multi sig transaction is not an escrow as such. You still need both the buyer and seller to agree to release the coins or else they are lost forever. Even after the buyer makes payment the seller could demand extra money to release the bitcoins.

With a third party escrow the seller can't do anything like that. The escrow agent can use his own judgement and release payment if he is shown proof that the buyer made payment.

[oakpacific]

Not anytime soon. Somebody has to develop a user friendly interface to it. I mean a web service with a top notch UI.

Also multi sig transaction is not an escrow as such. You still need both the buyer and seller to agree to release the coins or else they are lost forever. Even after the buyer makes payment the seller could demand extra money to release the bitcoins.

With a third party escrow the seller can't do anything like that. The escrow agent can use his own judgement and release payment if he is shown proof that the buyer made payment.

I agree with all of it, but multisig would somehow remian useful. Consider, for example, a platform like Silk Road where credit rating is quite important and buyers have to escrow their funds with the platform, since the identity of the platform operator is not known, there is always the risk that the operator will run away with the escrowed money. Now with the multisig any malicious buyer will be punished by the rating system, and the escrowing address can be used as proof, in this case a huamn escrower would not do better at judging the proof of delivery from the buyer as there will be none.

[David Rabahy]

Use case for 3 of 4 multisig;

Today a trust company will hold gold (or other asset) on behalf of someone -- a self-directed is an example.  Nothing guarantees the trust company won't lose/steal the asset.

A self-direct IRA where the owner (2 signatures) and 2 different/independent trust companies (1 signature each) can be sure the Bitcoins remain in the designated address until the owner and at least one of the trust companies agree to release them.  The owner only needs at least one of the trust companies to be reliable.  Even if both trust companies conspire to steal the Bitcoins they cannot.

Use case for 4 of 6; owner gets 3, three different trust companies get 1 each.

Use case for 5 of 8; ...

As the number of different/independent trust companies increases the risk of one of them being unreliable increases.  An unreliable trust company could conspire with the owner to release the Bitcoins inappropriately.

[cbeast]

Craigslist type classified ad services would benefit greatly from such an app. Two-party multisig transactions add additional privacy and security.

[BitshireHashaway]

It could be, however, that would require someone to really believe in it and have lots of coding knowledge and such to go out there and make a super simple super easy to use interface for it. I definitely wouldn't like it if it had a complicated interface because I would always be worried that I could mess it up and lose some of my BTC especially as the transaction sizes became larger.