Steve Furlong wrote...
I see that an irrevocable payment system, used by itself, is ripe for fraud, more so if it's anonymous. But why wouldn't a mature system make use of trusted intermediaries? The vendors register with the intermedi- ary *, who takes some pains to verify their identity, trustworthiness, and so on, and to keep the vendors' identities a secret, if appropriate. The sellers pay the intermediary, who takes a piece of the action to act basically as an insurer of the vendor's good faith. If there's a problem with the service or merchandise and the vendor won't make good, the intermediary is responsible for making the buyer whole.
There's nothing particularly unreasonable about this, from a risk persepctive. In fact, credit card companies already work like this more or less...they can afford to protect cardmembers from Fraud precisely because of the economies of scale. As for the card industry itself, it is already reputation based. People pay up not because they're afraid to get arrested or litigated against, but because they want to preserve their Reputation with the Rating agencies (real deadbeats don't care about their reputation, and most of the money they spend is never recovered.)
-TD
