Hello,
On e-gold-chat, Paul Vahur worried about the lack of a reputable gold escrow.
> Yeah, but to pick that pile up, a person will need the reputation-
> capital of...um...a Paul Vahur! Not a very common trait!
I agree. I would trust Paul, and perhaps a _very_ limited set of others.
I also receive remarks that people consider me as very reliable, but I
don't usually handle the large sums that Paul is known to handle with
grace.
There is one major problem with escrows as far as I can tell. When it
comes to physical delivery, there must be some form of notice that the
parcel was delivered. I am not sure if
* this works reliably [without need for the receiver's consent] everywhere
* the notices of delivery are reliably returned to remote country
Then, of course there still is the option to scam with the goods delivered.
* is there _anything_ included in the parcel?
* is the proper thing included in the parcel?
(testing this would involve customer consent, which makes it possible
to trick a customer)
* is the parcel of the proper quality / in working order?
I would say there are good reasons why there are no reputable escrow
services in the gold community -- they do not seem to be practical to
setup, unless of course you would want to work with an insurance scheme,
but then things start getting the bad smell of credit cards which is
somewhat counter-intuitive for the gold community... Moreover, such an
insurance would require the same (leaking) proofs of delivery or lack
thereof that an escrow service also needs.
And, as JMR suggested, only for a rather large sum would there be a chance
of making this profitable. Too bad.
It might be more along our streak of thinking to conduct some form of peer
review, by explicitly sharing votes of confidence. I have some wild plans
in that direction, and will set these up over the months that come, as part
of my initiation work for OpenFortress.
Just my tuppence,
Rick van Rein,
OpenFortress.nl / DNS.vanrein.org
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