Author: Melvin Carvalho 2013-06-06 22:22:40
Published on: 2013-06-06T22:22:40+00:00
On June 6, 2013, Peter Vessenes shared an article that discussed FinCEN's belief that irrevocable payments are money laundering tools. He proposed a scheme to add revocability without any protocol change by creating a trusted escrow service that issues time promises for signing. This approach would list addresses by the escrow service or in an open registry so that users could know if there would be a delay period when seeing a transaction go out. However, he acknowledged that this approach is vulnerable to griefing and requires trust in the escrow service. He requested input from other minds for a layer-on approach. Satoshi Nakamoto had previously outlined an escrow transaction similar to what Vessenes proposed. In this scenario, the buyer commits payment to escrow, and the seller receives a transaction with the money in escrow but can only spend it until the buyer unlocks it. The buyer can release payment at any point after that, with the seller having the option to release the money back to the buyer. While this system doesn't guarantee parties against loss, it removes the profit from cheating. Vessenes noted that he could see himself putting a good number of his coins into a one-day reversible system as it would give him warning if someone tried to spend them and allow him to do something about it. However, he was unsure if it offered anything over a standard escrow arrangement.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T18:35:10.782435+00:00