Author: Caleb James DeLisle 2013-06-07 05:46:04
Published on: 2013-06-07T05:46:04+00:00
The American Banker has posted an article discussing how FinCEN thinks irrevocable payments are money laundering tools. This led Peter Vessenes to propose a scheme that layers on revocability without any protocol change, as an opt-in, using a trusted escrow service that issues time promises for signing. However, this seems vulnerable to griefing and is not a guarantee against loss. The basic escrow system allows the buyer to commit payment to escrow, and the seller receives a transaction with the money in escrow but can't spend it until the buyer unlocks it. Although the buyer can release the payment at any time after that, it does not allow the buyer to take the money back. The seller has the option to release the money back to the buyer; however, a fraudulent seller could start negotiating, making negotiation unlikely due to lack of trust and spite. The tragedy of Bitcoin's irreversibility is that it makes kidnapping/ransom schemes profitable. The non-reversibility of Bitcoin is due to technological barriers. It seems AmericanBanker has a record of hosting articles that urge policy decisions that would obviously be of personal benefit to the author. However, it is the job of governments to resist lobbyists' efforts to line their pockets at the public expense. While there is no real caselaw in the US with regards to banning a technology, regulators are intelligent people who understand that legitimize Bitcoin rather than ban it. Caleb believes if there ever was such a ban, he would be more concerned for the future of the country imposing it than he would be for Bitcoin.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T18:35:37.408295+00:00