Who said anything about an escrow service? One of the whole reasons to use BTC i... | Hacker News

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		derefr on Sept 5, 2013 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: PayPal Freezes Mailpile Campaign Funds Who said anything about an escrow service? One of the whole reasons to use BTC is irreversibility. You can build a crowdfunding site on atomic USD->BTC->USD transfers, precisely because there's no possibility of chargebacks. Crowdfunding is fundamentally a "pay cash in advance for some probability of a return" model, and BTC is the "cash" part that would make that work. Credit cards are very bad at being cash.

michaelt on Sept 5, 2013 [–]

Before my transfer agent will send the irreversible transfer of bitcoins, they'll want to receive their USD by some irreversible means.

Why bother with the bitcoin sandwich? Why not transfer between the agents using Western Union or Hawala or whatever?

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