Quote from: erikalui on July 26, 2015, 12:08:37 PM

Quote from: ACCTseller on July 26, 2015, 04:40:45 AM

It is true that accounts on default trust (as well as escrow accounts) are sold, however the purchaser has incentives not to scam with them because those types of accounts tend to be very expensive. The purchaser would likely be better off over the long term of acting honestly and continuing to offer their services and collecting fees for such.

With that being said, you should also not trust excessive amounts of money with any one person to avoid giving them incentives to run away (see maidak).

I feel that the sold DT accounts/escrow accounts should have a neutral trust rating atleast on them so that people just don't assume to be trading with the same person as before. There are so many escrows here whom users deal and trust for every trade they make. If the escrow does sell his account, how can that be identified except from the pwd being changed? It doesn't make anyone trustworthy here if people who recommend using escrow only sell their accounts and leave the community.

Well part of what gives an escrow account it's value is that it has positive trust and others are willing to trust their money with them. So if neutral trust was given to such accounts then the value of the accounts would decline. This would effectively ban the sale of escrow/trusted accounts as the premium associated with such accounts would be diminished. You should also consider the reasons why an escrow would consider selling their account, it is primarily going to be because they need money, and what do you think is going to happen when they have no other way to raise money? If they are desperate enough they will act dishonestly and steal from those who have entrusted their money with them.

As I mentioned previously, you should not trust anyone with excessive amounts of money, regardless of if you know they are the original owner of their account as everyone has their "breaking point" where they will act dishonestly and steal given the opportunity.

Also, if an escrow account is sold and continues to act honestly, then it will be able to continue to earn some amount of money by acting as escrow, which would give them a long term incentive to not scam.

To answer your question as to how you can determine if someone has sold their account, the best way is to get a signed message from the escrow, if you get a signed message from a bitcoin address that is very old, and still has a good amount of bitcoin "in" it, then there is a good chance the account is not sold (private keys can easily be sold/transferred, however it would be a very bad idea to allow funds to remain in an address whose private key is known to more then one person because of the risk that the other person will spend such funds.

With all that being said, a greater concern that you should probably have when choosing an escrow is if the escrow has the ability to analyze the facts and evidence when trying to mediate a dispute between two parties in order to determine who the bitcoin being held in escrow should be released to. If there is a dispute and the escrow is unable to evaluate the evidence provided, then you could end up getting scammed even though the escrow has good intentions.

Quote from: ndnhc on July 26, 2015, 08:18:55 AM

I don't personally appreciate buying accounts for participating in campaigns and making lot of posts though not actually interested in discussion.

Don't you think it is kind of hypocritical to say this (and other statements critical about the sale of accounts), when you yourself have sold accounts (or at the very least have tried to sell accounts) in the past?