After thinking some more, I think it would be a mistake for the parties to such contracts to register an identity. There's no reason for the party/seller/Alice or the counterparty/buyer/Bob to reuse addresses since they don't need to have a persistent identity across trades. For privacy reasons, it's probably best to discourage address reuse for the party and counterparty. The escrow, on the other hand, will have policies across many contracts and future parties will want to audit and make sure the escrow agent has never misbehaved.

It probably makes sense for escrow agents to register an identity along with information about the terms under which they provide escrow. This will correspond to a fixed pubkey.

The "contract tx" would store the contract information and the chosen escrow agent (identified by the registered id) in the clamSpeech slot. The party and counterparty could be derived from the first and second inputs of the tx.

But obviously I'm still thinking this through, so I'm open to suggestion.


Thanks for the positive feedback!