A good example how an escrow fund can be managed professionally in a messy situation is whirlwind's Escrow fund managed by minerjones
I'm not convinced that's skill, more a coincidence. I've also seen
a bad example of how escrow funds can be managed.
I'm a sucker for strict rules, but it's difficult to take all possible scenarios into account before they happen. This is one of the reasons I don't actively offer escrow services (although I've done it a few times when asked). Yahoo62278's suggestion is a good disclaimer to add if it happens again.
Maybe every project doing a Signature campaign can provide an escrow fund and in case of an exit scam, losses could be covered.
Eddie's post comes to mind again:
Should never have put the temporary illusion of safety above personal liberty..
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This forum started acting like protecting idiots is more important than letting users express their free wills..
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A new startup can’t come here and start a signature campaign for example without completely being bullied into “trusting” some escrow they have probably never heard of, so heaven forbid they couldn’t possibly scam some users willing to take the risk..
Remember the forum's mission:
the forum's mission to be as free as possible.
If someone wants to risk having a certain signature for a week, who are we to stop them?
As long as Service provider and escrow provider is okay with agreeing mutually in private or in any form - I think it's just fine. It does not need to be public at all.
Agreed. But it will lead to topics like this one, where people question things they're not a part of. The next step would be handing out negative feedback demanding answers, and I'm pretty sure that would have happened already if the 2 accounts involved would have had a lesser reputation.
Difference was the manager Hhampuz was not trusted by $40k DAI so they went with an independent third party escrow which was minerjones in this case.
I'm pretty sure it was Hhampuz' own call to ask another escrow. He ran the campaign and avoided a conflict of interest this way.