Been doing more thinking about escrow:

Running a localbitusd.com type website would be a central point of failure and a target for regulators. We would be better served by multiple trusted users who can facilitate escrow as opposed to a single centralized website.

Fortunately all the components needed to do this properly will soon (I think) be in the toolkit.

Bytemaster has confirmed that there will be an escrow transaction type requiring 2 of 3 keys to send funds. Stan has also mentioned that there will be secure messaging builtin as well.

So I think we should leverage these two components to allow users to list BitUSD buy/sell adverts directly inside the client. These adverts could be created by Bitmessage-style broadcast messages, as they dont need to be stored forever on the blockchain, and because a new user does not yet have any funds.

Trusted members of the community can broadcast that they are willing to facilitate escrow, and BitUSD sellers can include their preferred escrow party in their sell advert. A new BitShares user then loads up the client for the first time and sees a safe and easy way to get his first BitUSD quickly.

This ties in nicely with the builtin reputation system that was talked about a while back.

What do you think? Is this the best way to do it?

Im of the opinion that a deep depression in Bitcoin is necessary to force people to think about the deep flaws that Bitcoin has. If Bitcoin does bubble again, people will continue to delude themselves that mining is not destroying value.

Pretty good video on the subject:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks

US cops are psychos. I was stopped for speeding here in the UK a few months ago and they certainly didnt ask me how much money I was carrying. They were very polite and made me feel like they were doing me a favour - I probably was putting myself at risk.

Quote from: trader on October 26, 2014, 04:42:16 pm

I keep thinking to myself that I should just code up a localbitcoins site that acts as the escrow 3rd party. I could do it in about a month in my spare time. But then I question whether this is needed given that i3 has secret plans for a fiat on-ramp anyway.

That sounds very useful!

Yeah having to go via BTC to get BTS sucks.

further supportive indications: BTS will be just a software update to BTSX .. nothing more!
all bitAsset balances will be preseverd .. all open orders will be preserved .. no changes will be made to the market engine (unless bugfixes)

Bytemaster has confirmed that already.

Never sell BTS, just trade on the internal exchange.

We have had hints about on-ramps from fiat to BitUSD for a while, is there actually a service actively in development? We are pretty much in the dark on this.

Or are we waiting to see what the escrow transaction type is going to look like first?

Did anyone really think they would try to regulate software development? They tried to do that in the 90s against the author of PGP, and the case went nowhere. Software source code is free speech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States