The two most basic ways would be simply:

(1) You create your transactions having a locktime of X days and has sequence numbers such that it can be replaced exactly once.  The replacement, can be executed within 30 days.

(2) You simply send money to 1-of-2 transactions:  me-or-you.  If the person who is receiving it wants it, they have to sign for it by sending it to one of their own single-sig addresses.  Otherwise, you can return it to yourself at some point in the future.

I don't totally understand the goal, and how/if these solutions actually achieve such goal.  But it does add a way for transactions to exist a non-final state for some amount of time.  But in both cases, accessibility is still binary:  you have complete access to it, until you don't.   Which might be seen as the point of irrevocable transfer.

-Alan



On 06/05/2013 08:19 PM, Peter Vessenes wrote:
So, this http://www.americanbanker.com/bankthink/the-last-straw-for-bitcoin-1059608-1.html?pg=1  article got posted today, noting that FinCEN thinks irrevocable payments are money laundering tools. 

I will hold my thoughts about the net social good of rent-seeking large corporations taking money from consumers over fraudulent reversals. Actually, I won't, I just said it.

At any rate, it got me thinking, can we layer on revocability somehow without any protocol change, as an opt-in?

My initial scheme is a trusted (hah) escrow service that issues time promises for signing. If it doesn't receive a cancel message, it will sign at the end of the time. 

The addresses would be listed by the escrow service, or in an open registry, so you could see if you were going to have a delay period when you saw a transaction go out.

This seems sort of poor to me, it imagines that mythical thing, a trusted escrow service, and is vulnerable to griefing, but I thought I'd see if some of the brighter minds than me can come up with a layer-on approach here.

When I think about it, I can imagine that I would put a good number of my coins in a one day reversible system, because I would have warning if someone wanted to try and spend them, and could do something about it. I'm not sure if it gets me anything over a standard escrow arrangement, though.

Peter

--

CoinLab LogoPETER VESSENES 
CEO

peter@coinlab.com  /  206.486.6856  / SKYPE: vessenes 
71 COLUMBIA ST / SUITE 300  /  SEATTLE, WA 98104



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