> Anyway, it's worth a rethink along the lines of "can you redefine the problem?"
What if you built an Ebay from scratch around a secure financial escrow service?
Perhaps you could place a hold upon a credit card at the time a bid was placed, release that hold as soon as they lose the auction, and charge the credit card as soon as they win the auction. Don't charge a transaction fee (or charge as small a fee as possible) -- just hold the cash in escrow until the buyer verifies that he has received the product as agreed. If the buyer tells you he has not received the item or that it is not as agreed, you perform some kind of resolution. If no feedback at all is received from the buyer in X days, you pay the seller anyway.
I don't know whether buyers and sellers would love these terms, but they should be securable, and if Ebay is becoming inoperable, maybe they would work.
Ebay does a form of resolution, but I don't know if it's really good enough. On the extreme end you could offer formal arbitration. I'm not sure what's in between.
True. Saying as eBay owns PayPal, they could probably turn it into one though, if only for use on eBay itself. And you've probably already given PayPal your credit card number too.
But remember that in those "anonymous cash transaction" that occur in shops, the person with the goods can see the cash and the person with the cash can see the goods before the transaction takes place. Further, for most shops, at least, there's the presumption that the shop will still be there when a dissatisfied buyer returns with a problem.
Note that /cash/ is crucial when talking about a anonymous transaction. In a cash transaction, after a sale completes, the honest seller has essentially no exposure beyond, say, a warranty return. If you payment is instead made in some way (credit card, paypal, etc) where the seller is on the hook for fraud, things start to suck hard. Unfortunately, no governments/banks like totally anon ecash, for national security reasons (e.g., funding terrorism).
There are certainly ways to make credentials that are not easily recreated. One example, although perhaps not the best, is to send a text message to a cellphone number.
Maybe... but I can't help but note that anonymous cash transactions do happen all the time successfully (albeit in person, at shops).
So perhaps credentialed id is not the answer, especially since, on the web it's easy to go back and create a new account at any time.
I doubt anyone would pay even a nominal fee to make bids for buying items
Maybe listing fees (whether paid by buyer or seller) is the wrong business model.
Anyway, it's worth a rethink along the lines of "can you redefine the problem?"