This site is ran by Gavin Andresen, technical lead of the bitcoin project.<p>If you are buying something using bitcoins, ClearCoin makes your transaction much safer.<p>Create an escrow transaction, and then instead of sending bitcoins directly to the seller, send them to ClearCoin.<p>Then show the seller that the bitcoins are secure by sending them a link to the transaction's status page, and wait for them to send you the product or provide the service.<p>After you've received the product or service, one click will release the bitcoins and complete the transaction.<p>If you don't receive the product or service, or if you're unhappy with it and the seller can't fix the problem, then don't release them. When the transaction expires, the bitcoins will either be refunded to you or donated to charity (you can choose which when you create a transaction).
It's clearly a brilliant idea to set up a charity escrow service. The buyers and sellers have no incentives to cheat after all as they can't gain anything from fraudulent transactions.
As an aside, there are currently 6221100 bitcoins in circulation (not counting ones that were lost, I suppose) and they are currently trading at around $7.50, which means Bitcoin has an implied market capitalization of around $46 million.<p>Not enough to take over any banking systems anytime soon, but that is an awful lot of momentum for a weird crazy open source P2P thing.
So, under "For Buyers", it says that if you don't release the funds, it gets refunded to you.<p>Under "For Sellers", it says that you get the funds unless they specifically block it.<p>WTF?
And so the process begins to make bitcoin as user friendly as credit cards.<p>Escrow has never worked well for consumer commerce because sellers dont like it.