Saturday, January 30, 2021

Using LN to mitigate risk of selling products in person?

Someone asked about how to sell a moderately expensive item through Craigslist for BTC. I'm wondering if it makes sense to use LN to mitigate the usual annoyances and risks from such transactions, such as but not limited to:

  1. Having to wait typically half an hour minimum for multiple confirmations after handing over the goods and the buyer sending a genuine BTC transaction to you that the buyer doesn't try to screw you on with a second higher-fee transaction or other games.

  2. Buyer showing up and trying to demand that you sell the item for $1 because he doesn't actually have that much BTC and otherwise you've wasted your whole day going out to meet him.

  3. Buyer insisting that BCH or BSV is "the real Bitcoin" or "Satoshi's true vision" and trying to force you to take shitcoins instead.

  4. Buyer bashing your head in with a baseball bat and stealing everything when you show up.

With LN, I'm thinking that you can tell the buyer to open and fund a channel with you ahead of time for the full amount agreed upon, then you show up, exchange goods and send the transaction, and close the channel. This means that at least you know the buyer has the funds and isn't just wasting your time trying to pressure you to agree to a lower price, and further that there are no confirmation-wait delays or double-spend attacks or bait-and-switch shitcoin games. There may also be some metadata available to help track down the buyer in the event of a robbery if you wind up dead in a cornfield. Non-serious buyers won't bother going through with all of that, and will have their own transaction fees to deal with if they try walk-away tactics to drive your price down.

Any steps I'm missing? Additional risks? Seems like as long as you don't screw up the channel close with something like an old state, both sides should be good with it.


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