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Thread: Is a trustless crypto payment/invoicing system possible?

  1. #1

    Default Is a trustless crypto payment/invoicing system possible?

    Saw someone trying to work out an interesting problem on Twitter today.

    Let's say you're a business looking to set up in the rapidly expanding crypto/blockchain tech sector. Your clients will be individuals as well as other businesses, and you expect upwards of 100k transactions—in cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, ether, whatever—a day. You want to be able to invoice your clients but you're concerned about bad hombres exploiting common vulnerabilities in order to target clients with eg. man-in-the-middle attacks, such as sending them a fraudulent invoice requesting payment to a wallet controlled by them rather than by you. You want to minimize the risk of this occurring, and mitigate the fallout if it does occur. You know that your clients are not as savvy and as security conscious as you are, so they need a convenient low-effort solution, because otherwise they won't pay for your services.

    Every reasonably convenient strategy I can think of that isn't blockchain-specific either requires you trust a third party (eg. one of a variety of non-custodial payment/invoicing services) or doesn't scale (eg. because you have to manually verify each transaction for each client through a "trusted" channel). One service—Kirobo—can make transaction attempts reversible, but is still vulnerable to attack (eg. the secret used to collect the transferred funds can be intercepted). I'm struggling to find a strategy—other than blockchain-specific smart contracts and invoices—that doesn't end up reinventing banks.

    How would you go about it? What compromises would you be willing to make, from the perspective of the service provider and the client, respectively?
    "One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."

  2. #2
    If I understand what you're asking for correctly, I don't think you can do it without on-chain tech. I'm not sure why you're adding the limitation against using smart contracts though - if you want to be able to accept a variety of cryptocurrencies, Ethereum is already handling all of the big ones, and OMG is specifically built to be currency agnostic.

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