From a vendor's point of view, escrow is an absolutely horrible way of doing business. Not only does it breed distrust, but it has cost many vendors thousands of dollars, myself included. Honestly, the escrow is the major reason I quit vending. I understand protecting customers from scammers but there needs to be a trust system for established vendors that they can set the option to bypass escrow, and if the customer does not feel comfortable with it then they need not order from that vendor. I would not be surprised to see many vendors quit in the future due to the fact that escrow is bullshit. When this site was designed bitcoin was stable and the community was small. We did not have to deal with things such as 'buyer fraud' or bitcoins plummeting in the span of hours, or hell even minutes. Escrow was fine back then. Then there has been the couple times that SR went down unexpectedly. I had thousands tied up in escrow with no way of knowing if it was lost. I can see all your buyers point of views but everyone really needs to take a look at this from both sides and see the drawbacks. I have lost thousands on SR that I would not have lost had I been selling on the street, or on OVDB. Sorry folks the system is flawed.