Quote from: awakened350 on September 07, 2012, 05:23 pmThey were 50btc slot listings so I believe he bought 1 listing and I bought the other 6. So again, they are making a pretty nice commission. As for the person that said twak could repay the loan to another btc address and claim it was ours? It was in the agreement that he would send the fund to the alternate account I made "twakloan" so he would be failing to satisfy the terms of the contract if he did so. As far as I can tell what it comes down to is if you give a loan on SR there is nothing they can do to help you if it goes bad.This being the case I don't think the loan section should exist, since SR gets a cut without being responsible for anything since we must finalize early on a loan. There is then no reason not to to send money direct outside of escrow.That was me that said ProfessorTwak could repay the loan to another Bitcoin address; I know that the agreement stated he would send the fund to "twakloan", but you stated in a recent post that he remitted a certain amount of Bitcoin to your awakened350 account (or similar.) Having done that, he already failed to satisfy the terms of the contract, and even if he'd paid you back in full you could still demand garnishment of his account for breach of contract. I'm not saying that you would do that, of course, just that you could have done so.However, the problem lies with the actual contract that was laid out on the forums; I recommended that SR Administrative staff be contacted and asked to act as the executor of the contract should the terms fail to be met by either party. Upon their agreement to do so, the contract would have become binding as it would have had an executor with the power to enforce the terms. This didn't happen, so in the eyes of Silk Road and indeed in any technical sense, the contract has no enforceable properties and is essentially a gentleman's agreement relying upon the honor of the parties for its fulfillment.I agree with your argument regarding the loan section, it does seem unfair that SR gets a cut without having responsibility for the loan, but the same is the case for every item on the site for which buyers choose to FE. They get their commission, and if the buyer finalises early, they are absolved of all responsibility. If the buyer stays within escrow, their responsibility remains.As a result I do not agree that the category should not exist. People tend to forget that this is an agorist marketplace; as such, and by it's very definition, it is free from regulation and restriction (apart from the obvious restrictions on CP, weaponry, and items whose purpose is to harm others.) It can be argued that such restrictions fly in the face of an agorist marketplace, but that's a different discussion for a different day.Loan schemes (I prefer to refer to them as investments, because they seem to share a similar level of risk) are there for those who wish to avail of them. SR (and indeed you, yourself) warn people not to FE; the reason being that when they do there is very little chance of recompense.I wish it weren't the case, but this is simply another case of FE going wrong - nothing more, nothing less.There is reason not to send money OOE, even for loan purposes; Silk Road deserves it's cut of all transactions, be they for digital goods, physical products or indeed loan agreements.There is nothing stopping both users seeing each other's email addresses and arranging a loan off-site wallet to wallet; however, they won't be able to come to the forum to complain if they get scammed, or advise others to stay away from Person X.Finalising early is essentially the same as doing the above; it is performing an out of escrow transaction as you are not protected by the escrow system.Perhaps there's a way that loans could be made using the SR cash advance system, with a large loan staying in escrow and the vendor using the cash advance feature to obtain a percentage of it? The entire loan amount would not be released from escrow until a transaction record shows that X amount of Bitcoin (the entire loan + interest) is remitted to the buyer's account. The buyer could then release the amount in escrow and the vendor would receive the full amount, less the cash advance fee. It would also be impossible to scam the vendor as there would be a transaction record in SR's system of the amount being repaid. Granted the initial loan amount would have to be quite large to enable the vendor to take enough from the cash advance feature but all of the buyer's Bitcoin would be protected in escrow should the vendor decide to run off with his cash advance money. Maybe a finely tuned version of this is something that vendors could bring up with DPR?Quote from: awakened350 on September 07, 2012, 05:29 pmI would argue that failure to repay a loan that was made out in the open with clear proof of what the terms were, when it was due, and failure to repay the loan is as clear cut as scamming gets. Customers can lie and say they never received a package but in this case SR can simply check our account records to see that he did not repay the loan and is now a week overdue which puts him in default.As I said in my last post, if SR doesn't want to get involved in any such loan cases there should not be a loan category that they get commission from.I do completely agree with you on the above but Silk Road's responsibility for transactions rests entirely within the confines of the main Silk Road site itself. It does look like a clear case of scamming to me, but as you said, customers can lie - which is why scammers aren't banned after the first few scam reports. As I stated earlier in the post, it would be possible for there to be no transaction records of repayments as ProfessorTwak could have sent the Bitcoin to your Bitcoin client itself, or indeed to his own in order to create a record in the Blockchain of X amount of Bitcoin being sent and received. It would then essentially be one person's word against the others.Again, the terms of the contract here on the forum stating that remittance would be to the 'twakloan' account were not binding as SR Admins weren't contacted to act as executors. If his terms of sale on the actual listing stated that remittance would be to your SR account then you would be able to prove via a lack of an SR record that the money wasn't paid back, but if the terms didn't state that then there is no actual proof that you weren't paid back. (For the record I believe that you haven't been paid back, and have indeed been scammed by ProfessorTwak.)It is unfortunately a case where Silk Road can say "We advise everybody to stay within the escrow system; there's nothing we can do unless we get more reports of scamming."I do hope that there is some other reason why ProfessorTwak hasn't paid you back yet, but the chances of that are looking more and more slim every day. :(- grahamgreene