>When you add in additional steps required to unlock funds and have the recipient transmit acknowledgement, it can take weeks to set up, fund, and use an escrow

>When you add in additional steps required to unlock funds and have the recipient transmit acknowledgement, it can take weeks to set up, fund, and use an escrow agreement. It still costs a lot of money, especially for international wires. What are these extra steps you're talking about? If I wire money to you as my escrow agent it will probably get to you next business day. You then verify whatever and send the escrow to the seller that will take another business day. Where are the weeks coming from? >And fees. $40 on a $1000 wire is %4. $1000 is a small amount of money to wire. Get a different bank if you're paying $40 for domestic transfers. Hell even if you're getting charged that much for international transfers. >Here we are talking about turn around times in under an hour, and fees under %1, even for small transactions. Except we aren't talking about comparable things since the end result is generally local currency not bitcoin you have to add in the steps and fees to convert it as well.