I got a vendor account on TMP when they were free, so thats been a few months now i think. Multisig is killing the site, its really a great site, way ahead of anything else in features but multisig....its not going to work for dnm's, this is what ive found
Multisig cannot be made to be buyer friendly. This would involve having the site handle the buyers keys so it can be point and click for them, no electrum or whatever, but multisig has a huge design flaw, if the one party has two of three keys they can reroute the escrow into their own wallet. So when you make the escrow wallet so that its either going to the seller or back to the buyer, it will only stay that way if no one controls 2 of 3 keys. But if someone controls 2 keys then the flow of money in an escrow wallet can be rerouted to any party after the fact which would open the door for the site to steal everyones money, so much for that option.
How else can we make this easier for the buyer? Not require electrum, technically you can by generating the keypair through brainwallets site (TMp has an offline version of this) but whether you do this or run electrum with the multisig plugin you still have to store and manage those keys, which means huge room for error (malware/trojans/dataloss). And now this has created a new problem...
What happenes if the site goes down? Multisig to the rescue!! Actually no, think about it, you the buyer have a pair of public/private keys stored in your electrum (or in a txt file) and the seller has his pair, chances are you've already placed your order and are waiting on your package, or maybe you already got it and havent gotten around to releasing funds. The seller is waiting on you to come through, the 3rd party (the site) is awol, the funds are locked. Whats the incentive for the buyer to jump through the hoops to pay you when most of them dont care enough to click on a damn button to release funds normally? Which brings us to the next problem...
Have you seen the process to release funds manually without the help of the site? I had to walk through this once when TMP glitched out, holy fuck i wished i had pursued that CS major in college cause that shit is complex. Im not talking about a few lines of code im talking about blocks of code that will need to be generated manually. Sorry to say vendors, if your multisig site goes down you can sleep better knowing no one has stolen your funds but youre still not getting paid.
Also we're forgetting the big picture here, buyers have a risk window of maybe a day or so, sellers have a risk window of up to 2 weeks. Multisig isnt for buyers, its for vendors. Its also to prevent scamming markets from running with the money, but still, you're asking your buyers to jump through hoops for you and most of them are too lazy to PGP their info. It was a nice pipedream but the future of dnm's wont be multisig, it will be escrow to build rep and then fe once you have it.
Which doesn't do anything to protect buyers and only encourages more big FE scams. The solution is simplifying multisig to make it more user friendly. Centralized marketplaces are too tempting to anonymous attackers and admins and governments. Multisig effectively stops all of those entities from being able to run off with your money. That alone will make multisig > all.