Unfortunately there are many sellers and buyers that lost money because of markets being hacked or turned out to be scam.
MultiSig Escrow will protect you against this.
Normally the escrow is deposited on the escrow account of the market, with MultiSig Escrow the escrow is deposited on the generated MultiSig Address.
The bitcoin network enforces that the money on this address can only be redeemed with 2 signatures. The buyer, the seller and the market can sign.
So the market, the buyer nor the seller can redeem the money without any other signature. So no party including the market can steal the funds.
You can read more about the theory of multisig on the article 'MultiSig: The future of Bitcoin'.
This is how it is done on TOM.
First, like normal the buyer selects an item. Then the buyer selects 'Multisig' as escrow type.
The buyer also needs to provide the quantity, shipment instructions(preferable encrypted!), shipment method and a public key.
There are many ways to generate a public and private key combination. For instance www.brainwallet.org. Use uncompressed keys.
Warning Do save your private key, you need it later.
When the form is filled in, the buyer clicks Purchase, the system indicates that it was successful.
Now the seller has to accept or reject the order within 72 hours.
The order to accept/reject is highlighted on the orders page, it has status 'Order waiting for acceptance by seller'.
By clicking on the order # the seller can view the details of the order. On this screen the 'Order actions' panel is visible.
If the seller decides to reject the order then the seller can just click reject and it all ends here :-(.
If the seller decides to accepts the order then the following information needs to be provided:
If the order is accepted the buyer has now 48 hours to send funds to the multisig-escrow address. The address and amount are mentioned in the message that the system sends.
The seller just deposits the funds to the multisig-escrow-address.
When the system detects that the funds are on the multisig-escrow-address it will change the status of the order to 'Waiting to be sent'.
Warning Not all bitcoin-wallets are capable of sending to a multisig-address.From now on there are 2 possibilities:
When everything goes according plan then the buyer receives the item and marks the purchase as 'Received' using the purchase-actions panel.
To mark the purchase as received the buyer needs to provide his private key (WIF format). We will make a transaction that pays 97 % of the funds on the multisig-escrow-address to the seller, and 3%(-network-fee) to the market (fee) and sign it with the buyers private key and the market private key.
A few things can go wrong, for instance when:
If this happens, the system will ask the buyer and the seller for their private key and support will offer a solution.
In case there is any problem with the market, you can redeem the money from the MultiSig address without the market. You can redeem the escrow using the below steps.