I am reminded of the following SN quote:

“The design supports a tremendous variety of possible transaction types that I designed years ago. Escrow transactions, bonded contracts, third party arbitration, multi-party signature, etc. If Bitcoin catches on in a big way, these are things we’ll want to explore in the future, but they all had to be designed at the beginning to make sure they would be possible later.”

I just wonder how escrow could be done in a trustless way for the online sales of physical goods. All escrow services are trusted, and have a customer service based system to go file your complaints to, but SN speaks of escrow transactions designed from the beginning to be possible later.

I remember seeing on twitter, some guys made a door lock integrated with a lightning wallet address using NFC to pay cover to unlock the door. I wonder if there could be some system where a package making it to that door and being scanned in to that NFC lightning wallet and partially signs a multi-sig escrow payment to confirm package was delivered.

I don't know, it's hard for me to wrap my head around how this could be done without a custodian, where the buyer and the seller have equal protections. I personally foresee reputation based systems playing a significant role here. Maybe new legit merchants will have to take a discount to gain rep... but then we perceive low price and no reputation to be a red flag too, so, I'm not sure how we win this one. Hopefully people much smarter than me are working on it.