THE NEXT IMPLEMENTATION
Same settlement guarantee. Nobody else in the room.
The logic barely changes. A consuming choice on a contract with two signatories already gives us atomicity, which is what the escrow pattern in Solidity is approximating. What changes is who can see it.
Ethereum todayWhere it goes
Escrow contract holds both deposits
Both parties are signatories. No escrow is needed because neither side can move alone.
Atomicity from a single transaction
Atomicity from the ledger model. Partial settlement is unrepresentable, not merely reverted.
Terms broadcast to every node
The contract reaches the two parties named on it. No other participant learns it exists.
Front-running is a design constraint
There is no mempool to watch, because there is no shared view to broadcast into.
Gas as a public bid for ordering
Traffic purchased ahead of time. Ordering is not an auction.
We want to run the node ourselves because the property we are buying is that contracts reach only their parties. Routing them through an operator we do not control puts every trade on a machine that is not a party to it, which defeats the reason for moving in the first place. We also expect to rewrite the templates repeatedly as we learn what settlement actually needs, and that loop has to be minutes rather than support tickets.