I don't have any trouble with fraud-proof markets, as was clear from the
remainder of my sentence from which the above fragment was extracted.
What seems strange to me is that you can get a fixed price with zero
risk for any goods you might have, but you can't get out of your boat
for the few seconds necessary to do so without someone sailing away with
it.
Did the buyers at Pennsic (I don't know what that is, but I assume some
kind of convention or market) have to make a decision whether to stay in
their cars, or get out in order to buy things only to have someone else
drive away with their cars?
Another point is that perhaps the "best" solution would be to allow
various sorts of conditionals, such as "Admit Oleg to my castle, but
with no more than 10 men." That seems like a perfectly reasonable thing
to want to do, especially if I have no other way of interacting with
him. But it seems to be impractical to add a whole raft of conditionals
for this purpose. Allowing direct GIVE/GET is a way of accomplishing
what would otherwise be accomplished by such conditionals, but without
the complications of doing so.
David desJardins