The Ars Technica article on their lawsuit against Apple [1] said they advertised a product on their website but received zero revenue from that product and seemingly didn't have any engineers working on it.
Their scheme protects the identity of the real domain owner, not necessarily the domain itself. They imply that the law enforcement wouldn’t be able to find the real owner and bring them to court.
What if instead of a blind auction, a company conducts an open Dutch auction? That is, everyone can see the amount of stock sold so far and the price of each transaction (the buyers may remain anonymous). The prices different buyers pay are not necessarily the same: the first buyer pays the highest price, the late buyers pay less but risk having nothing at all if they wait too long. In an open auction, bidding too high just causes the buyer to lose some money.
A noob question: Why don’t companies just bypass the underwriters and offer their stock for sale using a Dutch auction, where the price starts very high and gradually decreases until the most optimistic investors decide to buy? That way, the company always sells at the highest price the market is ready to offer.
Does escrow really work with secrets like this? The buyer receives the exploit and claims it doesn’t work. The seller claims it does. The money is still in escrow. How do you proceed? The escrow agent is getting a commission, they should not have access to the full secret. It’s really hard to find an escrow agent who has the skills to assess an exploit and whom both the buyer and the seller would trust not to leak it or use it for their own benefit.
This is the fourth part of a comprehensive work by Agner Fog, which contains tons of materials on optimizing C++ and assembly code on the x86 architecture and on the inner workings of processors from Pentium to Skylake.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/10/full-scale-of-ap...
Edit: Added the link.