Are you sure you're familiar to what you're talking about? E.g., VISA and MasterCard doesn't have any immediate transactions
Erm... they do, certainly. But Visa is a company with 60 years of experience in credit card payments (long before most relevant laws came into being, they adapted gradually to laws as they were ratified). They have an enormeous automated processing machine designed and refined over decades by a team of people who do nothing else for their living, and they close to 8,000 permanent employees (of almost 12,000 total) doing nothing but making sure processing follows the law to the letter. And, most importantly, they can afford to give a 100% guarantee to the merchant of receiving money (assuming the merchant followed the verification process to the letter), which they have never in history violated. This is most important pillar of their business model.
They perform an immediate transaction simply by deducting the amount of money that the customer has to pay from their customer's file in their database, and simultaneously give the guarantee to the merchant that he will see his money (minus a small fee). The merchant relies on this guarantee and immediately gives out the goods. End of immediate transaction.
Later, they pay the merchant from their own assets (well, not really their own... but the point is, they're not paying the merchant with your money). Which is easy to do if you have a two-digit billion amount of revenue per year and a three-digit billion amount of reserves.
Even much later, they will charge you, the customer (or sell the debts as bonds, or something different).
I will be bold and assume that you don't have a couple of millions (or even billions) which you can happily advance, and you cannot afford to lose a couple of hundred thousands because some transactions turned out being foul -- so this strategy does not work for you.
In order to pay the receiving client, you must first get paid by the other party. Which makes "instantaneous" a lot harder, and more risky.
How does eBay work? How does they allow people to sell items to each other? How they are receiving their fees?
Same reply as for Visa, basically. The system is a little different (and the guarantee is the other way around), but the general idea is the same. I wouldn't happen to know their legal department size, but my estimate is that has 4-5 digits, too.
Something you might want to read as an example of how non-obvious the legal implications can be: link
The interesting thing is not that "the idiots at eBay" made the customer destroy the violin and didn't pay the merchant, which is sooooo unfair. The interesting detail is why they did that. The article is not 100% fair and truthful insofar as it leaves out the most important detail of the story. Sending back the item would actually have been illegal for the customer (and asking the customer to do that would thus have been incitement to break the law!), thus eBay demanded the item's destruction.
Woe if you don't know that and are foolish enough to "do what's right". Because what you think is "right" doesn't matter.
That's the whole main point of my idea – you can't "win" anything!
The other alternative is that player 1 gives money to you, and then you give that money to player 2 (and perhaps keep a small % as a processing fee). This makes the technology side easier, as you're fully in control of the transaction, but it also is a much more dangerous legal situation, as you're now directly paying money to players. If you're paying money to a player, that could be considered paying them for services (in which case income tax becomes an issue), or you could be delivering a prize (in which case gambling becomes an issue), etc, etc...
This.
It doesn't really matter what you think. It matters what the IRS thinks (or a similar institution). When they see you handing money to people, they will instantly wake up. They will want some of your money (one way or the other), and they will want you to comply with some laws. Not knowing about the laws is no valid excuse to them.
And that assumes nothing hardcore illegal (money laundering, etc.) is going on...
