The invoice that is never paid
The most common property violation on earth has no name and no statistics: work delivered, payment deferred. It is not a moral failure but an ordering error.
A developer sends the last commit at two in the morning. The work is done, three weeks of it, every clause of the contract met. What she feels is not the lightness of finishing but a familiar knot: now the waiting begins. The invoice goes out, accounts will "look at it next week," a reminder is written, then a second, then a fifth. Perhaps it is paid in sixty days; perhaps it becomes "the budget is tight"; perhaps, the third time, it is never paid at all. The work took three weeks. Chasing the money will take longer.
This is the most widespread violation of property there is, and it has no name. It kills more small companies than unprofitability does: not unearned money, but earned money that cannot be collected. And in every instance the structure is identical, labour is delivered up front, its payment is deferred. The weaker party finances the stronger one.
What changes
The rule is a single line, and it is about order, not virtue:
Work does not exist until its payment is locked.
When the work order is created, the money leaves the client's account and is locked in the order's own escrow. It is no longer the client's, and it is not yet the worker's; it belongs to the work. The worker takes the job, does it, delivers it. On approval, the escrow opens in the same second. If approval does not come, the dispute goes to the arbiter named in the order before anyone started. If nothing is delivered by the deadline, the money returns to the client without anyone asking.
Nobody waits, nobody chases, nobody pleads. The client is protected too: no delivery, automatic refund. And there is a wider effect, which is the point of the whole exercise, when the guarantee moves from the parties to the mechanism, working with strangers gets cheaper. Trade that today happens only through referrals and acquaintance opens to people who have never met.