A reference post rather than a discussion. Corrections are the point; I would rather this be right than mine. It is about paying for it, and it is deliberately narrow — everything I am not confident about is marked as such.
What is actually established
The trade-off is reversibility against privacy and there is no option that gives you both. Card payments are reversible and disclose the most; crypto discloses least and is irreversible, which is precisely why pressure toward it is a warning sign when it comes from a seller rather than a buyer. Escrow only means anything where the escrow agent is independent of both parties, which is rarely the case in practice.
The condition it depends on
One detail people underrate: an irreversible payment removes your only leverage in a dispute, so it should be the last step rather than the first.
What I am not sure about
What would genuinely help is knowing how people are thinking about the trade-off between reversibility and privacy, because you cannot have both. I would rather have one careful answer than five confident ones.
CryptoCarl said:The trade-off is reversibility against privacy and there is no option that gives you both.
True, with the qualification that this is a self-selected group. The people for whom it did not work post less, and that shapes everything we think we know.
CryptoCarl said:The trade-off is reversibility against privacy and there is no option that gives you both.
This is where I part company with the consensus forming above. This treats a plausible mechanism as a demonstrated one. Plausible is where you start looking, not where you stop.
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Shop Reference StandardsShort answer first, then the reasoning. Order of operations matters more than any single choice here: establish a baseline, change one thing, wait long enough for it to express itself, then measure again under the same conditions.
TrialNerd_Beth said:True, with the qualification that this is a self-selected group.
Second this.