Collecting this in one place because it comes up every few weeks and the answer is always assembled from scratch. It is about paying for it, and it is deliberately narrow — everything I am not confident about is marked as such.
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.
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.
The question I want answered is how people are thinking about the trade-off between reversibility and privacy, because you cannot have both. Happy to be told the question itself is wrong.
hank_denver 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.
hank_denver said:The trade-off is reversibility against privacy and there is no option that gives you both.
Pushing back on hank_denver here. I think the framing smuggles in the conclusion. Ask it the other way round and the obvious answer reverses, which usually means the question is doing the work.
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Browse GL BiochemShort answer first, then the reasoning. If two explanations both fit, the useful question is which one predicts something the other does not. That is answerable; arguing about which sounds more plausible is not.