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.
So the question, as narrowly as I can put it: how people are thinking about the trade-off between reversibility and privacy, because you cannot have both. Not looking for reassurance. Looking for the part I have got wrong.
CanadaChris said:The trade-off is reversibility against privacy and there is no option that gives you both.
That holds where the measurement is reliable. Where it is noisy — and a lot of what gets tracked here is noisy — the same reasoning produces confident nonsense.
CanadaChris said:The trade-off is reversibility against privacy and there is no option that gives you both.
I read this differently. The confidence in this thread is running ahead of the evidence, and I would rather the uncertainty were stated than smoothed over because it is unsatisfying.
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View ResultsAnswering the narrow version, because the broad one does not have a single answer. The version of this that has an answer is narrower than the version being asked. Narrow it and it becomes tractable; leave it broad and the thread will produce nine confident and incompatible replies.