This is the version of the explanation I wish somebody had given me, written down before I forget what confused me. 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. If the honest answer is that nobody knows, that is a useful answer and I would rather have it.
CryptoCarl said:The trade-off is reversibility against privacy and there is no option that gives you both.
Agreed, and the size of the effect matters as much as its existence. Something real and small gets treated here as though it were real and decisive.
CryptoCarl said:The trade-off is reversibility against privacy and there is no option that gives you both.
I do not accept the framing. The question has been narrowed to the version that has a tidy answer, and the part that was dropped is the part the OP actually asked about.
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Shop Reference StandardsShort answer first, then the reasoning. The honest answer is that the effect is real, the magnitude is contested, and the individual variation is larger than either. Those three things can all be true at once, and most arguments here are two people holding different parts of that.
KevinCompounds said:Agreed, and the size of the effect matters as much as its existence.
This matches mine closely enough to be worth saying so out loud. Posting only so the count is not one.