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.
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
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. I would rather have one careful answer than five confident ones.
KetoKyle said:The trade-off is reversibility against privacy and there is no option that gives you both.
Agreeing with KetoKyle, and the qualification matters more than the agreement. Yes, and the corollary is less popular: if the reasoning holds, it also holds where it produces an answer we do not like.
KetoKyle 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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Browse GL BiochemAnswering the narrow version, because the broad one does not have a single answer. 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.
If somebody has the primary source to hand I would rather cite it than paraphrase it.
InsuranceTom said:Yes, and the corollary is less popular: if the reasoning holds, it also holds where it produces an answer we do not like.
Can confirm. Same sequence, different timescale. I had assumed I was the exception until I read this.