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 I am after is how people are thinking about the trade-off between reversibility and privacy, because you cannot have both. I have searched first, so if this is covered somewhere point me at it and I will read it.
chris_chi24 said:The trade-off is reversibility against privacy and there is no option that gives you both.
Agreed, with the usual condition: that holds for the average and this board is a collection of individuals. A population claim and a personal prediction are different things and get quoted interchangeably.
chris_chi24 said:The trade-off is reversibility against privacy and there is no option that gives you both.
Pushing back on chris_chi24 here. Pushing back on the anecdote-stacking. Twenty people reporting the same thing is twenty samples from the same self-selected pool, not twenty independent confirmations.
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Shop Reference StandardsThis one has a reasonably settled answer, so here it is. 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.
Dr.BariatricHTX said:Agreed, with the usual condition: that holds for the average and this board is a collection of individuals.
This matches mine closely enough to be worth saying so out loud. Posting only so the count is not one.