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
The bit I cannot resolve on my own is 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.
That is right, and it stops being right at the edges. The general case is well behaved; the interesting cases in this thread are all at the boundary where the general case breaks.
KetoKyle 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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View ResultsTaking the question as asked, rather than the general version of it. Take it one variable at a time. Almost every unanswerable question in these threads is unanswerable because three things changed in the same fortnight, and no amount of subsequent argument can untangle them after the fact.
Dr.SurgeonPGH said:That is right, and it stops being right at the edges.
Adding a me-too, because a thread of one person's experience is not much use. Posting only so the count is not one.