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.
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.
chris_chi24 said:The trade-off is reversibility against privacy and there is no option that gives you both.
True, and it depends on a baseline nobody has stated. Without knowing where someone started, the same number can be an excellent result or a disappointing one.
chris_chi24 said:The trade-off is reversibility against privacy and there is no option that gives you both.
This is where I part company with the consensus forming above. 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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View ResultsShort answer first, then the reasoning. 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.AddMedPHL said:True, and it depends on a baseline nobody has stated.
This matches mine closely enough to be worth saying so out loud. I had assumed I was the exception until I read this.