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
What I am trying to establish 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.
CryptoCarl said:The trade-off is reversibility against privacy and there is no option that gives you both.
Right, and one flattering data point from a group buy is not consistency. Consistency means separate batches, separately commissioned, over months.
CryptoCarl said:The trade-off is reversibility against privacy and there is no option that gives you both.
I disagree that testing history is decisive. It tells you what a supplier did when they were being watched. Continuity of behaviour under stress — a late shipment, a failed test, a complaint — is more predictive than any run of good results.
If somebody has the primary source to hand I would rather cite it than paraphrase it.
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Shop Reference StandardsThis one has a reasonably settled answer, so here it is. Prices dramatically below market are the strongest single signal, and the reason is arithmetic rather than suspicion. Synthesis, testing, and cold-chain shipping have floors. A price well under the floor means something was skipped, and the two things that get skipped are testing and content.
MikeFit_NJ said:Right, and one flattering data point from a group buy is not consistency.
Same pattern here, and in the same order. Nothing to add that would improve it.