Writing this once so I can stop repeating it across threads. 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. If the honest answer is that nobody knows, that is a useful answer and I would rather have it.
— CryptoCarl · corrections welcome and will be edited into this post with credit