Money
Four specimens, and this is the only room where a mistake is final in every case. Nothing here has a dispute process behind it, because a payment that has moved has moved.
What is in this room
- A deposit addressOne string, three seconds, no way back if it is wrong.
- A confirmation countA number going up slowly while you refresh, and what it is counting.
- A withdrawal screenThe screen that closes rank one, if you actually use it.
- A fee lineTwo different things called fees, and only one of them is negotiable.
The rule that covers the whole room
Fund what you are about to spend, then move the remainder out when the order closes. Not a round number, not a buffer, not an amount that felt tidy at the time. A balance sitting on a market is not in escrow, because escrow works around an order, and it is not covered by the signing arrangement, because nothing has been agreed.
This is the least glamorous advice on the site and it removes more expected loss than anything else here, which is exactly why it gets skipped.
The check that applies to every screen in here
Compare the first and last several characters of any destination against the source, after you have pasted it. Not the middle, which is the opposite of the advice in the addresses room and it is not a contradiction. A forged onion address resembles the original, so you read the middle. A payment destination swapped by software on your own machine is replaced wholesale, so the ends give it away.
The rule for this whole room
Fund what you are about to spend, then move the remainder out when the order closes. It is the dullest advice on this site and it removes more expected loss than anything else here.
The four screens and what each one can cost you
| Screen | Worst realistic outcome | How final |
|---|---|---|
| A deposit address | The payment goes somewhere else entirely | Final. No process exists |
| A confirmation count | You panic and send a second payment | Usually recoverable, and entirely self inflicted |
| A withdrawal screen | You never use it and lose a balance later | Final once the account or the market goes |
| A fee line | You size orders badly because the maths looked one way | Not final, and it compounds quietly |
What a balance actually is
A number in somebody else database saying they owe you. That is also true of a bank, and the difference is everything around it: with a bank you know who they are, where they are and what happens if they refuse. Here you know none of those, by design, and the design is the point of the arrangement.
So the question is not whether the operators are honest. It is whether a claim against a party you cannot identify is an asset, and the honest answer is that it is one only for as long as nothing goes wrong.
Why nothing warns you
A balance behaves perfectly normally right up until the day the account is gone, the market stops answering, or the password stops working. Every day it survives reads as evidence that it is fine, and the absence of a bad outcome so far is not information about the odds. That is the same shape of reasoning that keeps people reusing a password for years, and it fails the same way.