A deposit address
The screen gives you a string and a QR square and asks you to send money to it. There is no confirmation step, no undo and no support ticket afterwards, which puts all of the weight on three seconds of checking.
- What it is
- A destination generated for your account, often time limited
- Where you meet it
- The deposit or top up page, inside the market
- What it settles
- Where the money is going
- Cannot tell you
- That the string on your clipboard is the string on the screen
The specimen
expires in 42 minutes
minimum 0.0005
lime marks what you compare after pasting. the middle is not the check here.
A deposit panel. The address is illustrative and deliberately incomplete. The expiry line matters more than people expect, and the ends are the part to compare, for a reason that is the reverse of the addresses room.
Why the ends and not the middle
There are two different failures and they need opposite checks. A forged onion address is built to resemble a real one, so it matches at the ends and differs in the middle. Software running on your own machine that watches for anything address shaped does not resemble anything, it replaces the whole string, so the ends change completely.
Comparing the ends of what actually landed in the field against what you copied catches the second one in about three seconds. Nothing else you can do catches it at all, including checking a signature, because the machine you are checking on is the machine doing it.
The expiry line
Deposit addresses are usually generated per user and often expire. Sending to an expired one is the single most common way a deposit goes missing without anybody doing anything wrong, and it is recoverable in some cases and not in others depending entirely on the market. Generate a fresh one if you have been sitting on the page, and never reuse one you saved from last time.
What raises the odds of a swap
| Situation | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Software installed specifically for this activity | A category with a strong incentive to be malicious and a weak habit of verification |
| Anything obtained outside official channels | Repacks, mirrors, helpful reuploads |
| A machine shared with other people | Their installs are your exposure |
| A machine running for years without a rebuild | Accumulation, rather than any single decision |
If a payment already went to the wrong place
It is not recoverable and the machine is the problem rather than the market. Treat everything else on that computer as suspect, including saved wallet files, and do not repeat the payment from the same system. This is one of the few places in the collection where the honest answer is that the money is gone and the useful action is preventing the next one.