How this was put together
A site that spends thirty pages telling you not to trust things because they look right owes you an account of itself. This is it, including the parts where it is weakest.
The three kinds of statement on this site
| Kind | Example | How to treat it |
|---|---|---|
| Checkable fact | An onion address is fifty six characters and the alphabet has no zero | Verify it yourself in a minute. If it is wrong, it is simply wrong |
| Stable mechanism | Escrow needs two of three signatures, states are entered by hand | Widely documented and unchanged for years. Still worth confirming |
| Judgement | Dispute rate is more useful than rating, filing early costs you | Reasoning is shown on the page. Disagree with a step rather than the conclusion |
Most of the collection is the middle row. The judgements are marked by the fact that they come with an argument attached, and an argument is a thing you can attack.
Where this site is most likely to be wrong
- Anything specific to how this market behaves today. Interfaces change, states get renamed, a queue appears or goes away. The shapes described here are durable. The details are not.
- Numbers of confirmations, window lengths, fee structures. All of these are policies that get changed and none of them are quoted here as fixed for that reason.
- The claim that support never happens outside the market. It is true of every market this has been checked against, and it is the kind of universal that one exception would dent.
- Anything about the future. Nothing here predicts, including whether any of this will still exist next year.
Why there is no data
Nobody publishes reliable figures about how often any of this happens. Markets do not, for obvious reasons. Surveys reach people who answer surveys, which is a different population from people who lost money. Forum reports lean heavily toward the dramatic, because an ordinary loss is embarrassing and an exotic one is a story worth telling.
So anybody quoting precise percentages in this subject has invented them. The honest alternative is to describe mechanisms, which are observable, and to be explicit about the difference between a mechanism and a frequency.
What would change a page
| Change | What happens |
|---|---|
| A mechanism actually changes | The page gets rewritten, and the modification date moves with it |
| Somebody points out a factual error | It gets fixed |
| Somebody disagrees with a judgement | It moves if they name the step. It does not move because it feels wrong |
| Somebody offers money for a mention | Declined, which is the whole answer |
The modification date in the page markup follows real edits to the text rather than the day you happen to be reading. A date that advances every morning while nothing changes is the most common dishonest signal on sites covering this ground, and it is worth naming.
What this site cannot do for you
It cannot reach an account, release an order, pass a message to anybody, or find out whether an address is working. It is a reading guide written by somebody with no relationship to the market, which is the only position from which a guide like this is worth anything, and also the position from which it can do nothing practical on your behalf.