Reference / how this works
How this works
A site that spends forty pages telling you not to trust things because they look right owes you an account of itself, including the parts where it is weakest.
The three kinds of statement here
| 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, order states are typed in by people | Widely documented and unchanged for years. Still worth confirming |
| Judgement | That filing early costs more than it seems, that the dull cause is usually right | The reasoning is on the page. Disagree with a step rather than the conclusion |
How the orderings were arrived at
Every table on this site that says how often is a judgement, not a measurement. Nobody publishes reliable figures for any of this. Markets do not, for obvious reasons. Surveys reach the people who answer surveys, which is a different population from the 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 has invented them. The honest alternative is to rank rather than to measure, and to write the reasoning next to the ranking so somebody can attack a specific step.
What the frequency columns mean
Where a table here says very common or uncommon, read it as a claim about relative order that somebody is prepared to defend, not as a number with a decimal point hiding behind it.
Where this site is most likely wrong
- Anything specific to how this market behaves today. Interfaces change, states get renamed, screens appear and go away. The shapes described here are durable. The details are not.
- Confirmation counts, window lengths, fee structures. All policies that get changed, which is why none of them are quoted here as fixed.
- The claim that support never exists outside the market. True of every market this has been checked against, and one exception would dent it.
- Anything about the future. Nothing here predicts, including whether any of this exists next year.
What this site refuses to publish
| Not here | Why |
|---|---|
| An uptime figure or status light | Nothing here is monitored, and a number nobody maintains is worse than none |
| A last checked date | It would be a claim about right now that stops being true by lunchtime |
| A ranking of the addresses | Order on a page would imply a judgement no outsider can make |
| Vendor recommendations or ratings | No customers to quote and no basis for it |
| Anything about products | A boundary kept on purpose |
| Paid placement | Never offered, never accepted, and stated here so you can hold the site to it |
How the pages are arranged and why
Most writing on this subject is organised by topic, which works if you already know what your problem is called. Somebody looking at a captcha that will not pass does not know their problem is called rate limiting, and searching for what is on the screen gets them advice about something else.
So the arrangement here follows the observation rather than the topic, and each page opens with the likely causes rather than the interesting ones. The dull answer first is a deliberate editorial choice and it is the one most likely to be right.
The modification date
The 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 rather than quietly avoiding.