What none of this protects against
Every protection described here is real and narrower than people assume. The gap between those two is where nearly everything goes wrong.
| Protection | Covers | Does not cover |
|---|---|---|
| Checking a signature | Whether you are where you think you are | Whether the party is honest, whether your machine is trustworthy, anything after login |
| Escrow | The platform moving funds alone | A vendor who does not ship, your own account compromised, anything paid outside it, a parked balance |
| A second factor | A leaked or reused password | A live copy of the login page, anything running on your machine |
| The currency | The chain hop | The exchange record, timing at the boundary, custodial services, your own device |
| Vendor record | Who to deal with | When somebody changes their mind, and accounts that changed hands |
| Nine published addresses | Path failures being independent | Whether the party answering is genuine, or a genuine market outage |
| A separate operating system | Traces, and a shared machine | Landing on a copied page, or a reused password |
The false confidence this creates
People who check carefully sometimes become less careful about everything else, because they feel covered. That is the predictable consequence of holding one strong guarantee in a situation full of weak ones, and it is worth watching for in yourself.
A verified arrival at the genuine market still leaves you exposed to a vendor who does not ship, a balance sitting where it should not, a password reused somewhere else, and a machine you have not thought about. None of those are affected by the signature at all.
Six questions and what answers them
| Question | What answers it |
|---|---|
| Am I where I think I am? | Checking a signature, and nothing else |
| Is my account safe if a password leaks? | A second factor, and credentials used nowhere else |
| Is my machine trustworthy? | How you set it up and what you install. Nothing here can establish it. |
| Will this vendor deliver? | Their record, with all its known limits |
| Is my money exposed? | Whether it is committed to an order or sitting as a balance |
| Can this be linked back to me? | What happened at the boundary, before any of this started |
One of the six is answered definitively. This site concentrates on that one because it is the only place where a cheap action gives a complete answer, not because the others matter less.