- What it is
- A registered account on a different market, created in advance, with credentials you have stored the same way as your main ones.
- How you get one
- You register while nothing is wrong and you are not in a hurry, then you leave it alone.
- Where to keep it
- The credentials go wherever your other credentials go, clearly labelled so the two sets never get confused.
- How it goes wrong
- It goes dormant and forgotten, or the passphrase was never written down because it seemed unimportant at the time.
- What fails without it
- When the entrance you know stops answering, you are starting from nothing at the worst possible moment.
- Time to acquire
- An evening to register properly. Impossible to acquire quickly at the moment you discover you need it.
A registration, not an intention
Plenty of people will tell you they have a backup market. Asked to log into it, they cannot, because what they have is a name they remember hearing. The account does not exist. Nothing was ever created and no credentials were ever stored.
This entry is strict about the difference for a practical reason. An intention takes no time to hold and provides nothing. An account takes an evening to make and provides an option. Only one of those belongs in an inventory of things you possess.
What it buys you
It buys calm, which sounds soft until you watch what happens without it. The moment an entrance stops responding is the moment people make their worst decisions. They try addresses from places they would normally ignore. They click things arriving in messages. They register somewhere in a rush, using a passphrase they will not remember, on a page they did not look at properly.
An account that already exists removes the pressure behind all of that. You have somewhere to be while the situation resolves itself, or does not. The exit plan entry treats the same problem from the other end, and the two work together.
Age is the part you cannot hurry
An account created three months ago and one created five minutes ago are not equivalent, and none of the difference can be manufactured after the fact. Some markets treat new registrations differently. More to the point, an account you have logged into a few times is one whose habits you know, whereas an account made in a panic is an unfamiliar interface encountered on your worst evening.
Which is why the item sits here rather than in the stage about things going wrong. Once you are in that stage it is far too late to acquire this one, and most of the entries around it share the same property to some degree.
Housekeeping for the spare
- Different credentials on each. Reusing a passphrase across markets links the accounts to anyone who ends up holding both sides.
- Store them separately or label them clearly. The failure mode is typing one market's details into another, which is avoidable with a line of text.
- Note the registration date. It is the fact you will want first when deciding whether the account is still live.
- Log in occasionally. An account you cannot get into is not an account, and you would rather discover that on a quiet Sunday.
The credential handling is the same discipline as the passphrase entry and the recovery material entry, applied twice. There is nothing special about the second set except that people take it less seriously, which is exactly why it is the one that gets lost.
What this entry is not
It is not a recommendation of any particular market and this site does not make those. It says nothing about whether a second market is any good, whether it is trustworthy, or whether it is reachable, because the site checks nothing and would be inventing the answer.
What it says is narrower and defensible. Holding one option is a weaker position than holding two, and the second option has to be built while you still have the first. That is a statement about redundancy rather than about any market, and it would be equally true of anything else you depend on through a single door.
Questions that come up
Is having two accounts riskier than having one?
It adds a second set of credentials to look after and a second place your details exist, and both of those are real costs worth weighing. Set against that is the failure this entry describes, where a single door closes and the response is a series of hurried decisions made under pressure. Which way the balance falls is yours to judge, and judging it in advance is better than discovering it live.
How often should I log in to keep it alive?
Often enough that you would notice a change and rarely enough that it stays uneventful. Something in the region of once a month is a reasonable rhythm for most people. The point is not to keep the account warm for its own sake but to confirm that your stored credentials still work, because a passphrase you cannot use is indistinguishable from no account at all.
Does this belong in the arriving stage rather than the trouble stage?
It belongs here because acquiring it is only possible here. Everything in this stage shares that property: it can be obtained calmly in advance and cannot be obtained at all once the situation has turned. The trouble stage covers what you do with the things you brought, and this is one of the things you had to bring.