An account is a pile of objects, not a memory
The word account makes it sound like one thing. In practice it is a small pile of separate objects, each held somewhere different, each able to go missing on its own. A handle. A passphrase. The recovery material the market showed you once at setup. A second secret for the moment money moves. A key pair whose secret half is yours. A fingerprint you gathered yourself. A browser profile with nothing else living in it.
None of these is difficult to obtain. The trouble is that most people obtain all of them in one sitting, in a hurry, and then keep them in one place. That collapses a pile of separate objects back into a single object, and a single object is lost or copied all at once.
This stage takes them one at a time. Each page says what the thing is, how a copy of it is made, where it sits, what it looks like when it has quietly stopped being correct, and what specifically stops working when it is not in your hands. The whole inventory table puts them next to the material from the other stages.
Losing one is not the same as losing another
People treat account material as a single lump, so they treat every loss as equally bad. It is not. Some losses cost you a session and some cost you the account, and the difference is worth understanding while nothing is on fire.
| If this goes missing | What you can still do |
|---|---|
| The handle | Very little on that account, because a login form asks for the name before it asks for anything else. |
| The passphrase | Possibly recover, if your recovery material is written down somewhere you can reach it. |
| The recovery material | Log in as usual, right up until the day you cannot, and then nothing. |
| The spend PIN | Read messages, read orders, look at a balance, and move no money. |
| Your own secret key | Send, but not read what came back encrypted to you. |
| The market fingerprint | Log in, and take on faith whatever a page tells you about itself. |
| The clean profile | Everything, at the price of leaving one activity sitting on top of your ordinary browsing. |
The order most people acquire them in
The order below is the order these pages run in, and it is roughly the order the material appears in real life. The handle and the passphrase exist before an account does. Recovery material arrives during setup and is shown once. The spend PIN turns up the first time you try to move a balance. Keys and profiles tend to arrive last, usually after something has already gone slightly wrong.
- A username used nowhere else, and the record of the one place it is used.
- A passphrase that exists in one account and was not built out of anything about you.
- A copy in your own hand of whatever the market displayed once during setup.
- The spend PIN, held apart from the passphrase on purpose.
- A PGP key pair you generated, with the secret half somewhere you can actually reach.
- The market signing fingerprint you collected yourself, written down in advance.
- A browser profile with no other life in it, so one activity does not sit on top of another.
Where this sits between arriving and paying
The addresses printed at the top of every page here, and again on the page that prints them as published, belong to the arriving stage. They get you to a door. This site runs no checks against any of them and holds no view on whether any of them answers right now.
What comes after this stage is money, which is its own list of things you hold, and after that the material you only miss when something has already gone wrong. The account stage sits in the middle and is the one people skip, because a login form looks like a formality and the objects behind it look optional until the morning one is gone.
Questions that come up
Do I need all of this before I register an account?
No. The handle and the passphrase have to exist before you register, because the registration form asks for them. The recovery material is handed to you during setup, so you need somewhere to write it down at that moment rather than beforehand. The spend PIN, the key pair and the clean profile can be assembled afterwards, though a profile assembled afterwards has already carried one session it did not need to carry.
Why keep a written record at all if the point is secrecy?
Because the common failure at this stage is not someone reading your notes, it is you losing access to your own account and having nothing to fall back on. A written record kept in one physical place, away from the machine, fails in ways you can see and reason about. Material held only in your head fails silently and gives you no warning at all.
Is any of this specific to one market?
Most of it is not. A handle used in one place, a passphrase built from nothing about you and a key pair whose secret half you control behave the same way anywhere. The market fingerprint is the exception, because it belongs to one operator and changes when that operator changes it, which is why it is treated as material that goes stale rather than material that keeps.