- What it is
- Your independently recorded copy of the address a payment is meant to reach, made at the moment it was shown to you.
- How you get one
- Read the address off the page and write or save it yourself before pasting anything into a wallet, then leave the copy untouched.
- Where to keep it
- Alongside the order record, dated, in a place that is not the clipboard and not the same window you copied it from.
- How it goes wrong
- It is made after the transfer instead of before, at which point it records the outcome rather than the intention.
- What fails without it
- A payment that reached the wrong place cannot be distinguished from one that reached the right place and was mishandled.
- Time to acquire
- Under a minute per order, which is why the reason for skipping it is rarely time.
Recorded before, read after
The whole value of this artifact sits in its timing. A copy taken before the transfer is evidence of what you intended. A copy taken afterwards is a description of what happened, and the two are only interesting when they differ. If you make the copy after sending you have collapsed both into one statement and lost the ability to tell an accident from a redirection.
So the order of operations matters more than the medium. Write it down, then send. Not send, then write it down because the confirmation screen is conveniently showing you the address.
Where the copy should live
Somewhere that is not the clipboard and not the same browser window. A line in the notebook is the cleanest option because it is entirely outside the machine. A plain text file on the same device is acceptable and considerably better than nothing, though it shares whatever fate the device has.
Keep it with the rest of the order material rather than in a separate pile. When you need it you will be looking for everything at once, and an address filed on its own is an address you will spend ten minutes finding.
The clipboard paragraph
Software that watches the clipboard and swaps a copied address for a different one exists. It is a known category of nuisance and there is no need to dress it up with figures, because the figures would be invented and the defence is the same regardless of how common it is. The defence is comparison: look at what landed in the wallet field and check it against your own copy before confirming.
That check takes seconds and it catches the ordinary cases too. Truncated pastes, an address from a previous order still sitting in the clipboard, a copy that grabbed a trailing character from the page. Those mundane failures happen more often than any clever attack and the same habit catches all of them.
Deposit addresses do not stay meaningful
Many systems hand out a fresh deposit address per order or rotate them on a schedule. An address you saved last month may point at nothing useful now, which is why this item is filed as one that ages. The copy remains valuable as a record of that particular payment and worthless as a destination for the next one.
Date the copy for that reason. An undated address in a notebook is an invitation to reuse it out of habit, and reuse is one of the few ways to lose value with nobody at fault but the filing system. Mark it against the order it belongs to and let it retire with that order. Retiring an item covers the general habit.
What the copy is worth when something goes wrong
If a payment does not show up where it should, the first question is where it went. Your copy answers half of that immediately: this is the address I was given, and this is the address the transfer targeted. Whether those match narrows the problem enormously in one step.
Without the copy the conversation becomes a matter of recollection, and recollection about a string of characters is not worth much to anybody. Paired with the evidence you kept and a rate note, a dated copy turns a vague complaint into a specific one.
Questions that come up
Is a screenshot of the deposit page good enough?
It captures the address, which is the main thing, so it is better than keeping nothing. The weaknesses are that screenshots pile up unlabelled, they are easy to lose track of, and they tend to live on the same machine as everything else. A written line with a date attached is easier to find later and survives a machine going away.
Should I keep old copies once an order finishes?
Keep them until the order is closed and settled to your satisfaction, then they are historical rather than active. Some people keep them longer as a record of where payments went over time. What matters is marking clearly that an old copy is retired, so it does not get reused as a live destination on a distracted evening.
What do I do if my copy and the send field disagree?
Stop before confirming and find out why. The benign explanations are a stale clipboard or a partial paste, both of which are fixed by copying again carefully. If the two still disagree after a clean second attempt, treat the machine as the suspect rather than the address, and do not send from it until you understand what happened.