Choosing which coin to use
The account will accept more than one coin and they are not interchangeable. The choice affects how long you wait, what the transfer costs and how much of it remains legible to anybody looking afterwards.
Back to minute 45Crown market addresses
crownm5jmtbhqnoxhexx7nyiygqgqofp3wnjyyfl74gziohqqy6oq5id.onioncrownrywlm7mnohkzntlir2tlhafq6tzphgqyag5cw5en7nprchfklad.onioncrownwpaimgizxylrvrh4u6acpvk4l757cfla7xs6zjki7tdjqbnv6qd.onionPublished exactly as supplied. Nothing on this site is monitored, tested or checked, so no address here is claimed to be working. What a copied address does and does not settle.
What actually happens here
A deposit page offers a choice. You pick one, it shows an address for that coin, and you send to it. The choice is made in about four seconds and it is the last easy decision in the phase.
The reason it deserves longer is that the three consequences it carries land at different times. The fee lands immediately. The wait lands over the next hour. The visibility consequence does not land at any particular moment at all, which is why it gets ignored.
What actually differs
| What changes with the coin | What that means for tonight |
|---|---|
| How long you wait | Set by how often the network agrees and how many rounds the market wants. This varies by a lot between coins. |
| What it costs to send | Varies with network load. On a busy day the fee on one network can be several times the fee on another. |
| What stays visible | The important one. Some networks publish every transfer in a permanently readable ledger. Others do not, by design. |
| Where you can get it | A practical constraint that often decides the matter regardless of the other three. |
The visibility point, plainly
On a fully public ledger, every transfer is readable by anyone, forever, and the readable record includes which addresses sent what to whom. That is not an accident or a flaw, it is how those networks establish agreement without a central authority.
The practical effect is that a transfer made tonight is still legible years from now, and it can be examined by anyone who later has a reason to. Networks built for confidentiality deliberately withhold parts of that record. That is the whole of the difference and it is worth more than the fee difference on most evenings.
- The permanent public record of who paid what to whom is not there to be read later.
- It removes a class of after the fact analysis entirely rather than making it harder.
- Fees are often lower and less volatile, since it competes for space with less traffic.
- It is harder to obtain in some places, and that constraint is real rather than theoretical.
- Fewer services accept it, so it is less useful outside this context.
- It does nothing about anything you type in later. A confidential transfer followed by a plain text address is not confidential.
The stall is deciding on the deposit page, with an address already displayed, having never thought about it before. That is a four second decision dressed as a choice, and it is normally made on the basis of which coin the reader already has.
The second is a mismatch. Somebody picks one coin on the market page and sends a different one, or sends to an address generated for a different coin. This is the one error in the phase that can lose the money outright, and it is entirely preventable by reading the page.
The third is chasing the cheapest fee on a busy day, which converts a saving of very little into a wait of several hours, and produces the missing deposit panic that follows.
The twenty minute version includes going and obtaining a different coin, which is a whole separate errand and is the main reason this decision belongs before the session rather than inside it.
A workable default
- Decide before the deposit page, not on it.
- Prefer the network that does not publish a permanent readable record of the transfer, if it is available to you.
- Check the fee on the day rather than assuming. Network costs move.
- Send the coin the page asked for, to the address the page gave, and read both twice.
- Whatever you choose, note it down with the amount and the time, so the missing deposit page has something to work with if it comes to that.
The wait and the fee are annoyances. The permanent readable record is the thing that outlasts the session, and it is the only part of this choice that cannot be revisited.