Everything stopped at once and nobody is saying anything

Every address in the set behaves the same way. Support does not reply. Nothing has been announced anywhere you trust. This is the case people fear, and it is the one case on this site where fearing it is reasonable.

It still needs to be read carefully, because the same picture is produced by several things and only one of them is the bad one.

Four things that look identical

1. A planned or unplanned outage that will end.
2. An address rotation that you did not receive, so you are testing a stale set. See the rotation page.
3. A seizure or shutdown by somebody else, which usually announces itself eventually and often loudly.
4. An operator taking what is in the accounts and leaving.

From outside, on the first day, these four are one picture. Anybody telling you which one it is on the first day is guessing, and the confident ones are guessing hardest.

What the rumour cycle does

Within hours there will be posts declaring an exit, and posts declaring the opposite, and both will be written with total certainty. A significant number of them will include a helpful replacement address. That combination is not a coincidence, and it is worth naming plainly.

The reader who is frightened is the easiest reader to move. This is the exact moment when address hygiene collapses and people paste things they would never have pasted a week earlier.

What is worth doing

• Stop moving money in. That is the only irreversible thing still under your control.
• Write down what you are owed and by whom, with dates, while you still remember.
• Do not go address hunting under pressure. Anything you find in this state was found by the worst version of your judgement.
• Wait for a signed statement from a key you already held, if such a key exists. Anything unsigned is a rumour with formatting.

What follows from getting it right

Attributing this correctly does not save the balance. It saves the next one. A reader who understands that the loss came from holding funds on somebody else infrastructure changes their behaviour permanently. A reader who blames the network, or bad luck, or the police, learns nothing and repeats the pattern somewhere else within a month.

This site publishes addresses and monitors nothing, so it will never tell you that this is happening or that it is not. That is not caution for its own sake. A page that claimed to know would be making a claim it could not support.

• Back to the cases the market caused
• What this site refuses to claim
• The attribution rule

Asked often enough to answer

How long is too long before assuming the worst?

There is no honest number. Anybody offering one is inventing it. What is true is that the decision to stop putting money in should be made in hours and the decision about what happened can wait weeks.

Does this site know whether it is happening now?

No. This site does not probe addresses, does not monitor anything and publishes no status. It lists the addresses it was given and nothing more.