Funding a balance: two records, kept by different parties

Two separate records come into existence when a balance is funded, held by different parties with different visibility. Confusing them is the usual error.

Markets of this kind hold a balance for an account and issue an address for topping it up. Whatever the mechanics, the structure is the same: the platform tells you where to send something, and later the balance changes. That structure produces two records, and they are not copies of each other.

The record the platform necessarily holds

The platform issued the address, so it knows which account that address belongs to. When a payment arrives, it necessarily learns that this address received something, and when. It has to learn this, because otherwise it could not credit the balance, and crediting the balance is the entire purpose of the exercise.

That is one fact with a time attached, connected to an account label. It sits alongside the other timed facts in this section, and its usefulness comes from the same place: comparison. A deposit shortly before an order, or a run of deposits with a rhythm, is a shape in the same way a run of sign-ins is a shape. See signing in for what shapes of that kind support.

The record that exists whether or not the platform does

Public ledgers are public. That is what the word does. A transaction recorded on one is readable by anyone who cares to look, indefinitely, without asking permission from the platform or from you. It does not require an account, a relationship, or a legal instrument to read.

This record is independent of the market. If the platform vanished tonight, deleted everything and was never recovered, the ledger entry would still be there, because it was never held by the platform in the first place. This is the part people most often get backwards. They worry about what the market keeps, and the more durable record is the one nobody keeps because everybody has it.

Held by the platform

That an address it issued received a payment, when, and which account it belongs to.

Held by a public ledger

The transaction itself, permanently, readable by anyone. What is contained in an entry varies by design, and this site takes no position on any of them.

Held by neither

Your name, your location, or any reason for the payment. Those come from elsewhere if they come at all.

What the platform does not learn

The platform does not learn where the value came from before it arrived. It sees an arrival at an address it issued. It has no special view of what happened upstream, and no privileged access to anything the ledger does not already show to everyone.

That last clause is doing a lot of work. The upstream history is often visible on the ledger itself, because that is frequently what a ledger is: a chain of entries in which each refers to earlier ones. Where that holds, the history is not something the platform learned from you. It is something anyone can read, including the platform, and including people with no connection to any of this.

The platform also does not learn a name from a payment. A ledger entry is not an identity document. Names attach to entries at the edges of the system, where value enters or leaves it and someone recorded who was standing there. That is outside the scope of this catalogue and it is not a market-side observation.

Two records, two different lifetimes

The platform-side record has the properties every record in this section has. It exists because the mechanics required it, its retention is a decision made by whoever runs the platform, and it can change hands with the hardware. It is unknowable from outside and potentially readable later.

The ledger-side record has different properties entirely. Nobody has to choose to keep it. Nobody can choose to delete it. Its readability does not depend on anyone's intentions, and no future event makes it less readable. When people describe one of these as permanent, it is usually the second one they should mean.

Where this sits beside the rest of the catalogue

Funding a balance is the only action in this section that creates a record outside the market entirely. Everything else here is a fact the server received. This one produces a market-side fact and, separately, an entry in a place that has nothing to do with the market and answers to nobody. Elsewhere in the catalogue, the closest parallel is a parcel: an object that continues to exist and be handled by parties who never agreed to anything with you, discussed in a parcel entering the postal system. The general habit of reading a record for what it structurally must contain is the whole method here, laid out on the observers page.

What changes the answer

4 things change how much this action gives away. None of them takes it to zero, and none of them is a promise.

1. Knowing which record is whichThe platform-side fact and the ledger entry have different holders, different lifetimes and different audiences. Most confusion about deposits comes from treating them as one thing. This is understanding rather than mitigation, and it changes nothing about either record.
2. Reading the ledger as public, because it isAnything visible on a public ledger is visible to everyone, permanently, with no gatekeeper. Assuming that from the start avoids a class of surprise. It does not alter what is already recorded there.
3. Not annotating a payment anywhere on the siteA message or a note explaining what a deposit was for creates a plain-text link between a ledger entry and a purpose, held by the platform. The deposit itself carries no such explanation. See the market inbox.
4. Expecting the timing to be legibleA deposit has a time and so does everything else you do on the site. Times sitting near each other are comparable by anyone holding both, without any interpretation being needed. Nothing changes that, it is a property of records having timestamps.

What this card is not

This card gives no financial or operational advice, names no coin, recommends no method and describes no procedure for moving anything. It states only who ends up holding which record, and what each record structurally contains.

Questions that come up

Does the market see where my coin came from?

It sees an arrival at an address it issued. Anything visible about the history before that is visible on the public ledger to everyone, not disclosed privately to the platform.

If the platform is gone, is the record gone?

The platform-side record shares the fate of the hardware. A public ledger entry does not, because it was never held by the platform. It remains readable regardless.