Nexus Loss Table Ranked by expected cost, not by how frightening it sounds
Table › What stops it

Nexus addresses

Three published addresses for the same market. Copy rather than retype.

nexusb2l73qzjn4slhyfxa3jvpolw7fomiz5sgyyefnsdhikaqgborqd.onion
nexusma2iqgauqqvjcgds4ckv5xbf272tkfagq4epojjhsgleqpwxiqd.onion
nexusabcdrwy7632jfmkfu3f6u7usyw2xn2mcfiljunz6zsj4p5vioqd.onion

This list is published, not monitored. An address that opens is not an address that is genuine.

Verify on arrival

The single highest value habit here, and the one most likely to fall off the routine because it produces no visible result.

Before you can use it

You need a fingerprint established independently and stored where you control it. Without one this check proves nothing, because a signature verified against a key taken from the page being checked is a page vouching for itself, and internal consistency costs a forger nothing.

Collect it from several sources that would have to be compromised separately, compare it in full rather than the ends, and write it down. About an hour, once. Three pages by one operator count as one source, and three that copied a fourth also count as one.

The procedure

  1. Find the signed block. It begins and ends with the armour lines. No signed block means the answer is no.
  2. Copy all of it. Nothing trimmed, no whitespace altered. A partial copy fails in a way that looks identical to tampering.
  3. Check against your pinned fingerprint, never a key the page offers.
  4. Read the output. Both which key signed and the date inside the signed text.

The four results

ResultMeaningDo
Bad signatureText altered or fabricatedLeave. Unambiguous.
No public keySigned by a key you do not holdImport the right one after checking its fingerprint, never one the page offers.
Good, unexpected keyMaths works against a key that is not yoursLeave. The word good appears, which is why this catches people.
Good, old dateVerifies, statement is months oldTreat as unconfirmed. Signatures never expire, so old genuine ones get replayed.
The habit inside the habitThe last two rows catch experienced readers, and one habit defeats both. Read which key signed and when, rather than stopping at the word good. Two seconds.

What it does not reach

Whether the signer is honest, whether your own machine is trustworthy, and anything that happens after you log in. It answers one question completely and no others, which is exactly why it is worth doing and why the other five habits exist.

What a signature proves, exactly

Two things, narrowly and completely: that whoever produced the block held a specific private key, and that the text has not changed since. It does not prove the signer is honest, that the key still belongs to the same people, or that the statement is current. Those limits are not weaknesses. They are what makes the guarantee worth anything, because a check that claimed to answer everything would be answering nothing.

Collecting the fingerprint, which is the hard part

  1. Gather it from sources that would have to be compromised separately. Three pages run by one operator are one source.
  2. Compare in full, not the first and last few characters.
  3. Write it down outside the browser, in a file or on paper you control.
  4. Note the date you pinned it, so a future change is a change rather than a vague impression.
When the key itself changesA key change announced only by the new key is not an announcement, it is an assertion. Genuine changes are signed by the old key, published in several places, and given a long overlap. If a change appears during an outage and demands immediate action, wait, which costs nothing at all if it turns out to be real.

Why it falls out of the routine

Because it succeeds silently. Every session where the check passes feels like a minute wasted, and after a hundred of those the habit erodes on its own without any decision being made. The people who lose accounts this way are usually not people who never checked. They are people who checked for a year and then stopped, and the evening it mattered looked exactly like the hundred that did not.