The address a deposit page hands you. The important word is that it is issued for this payment rather than for you.
- What it literally says
- Send funds here for this deposit.
- What it actually means
- A one time destination derived from a wallet, issued fresh so that two payments cannot be linked by where they went.
- What it does not mean
- That it is your permanent address on the platform. It is not, and treating it as one removes the separation it exists to provide.
- What to do
- Copy it fresh each time from the deposit page you have open. Never retype it, and check the ends of what actually landed in your send field.
- If it looks different
- An address that appears in a message, an email, or anywhere other than the deposit page you opened yourself.
Why fresh each time
Separation. If every deposit went to the same destination, anybody looking at the chain could group them, which removes most of the reason for using this kind of currency at all. A fresh destination per payment means the grouping is not available.
There is also a practical failure. An address left open in a tab from a previous session may have been recycled on the platform side, and a payment to it can credit somewhere unexpected. That is one of the more common causes of a deposit that never appears.
The check that takes three seconds
Compare the first and last several characters of what is actually in your send field against the deposit page. The ends, not the middle, because the failure here is wholesale substitution by something running on your own machine rather than a resembling address. This is the one place in this book where checking the ends is the right check.
Where the privacy actually goes
Not on the chain. At the boundary, where money converts from something with a record into something without one. A withdrawal from a service that knows who you are, followed minutes later by a deposit of a matching amount, is a pattern nobody had to read the chain to see. Fresh destinations protect the hop and do nothing about the timing on either side of it.