Coming back after a while
You know how this works, which is most of the problem. The parts that changed are exactly the parts you will not think to check.
Why your old address is the danger
Addresses get retired for ordinary reasons. An address that was public for years accumulates scrapers, stale bookmarks and flooding until a fresh one simply serves people better. Nothing about that is a crisis and it happens quietly.
What happens next is the problem. A retired address carries years of accumulated recognition, and anyone who stands up a login page at something resembling it inherits all of that for free. The traffic arriving from old bookmarks is disproportionately people who recognise the address and therefore do not check it. That is you.
To be precise, nobody takes over the exact string, because serving traffic at an address requires the key it was derived from. What they do is generate one matching the first several characters, which is cheap, and let the middle differ, which nobody reads. The address page covers how to compare one properly.
What has changed since you were last here
| Then | Now |
|---|---|
| Bitcoin was normal for funding | Monero is the default for new accounts, and the reason is that chain analysis is retroactive and only improves |
| Single signature escrow was common | Two of three multisig is the norm, so the platform cannot move funds alone |
| One address, maybe two | Three on rotation with published overlaps, so an address leaving is routine rather than a signal |
| Support questions went to forums | Forums are still useful for whether others see an outage, and never for addresses |
| Two factor was optional in practice | Assume it is expected, and turn it on before you do anything else |
The habits worth re-examining
- Recognising an address is not checking it. This was always true and it mattered less when you were using it weekly.
- Your old password is in a breach somewhere. Long enough has passed that assuming otherwise is optimistic.
- Your old PGP key ties you to your old identity. If that identity had any exposure, reusing the key carries it forward.
- The forum you trusted may have changed hands. Sites in this space get sold quietly and the readers are the asset.
- Your feedback history is gone if the account is. Reputation accrues per platform and does not transfer.
The short version
- Delete every address you have saved. Not archive, delete.
- Re-establish the fingerprint from scratch, from several independent places. Do not assume the one you remember is current.
- Take a fresh address from a published roster and verify on arrival.
- New password, two factor on, recovery material saved somewhere you control.
- Fund small the first time back. Treat yourself as a beginner for one order, because the parts that changed are the parts you would not notice.
That is the whole path. It is short because you already have the concepts, and the risk for you is not ignorance, it is confidence about things that quietly stopped being true.