Almost everything you handle around Awazon Market arrives as a string, a block or a file, and each of those has a shape it is permitted to take. This reference writes those shapes down, one to a page, and says at the foot of every page what a correct shape still leaves open.
A shape is the set of rules a piece of text obeys before anything else about it can be true. A run of characters is the right length or it is not. It is drawn from one alphabet or it contains a symbol that alphabet does not have. It carries a prefix, a separator and a suffix in a fixed order, or the order is wrong. None of that requires software, an account or a connection. It requires looking at the thing in front of you and knowing what it is supposed to look like.
That second half is the part people are missing, and it is the only thing this site supplies.
What a card contains
Each card takes one kind of thing, states its shape exactly, gives a procedure you can run on it in a few seconds with nothing but your eyes, says what a wrong shape does and does not tell you, and then closes on the section that gives this reference its point: what a correct shape does not prove.
That last section is on every card because it is the part that is normally left off. A great deal of harm around markets like this one comes from people who checked something, found it well formed, and quietly upgraded that into a belief that it was genuine. The two are not related. A format check is a filter, and a filter that removes obvious rubbish is worth running precisely because it is cheap, not because it is strong. The layout is walked through in detail on how to read a card here.
The five families
Cards are grouped by what kind of thing they document rather than by when you meet it, because the same shape turns up at several different moments and filing it by moment would mean writing it out more than once.
- Addresses and identifiers8 shapes
- Keys and signatures8 shapes
- Money8 shapes
- Session and account7 shapes
- Files and text7 shapes
Three ways in, depending on what you have
If you are holding something right now and it looks wrong, start from the symptom. Wrong shapes, filed by what you see is an index in reverse: you find the thing on your screen in the left column and it points at the rule that has been broken.
If you cannot tell which alphabet a string is drawn from, the four alphabets sets hexadecimal, base32, base58 and base64 beside one another with their symbol sets and their exclusions. Every card links there rather than reprinting the character classes, so the legend is written once and stays consistent.
If the problem is simply that a run of characters is too long to count, counting characters without a tool is a method page. Length is the single most useful property on this whole reference, and most people cannot count to 56 reliably without a technique.
- Wrong shapes, filed by what you see
- The four alphabets
- Counting characters without a tool
- Every shape on this reference
- What a shape proves, and where it stops
Examples here are fake on purpose
Only three real strings appear anywhere on this site, and they are the Awazon market addresses printed at the top of every page. Everything else in a code block is a placeholder built so that it cannot be mistaken for a live value.
Where an alphabet permits letters, the placeholder spells the word example or runs a line of x. Where the alphabet is hexadecimal or digits only and no word can be spelled, the placeholder counts up, so a sixty four character example reads as 0123456789abcdef four times over. Armoured blocks show their opening line, their closing line, and a bracketed marker where the body would be. There is no key material, no signature material, no transaction identifier and no credential of any kind on this site, and there is nothing here to copy and use.
The addresses above
The three Awazon market addresses sit above the article on every page, with a button beside each one. They are printed as the site owner supplied them, unordered and unnamed, because putting them in an order or attaching a word like main to one of them would be a statement about them, and this reference makes no statements about them.
It also makes no measurements. Nothing here opens an address, requests anything from it, or records what happened, so there is no availability percentage, no indicator light and no date of most recent contact on any page, and there never will be. The format rules that apply to those strings are written up at the onion address, and the page at the Awazon market addresses says what this reference does and does not do with them.
The edges of this manual
This is a reading aid and nothing else. It cannot inspect anything on your behalf, it holds nothing, it reaches nothing, and it has no way to affect an account, an order or a message. It is written independently of the market and carries no advertising, no paid placement and no affiliate arrangement. There are no accounts, no cookies, no forms and no tracking on it.
No figure anywhere on the site is a measurement. Where a number appears it is a property of a format, such as the fact that a Monero address is ninety five characters or that a fingerprint is forty hexadecimal digits. Those numbers come from the formats themselves and can be checked against any independent description of them. Nothing has been counted, sampled or estimated here, and no date, name, quotation or figure has been invented to fill a gap. Where a format is set by the market and not published anywhere, the card says exactly that instead of guessing at it.