A short statement of the subject, the method and the boundary, so you can tell in a minute whether this site is any use to you.
Awazon Shapes is a manual of formats. Its subject is the strings, blocks and files a person runs into around Awazon Market, treated purely as arrangements of characters.
Every entry answers the same four questions about one format: what it must look like, how to check that by eye without software, what a wrong version indicates, and what a correct version leaves unresolved. The fourth question is the reason the site exists.
The subject, stated exactly
Five families divide the material. Addresses covers hostnames, links and the identifiers attached to them. Keys covers armoured blocks, fingerprints and the lines that hold them together. Money covers wallet addresses, amounts, phrases and transaction identifiers. Session covers the short lived strings a site hands you and the ways time gets printed. Files covers names, hashes, listings and message blocks. The complete list is on every shape on this reference.
The edges of the subject
Several things sit next to this material and are deliberately absent from it.
- No guidance on using any market, and no description of how to do anything on one.
- No ranking, scoring, review or comparison of markets, vendors or services.
- No prices, no availability, no news, no events and no dates on which anything happened.
- No security advice tailored to a person or a situation, and no legal commentary of any kind.
- No links off this site, and no naming of companies, projects, forums or organisations. Open formats are named because a format is a rule rather than a body.
How the reference is made
It is written independently. There is no connection to the market it describes, no arrangement with anyone who operates or uses it, and no channel through which anyone could ask for a change to a page.
There is no advertising here, no affiliate relationship, no paid placement, no sponsored entry and nothing that earns anything from a click.
There are no accounts, no cookies, no analytics and no tracking of any sort. Nothing about a visit is collected, so nothing about a visit can be stored, shared or lost.
Where the numbers come from
No figure on this site is invented, and no figure is measured either. Every number printed anywhere here is a property of a format: a character count, a symbol count, a number of lines, a number of decimal places, a permitted word count.
Numbers of that kind are checkable. You can hold a string against the rule and see for yourself, which is the only sort of claim this reference is prepared to make. It publishes no observation of any system, no rate, no percentage and no total of anything that exists in the world.
The distinction matters most on the addresses. Three are printed at the head of every page and nothing is attached to them: no status, no figure, no moment of contact. The policy behind that, and the reasoning for it, is written out on the Awazon market addresses.
Who the pages are written for
The reader assumed throughout is somebody who already has a string in front of them and wants to know whether it is intact. Not somebody choosing what to do, and not somebody being introduced to a subject.
That assumption shapes the writing. Cards start from the format rather than from an explanation of why the format exists, procedures are short enough to run while looking at a screen, and nothing is repeated from one card to the next, so a reader who arrives at a single page through a search still gets the whole of that page rather than a summary of the site.
It also sets the tone. Nothing here recommends, warns off, endorses or ranks, because none of those is a statement about a format and all of them would require knowing things this reference does not know.
The example strings
Apart from the three Awazon addresses supplied by the site owner, every string printed on this site is manufactured so that it is obviously unusable: it spells out the word example, runs on the letter x, or counts up through the hexadecimal digits, and armoured blocks show only their opening and closing lines with a marker where the body would be.
The reason is that a reference full of realistic keys and realistic wallet addresses becomes, over time, a source of realistic keys and realistic wallet addresses, quoted by people who did not notice where they came from. The full rule and its notation are on how to read a card here.
What a reading aid cannot do
This is a document. It has no capabilities and the following are outside them entirely.
- It cannot check anything on your behalf. Every procedure here is one you run yourself, on your own screen, on a string you already hold.
- It cannot tell you whether a particular string is genuine, current or connected to anyone in particular. That reasoning is set out on what a shape proves, and where it stops.
- It cannot recover a lost key, a lost password or a lost phrase, and nothing written here brings any of them back.
- It cannot restore access to an account, reverse a payment, retrieve an order or intervene in a dispute.
- It cannot contact anyone for you, and it holds no address, channel or identity through which anyone could be contacted.
Disagreeing with a page here
Every rule stated on a card is checkable against the format it describes, which is the point of stating rules rather than conclusions. Where a card and a real string disagree, the card is the thing to distrust first: formats acquire variants, and a reference written at one moment will not have all of them. Read the card as a description of the common case and treat anything it does not mention as unexamined rather than as forbidden.