Where Nexus links come from
Nine channels deliver almost every Nexus address in circulation. They fail in different ways and they fail for different reasons, so knowing which one you are looking at tells you what to worry about.
Why grade sources at all
Because people already grade them, just badly. Everyone carries an intuition that a well known directory is safer than a random forum post, or that a link from a friend beats a link from a search result. Those intuitions are not stupid. They track something real about how likely a source is to be careless.
What they miss is that carelessness is not the threat model. The threat is somebody deliberately placing an address where you will find it, and a channel with a good reputation is a better place to put one than a channel with a bad reputation. Reputation makes a source more attractive to attack, not less.
What the grades mean
| What it proves | The honest answer to what arriving through this channel establishes about key ownership. For almost every channel the answer is nothing, and saying so plainly is more useful than grading on a curve. |
| Risk if trusted alone | How badly it goes when somebody skips verification and acts on this channel by itself. Severe means the channel can harm you even when the address is genuine. |
| Safe use | What the channel is actually good for. Most are fine as a starting point and dangerous as a conclusion. |
The catalogue
Each page covers how the channel works, the specific attack it enables, how it fails when nobody is attacking, and what to do with something you found there.
| Channel | What it proves | Risk alone | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search results | Nothing | High | Ranking measures links and clicks, never key ownership. |
| Link directories | Nothing on its own | High | A list is only as current as whoever last touched it. |
| Forum posts | Nothing | High | Accounts are bought, borrowed and taken over. |
| Chat and messaging | Nothing | Severe | No market runs support or announcements there at all. |
| Wikis and community lists | Nothing | Moderate | Open editing means the last edit decides what you read. |
| Archives and caches | What was true then | Moderate | A faithful copy of a page that has since expired. |
| Clearnet onion gateways | Nothing | Severe | The operator makes the request and sees everything you send. |
| Someone you trust | Nothing | Moderate | Honesty is not the same as having checked. |
| Paste and dump sites | Nothing | High | Anonymous, undated, unattributable by design. |
The pattern across all nine
Read them together and one shape repeats. Every channel is good at distribution and none is capable of authentication, because authentication requires a key and a channel only carries text. No amount of editorial care, moderation, reputation or curation changes that, and channels that imply otherwise are the ones to be most careful with.
Which means the work does not happen at the source. It happens on arrival, once, in a way that does not care which channel you came through. That is the whole argument for spending your attention on the check rather than on picking a better list.