Equivalence

What this section covers

A reader who moves between WTN market links wants to know one thing above all: is this the same place. The answer has two halves and most writing gives only the first.

The first half is that the things you would worry about losing are shared. An account is one account. An inbox is one inbox. An order record does not belong to the address it was created from. The second half is that several things people assume are shared are not, and every one of them can produce a moment that looks alarming and is not.

1. One account, reachable from any of the threeAn account belongs to the market, not to the address you created it from.
2. The inbox is one object, seen from three routesMessages do not belong to the address you were on when they arrived.
3. An order does not belong to the address it came fromThe case where the answer matters most, and where the fear is strongest.
4. A balance is not held per addressOne figure, three views of it, and one common reason the views disagree.
5. The circuit is yours, not the address'sThe path your traffic takes belongs to your attempt, and nobody else can measure it.
6. A session does not follow you across addressesThe account travels. The state of being signed in does not.
7. Checks at the front door are per routeAnything that guards an entrance guards that entrance only.
8. Where the sameness stopsThe boundary drawn once, with both sides of it named.

What the word mirror is doing

The word is borrowed and it is not exact. A mirror in the older sense of the term was a copy of a set of files kept somewhere else. These are not copies. They are additional ways of reaching one thing, which is why the studies here keep using the word route.

The distinction matters because a copy can be out of date and a route cannot. That single difference removes a whole family of worries, and the study on a mirror not being a backup is where it is argued out.

The honest limit of this section

This site cannot see inside the market and does not claim to. What it can do is reason from what the arrangement is: three published addresses offered as routes to one market. If they were not routes to one thing, they would not be mirrors and the word would be wrong.

So the claims here are claims about what follows from the arrangement, not reports of anything measured. Where that reasoning runs out, the studies say so rather than filling the gap.