There is no account on this board. No email address, no password, no login page and no user table. A listing is owned by whoever holds its claim token, which is a random string shown to you exactly once, at the moment the invoice is created.
That is a genuinely different trade from a normal service, so here is the whole of it: what it protects you from, what it costs you, and what happens when it goes wrong.
What is actually stored
A SHA-256 hash of the token. Not the token.
That means the board can check a token you present and cannot produce one. It cannot email it to you, because there is no email address and nothing to send. It also means a seized or leaked database does not let anybody take over a listing, because the hashes in it are not tokens and cannot be turned back into them.
What that buys you
Nothing to be approved for. You are a link and a token, not a record. There is no account to be suspended, locked out of or reviewed.
Nothing to hand over. An account that was never created cannot be produced under any kind of order, which is a stronger guarantee than a promise not to produce it.
Nothing to leak. The most sensitive thing about most services is the user table. There is not one here.
What it costs you
You can lose it. That is the trade, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
If you lose the token, nobody here can look it up, reset it or verify you some other way over email, because the other way over email does not exist.
The way back
There is one, and it does not involve us knowing who you are. Ownership of a listing is treated the way a registrar treats a domain: whoever controls what the listing points at controls the listing.
So a recovery is proved against the destination, not against a person, in one of three automatic ways:
- DNS. Publish a given TXT record on the domain the listing points at.
- A file. Serve a given string at a given path on the site.
- A page. Put a given string in the page the listing points at.
Any one of those, checked automatically, replaces the token and ends the old one by using it.
For the cases none of those reach, an onion service somebody cannot easily add a DNS record to, or a page that only renders in a browser, there is a by-hand route. It is deliberately slow and deliberately loud: the request is announced on the listing itself for 72 hours before it can be answered, so whoever actually holds the listing has time to object by simply using their token, which ends the request. The decision, either way, is published.
Keeping the token
Treat it the way you would treat a wallet seed, because the security properties are similar.
- Save it the moment it appears. It is shown once and then it is only a hash.
- Put it in a password manager, not in a browser tab you will close.
- It is per listing, not per person. Two listings, two tokens.
- Raising a bid on your own listing uses the token to prove it is yours, so you
will want it before you want to move up.
If that sounds like more responsibility than a password, it is. What you get for it is a service that cannot lock you out, cannot lose your data, and has nothing about you to give away.