A handle is a search term before it is a label
The condition covers one field on one form. The string you type there is what the market will call you, and it is also something anybody can paste into a search box. Those are the same fact seen from two sides. So it has to be a string that has never been attached to you anywhere else: not on a forum, not in a game, not in the front half of an email address. A variation does not count as new.
Reuse joins two identities together at no cost to whoever is looking. They need no access and they break nothing, and they do not have to be looking for you in particular, because the string does the work. Whatever gets joined stays joined, since the join was made by the characters and not by any system you can log in to.
The timing is the unusual part. At the moment of choosing, this condition is free, because every unused string is as easy to type as the one you already use elsewhere. A minute later it is fixed. The old name stays wherever it was already indexed, and abandoning the new account removes nothing from that side of the join.
Free at the moment of choosing and not repairable afterwards. Most conditions here can be fixed late at some cost. This one closes. See Roots and endings.
What has to be settled about the address first
One card sits above this one: You can tell a mirror from a copy of the market. It supplies the identity of whoever receives the name. Registration is the first moment you hand anything over, and the name is the first thing handed. If the address merely looks like the market, all that care was spent handing a clean string to somebody you did not choose.
That card has a chain of its own behind it, including The string has the shape an onion address has and The security level was set before the first page loaded. The run of conditions standing behind a username is longer than it looks from the form, and easier to see all at once on the Dependency map.
The three cards that take the name as given
Everything else in this stage inherits the name without questioning it. Each of the three cards below is a record or a capability belonging to an account, and an account is identified by its name. If the name is wrong, none of the three is wrong in itself and all three are worthless, which is a much harder failure to notice.
| Cannot hold | The reason it cannot |
|---|---|
| The password exists somewhere outside your head | A stored password is half a pair and the name is the other half. Filed under a handle you will abandon, it opens nothing. Filed under a handle you use elsewhere, it files this account with the rest of your life. |
| You can produce the second factor on demand | Enrolment binds a factor to one account. Abandoning the account discards it and forces the decision again on a second registration, in a hurry, which is when people enrol something they cannot reproduce. |
| The recovery phrase is written down before it is wanted | A phrase recovers a named account. Recorded without the name, or against a name you later drop, it is inert, and there is no second showing in which to correct the label. |
The password case is the one people get backwards. The name is not a detail. It is what the record is filed under, and what makes the record usable at a login form months later. A reused handle also drags the store itself into the join, since this account now sits under the same label as ordinary services.
The phrase card is the least forgiving of the three, because its material appears once. A phrase captured perfectly and filed against the wrong name is a page of words you cannot use, and you learn that on the day it is the only thing left. Past all three the stage funnels into You can log in a second time, where the rest of the map waits. A name failure does not cost a username. It costs a session rebuilt from the beginning.
If the name has to be abandoned, the password record, the second factor and the recovery phrase all have to be made again on a new account, while the old one stays standing where anybody who ran the original search can read it.
What a reused name does after you press the button
On the screen, nothing. The form accepts the name. There is no warning, no colour, no message and no later notice. Many failures on this map announce themselves in some form, even when the announcement points at the wrong cause. This one is silent by construction, because whoever benefits from it is not on your screen and has no reason to tell you.
What happens instead happens elsewhere. Somebody copies the handle from a public page, pastes it into a search, and gets whatever it has been attached to over the years: old posts, an abandoned profile, a question you asked in another context. This is also why the confusion lands in the wrong place. People look inside the account, and there is nothing wrong with the account. There is no error message at all, so there is nothing to misread. If this is false collects the other conditions that fail without producing a visible event.
Searching the candidate while it still costs nothing
The check runs before you take the name and uses only what you already have. Put the candidate into an ordinary search, in quotes, then again with the separators removed. Then search your own material: the password store, the mail archive, the file names on the machine in front of you. A pass is nothing coming back and no recollection of ever using it. A fail is anything coming back, including a near miss and a result that is not you but would be read as you. Not being sure is also a fail. The cost of a fail is thinking of another string, and none of this touches either address on Onion addresses.
One join closed, and the ones it leaves open
This is not a claim that a fresh name makes you unidentifiable. It closes one join, the one made by a string. The adjacent card people confuse it with is The browser doing this does nothing else, which closes a different join, made by the browser rather than by the name. A new handle written in your usual phrasing, at your usual hours, about your usual subjects has changed the label and nothing behind it.