Holding value against holding the right value
This card separates two things that feel like one. Having value available is one condition. Having it in the denomination the order is actually priced in is a second, entirely independent condition, and satisfying the first says nothing about the second. A holding that cannot pay the order is not a partial success. For the purposes of this stage it is the same as an empty one.
The denomination is not yours to pick. It is a property of the listing and of the receiving side, decided before you arrived. Your side is a comparison: read what is being asked for, look at what you have, and see whether the names match. If they do, the card is satisfied. If they do not, there is a gap, and the whole content of this condition is about when that gap gets closed.
The answer is before, not during. Converting between denominations is a movement of value, and movements take as long as they take. That would be an inconvenience and nothing more, except that the gap usually becomes visible at the point a quote appears, and a quote comes with a window that does not pause. So the gap has to be closed while nothing is running, in a period whose length nobody but you is setting. Closing it inside a window means racing a clock with a movement whose duration you do not control.
The two things this card is standing on
a wallet exists and the keys are yours supplies the ability to act on what you find. Discovering a denomination gap is useless if you cannot move anything, because closing a gap is a movement and inherits every restriction on movement. Under somebody else's custody the conversion may be offered as a convenience, and it will then happen when they permit it and at the size they permit, which is a different arrangement from being able to do it now.
you can log in a second time supplies the information. You cannot know what the order is priced in without being inside the account, looking at the listing, which is why this card cannot sit purely in the value stage. It needs a durable session, because reading the requirement once and acting on it much later is not enough. That parent also carries the listing is one you have actually read, and the denomination is exactly the kind of specific that card exists to make you notice.
With both parents true, this card costs nothing to satisfy. It is a comparison of two names, made at a moment when no timer is running.
What the wrong denomination stops
One card hangs directly beneath this one, and the block is complete rather than partial.
| Cannot hold | The reason it cannot |
|---|---|
| there is something left over for the fee | A margin has to be a margin in a particular denomination. A surplus held in some other one is not a surplus at all, and the fee cannot be paid out of value the transfer will never touch. |
The fee card asks whether the amount plus the fee is covered out of the same pot. That question only makes sense once the pot has been identified, and identifying the pot is what this card does. Fees are paid in the denomination the transfer is made in, so a comfortable holding elsewhere contributes nothing. When this card is false the fee card is not merely at risk, it is unaskable, and any answer you give yourself describes a quantity that is not the one being spent.
Below that sits the total is covered at the moment you press the button, and the way the failure reaches it is worth stating precisely. That card is about several conditions being true at once. A denomination gap does not simply make one of them false. It makes one of them slow, and slowness is the specific poison for simultaneity. The moment you begin a conversion you have introduced a step whose completion is not yours to set, inside a window whose expiry somebody else has set. Two clocks with different owners are running against each other and you hold neither.
There is a knock-on further along. the deposit address came from the session you are in wants a destination used immediately, and a conversion in progress is the most common reason a destination gets written down and used later. The gap does not appear on that card in the graph, but it is a reliable way of breaking it. if this is false follows the same pattern across the rest of the map.
A conversion started inside a running window will either finish too late to be useful or finish into a quote that no longer applies. Neither outcome is recoverable inside that window.
Converting against a clock somebody else started
Skipping this begins uneventfully. You have value, you have read enough of the listing to know what you want, and you proceed. The denomination is written somewhere on the way through and does not register, because at that point it is one label among many and looks like a formality.
It stops looking like a formality at the point of paying. A figure appears, a destination appears, and something indicating the offer will not last. Now you look at your wallet and find the wrong name on it. Most people start a conversion and hope it lands inside the window, which produces a distinctive mess. The value is briefly in neither place, the window expires while it is in flight, and you come back to a page that has moved on, holding the right denomination for an offer that no longer exists. What arrived from the conversion is newly arrived, so the balance has confirmed and can be spent is now in play as well. The original error is two cards away from the symptoms and everything on screen points at the market.
Reading two names before anything starts
Read the denomination the listing states. Read the denomination your wallet holds. Compare the names, not the amounts, and do it while nothing is quoted and no window is open. A pass is that the two names are the same and you can say so from memory of what you just read. A fail is any of these: you are not sure, you are thinking about which holding you would convert, or you are counting on being able to convert quickly. Uncertainty is a fail, because the cost of being wrong lands during a window and the cost of checking lands now.
A useful second question: if you already hold the right denomination, do you hold enough of it in that denomination alone, ignoring everything else you own. If the answer requires adding two holdings together, the card is not satisfied yet.
No opinion here about which coin
This page recommends nothing and compares nothing. Which denomination is used is decided on the other side and communicated to you, and your only task is to match it. Matching it also makes no payment correct in any other respect. how to read a card sets out why the map keeps that kind of question out.