Check any balance yourself

All of this rests on one ability: looking up an address yourself, on a source you picked, without asking anyone. It takes about thirty seconds, and it's the difference between believing a claim and checking one.

A block explorer is a website that reads the chain and shows you what's there. Paste an address and you get the balance and every transaction it has ever made.

There are several for each network, run by different people. They should all agree — that's the check. If two disagree about an address, something is wrong with one of them, and you want to know that before you act on either.

Use one whenever someone shows you a number. A screenshot proves nothing: screenshots are trivial to edit, and a wallet interface can be made to display anything. The address is the fact. Ask for it, look it up, and you've replaced a claim with an observation.

That includes us. When Aureus shows you a balance, paste that address into an explorer and you should get the same figure. If you don't, we're wrong — and we'd rather you found out that way than took our word for it.

One thing to know before you draw a conclusion: an explorer shows you one network. An address can hold things on several at once, and an explorer for one of them tells you nothing about the others. “I looked and there's nothing there” isn't the same sentence as “there's nothing there”.

Aureus has the same limit and says so on every read. We read Bitcoin and Ethereum. We name the networks we didn't read, and the two nobody can read from an address at all — Monero and Zcash.

A partial picture labelled partial is honest. The same picture labelled complete isn't.