- How often
- Every few weeks, straight after comparing your list.
- How long
- Seconds.
- What it prevents
- Pasting a retired address months later, on a distracted evening, when it has a new owner.
- If you skip it
- Your file slowly fills with strings that are more dangerous than useful.
- How you notice you stopped
- The file has entries you cannot date and cannot account for.
What a retired address is worth to somebody else
Think about what an address that served for two years has that a fresh imitation does not. It sits in old forum posts, archived pages, unmaintained lists, bookmarks and screenshots. People recognise it. Some recognise it well enough to skip checking, because it looks like the one they have always used.
Whoever answers there inherits every bit of that without doing anything. No ranking to build, nobody to convince. They wait for traffic that was already heading there, and that traffic is disproportionately people who trust the string because they remember it.
Being precise about what is possible
| Possible? | |
|---|---|
| Taking over the exact address | No, absent a key compromise. Serving traffic there requires the private key it was derived from. |
| Standing up a close resemblance | Yes, and cheaply. This is what you will actually encounter. |
So the thing answering is a near miss: a familiar opening, sometimes a familiar ending, and a middle that differs. That is the whole reason the middle is where you look.
Delete, do not archive
An address kept in an old entries section, or commented out, or moved to the bottom of the file, is an address you might paste months later. The point of pruning is that the string stops existing in a place you can reach in a hurry. Keeping a record that a rotation happened is fine. Keeping the string is not.