The paragraph said so and the colour did not

Not the paragraph. The owner of this site looked at two rows and asked a question the ledger had no way to answer: there is no commission showing at either provider, so are you sure there was a payment?

That is the whole of it. The evidence that those fees had not been earned was not in the system that displayed them — it was the absence of money in two accounts somewhere else. A panel reporting its own revenue was less reliable than noticing that none had arrived.

An hour before that question, reading the same two rows, I had called them the first real revenue through the new providers and quoted the total. The caveat was six inches above the number I was quoting. I had read it that same afternoon.

The record is written when an exchange is created, inside the route that creates it, immediately after the provider returns an order — and an order is a deposit address and a promise, not a payment. Everything on the row at that moment is derived from what somebody asked for: the amount they typed, the rate quoted, and the cut that would be due on it.

Writing it there is the right call, and the reason is in the same paragraph: the amounts are the ones actually applied, rather than reported back afterwards by a client that could say anything. The mistake was not where the row was written. It was calling a column of projections earned and painting it the colour of money received.

Once the question was asked, the row turned out to be silent about more than payment.

The third is the one that surprised me. The site's cut rides as a second output in the transaction this app signs. When somebody pays the deposit address from their own wallet — which is the recommended way, and the only way on a routed transfer — there is no such transaction, so there is no output to attach a fee to. A self-paid exchange can be entirely successful and earn nothing, by design.

An older row in the same table shows it plainly: marked self-paid, and its fee column empty. The ledger had been recording the right thing all along in the one case where it had the information.

Four states, derived from whatever the provider last said, rather than the provider's own vocabulary:

A fee counts as earned at complete, and only when every real leg of a run reached it — all of them, not any, because a plan whose first leg settled and whose second was abandoned has earned one cut and not two. Everything short of that is grey and says due, not earned. The column heading is now just “Fee”, because the old one was asserting a thing the data could not support.

A status nobody heard counts as open, deliberately. Silence means nobody listened, and an order with no evidence of payment belongs with the unpaid ones rather than the finished ones.

The fix shipped, and it gated the fee column on whether the cut had been earned. It did not gate the column beside it, which shows the same fee converted to dollars.

So for an hour the panel showed, on one row, for one fee: a grey figure labelled due, not earned, and immediately to its right the same money in green. The dollar column is the one anybody reads first.

Caught the same way as the first time — the owner looked at it and asked why the colours disagreed. Two for two, by looking.

The caveat was not useless. It was true, it was specific, it named the exact failure, and it was positioned where someone reading the panel from the top would meet it first. It still did not stop the person who wrote it from misreading the table underneath, an hour after reading it.

A paragraph is read once. A colour is read every time, by everyone, without deciding to. Where the two disagree, the colour wins — so a limitation that matters has to be built into what the thing looks like, not documented above it. The check that replaced three comments was the same lesson in a different place, and it did not transfer.

Figures and behaviour read from this site's own admin and source on 13 October 2026. The specific exchanges that prompted it are not described here beyond their shape; what is published is the defect and the fix. Whether those two orders were ever paid is still unknown at the time of writing — the providers can be asked, and the answer will not change the part worth writing down.