My saved address still works
My saved address still works, so it is still fine
What a retired address is worth to somebody else
Think about what an address that served for two years has that a fresh phishing domain does not. It sits in old forum posts, archived pages, unmaintained directories, 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 for free. 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 the mechanism
Two different things get called this and only one is possible.
| Possible? | |
|---|---|
| Taking over the exact address | No, absent a key compromise. The address is derived from a private key and serving traffic there requires holding it. |
| Standing up a near miss | Yes, and cheaply. Generate keypairs until one matches the first several characters, and let the middle differ. |
The second is what you will encounter. Matching four or five opening characters takes minutes on an ordinary machine. Matching seven or eight takes days and is still entirely practical. Matching the whole thing is impossible, which is why every forgery has a familiar start and a different middle, and the middle is the part nobody reads.
The five second habit
If you are going to spot check rather than paste and compare, check characters twenty through forty. That is the region a forgery differs in, and it takes exactly as long as checking the ends. Better still, paste both strings somewhere that reports an exact match, because human comparison of random characters is unreliable no matter how carefully it is done.
Base32 as used here excludes visually confusable pairs by design, so an address that looks slightly off genuinely is off. That is never a font problem.
The rule
An address that stopped working and later starts working again has not recovered. Nothing retired returns under the same string, so something resembling it is answering under different ownership. Close the tab, delete what you saved, and take a current address from a published list. This is the same shape as the claim about a platform coming back, and it catches experienced people far more often than beginners.