Payment and settlement

How this class fits together

Payment splits into a decision, a path and a protocol, and the documents here follow that order. The decision is which coin settles the order, and it is treated separately because it is the only choice in the archive whose consequences are permanent rather than situational. A public ledger entry cannot be edited or aged out, and its usefulness to somebody reading it later can grow rather than fade as surrounding data accumulates.

The path covers custody, which is the requirement that funds pass through a wallet under your own control before reaching an order. This is one extra step and it is the difference between a payment and a straight line from an identity checked account to a marketplace. The same document covers recovery material, because the seed that restores a wallet is the part people lose and the part no service can replace for them.

The protocol covers what happens after funding. Deposits behave predictably once you know that confirmations take time and that a fee deducted rather than added produces a shortfall, and those two facts account for nearly every deposit that appears not to arrive. Escrow then holds the payment until release conditions are met, and the one action that voids it is described plainly, because a policy applied without exception is easier to hold than a judgement made under pressure from a counterparty.