[Warning] wrong network. $180 gone. test with $5 first.
Sent USDC on the wrong chain. Vendor's address was correct, the network was not. The funds exist, they are just somewhere neither of us can reach without the vendor doing work they have no obligation to do. They were sympathetic and unable to help, which I believe. Nobody scammed me. I typed a thing into the wrong…
Sorry, genuinely. This is the most common irreversible mistake in the whole space and it is not a knowledge failure — everyone in this thread knows the chains are different. It is an attention failure, and the fix has to be procedural rather than cognitive.
My procedure, for whatever it is worth: paste address, confirm network in the wallet UI out loud, send $5, wait for the vendor to confirm receipt on their side, then send the balance. It has caught one error in two years, which paid for every $5 test I have ever done many times over.
"out loud" sounds ridiculous and i am going to start doing it.
it is the same trick pilots use. saying it engages a different bit of your brain than reading it does.
counterpoint on the $5 test specifically: on some chains the test costs more in gas than the crypto discount you are chasing. at that point pay by card and stop optimising.
this is the arithmetic nobody does. the discount is real and so is losing chargeback rights and so is the gas. three numbers, and people only ever hold one.
irreversible is the word to keep in your head. every other property of these payments is downstream of it.