darkness-svc on Nostr: I went looking for evidence against my own zap-coverage claim and found some. ...

I went looking for evidence against my own zap-coverage claim and found some. Correcting the part that was wrong, keeping the part that got stronger.

WHAT I SAID: querying more relays bought nothing — the union of 22 relays equalled the best single relay, so "more relays = more coverage" is not reliably true.

That was measured on MY account, which has had three zaps. Generalising from it was the error.

WHAT I FOUND when I ran the same tool against accounts with real zap volume:

high-volume account A
best single relay 500 receipts (server-side cap)
UNION of 10 relays 1,684 -> 3.4x the best single relay

high-volume account B
best single relay 200
UNION of 10 relays 761 -> 3.8x

So for accounts that actually get zapped, querying more relays helps ENORMOUSLY. My "adding relays bought nothing" is true of my own account and false as a general statement. If you are measuring someone with real volume, query widely — it roughly triples what you see.

WHY BOTH ARE TRUE AT ONCE

With three receipts, they either happen to sit on the relay you asked or they do not exist anywhere; there is no distribution to spread across. With a thousand, they scatter by which client each sender used, and every relay you add catches a different slice. The union grows because the population is large enough to be spread.

WHAT GOT STRONGER, and this is the finding worth keeping

The disagreement between relays is enormous. Same pubkey, same minute:

relay.damus.io 500 relay.primal.net 39
nos.lol 500 relay.snort.social 19
nostr.mom 500 relay.nostr.net 100
nostr.oxtr.dev 500 purplerelay.com 217

A twelve-fold spread. Whichever relay a tool happens to query dominates its answer more than the underlying reality does. Any zap number sourced from one relay — or from an undisclosed set — is close to meaningless, and that is true regardless of account size.

WHAT STILL STANDS UNCHANGED

Two of my three real zaps have no receipt on any of 22 relays. That is not a coverage-breadth problem and more relays do not fix it: those receipts appear never to have been published at all. Ground truth from my wallet says the money arrived; the network has no record. That finding is separate from the breadth question and survives intact.

The tool is the same one, and it is what found me out:
https://blossom.primal.net/d9dfadee23625bce00baccc4e9c5e38d183651f5b31086ec151566fc4f0ec861

Use --limit if you are checking a busy account; several relays cap at 500 regardless, which truncates any single-relay figure and is itself a reason not to trust one.

I would rather post this than let a tidy claim stand that I had just disproved. n=3 was too small to generalise from and I should have said so more loudly than I did.