Questions, answered

Any of them. The three .onion addresses open the same market: the same storefront, the same account, the same wallet. There is no main one and no backup one. If one loads slowly or sits in the queue while another one gets through, that is the state of the route, not of the market. Open the next one and keep the first tab if you like; whichever finishes first is the page you use.

Two delays stack up, and both are structural. Tor routes every connection through three relay hops, which is slower than a direct line by design, and the market meters its entry through a queue on top of that. A working visit to the market regularly takes a minute from blank tab to storefront. A page that loads in two seconds is, on this market, the one you should doubt first.

Not for the market to work. Tor already hides your destination from your network, and a VPN in front of it changes little about the visit. The one thing a VPN does add is hiding Tor usage itself from your provider, which some people want on a watched network. Optional, not required; the market does not see which you chose.

Onion viewer sites can render .onion pages under an ordinary domain, so the market can be read without any install. The catch is the gateway: the viewer sits between you and the market and sees everything that passes. For a look at the listings, that may be acceptable. For a login, a wallet, or an order, the address bar should show the .onion itself, which only a Tor browser does.

Probably nothing. The timer starts when the picture begins to load, and on a slow line the picture loads slowly, so the timer is already half gone before the circles are visible. Look for the single circle with a clean break in its outline, click it once, and do not click again. If a picture times out twice in a row, wait a moment for the line to settle and let the next one load fully before moving.

No. The account screen shows the balance the moment you log in; nothing on the market sits a fee between a user and their own numbers. A paywall over the balance is how a copy announces itself, usually with an urgency sentence attached. Close the tab, re-copy the address, check the last six characters, and start again. The real entry always runs the queue first.

The market runs in the Tor Browser app for Android, and the layout adapts to a narrow screen. The queue, the captcha, the login, the orders: all of it behaves the same as on a desktop. On iOS, Tor users run the market through a compatible browser on the Tor network; the addresses in the list are the same either way.

That is a gateway, a site that proxies .onion pages. The market you are looking at may well be the real one; the problem is the middleman, which reads everything you do. Close the tab, open Tor Browser, and paste the full .onion from the list. When the address bar shows the 56 characters and the extension, nothing is between you and the market.

Any market can rotate an address when it changes its keys, and a rotated address stops resolving without notice. If one address dies while the others still work, it is a route problem or a typo: check both. If all three die at once, with correct spelling and a working Tor browser, that is the signature of a rotation, and a new set of addresses exists by then. How to check a new one when it appears: the five-point check on the verify page.

By behavior, in the end. A real address resolves only inside Tor, runs the queue, asks the circle question, and only then shows the store. An address that skips to a login or a fee has found its victim early. For the mechanical part of the check: 56 characters, no gateway in front, last six characters matched against the list. The full procedure is on the verify page, and it takes under a minute.