AWazon Market mirrors

An .onion address is not a domain. There is no registrar, no DNS record, no whois page that can confirm it. All there is, is the string itself: 56 characters, lowercase letters and digits, and then the .onion. Retype it and you almost certainly change one character, and one changed character is a completely different address, owned by whoever generated it. That is why the addresses above come with copy buttons, and why the last six characters are highlighted.

The last six characters

Before you press enter, look at your address bar and count backwards: the final six characters must match the blue ones, and nothing else. A full 56-character comparison takes thirty seconds and is the only comparison that really counts; do it the first time you open an address you found somewhere. The tail check catches most typos, because typos cluster at the ends of long strings.

One market, three doors

The three addresses open the same storefront. Same listings, same sellers, same account, same wallet balance. There is no main mirror and no backup mirror: the routes through the Tor network are different, so one address may load quickly while another crawls, and that difference says nothing about which one is "the" market. If one entry point sits in the queue for a long time, open the next one. Your account follows you, not the address.

Keep the .onion in the address bar

Viewer sites exist that render .onion pages under their own domain, so a market address appears as a subdomain of an ordinary website. Convenient, except the site in between sees everything you send and receive. For browsing, it is a gamble. For a wallet, it is not. In Tor Browser the address bar shows the full .onion address and nothing in front of it. If you see a market URL sitting under a foreign domain, close the tab and open the .onion directly.

If an address stops resolving

Markets can rotate an address when they change their keys, and a rotated address simply stops opening. A typo fails instantly with a "did you mean" page; a rotated address fails with a timeout. The two look different and fix differently: one is fixed by re-copying, the other by waiting for a new set. How to tell which is which: when the address will not open.