Reference
Words
Several of these are used loosely everywhere else, and the looseness is where most bad reasoning about this subject gets in. Here each one means one thing.
Terms used on this site
| Onion address | Fifty six characters computed from a public key. Cannot be reassigned by anybody, and proves nothing about who holds it |
| Published set | The addresses a market currently has in circulation. A statement about circulation, not about safety or reachability |
| Vanity prefix | Opening characters chosen deliberately by generating keys until one matches. Seven of the nine markets here do it |
| Near miss | An address matching the recognisable opening of a real one and differing in the middle. What people mean by a cloned address |
| Rotation | Retiring an address and publishing another. Routine, unannounced, and it does not reverse |
| Escrow | Funds that move only when two of buyer, vendor and market sign. The market is a tiebreaker, not an owner |
| Finalise early | Releasing escrowed funds before delivery. The one action on an order that nobody can undo |
| Market fee | Goes to the platform, set by the platform, usually a percentage plus something fixed |
| Network fee | Goes to whoever confirms the transaction, priced by transaction size rather than by value |
| Confirmation | One block built on top of the block holding your transaction |
| Credited | The market deciding to treat a deposit as real. Different from the network having seen it |
| Regional market | One presented to a country or language rather than to everybody. One entry here |
Two worth extra care
Verified is used here in one narrow sense: a signature checked against a fingerprint gathered independently beforehand. It does not mean an address that opened, an address somebody recommended, or an address that appeared on a list. All three get called verified elsewhere, which is exactly why the word needs pinning down.
Mirror is used loosely everywhere, including here, to mean another address reaching the same market. It does not imply a separate copy of anything, and a market being reachable at five addresses says nothing about how the thing behind them is built.
Phrases with nothing inside them
| If you read | Ask |
|---|---|
| Official mirror list | Official compared to what. No authority exists that could grant it |
| Verified daily | By whom, against which fingerprint, and published where |
| 99 percent uptime | A measurement claim, and whoever measures has to say with what |
| Trusted market | Trusted by whom, on what evidence, with what at stake |
| Best for beginners | A column being filled. Ask what was measured |
| Scam free | An assertion about the future made by somebody with no way to know |
None of those prove bad intent. They are claims with no content, and noticing an empty claim is a much cheaper skill than evaluating a full one.
Words this site avoids
Dark web, which names no network and describes nothing technical. Deep web, which properly means anything a search engine has not indexed and is mostly bank statements and intranets. Both turn up in the way people search, so they appear in a page title here and there, and neither is used to build an argument, because neither is precise enough to carry one.