The words
Several of these are used loosely everywhere else, and the looseness is where a lot of bad reasoning gets in. Here they mean one thing each.
Terms this collection uses
| Word | What it means here |
|---|---|
| Onion address | Fifty six characters computed from a public key. Cannot be reassigned, proves nothing about who holds it |
| Published set | The addresses currently in circulation. A statement about circulation, not about safety |
| Near miss | An address matching the recognisable opening of a real one and differing in the middle |
| Fingerprint | A short hash of a public key, comparable by eye. The thing you pin. The key file itself is disposable |
| Replay | Presenting a genuine old signed statement as current. Works because signatures never expire |
| Escrow | Funds that move only when two of buyer, vendor and market sign. The market is a tiebreaker, not an owner |
| Delivery window | The period after which non arrival becomes meaningful and a dispute becomes appropriate |
| Finalise early | Releasing escrowed funds before delivery. The one action on an order that cannot be undone |
| Gateway | A service that fetches onion pages for an ordinary browser and therefore reads everything you send |
| Queue | A holding page that admits visitors at a controlled rate, because a hidden service cannot filter by identity |
| Confirmation | One block built on top of the block holding your transaction |
| Swap | Software on your own machine replacing an address between the copy and the paste |
Two worth extra care
Verified is used here in exactly one sense: a signature checked against a fingerprint you collected independently. It does not mean an address that opened, an address somebody recommended, or an address that appeared on a list. All three of those are routinely described as verified elsewhere, which is 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 being reachable at ten addresses says nothing about how the thing behind them is built.
Phrases that carry no content
| 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, published where |
| 99 percent uptime | That is a measurement claim, and whoever measures has to say with what |
| Trusted vendor | Trusted by whom, on what evidence, with what at stake |
| Secure escrow | Escrow is a mechanism, not an adjective. Ask what has to sign |
None of those prove bad intent. They are simply claims with nothing inside them, 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.