Common questions about Tor, onion addresses, Monero, PGP and how the shops work. Short answers, one per question.
A long string of random letters and numbers ending in dot onion. It is the address of a site that lives only on the Tor network. You paste it into Tor Browser and it opens. A normal browser cannot open it at all. The address is long on purpose so that nobody can guess or fake the short way.
A free browser made by the Tor Project. It looks like Firefox because it is based on Firefox, but every request you make goes through the Tor network so the site you visit does not see your real address. You install it once and that is the whole setup. Without Tor Browser the onion links on this site do not open.
A second onion address for the same shop. Mirrors exist so that when one address gets attacked or slows down, people can switch to another one and keep using the shop. Your account, balance and orders look the same on every mirror because they all lead to the same back end. A new shopper sometimes thinks mirrors are separate shops, they are not.
The middle step between you and the seller. You send the money for an order to the shop and the shop holds it while the seller ships. When you confirm that you got what you paid for, the shop releases the money. If you do not confirm, the order finishes on its own after a few days. If you dispute, a moderator decides. The whole point of escrow is to make sure the seller cannot run with your money before you get the goods.
Short for multi-signature. Instead of the shop holding your money alone, the deposit needs more than one key to move. The usual setup is two of three keys, where the buyer holds one, the seller holds one and the shop holds one. Any two of them can release the money. This means the shop alone cannot exit-scam with the deposits because two keys are needed and they only hold one.
A coin that hides the sender, the receiver and the amount in every transaction. It is the privacy default on Tor shops. If you do not have a strong reason to use a different coin, this is the one to pick. The downside is that fewer exchanges sell it than they do Bitcoin, so you may need to figure out where to buy it locally.
The original cryptocurrency and still the one most people have. Every transaction is public, which means anyone watching the chain can follow the money. On a Tor shop, Bitcoin works fine but it is not private. Most buyers use it only when the seller does not take Monero.
A forum on Tor where dark web shoppers and shop operators post and read. When a shop changes its onion address, the announcement usually shows up there first. People go to Dread to see if a mirror is real, to read shop drama, and to argue about which markets are still trustworthy.
An old way to encrypt messages. On Tor shops PGP is the way you send your real shipping address to the seller without anyone in the middle reading it. You make a key once, paste your public half into your account, and the shop does the encryption for you when you check out. The seller decrypts with their key on their end.
The puzzle you solve at the login screen. On a real shop the captcha image carries the real onion address inside it, so you can compare what you typed against what the picture shows. If those do not match, you are on a fake copy of the shop.
A waiting page that the shop puts in front of the login screen. It holds you for a short while, usually under a minute, before letting you through. The shop does this so that attacks and bots cannot pile up on the captcha. If a mirror sends you straight to the login without a wait, the page is fake.
The seller. On Tor shops vendors run their own listings, pick their own shipping options and answer their own messages. Every vendor profile shows the number of orders they have finished and the share of disputes they lost. Read both before placing an order. It takes a minute and saves a lot of trouble.
When the buyer releases the money to the seller before the order actually shows up. Some shops let trusted vendors ask for FE, others never do. Doing it for a vendor who has not earned it is the easiest way to lose your money.
Monero is the coin most Tor shops want. Buying it without handing over your ID takes one more step than buying Bitcoin on Coinbase, but the step is not hard once you know which service to pick. Read the full guide.
Phishing onions look exactly like the real one because nobody remembers 56 random letters. The fix is not memory, it is a PGP signed announcement. Verifying one takes about a minute. Read the full guide.
Tor Browser out of the box is safe enough for reading the news. For anything you would rather nobody link back to you, spend five minutes on the settings below. Read the full guide.
Tor Browser hides your traffic. It cannot hide your operating system. For anything more than casual browsing on Tor you want the OS itself to be the sandbox. Three options: Tails, Whonix, and Qubes with Whonix. Read the full guide.
Classic escrow means the shop holds your coins alone. When a market exits, the shop wallet leaves with everyone. Multisig turns that single point of failure into three. Read the full guide.
Every year a few more ways get closed off. Every year some new ones show up. This is what still works in 2026 without giving anyone your ID. Read the full guide.
A fake mirror will look identical to the real one down to the pixel. It has to, or nobody would type their password. The tells are almost never visual. Read the full guide.
Every serious market operator says theirs is different. Most of the time they mean it. Almost none of them stayed different for long. Read the full guide.
The star rating is almost useless. Everything you need to know is a level down, in the shape of the reviews and when they were written. Read the full guide.
Vendors ask for FE because they want the money now. Buyers say yes because they are new and think being polite matters. Both of those are bad reasons to give up your only safety net. Read the full guide.
Most people who get caught do not get caught by the shop or by law enforcement breaking Tor. They get caught by mistakes on their end. Ten habits fix nine tenths of it. Read the full guide.
