Darknet Market Glossary: Terms Explained
The vocabulary of a Tor market is small, but the words mean specific things, and guessing wrong about one of them has cost people real money. This is the working glossary, defined in plain language with the detail that matters.
The core terms
- Onion address
- The long string that identifies a hidden service on the Tor network. A v3 address is fifty six characters before the
.onion. It is generated from a key pair, which is why it looks random and why a single changed character is a different site entirely. - Mirror
- Any of several onion addresses that open the same storefront. Mirrors are equal. There is no main and no backup. They exist so that if one path is congested or blocked, another works. The set rotates over time.
- Escrow
- The mechanism that holds a buyer's payment until the transaction is complete. On Awazon it is a two of three multisig contract, meaning the funds are released only when two of three keys sign, and no single party holds them alone.
- Multisig, 2 of 3
- A scheme where three keys exist and any two can spend. The buyer, the vendor and the platform each hold one. In a normal sale the buyer and vendor sign and the platform key never moves. In a dispute the platform key becomes the tiebreaker.
- PGP
- A public key encryption system. On a market it backs two factor login, encrypts order messages, and signs the operator's announcements. Verifying the operator's PGP signature is how you tell a real announcement from a phisher's copy.
- Mnemonic seed
- The list of words that restores an account. Generated once at registration and shown once. It is the only recovery path, so it belongs written down, outside the machine you log in from.
- Dusting
- Sending tiny amounts of a coin to a wallet to mark it, so that later transactions from that wallet can be linked back to the marker. It is a chain analysis technique that matters more on Bitcoin than on Monero.
- Access queue
- The loader a market shows when traffic is high, telling you to wait and not refresh. It flattens traffic spikes. Refreshing resets your place in line, which is the one mistake that makes it worse.
- Captcha
- The challenge on the login page that separates a human from a bot. On Awazon it is a small visual puzzle with a countdown. Passing it first try is about reading the instruction carefully, not about speed.
- Descriptor
- The data a hidden service publishes so that Tor clients can route to it. You do not handle it directly, but it is the reason an onion address resolves to a working service rather than nothing.
Terms that cause mistakes
Three words deserve extra care because misunderstanding them is expensive. A deposit address is chain specific, so sending the wrong coin to it loses the funds. A confirmed deposit is credited after the chain reaches the confirmation count the market requires, and it is not the same as a withdrawal arriving. And a verified address means you have checked it against a source you trust, not merely that it loaded. Loading is not verifying. That distinction is the whole defense against a fake mirror.