Tor Onion Guides
A short, plain-English handbook for people who use Tor hidden services and want the practical mechanics of how they actually work. No marketing copy, no scare stories. Just the underlying structure and the habits that make it usable.
The handbook is four pages. Read them in any order.
The Guides
Why a v3 Onion Address Validates Itself
What a fifty-six character onion address actually encodes, why a single wrong character breaks the address rather than landing you on a near miss, and what the protocol does to enforce that.
How Tor Hidden Service Mirrors Are Rotated
Why services publish a small set of addresses instead of one, how operators introduce a new address without breaking continuity, and what the rotation looks like from the user side.
Two of Three: The Multisig Contract Behind Modern Marketplaces
What 2-of-3 multisig escrow does in plain words, why the platform’s key alone cannot move the money, and what the structure changes for the people who use it.
Funding a Tor Service: Bitcoin, Monero, and Litecoin Compared
Three coins, three different trade-offs. When each one is the right pick, what each one costs you, and what the privacy properties actually are.
External References
- Nexus Market directory - a working example of a maintained mirror directory for a Tor marketplace.
- Verifying onion addresses on Medium - companion piece on the user-side verification workflow.
- Onion mirror rotation on Telegraph - companion piece on why services publish multiple addresses.
- Tor Project overview of onion services - the protocol-level documentation from the Tor Project.
This handbook is opinionated about practice and neutral about marketplaces. The guides are written to make the underlying mechanics legible, not to recommend any particular platform.