What this page is and is not

The page, plainly

The page carries the three published onion addresses, the short set of instructions that people search for before a first visit, and the pages that explain the escrow, the coins and the security. It does not carry a login form, a balance or an order history, and that absence is deliberate. A page in front of a hidden service that still asks for a password is a page that can hand that password to somebody who is not the market, and the one page that avoids that trap is the one that is safe to keep open.

The addresses are compared against the operator’s signed announcement and the date under the list is the day of that comparison. When the operator retires an address and publishes a new one, the list is updated within an hour of the post, and the date moves with it. A list that is a few months old will not match, and that is normal, not a fault.

Why it is on the open web

A hidden service is only as findable as the address, and the address is a 56 character string that does not appear in a search box. The open web page exists to close that gap, to be the thing that shows up when someone types the market’s name into a browser that is not the Tor one. It is a bridge, and a bridge is only as good as the fact that it does not collect the things it is not supposed to.

The tradeoff is that a page on the open web can be read by anyone, including the people who read it for the address. That is the price of being findable, and it is why the page keeps the login form out of it and the verification in it.

How to reach the people behind it

There is no office and no phone number, and the contact is a PGP encrypted message, which is the same arrangement as the market itself. The contact page has the key and the address, and the replies come back on the same channel, which is the point of using it.