The screen before the login page

What the screen is

The screen is a gate in front of the hidden service, not a page inside it. It exists because a raw onion address is easy to reach and hard to prove, so the market puts a small check between the address and the login form. The check is a short puzzle, usually a line of characters to read off an image and type in, and it is the same kind of thing a captcha is, only quieter.

The reason it is there is the same reason the market is a hidden service. The address is public and the login is not, and a gate that costs a phisher a minute and a human five seconds is worth more than it looks. It is the cheapest layer in the stack and the one people underestimate most.

How to pass it

1. Read the challenge exactly as it is shown. The characters are not a word and they are not case sensitive in the way a password is, so type them as they appear, not as you would spell them.
2. Submit. If the screen refreshes with a new set, the first attempt did not register and the second is a fresh one, not a penalty.
3. If the screen does not change at all, the circuit is the likely cause, and a new tab on a new circuit clears it more often than a reload does.

The mistake that locks people out

The one that costs the most time is solving the challenge on the wrong page. A clone that copied the address and the gate but not the store will pass the challenge and then show a login form that is not the market’s, and the challenge clearing is what makes the clone feel right. The check is the address bar, not the gate. The gate proves the page is alive. The address bar proves it is the right one.

The second is giving up on a screen that is only slow. A fresh circuit takes a moment to build, and the gate waits for it. The restart is the wrong answer to a delay, and the right answer is a new tab, not a new opinion about the market.