The moving parts, in plain terms
A darknet market is a shop, a vault and a judge in one. The shop is the hidden service, the vault is the escrow, and the judge is the dispute process, and the three only work because they are separate from the person holding the coins.
The shop
The storefront is a hidden service, a web server that only answers through the onion layer. There is no IP address to map and no domain to look up, which is the whole point of the onion. The buyer reaches it through a routing path, not a location, and the path is the part that can fail without the shop knowing.
The vault
The escrow is the vault. The coins do not go to the vendor, they go into a script that needs two of three keys to spend. The buyer, the vendor and the market each hold one, and a clean order is buyer plus vendor, so the market is not in the loop. The vault is what makes a stranger’s promise enforceable without a stranger’s trust.
The judge
The dispute is the judge, and it is the market’s key acting as the tie breaker. It is the part people underestimate, because it is the market’s own machinery deciding a question about the market. The escrow page has the window and the proof, and the review has the honest account of where the judge can be wrong.