Nexus market mirror, first onion

This is the dossier for the first nexus market mirror listed on this site. The string is the top line of the panel above, and it is the address the site prints first on every other page too.

What it is

The first line in the panel above is a v3 onion address. It is the nexus market mirror the operator of this site pinned first when the site was written. The order the addresses are printed in is not a ranking, so first here means first on the list, not best on the list. The dossier below reports only what the string itself carries.

A v3 onion address is a fixed shape. Fifty six characters of lowercase letters and base32 digits, then a dot and the four letters that read onion. The last part of the string is a checksum the tor browser can verify without asking a server. The first few characters are the vanity prefix, which the operator ground for. Everything between is drawn from the public key of the hidden service.

Lifeline

Shape of the string

Length

56 characters before the .onion label. That is the fixed length of a v3 onion, not a claim about this string.

Letters

47 lowercase letters in the string. The reader can count them for themselves in a text editor with word wrap turned off.

Digits

9 base32 digits in the string. Every v3 onion is drawn from a-z and 2-7. Any other character in a paste is a signal the paste picked something up.

Vanity prefix

The first characters spell a short readable run before the checksum body of the address begins. The reader can see it above. The vanity prefix is what makes this address recognisable in a hurried glance.

Checksum tail

The last two characters before .onion read yd. That pair is not decorative, it is the end of the checksum. If a paste drops those two characters the tor browser will not open the address at all.

How to read this string with your eyes

Read the string in three parts. The first eight or nine characters are the vanity prefix, which spells a short recognisable run. The middle forty odd characters are the checksum body, which reads as noise on purpose. The last two characters are the checksum tail.

A reader who wants to recognise this address from a paste can look at the first block and the last two characters and skip the middle. A reader who wants to recognise a lookalike compares the middle block character by character, because that is the block a lookalike gets to fake up freely without paying the mining cost of the vanity prefix.

Engagement

What this card does not say

• It does not say the mirror is up right now. This site never probes an onion, so no card here can put a status light next to a string.
• It does not say the mirror is the fastest of the three, or the safest, or the newest. Speed is a property of a circuit, not of an address.
• It does not say when this string was first written down. A calendar date under any part of this card would be a claim about freshness the site is not doing the work to earn.
• It does not link the string to any operator handle. The dossier is about the address, not about the person who runs the market.

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