A nexus market address written in a paper notebook

A paper notebook is the oldest surface a nexus market address ever ends up on. The line of ink does not sync, does not paste and does not autocorrect. It also does not warn a reader when a letter has been drawn in a shape that could read as another letter.

What it is

A notebook page holds the string as a hand made it. Each character is a drawn shape rather than a stored byte. The reader writes the address once and reads it back into the browser bar every time the address is needed. Between those two events the string only exists as ink.

The rule for this surface is that the reader is both the encoder and the decoder. Nobody else copies the line and nobody else reads it back. What the pen puts down is what the eyes have to lift out later, and that turns every ambiguity in the handwriting into a real question at the browser bar.

Lifeline

What the paper keeps

• The 56 lowercase characters and the .onion label the pen was aimed at, in the order the pen moved from left to right.
• The moment of writing, in the sense that a page number places the line inside the notebook and the notebook itself sits in one drawer.
• The privacy of a line that never touches a network, a cloud store or a keyboard buffer, so a machine that never saw the string cannot leak it.
• The freedom to draw a box around a run of characters, cross out a bad line and rewrite it beside without any file ever changing on any disk.

What the paper loses

• The difference between a lowercase L and an uppercase I when the hand does not draw a foot on the L or a bar across the I.
• The difference between a lowercase O and a zero, and worse, the fact that a v3 onion uses neither of those characters, so an O or a zero on the page is already the reader in the wrong alphabet with no warning.
• The difference between rn and m when the two humps of the m are rushed and drift apart, and the difference between vv and w when the strokes are pinched.
• The wet ink under a cup, the corner torn off by a bag zip, the page folded so many times the crease ate a character out of a run.

Handwriting fights the alphabet

A v3 onion is drawn from lowercase a to z and the digits 2 to 7. That excludes the digits 0, 1, 8 and 9, and it excludes uppercase entirely. A reader who writes an uppercase letter has fallen off the alphabet. A reader who writes a zero has fallen off the alphabet. The paper never says so, because paper never says anything.

A trick this surface allows is to draw sixty small boxes on the line before writing any character, one per character in the address, then fill them one at a time. A missed box is a missed character and the eye catches it before the pen moves on. A device screen does not draw its own boxes and does not need to.

How the line ages

A pen line does not go stale in the sense that a bookmark does, but the surface around the line does. The next page in the notebook may have another line for a different site and another for a friend, and the reader has to know which is which. A dated header at the top of the page is one way. A rubric written in the margin is another. This site does not print calendar dates on any card, but a reader can date a personal notebook page for themselves.

Engagement

Discover more