Every statement in one table
The whole site on one screen. Bucket first, then the claim in the form people usually say it. Follow a link for the reasoning and for the part that says what would move it.
ALWAYS
| Statement | In short |
|---|---|
| An onion address is 56 characters | The encoding fixes the length |
| There is no 0, 1, 8 or 9 in it | Base32 uses a to z and 2 to 7 |
| Upper and lower case are the same address | Case is discarded before lookup |
| The address is the key | Not a name pointing at a key |
| Every character carries equal weight | No part of it is a checksum you can eyeball |
| Each mirror is its own key | Three addresses, three keypairs |
| An onion link resolves only inside Tor | No public DNS record exists |
| A signature proves who signed and that the text is unchanged | And nothing else at all |
| A payment outside escrow has no process behind it | There is nothing to appeal to |
| A confirmed payment cannot be recalled | No sender-side reversal exists |
NEVER
| Statement | In short |
|---|---|
| A retired address comes back later | The same string will not be reissued |
| Support exists outside the market | There is no external help desk |
| Something legitimate asks for a recovery phrase | The request itself is the tell |
| A screenshot proves something | It proves an image was made |
| A search result confirms an address | Ranking is not verification |
| The first few characters confirm the address | Prefixes are cheap to reproduce |
| The padlock icon tells you the site is right | It describes the transport only |
| A wrong address warns you it is wrong | There is nobody to raise the alarm |
| A page can tell you an address is up right now | It can only tell you about the past |
DEPENDS
| Statement | Depends mainly on |
|---|---|
| A deposit takes about twenty minutes | Fee, mempool, confirmation policy |
| You need three confirmations | Coin, amount, current policy |
| A slow page means the site is dying | Circuit, load, your own network |
| One mirror is better than the others | Your circuit at that moment |
| Disputes go the buyer's way | Evidence, timing, what was claimed |
| An old account is a safe account | What the age is measuring |
| The fee is a fixed percentage | Which fee you mean |
| A refund comes back as what you sent | What was held and in what unit |
| You have to use PGP | Which step you are on |
| Lost access can be restored | What exactly you lost |
Reading the table
The right column is a compression, not a summary. It is there so you can scan. Several of the DEPENDS rows have four or five variables and only the loudest one fits in a table cell.
If a row surprises you, the page will say why in its first two paragraphs. The disagreements people have with this table are almost always about a different statement than the one written down, which is why each page opens by pinning the wording.
The counts
Ten in ALWAYS, nine in NEVER, ten in DEPENDS. The balance is not deliberate and it is not meaningful. It is what came out of applying the rule to the claims that were common enough to bother sorting.
If anything the DEPENDS column is undercounted. Several statements that sit in ALWAYS or NEVER have a conditional cousin that people confuse them with. An address is 56 characters, always. Whether a particular 56 character string is the one you want, entirely conditional. The table lists the statement, not the cousin.
What is missing
Anything that needs data we do not have. Whether the market is busier than it was, how many vendors are active, whether shipping times have got worse. Those are all real questions and every one of them would need us to be logged in and counting, which we are not.
Also missing, deliberately, is anything about the current state of any awazon mirror. That belongs to no bucket because it is not a statement, it is a reading, and readings go stale between the moment they are taken and the moment you read them.