A link on the ordinary web
When you type a normal web address, a chain of systems turns the name into a machine. A registry says who owns the name. A name server says which address it points at. Any link in that chain can be changed by whoever controls it, which is why names can be sold, seized, expired and redirected. The name is a label attached to something, and the attachment is administrative.
That is why ordinary web addresses are short and readable. They were chosen by people, from a namespace, and the whole system exists to let humans use words instead of numbers.
A TorZon onion link
The strings on this site work the other way around. Nobody chose them, nobody assigned them and no registry has a record of them. Each one is a public key written out in base32, and the service that answers on it is the service holding the matching private key. The address is not a pointer to the service. It is a statement of which key the service must have.
That is the source of every strange property these strings have. They are 56 characters long because that is what the key plus a checksum plus a version marker encodes to. They contain no 0, 1, 8 or 9 because those four digits are not in the alphabet. They all end with the same character because the version marker is constant. None of this was designed for humans and none of it is negotiable.
It also means a TorZon market link cannot be redirected by a third party. There is no registry to lean on and no name server to poison. What can happen is that you are given a different address, and that is a completely different attack. It works on you rather than on the system, and no amount of cryptography helps if you accepted the wrong string in the first place.
What that means for checking one
Since the address is the key, the only thing worth checking about a string is whether it is the string you meant to have, character for character. There is no partial credit. An address differing by one character in the middle is not a slightly wrong version of the right service. It is a completely unrelated address that either answers or does not.
This is why the practical advice on this site is so narrow. Copy the whole thing. Do not retype it. Do not trust the first six characters. Do not trust a resemblance. Every one of those shortcuts substitutes a small check for the only check that works.
| Property | Ordinary web address | TorZon onion link |
|---|---|---|
| Who assigns it | A registry | Nobody, it comes from the key |
| Can be transferred | Yes, administratively | Only by handing over the private key |
| Can be redirected by a third party | Yes, at several points | No |
| Readable by design | Yes | No, 56 characters of base32 |
| Length | Varies | Fixed at 56 before the suffix |
See the twelve published links
Questions
Can a TorZon market link expire?
Not in the way a domain expires. There is no renewal and no registry. An address stops working when the service behind it stops running, and the string itself remains valid forever in the sense that nobody else can be given it.
Why is a TorZon link so long?
Because it contains a full public key rather than a chosen name. The length is what the key encodes to and cannot be shortened without breaking the property that makes the address useful.