Reference

Darknet market glossary

The words you meet in every thread about a market, written without the jargon. If you came from the BlackOps Market thread and a word stopped you, it is defined here.

Network

Onion address (hidden service)

A .onion address that only Tor can open. BlackOps Market runs three of them, and all three sit in the block at the top of this page. If the address you have does not match that block, something is wrong.

v3 onion

The current generation of Tor addresses: 56 characters long, faster and more stable than the old v2 format. All working market addresses you will see from now on are v3.

Circuit

The chain of three relays (guard, middle, exit) that your traffic travels through. "New Circuit" in the menu means Tor has built a fresh chain for the next connections.

Guard node

The first relay in your circuit. Tor reuses the same guard for many sessions so that an observer cannot see you starting from a different place every time, which would make your movement pattern stand out.

DDoS

A flood of packets aimed at one address until it stops answering. With a market that has several mirrors, a DDoS usually closes one door while the rest keep working.

Tor Browser

The browser from the Tor Project (torproject.org). It is the only reliable way to open .onion addresses; everything else is a gateway with its own risks.

Money

XMR / Monero

The privacy coin. RingCT hides the amount of a transaction and stealth addresses hide who receives it. Monero is the default currency of BlackOps Market.

Stealth address

A one-time receiving address inside Monero. Every payment gets its own, so two different orders never share a visible destination.

RingCT

The Monero technology that encrypts the transaction amount. On-chain you see that money moved, but not how much.

Internal swap

Converting BTC or LTC into XMR inside the market instead of using an external exchange. The rate is shown at checkout, right before you pay.

Escrow

The order money sits with the market until you confirm you received what you bought. Disputes are settled from escrow, which is why you confirm only after checking the delivery.

Deposit address

The address you pay to for a specific order. Take it only from the payment page in your account; screenshots and forum posts can be stale or fake.

Recovery phrase

The 12 words that belong to your account. The market does not store them, so if you lose them the account is gone. Write them down somewhere offline.

Trust

PGP

A key pair (public and private) used for signing and encryption. On the market it powers 2FA login and encrypted correspondence.

PGP fingerprint

40 hex characters that identify a public key. Two keys can share a name, but only one has the right fingerprint; that is how you tell the real one apart.

PGP 2FA

Login by challenge: the market sends a code encrypted with your public key, and only your private key can read it. Whoever has the private key has the account.

PGP-signed post

A forum post with a signature you can check against a known key. BlackOps Market signs its address rotation announcements this way, so a post with a bad signature is not from the market.

Dread

A forum inside Tor (dreadditeblldkuy.onion) where the market keeps an official subdread. Rotations, outages and statements appear there first.

Subdread

A section of Dread, the same idea as a subreddit on Reddit.

Trust on first use

The first key you meet is accepted on faith, straight from the first post; from then on you check every new signature against that fingerprint. Get the first one right and the rest is verifiable.

Vanity address

An address generated to start with a specific string. All three BlackOps Market addresses begin with "blackops". Generating one is expensive, which is why clones bother to copy only the prefix.

Clones and access

Phishing clone

A copy of the market page on its own address, waiting for you to log in. It can look identical, but it cannot put your real address in your browser's bar.

Clearnet gateway (tor2web, .onion.watch)

A service that shows an onion site in a regular browser. The gateway sees your traffic, and clones live on gateways, so treat anything loaded through one as untrusted.

Anti-DDoS gate

The clearnet stub page that says "Checking Your Browser" before it passes you to the onion. It reloads itself until the check is done.

Opsec

The practice of not letting the small details of your behavior add up into a portrait of you: window size, reused passwords, separate wallets for market use.

Tails / Whonix

A live OS and a VM pair that keep Tor isolated from the rest of your machine. A good option for sensitive sessions, not a requirement.

Clearnet

The regular internet, as opposed to Tor. Everything outside the onion namespace lives here.

Came from the thread and want to go deeper: verify the address you have, read the phishing notes, or open the FAQ.