Zion How long it takes

Ground rules

The two addresses

Two strings, published as they were given. Nothing on this site has opened either one, and this page will not tell you that either of them works.

Both strings, as supplied

These are reproduced character for character in the order they were given to this site. Neither is labelled, numbered or preferred over the other, because ranking them would be a judgement nobody outside is positioned to make.

markz73ffpnbidkldppsj5cjnkfujdsy3rkpi5inqw3ikt4omwsldlqd.onion
zionm3fshzgd5pin3yrc5ueltoykozprcsggrgbl6b3dzbpdtfphv2id.onion

Nothing on this site contacts either string. There is no uptime figure here, no status light and no last checked date, and their absence is deliberate rather than an oversight.

What an address of this kind actually is

A string of this shape is not a name that gets looked up in a directory somewhere. It is derived from a key held by whoever runs the service, and that is the whole of its usefulness. Reaching it means your client and the service arrange to meet somewhere neither of them controls, along a path built from both ends.

The practical consequence is that the address proves one narrow thing: that whatever answers it holds the corresponding key. It proves nothing about who that is, what they intend, or whether the thing behind it is what you were expecting. Those are separate questions and no lookup answers them.

The other practical consequence is that these strings are long and unmemorable by design, which is why reading the string again is a card on this site and why it is the cheapest wait in the whole register relative to what it prevents.

What this page does not do

Why they appear on every page

The two strings sit above the article on every page of this site rather than only here and in the footer. That is a deliberate choice about how people actually arrive. Someone who lands on a card about a stalled screen from a search result should not have to navigate anywhere to see what this site publishes.

It also makes a point about what this site is. It is a register of waits, and the addresses are context rather than the product. There is no page here whose purpose is to hand you a link and stop.

The waits that touch an address directly

What the two strings have in common

Both are the same length and both end the same way, which is not a coincidence and is not a security property either. It is simply what strings of this generation look like. Anything that claims to be an address for this market and is a different length is not a shortened version of one of these. It is a different string entirely.

Both are also case insensitive in practice, and neither contains a character that could be confused with a digit in the alphabet they use. That removes one class of transcription error and leaves the far more common one, which is a substitution somewhere in the middle that your eye slides over.

Neither string tells you anything about capacity, location, ownership or intent. Two addresses can lead to the same place, to two copies of the same place, or to two entirely unrelated things, and nothing in the strings themselves distinguishes those cases. That is why this page describes them and stops.

Copying them without breaking them

Each string above has a copy button next to it. The button puts the exact string on your clipboard with nothing attached: no trailing space, no protocol, no punctuation from the sentence around it. That matters more than it sounds, because a trailing character produces a failure that looks exactly like an address that is not answering.

If you copy by hand instead, select the whole string in one movement rather than in pieces. Selections assembled from several drags are where a missing character comes from, and a missing character in the middle of a string this long is close to invisible.

Whatever you paste it into, read it back once before you press enter. That habit is the subject of its own card, and it is the only wait on this site that is worth making longer on purpose.

A note on searching for more

The moment one address stops answering is the moment people go looking for another, and it is also the moment they are least careful. A search result that appears while you are frustrated is not a better source than one that appears while you are calm, but it will be treated as one.

This site does not publish anything beyond the two strings above and has no view on any other list. If you take one thing from this page, take the habit of deciding in advance what you will accept as a source, rather than deciding it while you are locked out.

What this card is not. This page is not a directory and not a link checker. It publishes what it was given and declines to characterise it further.

Everything on this site