What you can observe, and what each thing is worth
Mars market mirrors
marshjhtog245vzjzcicnmv2ci6yljibvdm4pngq5kmkfvcutppboxad.onion
marsiujka6lrsaqpnxiwvknthhzsrlmq77mnl2fi62guc4lwxif65syd.onion
marsmtbwtxkohhpu34m4jkwcntian7n257wsex5tbkmsjdjrsz6me3yd.onion
Printed as supplied, in no order. Nothing here is watched or timed, so an address that opens is not proof of anything. More about the set
Attribution runs on evidence and most of the evidence available here is weaker than people treat it as being. This page lists what can actually be observed and says plainly what each observation supports.
The observations
| Observation | What it supports | What it does not |
|---|---|---|
| A page fails to load | Something in a long chain did not work | Nothing about the market. At least five causes |
| Every published address fails | Either a shared condition or a shared cause | Still not proof of a market state. Repeat over hours |
| A page loads slowly | Nothing on its own | Test another onion service before concluding anything |
| A page loads perfectly | Your path worked at that moment | Nothing about anyone else, and nothing about ten minutes from now |
| A transaction on a chain | Genuinely strong. A third party recorded it | Says nothing about whether the market has looked |
| A tracking reference exists | Somebody created a label | Nothing about whether an item was handed over |
| A tracking scan exists | Strong. A third party physically handled something | The first real evidence in the whole postal chain |
| A message appears in your sent view | It reached the market | Nothing about whether anybody read it |
| A signed message verifies | The holder of that key wrote that text | Nothing about whether the text is true |
| A vendor profile is missing | A state changed | Cannot distinguish moderation from departure |
| A site looks exactly right | Somebody produced a convincing page | Nothing at all. Appearance is the cheapest thing to copy |
The strong ones
Three items on that list are worth more than the rest, and they share a property. A transaction on a chain, a physical scan and a valid signature are all records made by somebody other than the two parties in the dispute.
That is the whole reason they are strong. Everything else on the list is either a claim by an interested party or an inference drawn from an absence, and absences are the weakest evidence there is.
The trap of repeated weak evidence
Ten failed page loads are not ten pieces of evidence. If they all went through the same client, on the same connection, within the same hour, they are close to one piece of evidence repeated.
Independence is what makes evidence add up. Two failures separated by a day, on different networks, using different addresses, tell you far more than fifty attempts in an afternoon. Most people generate the fifty and believe they have built a case.
What is never available
- Whether an onion address is reachable for anybody other than you.
- Whether a service is up in any general sense, since up is not a single fact.
- Whether a message was read, as opposed to delivered.
- Why a moderation decision was made.
- Whether an item that was never scanned ever existed.
- Whether a coincidence was a coincidence.
Every one of those gaps gets filled in by somebody, confidently, somewhere public. The filling is invention, however reasonable it sounds, and it is worth recognising the shape of it.
Writing evidence down
Two minutes of notes at the time beats an hour of reconstruction later. Times, amounts, exact wording, what you did and in what order. Memory reorganises itself to support whatever conclusion you have since reached, and it does this without telling you.
This matters most for vendor cases, where a dispute may need dates, and least for network cases, where the whole thing usually resolves itself before there is anything to record.