The address set changed and nobody told you
An address that opened last month refuses to open now, and every other site in the browser is fine. This is one of the few situations where the market really is the author of what happened.
Operators add and drop onion addresses for reasons that are entirely their own. Load spreading. A key they no longer want to use. A machine being retired. From the outside, all of these produce one identical outcome, which is a string that used to work and now does not.
- Responsible
- The market. An address was retired or replaced by a deliberate act on their side.
- Usually blamed on
- Tor, for being flaky, or the reader own setup, which gets reinstalled needlessly.
- What follows
- Re-source the set from wherever you originally got it. Reinstalling software fixes nothing here and wastes an evening.
Why an address cannot simply come back
Each onion address is a public key written out in base32. The service proves it owns the address by holding the matching private key. If the operator stops using that key, the address is not turned off in the sense a domain is turned off. It becomes an address that nothing in the world can answer for.
There is no registry to appeal to and no transfer to arrange. This is why a retired address is a permanent state rather than an outage, and why waiting for it to return is a way of spending time rather than a plan.
What the reader sees
| Message | What it narrows down |
|---|---|
| Onionsite not found | The client could not obtain a descriptor for that key at all |
| Onionsite has disconnected | A descriptor exists but the introduction points did not answer |
| Invalid onion address | The string itself is malformed, which is a different case entirely |
| A long hang and then nothing | Ambiguous, and the least informative of the four |
The first two are consistent with a retired address and also with several network conditions, so neither one proves this case on its own. The third one points straight back at the string being mangled before it reached the browser.
Why the network gets blamed instead
Because a retired address and a network problem produce the same screen, and the network is the more familiar culprit. Everybody has had a slow Tor evening. Almost nobody has watched an operator rotate keys, because that is invisible by design.
There is a second reason, which is that blaming the network suggests waiting, and waiting is easier than the alternative. The alternative is going back out to find the current published set, which involves judgement and a little risk.
What follows from getting it right
You stop waiting. You also stop treating a rotation as a sign that the market is in trouble, which is a bad inference that leads people to panic sell positions, close accounts or move somewhere worse. An operator publishing several addresses and moving between them is doing ordinary maintenance.
The habit that helps is holding more than one address in advance. A reader with a set of three does not experience a rotation as an emergency. A reader with one experiences every rotation as the end of the world.
What this site publishes
marshjhtog245vzjzcicnmv2ci6yljibvdm4pngq5kmkfvcutppboxad.onion
marsiujka6lrsaqpnxiwvknthhzsrlmq77mnl2fi62guc4lwxif65syd.onion
marsmtbwtxkohhpu34m4jkwcntian7n257wsex5tbkmsjdjrsz6me3yd.onion
Printed as supplied and in the order supplied. This site does not probe them, does not time them, and cannot tell you whether any of them answers right now. See what this site does not do.