Why Your Saved .onion Bookmark Went Dead

The bookmark you saved six months ago stopped opening, and the first thought is that the market closed. Usually it did not. What happened is almost always one of three things, and all three have the same fix.

The most common cause is rotation. Markets change their onion address on a schedule or in response to pressure, and when they do, the old address stops resolving. The market is still there, at a new address, and the old one is simply retired. The second cause is a flood, where the address is temporarily overwhelmed and will answer again in a few hours or a day. The third, the rare one, is an actual shutdown, and you can usually tell because the market said so in advance.

The fix for all three is the same. Do not trust the dead bookmark and do not hunt for a replacement through a search result. Go to the market's own published list of addresses, copy a current one, and confirm it before you log in. If the market is healthy, one of its published addresses will open, and you will be back in with the same account and the same balance. The bookmark was never the market. The market is the operator, and the operator publishes where to find them.

The habit that prevents this from ever feeling like an emergency is to save the list, not a single address. Keep all of a market's published addresses together, in one place you can reach without the market itself, and update that list whenever the market announces a change. Then a rotation is a copy-paste, not a scavenger hunt, and the moment you would have been searching for a replacement, which is the moment a copy of the site is waiting, is a moment that no longer arrives.

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