addresses ยท post 06 of 7 in this channel
Copy the WTN market address, never type it out
There is a copy button beside each of the three addresses above. It is there because hands are bad at this and machines are good at it.
the three wethenorth market addresses
hn2paw7zfvndw3dovycegeqmvvnf4pl67b3g2p7pohjlzavloosh73id.onionhn2paw7zrgujyhnt6mgxlt2q6uhgbke4itpqitxhyfbumq3wtnckbuyd.onionhn2paw7zadwkcra3qzv5e4q547i7e5lvxm62cfxqftuqdu7moiu2ceyd.onionprinted the way they were handed over. no labels, no numbering, nothing here says which one to try first. this feed never opens them, so it has no status light, no percentage and no date of checking to give you.
the arithmetic of typing
Fifty six characters, no words, no rhythm, nothing your fingers can predict. Every single character is an independent chance to be wrong.
You do not have to be careless to get one wrong. You have to be human, once, at character thirty one, while thinking about something else.
The failure is quiet, too. Nothing flashes. You will not feel the moment it happens, which is why people who are certain they typed it correctly are wrong about as often as people who are not.
and there is no forgiveness in the string
A wrong character does not take you to a slightly wrong version of the market. Onion addresses carry a checksum, so most single character errors produce something the browser refuses outright.
That is the good outcome. The bad outcome is the small fraction of typos that land on a string somebody else already owns, and you will not be told that is what happened.
so copy it
Use the button. It puts the exact string on your clipboard with nothing added and nothing dropped. Then paste it. Do not paste and then tidy it up.
If you are moving addresses between your own devices, move them as text you copy and paste, not as something you read off one screen and type into another. Reading from a screen and typing is just typing with extra steps.
the place a clipboard habit goes wrong
Clipboards are not private. Plenty of systems keep clipboard history, sync it between devices, or expose it to whatever app is in front of you.
That is not an argument for typing. It is an argument for knowing what your clipboard does. If it syncs to somewhere you did not think about, that is worth knowing before it holds a market address rather than after.
what to do after pasting
Check the length and the tail, using the chunking method in the post on reading an address. It takes seconds and it catches the case where something in the middle of the journey mangled your paste.
Watch out for anything that helpfully turns a pasted string into a link, adds a space, or trims what it thinks is trailing whitespace. Chat apps and note editors both do this, and neither tells you.
That is the whole discipline. Copy, paste, glance at the tail. Never a full manual transcription, and never a partial one either, because the half you typed is the half that will be wrong.
replies
a reader askedWhat if I have to move an address to a machine with no clipboard sharing?
the answerThen you are choosing between transcription and moving a text file. Moving a file is usually the better of the two, because a file does not lose a character on the way.
a reader askedIs a screenshot of the address a good way to keep it?
the answerIt is a bad way, and there is a whole post on why in the screenshot. A picture of text cannot be pasted, which forces you straight back into typing.
a reader askedDoes the copy button on this page send anything anywhere?
the answerNo. It writes the string to your clipboard in your own browser. This site has no analytics, no tracker and nothing that reports what you clicked.
what this post is not Not a claim that copying makes an address safe. Copying makes it accurate. Whether the string you copied was the right one to begin with is a separate question this post does not touch.