addresses ยท post 03 of 7 in this channel
How to read a WTN market address without going cross eyed
A modern onion address is fifty six characters of lowercase letters and digits. It was not designed to be read by a human being, and it shows.
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.
why it is hard on purpose
The string is a public key rendered into text, plus a checksum and a version byte. Every character carries information. There is no filler in it and no part of it is decorative.
That is why it cannot be shortened, prettified or abbreviated. A wethenorth address with four characters missing is not a slightly wrong address. It is not an address.
the characters that eat people
Onion addresses use base32, which is lowercase a to z plus the digits two to seven. There is no zero, no one, no eight and no nine in a valid string.
That single fact kills a whole family of mistakes. If you are staring at something that looks like a zero, it is the letter o. If it looks like a one, it is the letter l or the letter i.
compare the tail, not the head
People check the first few characters and stop, because that is where reading starts. It is the worst place to look, for the reasons in the post on the shared prefix.
Read the last eight characters instead. They are the part nobody bothers to match, and they differ sharply between the three addresses in this set. Then check a chunk from the middle.
read it in chunks of four
Nobody can hold fifty six characters in their head. Four at a time is about the limit for most people, and four at a time is enough.
Take the first four, the last four, and one group of four from somewhere in the middle. If all three groups match and the length is right, you have done a far better check than reading the whole thing straight through and losing your place at character thirty.
better still, do not read it
Every technique above is a fallback for when you have no choice. The real answer is to copy the string and let the machine do the comparing, which is what the post on copying rather than typing is about.
Your eyes are the least reliable instrument in the room. Use them last, and use them to spot check something a machine already handled rather than to do the work from scratch.
There is a version of care that is actually carelessness. Squinting at a full string, character by character, feels thorough and produces a worse result than three sampled chunks, because attention runs out long before the string does.
replies
a reader askedHow long should a wtn onion address be?
the answerFifty six characters, then the dot and the word onion. If what you are holding is shorter or longer than that, stop there. The length check is free and it catches truncation immediately.
a reader askedCan I just check that it ends in the right characters?
the answerThat is a better check than the prefix, and it is still not sufficient on its own. Tail plus length plus one middle chunk is a reasonable amount of work for a string you are about to trust.
a reader askedIs there capitalisation in these addresses?
the answerNo. Onion addresses are lowercase. If you have been sent one with capital letters in it, something has reformatted it along the way, and you should be asking what else that something did.
what this post is not Not a validator. Reading an address carefully tells you it is well formed. It never tells you the address belongs to who you think it belongs to.