From cold start to the login page

Six steps. No account needed to look around, no app store, no .com version. The whole entrance is: paste the address, wait, and read the screens instead of reloading them.

Black Ops Market addresses

Paste one of these into Tor Browser’s address bar. Any of the three works.

  • blackops5l63qnwnmlnsfvtlu66md3x3vp3fdtpna42eq7ozujr67hid.onion
  • blackops6kignp3eddmvqcfkjzf6qr6haxbmkypc2xtqlnhuu4ak4dqd.onion
  • blackops27m32abqvbhnyswgazqawxqbznbzkkkv5sjo7gve2ndpsdad.onion

The steps

  1. Get Tor Browser. The only sensible source is torproject.org, reached from a normal browser on a normal day. Verify the download signature once, the first time, and you are done with that forever.
  2. Open it and leave the home screen alone. Do not type into the search field on the start page; that goes to a regular search engine and is the opposite of what you want.
  3. Paste the .onion into the address bar and press Enter. Paste, not type: 56 characters, and the keyboard is not the friend here.
  4. Wait through the queue. A plain page, a spinning circle, the line “Do not refresh the page. Please wait…” It is the normal entrance. Leave the tab exactly where it is.
  5. Solve the captcha. A page of shapes with the instruction to click on the circle or square with a cut. Click the one with the cut, no more, no less.
  6. Check the address bar. The market is now loaded. Before anything else, compare the last six characters of the address with what you copied. Then, and only then, log in if you have an account.

What a correct load looks like

The queue page is nearly empty. The captcha page is a grid of shapes. The market itself is a dark storefront: a search bar across the top, categories, a vendor grid, and your account area in the corner if you are logged in. If the page you are looking at is a .com domain, a light theme with a shopping cart, or a form asking you to “confirm your email”, you are not on the market. One of the earlier steps went wrong, and the fix is always the same: close the tab, go back, paste the address again.

Your regular browser will not do

.onion addresses resolve only inside the Tor network. In Chrome or Safari the same address is a DNS error, full stop. A website that promises to show you the onion “for free, no download” is a clearnet gateway, a server standing between you and the market that reads everything you send through it, login included. Open why gateways fail the address check if you want the mechanics.