An address that is the market
Five conditions about a string of characters. Everything after this stage assumes you are looking at the thing you think you are looking at.
Stage C is about a string. Not about a site, not about a market, not about what is on the other end. Just the characters, where they came from, and where they live when you are not looking at them. Everything downstream of this stage assumes the string is what you think it is, which is why the conditions here are the ones most worth being pedantic about.
This site publishes two of these strings, at the top of every page, without labels and without ranking. It does not open them, so it has no view on what happens when you do. That is not modesty. It is the same rule the rest of the map runs on: state only what can be stated, and mark the boundary clearly.
What enters this stage
Three arrows arrive. The single copy question feeds the storage condition, because a string kept in exactly one place is a string you can lose in one event. The circuit condition and the security level condition both feed the mirror question, because you cannot form a view about what an address leads to without a path to it and a browser you have already configured.
What leaves this stage
Two arrows go forward. The mirror question feeds the account name condition, which is the gate into the session stage. And the storage condition feeds both logging in a second time and, right at the far end of the map, coming back tomorrow. That second arrow is the longest one on the whole map, and it is the reason the map is a graph rather than a line: the last card reaches back and depends on a card in stage C.
What a string can and cannot tell you
| Property of the string | What it can establish | What it cannot |
|---|---|---|
| Length and character set | That it could be a current onion address | That it is the market |
| Where you got it | That the source can be revisited | That the source was right |
| That you can retype it | That it can be compared later | That it is worth comparing |
| That it is stored outside the browser | That it survives a reboot | That it survived unmodified |
Read down the middle column and then down the right one. Almost everything you can establish about a string on its own is negative: it rules candidates out. That asymmetry is the honest reason this stage has five conditions instead of one confident sentence.
Where this stage is usually skipped
It gets skipped by people who arrived through a link rather than a string, which is exactly what the first condition in the stage is about. Arriving by click is not a mistake in itself. It becomes one when the click is the only artefact you keep, because a click cannot be compared against anything, cannot be read aloud, and cannot be written on paper. If you take one thing from this stage, take the habit of ending up holding characters.