How escrow finalization actually works
Money sits in escrow from the moment you pay until the order finalizes. Here is the timer, the early-finalize rule, and what happens if you never touch it.
Read the note6 notes · updated weekly
Journal
Short, dated notes on the market. Escrow mechanics, mirror rotations, vendor feedback, shipping times, and the occasional complaint that keeps coming up. Each note covers one thing and does not repeat the others, so the archive reads like a log, not a brochure.
The vendors buyers keep coming back to
A look at the shops that hold the top of the feedback list this month, what they sell, and the two things that separate them from the rest of the catalog.
Read the noteWhy the mirrors changed again in October
The three .onion addresses on this page are not permanent. Here is the logic behind rotating them, how to tell a real rotation from a fake one, and what to do if your bookmark stops working.
Read the noteWhy the market insists on PGP
Most people would rather not deal with a key and a fingerprint. The market makes you anyway. Here is the practical reason, and the two failures it is actually protecting against.
Read the noteShipping times, by region, without the marketing
The real windows for the US, Europe, Canada, Australia and Latin America. What slows a parcel down, what does not, and the one number that matters more than the estimate.
Read the noteMonero fees and the confirmation count
Why the market waits for a specific number of confirmations, what that does to the feel of a checkout, and the small fee math that decides whether your payment clears on time.
Read the noteAbout the journal
Why a journal, and not a blog
A journal is a log, and a log is a record of what actually happened, which is a different animal from a blog, which is a record of what the author wants to say. The notes here are written the way the market's team would jot something down for the next person, which is specific, dated, and unembellished. When a mirror rotates, there is a note. When a pattern in the vendor pool changes, there is a note. When a question comes up enough times that it deserves its own answer, there is a note. The dates are real, the topics are the ones that came up, and the absence of a topic is as informative as its presence, because a journal that only wrote about the good weeks would not be a journal, it would be a press release.
The notes are not exhaustive, and they are not authoritative in the way the guides are. A guide tells you how to do a thing, and a note tells you what happened with a thing, and the two are different verbs. Read the guides for the how, and read the journal for the what, and between the two you have the whole picture, which is the point of keeping both. The journal is the market talking to itself out loud, and the value of that is that it is not performing, which is the one quality a marketplace has a reason to hide and the one quality its readers have a reason to want.