Glossary
Plain definitions of the terms you meet around Zion Market and Tor: onion address, escrow, finalise-early, mirror, PGP, mnemonic and more.
| Onion address | A 56-character v3 Tor address ending in .onion. Copy it, never type it, and verify it against the login header. |
| Mirror | A distinct onion address that reaches the same market backend. Markets keep several warm for resilience. |
| Escrow | A held contract that keeps your payment between paying and confirming receipt, so neither side can run off with it. |
| Multisig | An escrow arrangement requiring more than one key to move funds, so no single party can release them alone. |
| Finalise-early (FE) | Releasing escrow before an order arrives. It removes your dispute path and is the most common way buyers lose money. |
| PGP | Public-key cryptography used to verify signed announcements, encrypt your address to a vendor, and prove identity at login. |
| Recovery mnemonic | A phrase that restores an account whose password is lost. Store it on paper. No login ever asks for it. |
| Onion-Location | A standard that lets a site advertise its onion address to Tor Browser, showing a ".onion available" prompt. |
| Service descriptor | A small signed document a client fetches to locate an onion service. Slow directory fetches show up as a slow first connection. |
| Rendezvous point | A relay where client and onion service meet to build a connection without either learning the other’s location. |
| Guard relay | The first, long-lived relay in your Tor circuit. Guard failures during congestion cause slow or dropped connections. |
| Phishing clone | A pixel-perfect copy of a market that swaps the address and deposit details to steal logins and coins. |