The Awazon Market Access Queue screen
You paste an onion address, and instead of a storefront you get a dark page, a spinning ring, a date, and one line: do not refresh the page, you are being forwarded to the market. That page is usually not the market.
What you are looking at
A public gateway that sits between the ordinary web and a hidden service. It runs Tor on its own end, fetches the onion page and hands it to your browser over normal HTTPS, so you can read a market without a Tor Browser at all. The waiting screen is that gateway’s own lobby, not the shop’s. It carries the gateway’s logo and its own countdown, and the moment it has the page it forwards you.
The line about refreshing is the only genuinely useful sentence on it. A hidden service builds a circuit of three random relays for a reason, and refreshing tears that circuit down and starts the search again, so refreshing a queue that is already working is the one reliable way to turn a ten second wait into a minute.
If the tab stops at a percentage instead of reaching the spinner, that is a different object. A stalled bootstrap is a Tor problem and is described on the Tor Browser page.
Why a queue is not proof of anything
Read this part twice
A gateway lobby can be dressed however its owner likes. A dark card, a date, a countdown and a wordmark that opens on a lowercase a cost nothing to copy, and a screen that tells you not to refresh and that you are being forwarded is a screen a visitor has already been disarmed by before they notice who built it. The queue is not a login box, which is the main thing in its favour, but it is also not evidence that whoever runs it has any relationship to the market at all.
The reason this is worth dwelling on is that a redirect is not the same thing as an identity. A gateway that forwards you correctly to the real hidden service is a service worth having. A gateway that forwards you to a page that looks like the market while holding a form is doing something else, and both of them render the same spinner.
When it means trouble
- The spinner never finishes across two different addresses and two different hours. A gateway that has been queueing you for a day is not queueing.
- The page asks for a username and a password. A hidden service does not need a lobby to introduce itself, and a lobby that asks for credentials is the reason people learn about the word phishing.
- The address bar stops ending in
.onion. The gateway has a normal domain name, so you are now reading a copy that somebody’s web server served, and every character of the onion address you came in on has left the screen. - A countdown appears with a number that changes when you reload. A real capacity limit does not reset because you pressed reload twice.
- The market answers instantly on one address and queues for minutes on another, which is what a set of gateways with different load on them looks like.
Questions
- Is the Access Queue page the real Awazon Market?
It is a gateway holding your tab open while it fetches the hidden service. The market itself is what appears on the far side of it, and if the far side asks you for a password, the thing that is real is in question.
- Why does it say do not refresh?
Because reloading destroys the circuit or session the queue was already standing in. The instruction is technically correct and it is also the sentence that makes people stop checking.
- Should I use a gateway at all?
For reading a listing, it is a way in when Tor Browser will not connect. For anything with a password or a withdrawal button behind it, the browser is the better tool, because a gateway sees everything you send it in clear text before it enters Tor.
- Does a queue change my balance?
No. Balances and escrow live on the market, and the escrow rules are the same whichever door and whichever relay you came through.