AWazonmirror directory
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From nothing to the market in ten minutes

You do not need a special machine or a strong opinion about your ISP. You need Tor Browser, one of the three addresses below, and the patience to wait out the queue once.

  1. Install the Tor BrowserDownload it from torproject.org for Windows, macOS, or Linux. On a phone it is the Tor Browser app in the Play Store (Android). On iOS the Tor Browser app from the App Store also opens .onion addresses. Do not install “Tor” from a third-party bundle or a “fast mirror of torproject.org” site; the official domain is the only one that matters.
  2. Copy an addressUse the Copy button above. Pasting is the point: by the time you have typed 56 characters by hand you have made your mistake.
  3. Paste into the address bar and press EnterThe first load builds a fresh circuit through the network. On a good connection that is 10 to 30 seconds. On a slow one, a minute. The address bar will show a progress indicator; let it run.
  4. Wait out the access queueThe first page you see is a white screen with a spinner: “Do not refresh the page. Please wait… you are being forwarded to the market.” This is the normal entrance, not a fault. Depending on how busy the market is at that hour it holds from a few seconds to a few minutes. Do not touch the tab. Every refresh starts your queue over.
  5. You are at the marketThe queue hands you over to the storefront, and if you have an account, to the login page: username, password, captcha, or a PGP signature instead of a password. Here is what the login looks like and the one rule about it.

First open or later opens

The first time is always the slowest. Tor builds its path from scratch, and the mirror queue is often at its longest in the evening hours, when most of the market is online. A second open ten minutes later will usually be noticeably faster, and a return visit the next day may get you straight through. None of that means anything is wrong. It means the network is doing its job.

How long is too long?

If the circuit never finishes after about three minutes, tap the onion icon in the toolbar, choose a new circuit, and load the page again. If the page loads but the queue itself holds for more than 15 minutes, close the tab and open one of the other two addresses. They are the same market, so you lose nothing by switching.

On a phone

Everything above works in the mobile Tor Browser, with two adjustments. Phone networks drop long-lived connections more often than cables do, so a circuit that was building may quietly restart. If the spinner simply sits, pull the page down to reload. And keep the screen on while the queue runs; an app that is backgrounded for long can be paused by the OS and make it look like the market froze.