Short answer: A directory is a record of claims, not a live key ceremony. Tags such as Escrow, PGP, or XMR describe what a listing file says. Uptime means a host answered. Neither replaces a PGP key you already bound independently, and neither is a reason to paste a stranger’s .onion into a wallet.
How to check a v3 string itself (56 characters, vanity prefixes, signed lists): Finding verified onion links. This page is the catalog-language layer — what a tag on a card is allowed to mean.
Search engines do not crawl most onion services. People therefore use indexes: legacy Hidden Wiki clones, editorial sites such as torwiki.org, crawlers such as onion.live, forum pins, and encyclopedias like this one. The failure mode is the same on all of them: treating the index as the operator.
This is catalog literacy, not a shopping walkthrough. TorBible does not publish shop onions we did not already hold, and we do not tell you how to place an order.
What an index can honestly say
A maintained directory can report, with dates:
- that a name is described as active, seized, or retired;
- that public write-ups mention 2FA, PGP, or an escrow hold;
- that a coin appears in those write-ups;
- that a clearnet URL belongs to a known project (Tor Project, Tails, a newspaper).
It cannot honestly say that coins in a hold are safe, that a mirror is the only real one, or that last week’s table still matches this week’s private keys.
TorWiki’s front page (as of 2026) frames itself as an editorial Hidden Wiki alternative: staff-written listings, no user graffiti, guides alongside a market table. onion.live describes a search index with uptime probes and optional PGP material supplied by operators. Both are useful as other people’s notes. Neither is the Tor Project, and neither signs TorBible’s catalog.
Uptime is not authenticity
onion.live’s about page states that it checks whether listed hosts respond, and that some listings include PGP-signed mirrors. A green probe means something answered on that address.
A phishing clone answers too. A seized box can still serve HTML. A rotating gateway can point at a different backend than the one you bookmarked. Response time is a network fact. Identity is a key-binding fact. Keep them apart.
How to read tags on a catalog card
TorBible’s market cards reuse language you will also see on TorWiki-style tables. The words are short; the meaning is narrow.
| Tag you see | What our file records | What it does not mean |
|---|---|---|
| Escrow | The name is described as using a hold | Coins survive an exit scam |
| PGP | Public notes mention PGP or signed canaries | You have verified this key |
| 2FA | The listing mentions a second factor | The factor is PGP, not an SMS on a clone |
| BTC / XMR | A coin is listed in sources we used | The payment is private or the shop is safe |
| Active | Status in our file as of the review date | The onion you found elsewhere is theirs |
Longer explainers: escrow systems and Bitcoin vs Monero. If two directories disagree on a coin or a feature, we omit the tag rather than invent a tie-breaker.
Why “verified links” is a marketing phrase
Legacy community wikis were easy to vandalize: replace one onion, keep the layout, harvest logins. Editorial directories reduce that vandalism by not taking anonymous edits. They do not remove clone sites on the rest of the network, and they do not make a copied table true.
A directory that says “manually checked” is claiming a process. Ask what the process actually checked:
- Did someone load a page and see a familiar logo?
- Did they compare a PGP signature against a key they held from last year?
- Did they copy another wiki?
Only the middle item is verification in the sense of PGP for Tor users. Logo recognition is how clones work.
Cross-checking without building a new wiki
Practical order, without collecting a private onion hoard from this page:
- Prefer the operator’s own clearnet property (newsroom, software project, documented onion list).
- Prefer a signature over a screenshot.
- Prefer a key you stored before the current incident.
- Treat forum threads and second-hand indexes as rumor until those hold.
If you cannot do (1)–(3), you do not have a verified address. You have a hypothesis. Phishing detection covers urgency, fake support, and unofficial Tor installers — the usual payload once a clone has traffic.
We do not tell you to “trust Dread” or any other board. A forum is a conversation on someone else’s disk. It can surface a takedown rumor earlier than a static table. It can also pin a phishing URL with the same confidence.
What TorBible does differently on purpose
We split markets, service links, and guides. We do not scrape another wiki’s shop-onion table into ours. Empty Official slots stay empty. That is slower than a “40+ mirrors” headline. It is the point of an encyclopedia: missing data is better than a invented string.
When we cite TorWiki or onion.live, we cite claims and culture (how tags are used, that PGP canaries are common, that uptime dashboards exist). We do not import their onion columns.
What this page will not do
We will not rank directories, publish a competing mirror dump, or walk through logging into a shop. For the network path, start with Tor Browser setup. For identity separation, OPSEC. For the term “Hidden Wiki” as history rather than a download button, What is the Hidden Wiki?.
Sources
- onion.live About — uptime monitoring and PGP-on-listing claims; not affiliated with torproject.org
- torwiki.org — editorial directory framing and public market-table language (paraphrased)
- Tor Project: Onion services overview
- TorBible: editorial policy (we do not invent .onion strings)