Encryption keys in a first session
A key comes up twice in this run. Once here, as an optional login protection, and once at minute 75, where it is not optional in practice. The question in this phase is which of those you are dealing with tonight.
Back to minute 35Crown market addresses
crownm5jmtbhqnoxhexx7nyiygqgqofp3wnjyyfl74gziohqqy6oq5id.onioncrownrywlm7mnohkzntlir2tlhafq6tzphgqyag5cw5en7nprchfklad.onioncrownwpaimgizxylrvrh4u6acpvk4l757cfla7xs6zjki7tdjqbnv6qd.onionPublished exactly as supplied. Nothing on this site is monitored, tested or checked, so no address here is claimed to be working. What a copied address does and does not settle.
What actually happens here
Nothing forces the issue at minute 35. There will be a settings area mentioning keys, and there may be a prompt suggesting you add one. You can move on without touching it and most first sessions do.
The reason it belongs in this phase anyway is that it is recovery material of a sort. A key is a file, that file has a passphrase, and losing either has consequences that look very much like losing a recovery phrase. If you are going to have one, it should be created and stored in the same sitting as everything else on this page, not bolted on later in a hurry.
The two jobs a key does here
- Protecting what you send. At minute 75 you will be typing a delivery address into a form. Encrypting it to the recipient key means the text is unreadable to anything sitting between you and them, including the market itself. This is the job that matters and it is not really optional.
- Protecting the login. Optionally, the account can require you to decrypt a challenge at each login. Strong, and covered on the second factor page. Also the fastest way to lock yourself out permanently.
What a first session should actually do
- Create a key pair now, if you are willing to spend twenty minutes, because you will need one at minute 75 anyway and doing it under time pressure there is worse.
- Give it a passphrase and write that passphrase down with everything else from this phase.
- Save the private key somewhere that survives this machine. It is a file. Treat it exactly like the phrase.
- Do not enable key based login tonight. That is the setting that turns a mistake into a permanent lockout.
- If twenty minutes is not available, skip the whole thing for now and read minute 75 before you get there, because that page assumes nothing.
- It removes the worst time pressure in the run, which is learning a new tool at checkout.
- The key and its passphrase get stored alongside the rest of the recovery material, in one deliberate act rather than two hurried ones.
- You can practise on something harmless before it matters.
- It adds twenty minutes to a phase that was going to take five, in a session already running long.
- A key made carelessly, with a forgotten passphrase, is a liability rather than an asset.
- It is genuinely the most technical thing in the run, and doing it while tired is how people end up with three key pairs and no idea which one is in use.
The stall is tooling. Choosing software, installing it, working out what a public key is against a private one, and discovering that the terminology assumes you already know. Twenty minutes is optimistic for a first encounter and forty is common.
The second is a passphrase invented for the key and never written down, which produces a key file that exists and cannot be used. That is a particularly annoying failure because everything looks fine until the moment it does not.
The third is enthusiasm. Somebody reads that key based login is stronger, enables it immediately, and locks themselves out of a working account within the week. The setting is correct. The timing is wrong.
This is the largest single optional block on the timeline. Taking it on is defensible and skipping it is defensible. Starting it at minute 35 and abandoning it half done at minute 55 is the outcome to avoid.
If you skip it
That is a reasonable choice for a first session and it has one consequence. At minute 75 you will meet the same subject with an order in front of you and a checkout waiting, which is the worst possible moment to learn it.
The way to make that survivable is to read the minute 75 page before you get there, so the vocabulary is not new. If you get to the address field and realise you are not ready, stopping is fine. Nothing has been ordered. The stopping page covers what a clean pause looks like from that point.
Make the key tonight if you have twenty spare minutes, store it like the phrase, and leave key based login switched off until the account is something you use routinely.