Crown the first ninety minutes What this site is
The first ninety minutes /Placing the order/Encrypting what you type
75

Encrypting what you type

Costs
Three minutes prepared, twenty five unprepared
Prepared at
Minute 35

One box, one paste, one button. It is three minutes if you have done it before and it is the reason a large number of first sessions end unfinished if you have not.

Back to minute 75

Crown market addresses

crownm5jmtbhqnoxhexx7nyiygqgqofp3wnjyyfl74gziohqqy6oq5id.onion
crownrywlm7mnohkzntlir2tlhafq6tzphgqyag5cw5en7nprchfklad.onion
crownwpaimgizxylrvrh4u6acpvk4l757cfla7xs6zjki7tdjqbnv6qd.onion

Published 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

The seller publishes a public key. You take the address you wrote, encrypt it to that key, and paste the resulting block into the form instead of the plain text. Only the holder of the matching private key can read it, which means the market itself cannot, and neither can anything that later gets access to what the market stored.

Mechanically it is a copy, a paste, a button, and a paste back. Conceptually it is the only part of this run that requires a tool outside the browser, and that is why it lands differently from everything else.

Doing it, step by step

  1. Copy the seller public key from their profile. All of it, including the header and footer lines. A partial key does not work and the error message will not say so clearly.
  2. Import it into whatever encryption tool you set up.
  3. Write or paste your address into the tool, select that key as the recipient, and encrypt.
  4. Copy the output block, again including the header and footer lines.
  5. Paste it into the order form in place of the plain address.
  6. Check that what is in the form starts and ends with the expected lines and looks like a block of nonsense. If you can read your address in the box, it is not encrypted.
The check that costs five secondsThe last step is the one worth repeating. The failure that matters here is silent. A form submitted with plain text in it looks exactly like a successful order, and nothing anywhere will tell you the details went in readable.
What encrypting buys you
  • The details are readable only by the recipient, not by the system carrying them.
  • Anything that later obtains what the system stored gets a block it cannot read.
  • It is the one protection in this run that does not depend on trusting anybody to behave well.
What it costs you
  • It requires a second tool and some vocabulary, at the most tired point in the session.
  • It fails silently in several ways, all of which look like success.
  • It protects the transmission and nothing else. The recipient can still do whatever they like with it.
Where people stall

This is the largest single stall on the site. A reader arrives at a box asking for something they have not prepared, with an order half placed and a balance sitting there, and the honest options are to learn a tool now or to stop.

Stopping is the better of those and it does not feel like it. Nothing is lost by stopping here. The balance stays, the listing will be there, and coming back prepared turns a twenty five minute struggle into three minutes.

The second stall is a partial key. The header and footer lines look decorative and get left behind, the import fails, and the error message is unhelpful in the way that error messages about keys usually are.

The third is not a stall at all and it is the expensive one. Somebody gives up on the tool and submits the address in plain text, because the form accepted it and the order went through. Nothing warns them. Nothing ever will.

How long this really takes
What people expectNot expected at all, it is not on any shopping list
What it usually costsThree minutes prepared, fifteen to twenty five learning it here

The unprepared version is the widest gap between expectation and reality in the second half of the run, and it lands at the point where the reader has the least patience left.

If you are not ready

Stop and come back. That is the whole advice and it is worth saying plainly, because the alternative that people actually choose is to submit the plain address and get on with it.

The cost of stopping is one evening. The cost of the alternative is a complete set of delivery details sitting in readable form in a system you know nothing about, for as long as that system keeps anything. Those are not close.

Prepare using the minute 35 page, which covers making a key and storing it with everything else. Then this step is three minutes and it never troubles you again.

In one line

Copy the whole key, paste the whole block, and confirm you cannot read your own address in the box. If you are not ready, stopping costs you nothing.

Questions that come up here

Do I need my own key to encrypt to the seller?

Not for encrypting to them. You need theirs. Your own key matters for anything they encrypt back to you, and for the optional login protection at minute 25.

The form accepted my plain address. Was that fine?

It was accepted and it was not fine. Acceptance is not validation. Nothing in the system checks whether what you pasted was encrypted.