Glossary

Every term used across the Bureau, defined in plain language. Alphabetical.

Anti-DDoS queue

Wait page in front of the login form. Holds visitors for 20 to 60 seconds before rendering the captcha. Rate-limits automated credential-stuffing attempts.

Bond

Refundable deposit posted by a new vendor before their first listing goes live. Returned after a clean thirty-day probation. Filters out casual scam-bait accounts.

Captcha match

The practice of comparing the onion address baked into the login captcha image against the URL bar. Catches most phishing clones on the first check.

Dispute

Formal disagreement over an order. Buyer or vendor opens it. Moderator reads both sides, checks the vendor history, cosigns with whichever side they judge correct. The moderator signature is the second of the two needed to release the coin.

Escrow

Payment arrangement where funds sit in a multisig contract until both buyer and vendor agree the trade is done. Nexus escrow runs on 2 of 3 multisig.

Finalisation

Marking an order complete, which releases coin from escrow to the vendor. Do not finalise before delivery. See the note on finalise-early warnings.

Finalise early (FE)

Marking an order complete before delivery. Drops escrow protection. Almost always the wrong move.

Guard node

The first Tor relay in your circuit. Tor uses the same guard for months to reduce anonymity attacks that rely on shuffling entry points.

Mirror

A distinct onion address that resolves to the same storefront backend. Account, balance, orders and messages appear identically on every mirror. Nexus currently publishes three mirrors.

Mnemonic seed

Human-readable phrase issued at registration for account recovery. Write on paper. Never screenshot or cloud-sync. Anyone with the mnemonic owns the account.

Multisig (2 of 3)

Payment contract with three keys held by buyer, vendor and platform. Any two release the coin. Platform key never moves in a healthy order. See the escrow dossier.

Onion address

56-character string ending in .onion. The public key of a Tor hidden service, base32 encoded. Only Tor Browser can resolve it. See the onion-address dossier.

Operator key

The Nexus operator PGP public key. Every rotation and every operator statement is signed with the corresponding private key. Has not rotated since launch. See the operator-key dossier.

PGP signature

Cryptographic signature over a message, made with a private key. Anyone with the matching public key can verify that the message came from the key holder and has not been altered.

Signed rotation

PGP-signed operator announcement listing the current mirror set. Verifying the signature proves the addresses are real.

Vendor bond

See Bond.

V3 onion

The current generation of Tor onion addresses. 56 characters, Ed25519 public key based. Replaces the older 16-character v2 format.