The guide library
Every torhaven guide in one place, sorted by what you need (2026)
A shelf, not a feed. The torhaven guides below are grouped by the job in front of you, so you can walk in with a question and leave with an answer you were able to test yourself along the way.
The library falls into three parts. First comes getting onto the network at all, safely and without picking up a tampered copy. Then the proof and money habits, which is where most avoidable loss is either prevented or invited. Last are the short honest profiles of names people keep typing into a search box. Newcomers do best going in that order; anyone with a specific worry should jump to the card that names it.
On this torhaven page
On this torhaven page
How this guide library is organized, and why
The three-part order below is not arbitrary. Reading a proof-and-verification guide before you understand how the network itself works tends to produce cargo-cult habits — steps followed without understanding why they matter, which fall apart the moment something looks slightly different than the guide described. Getting the network fundamentals first means every later guide can build on real understanding instead of memorized steps.
The honest-profiles section sits deliberately last, not first, even though it is often what actually brought a reader here through a search engine. A profile page makes far more sense once you already understand what a signed address, an escrow system and a verification habit actually are — which is exactly what the first two sections teach.
Getting onto Tor
What the network is, what it hides, and how to reach it without picking up a fake copy on the way in.
What is Tor, in plain words
How onion routing carries your traffic through three relays so no single one sees both ends.
7 min readAccess & TorHow to access Tor safely
Download, check the signature, set the right security level, then reach an onion by hand.
8 min readOnion addressesWhat an onion address really is
Why the 56-character string is a public key, and why that makes a fake impossible to hide.
7 min readProof and market safety
The habits that separate a safe routine from a hopeful one, centred on signatures and on the moment you move money.
What is PGP, and why learn it first
Keys, signatures and fingerprints, taught as the habit that turns blind trust into a quick check.
9 min readMarket safetyVerify an onion address before you deposit
A one-minute checklist for the moment before you pay, when a swapped address still costs nothing to catch.
7 min readMarket safetyWhat a darknet market is
Escrow, finalising and disputes, described plainly, with an honest map of where the money actually goes wrong.
8 min readHonest profiles
Short, plain reads on specific names people search for. No rankings, no endorsements, just what can be confirmed and how to check it.
How to actually use a guide once you have picked one
A guide here is written to be followed with the relevant tool open beside it, not read once and set aside. Open the browser, or your PGP tool, alongside the guide and perform each step as you read it rather than reading the whole page first and trying to reconstruct the sequence from memory afterward. Every guide here is checked against exactly that follow-along reading pattern before it publishes, which is part of why steps are numbered and kept short rather than folded into long paragraphs.
Being written now
Guides in progress. torhaven publishes a page when it is checkable, not before, so these appear when they are ready and not a day sooner.
These titles are visible now specifically so a reader waiting on one of them knows it is coming rather than assuming torhaven has no plans to cover the topic. None of the three below has a publish date yet, and none will until each one clears the same primary-source standard applied to every guide already on the shelf.
Choosing between Tails and Whonix
A calm comparison of the two amnesic systems by the threat each one is built to answer.
Spending Monero without a trail
Turning cash into XMR, holding it, and paying with it while the money stays hard to follow.
The plain-English glossary
One home for the vocabulary that trips newcomers, from finalising to vendor bonds, defined once.
What you will not find here
No scores, no leaderboards, and no page telling you a market is safe to use. A ranking reads as a promise, and it is one nobody can honestly keep for services whose owners can disappear overnight. What torhaven's guides give you instead is the reasoning and the checks, so the judgement stays with the person who has to live with it.
This is also why a torhaven guide never ends with a single recommended market. Every guide in this library is built so its conclusion is a method you can apply to any market you encounter, present or future, rather than a specific name that could stop being accurate the moment torhaven stops actively re-checking it.
Curious why we work this way? The editorial policy lays out the rules, and the about page says who keeps them.
Reading order for a first-time visitor to torhaven
If this is your first time on torhaven and you are not sure where to start, the safest default is the order the three main sections already appear in above: network fundamentals, then verification habits, then honest profiles. Skipping ahead is fine if you already know what you need, but a reader who lands on a profile page cold, without the verification background, is the reader most likely to misapply what that page says.
Why torhaven keeps every guide on one shelf instead of scattering them
Every torhaven guide lives under this one library rather than being split across separate micro-sites, and that is deliberate. A reader working through torhaven's material benefits from the guides referencing each other directly — the PGP torhaven guide points forward to the onion-address torhaven guide, which points forward to the deposit-verification torhaven guide — and that chain only holds together if every torhaven guide sits in one place with one consistent standard behind it. Splitting torhaven's teaching material the way torhaven splits torindex and torverify out as separate tools would break the exact sequence this page exists to lay out.
How torhaven decides when a guide is ready for this shelf
A torhaven guide does not appear on this library page the moment someone starts drafting it — the "being written now" cards above exist so a reader can see what is coming without torhaven pretending a draft is a finished guide. Every torhaven guide that does appear here has already cleared the same checkable-source bar described in torhaven's editorial policy, which is also why this shelf grows slowly rather than all at once.
Questions about the guide library
Which guide should I read first?
If you have never opened Tor Browser, start with What is Tor, then How to Access Tor Safely — those two get you onto the network correctly. If you already use it and just need the verification habit, jump straight to What is PGP and Verify an Onion Address Before You Deposit; those two are the pair that actually protects a deposit.
Do I need to read every guide before I can use Tor safely?
No. The three "Getting onto Tor" guides are the floor, not the ceiling — enough to install the browser correctly and understand what it does and does not protect. The proof-and-market-safety guides matter specifically once money is about to move, so it is reasonable to read those closer to when you actually need them rather than all at once.
Why is there only one market profile so far?
Each profile takes the same checkable-source approach as every guide here, which is slower than writing a quick paragraph per market. Torzon was first because it is one of the names people search for most; more profiles are added as they clear the same bar, not on a fixed schedule.
How is this library different from a Tor tutorial on a forum?
A forum post is written once, by one person, and often goes years without a revision even as tools and threats change underneath it. Every guide here is treated as a living page: corrected when something changes, and explicit about what it does not know rather than papering over a gap with confident-sounding filler.
Can I suggest a topic for a future torhaven guide?
The three "being written now" cards above reflect what is already in progress, prioritized partly by what readers ask about most. A topic that keeps coming up in questions is more likely to get written sooner, though every new guide still has to clear the same checkable-source bar before it publishes — a popular request does not skip that step.
Do the reading-time estimates on each card mean anything precise?
They are a rough guide to length, not a promise. A guide's job is to be complete enough to actually close the gap it covers, so a topic that genuinely needs more explanation runs longer rather than being artificially trimmed to hit a round number.