You expect the address to keep working

WeTheNorth addresses

hn2paw7zadwkcra3qzv5e4q547i7e5lvxm62cfxqftuqdu7moiu2ceyd.onion

hn2paw7zfvndw3dovycegeqmvvnf4pl67b3g2p7pohjlzavloosh73id.onion

hn2paw7zrgujyhnt6mgxlt2q6uhgbke4itpqitxhyfbumq3wtnckbuyd.onion

Printed as supplied, in no order. Nothing here is checked or timed, so an address that opens is not proof of anything. more about the set

#1links and addresses

The address I have works. If it worked in March it will work in July.

what actually happens

Address sets rotate. One stops answering, others keep answering, and nothing anywhere tells you that this happened. There is no notice because there is no channel that could carry one safely.

The gap: you are treating an address as a name. It is a key.

Where the expectation comes from

Everything about the normal web trains you into it. A company buys a domain, renews it every year, and defends it in court if somebody takes it. If the site moves, the old address forwards to the new one. Nothing is ever really lost. People carry that model across without noticing they are carrying anything, because on the clearnet it is simply true.

The habit is strengthened by how rarely it fails. A wethenorth onion link can work for months. That run of success is read as evidence of permanence when it is only evidence that nothing has changed yet.

The mechanism

An onion address is not rented from anybody. The string is derived from a public key. Whoever holds the matching private key can answer on that address and nobody else can, which is the whole security story of the system in one sentence. There is no registrar, no renewal, no expiry notice and no forwarding.

A market of this size runs several addresses at once, generated from different keys. They are added and retired for ordinary operational reasons. One takes a sustained flood and gets pulled. Another gets added because the front end needs more capacity spread across more entry points. Some are retired for reasons the operators never explain to anyone, which is their normal practice and not a signal of anything.

When an address stops answering, no process exists that could tell you. The market cannot email you, because it holds no email. It cannot post a notice you would see, because the notice would sit behind the login you are currently unable to reach. Any public channel loud enough to reach everyone is a channel an impostor can also use, and impostors do use them. So the honest design answer is not better announcements. It is more than one address in your hands before you need them.

What this changes for you

Hold the set, not the favourite. One address that works today is one address away from an afternoon of guessing.
Treat a dead address as information about that address, not about the market. The error text tells you which layer failed, and most of the time it is not the layer people assume.
Go back to where you got the addresses rather than searching fresh. A source you have used before and can still identify is worth more than a new page with a confident tone.
Do not read rotation as trouble. A set that never changed would be stranger than one that does.

The people who get hurt by rotation are not the ones who lost an address. They are the ones who lost an address and then went looking in a hurry. That is the moment a wethenorth market working link is easiest to sell you, and the next entries in this section are about that moment.

Questions people send about this

Does a rotated address mean the market is gone?

No. One address not answering says nothing about the others, and nothing about the platform. It is the most ordinary event in this system.

How often do the addresses change?

This board does not track that and does not guess. Anyone publishing a rotation schedule is describing a pattern they cannot see from outside.