Address Encryption Guide

🔐 Why Encrypt

Of everything you hand a vendor, your shipping address is the single most sensitive piece of information — a username is disposable and a PGP key is replaceable, but a physical address ties directly to a real, findable location. Stored as plaintext, it survives exactly as long as the market's database does, which means a seizure or a breach exposes it right alongside every other plaintext address on the platform at once. PGP-encrypting it to the vendor's public key changes that outcome entirely: only whoever holds the matching private key can decrypt it, so a compromised market database yields nothing but unreadable ciphertext for every address encrypted this way. This single habit is arguably the highest-leverage thing covered anywhere in these guides, precisely because it protects the one piece of information that can't be rotated, changed, or walked back after the fact.

💡 Tip: Your address can't be rotated or replaced the way a password or key can — that's exactly why encrypting it matters more than almost anything else here.

📝 Formatting

Write the address out in a clear, standardized block before encrypting anything — name or alias, street address, unit number, city, state or province, postal code, country, each on its own line. Spell things out rather than abbreviating; an abbreviation that reads clearly to you can be exactly the kind of ambiguity that causes a misdelivery, and a misdelivered package tied to a darknet order is a problem you don't want to create for yourself. Put any special delivery instructions on their own separate line rather than folding them into the address itself, so the block stays unambiguous. Encrypt the whole thing to the vendor's PGP public key — and before you do, actually compare that key's fingerprint against the one shown on their market profile, since encrypting sensitive information to the wrong key defeats the entire purpose regardless of how carefully you formatted it.

💡 Tip: Verify the vendor's key fingerprint before encrypting, not after — encrypting your address to the wrong key defeats the entire point regardless of formatting.

✅ Verification

Confirm the encryption actually worked before submitting anything — try decrypting the block with your own key; it should fail unless you deliberately added yourself as a second recipient, and a block that decrypts for you when it shouldn't means something went wrong in the encryption step. Check that the output actually looks like PGP ciphertext, opening with -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE----- and closing with -----END PGP MESSAGE----- — a block missing those markers didn't encrypt correctly, full stop. Only then paste it into the order form. If a vendor reports they can't decrypt what you sent, the most common cause by far is a mismatched public key, not a problem on their end — re-verify the fingerprint you used and re-encrypt rather than assuming their software is broken.

💡 Tip: If a vendor can't decrypt what you sent, a mismatched public key is the most likely cause — re-check the fingerprint before assuming their software is broken.

⚠️ Important Warnings

🔑 Verify the vendor's PGP fingerprint before encrypting — the wrong key defeats the entire purpose
✅ Confirm the output actually looks like PGP ciphertext before submitting it in the order form
📍 Your address can't be rotated the way a password can — encrypt it every single time, no exceptions
🔓 If a vendor can't decrypt it, suspect a mismatched key first, not a broken client on their end