Three addresses can describe one market

The plural sits in the addressing, not in the market

A reader who has three strings in front of them is holding three of something. The natural reading is that there are three of the market, in the way that a chain has three branches. That reading is wrong, and almost every muddle further down this site starts with it.

What there are three of is ways of asking. Each string is a separate way to reach the same service, in the same way that a building with three doors is still one building. Nothing behind the doors is duplicated by the fact of the doors existing.

What an address is actually doing

An onion address is not a label somebody chose and hung on a service. It is derived from a key that the service holds. When a service can prove it holds the key, traffic addressed to that string reaches it. That is the whole mechanism, stated as briefly as it can honestly be stated.

Because it works that way, a service can hold several keys at once and answer to all of them. Nothing about this is unusual or suspicious. It is a normal thing for an operator to arrange, and it is the ordinary explanation for a set of WTN onion strings that all lead to the same place.

Three of what, then

Three keys. Three strings derived from those keys. Three routes that traffic can take to arrive. That is the exhaustive list of things there are three of.

There is one account system, one set of orders, one message store, one balance. The section on equivalence takes each of those and works out how far the sameness goes, because it does not go all the way and the places where it stops matter.

Why the singular keeps applying

When somebody says they cannot get into the market, they usually mean they tried one string and nothing came back. The sentence uses the singular for the market and that is correct. The market is one thing. What failed was one route to it.

Keeping the two words apart is not pedantry. It changes what you do next. If the market is one thing and the route is one of three, then a failed route is a small event with two obvious next moves. If they are the same thing, a failed route is a catastrophe and you go looking, which is the state in which people make their worst decisions.

Where the plural becomes visible to you

Most of the time the plural is invisible. You open one string, you use the market, you close it. Nothing on the screen tells you there were two others.

It becomes visible in exactly four situations, and this site is organised around them. One string stops answering. Two strings behave differently from each other. You move from one string to another in the middle of doing something. Or somebody hands you a list and you have to work out how it relates to the set you already hold.

What this does to how you should hold them

If the three were three markets, keeping one would be a preference. Since they are three routes to one market, keeping one is keeping a single point of failure while a fix sits in plain view.

The practical form of this study is short. Hold the set, not a favourite. Nothing else in this study needs remembering.

A test you can run on any page about this

Ask whether the page treats the three as three things or as one thing described three ways. Pages that count markets rather than routes tend to slip into talking about which of them is the good one, which of them is up, and which of them people prefer, none of which are questions that survive the distinction.

It is a quick way to sort writing on this subject. A page that has the structure right will say very little about the individual strings, because there is very little to say about them once you accept that they lead to the same place.

What this study is not. It is not a description of what the market sells, how it works inside, or who runs it, none of which this site knows anything about.