The secondary approach that keeps two markets separate

When I use two markets I try to make them look, from my own machine's point of view, like two entirely unrelated activities.

What contamination looks like

Contamination is when a habit or a piece of state that belongs to one market leaks into the workflow of the other. It can be as small as pasting a message from one market into a tab open on the other, or as large as reusing a username across both.

The contamination does not usually produce an immediate consequence. It produces a slow blurring where the two markets start to feel like the same activity in my head. Once they feel the same, they get treated the same, and the separation is over.

What I keep separate

Different account names. Different passwords. Different manager entries. Different notes on paper if I have any. Different bookmarks in Tor Browser, or better yet, no bookmarks and just this site for one market and a different reference for the other.

Different browser sessions. I never have both markets open in the same Tor Browser window. If I want to switch, I close one window first.

Different clipboards. Nothing that came from one market's tab ever gets pasted into the other market's tab.

What I do not try to keep separate

The room. The desk. The chair. Those are shared with everything else I do. Trying to make them market specific is theatre.

The machine. If I have a second machine, both markets are on it. That is fine. The separation is at the level of sessions and accounts, not machines.

The network. Both markets share the same connection out. Tor handles the routing separately for each.

How the separation looks in a visit

I open Tor Browser. I decide before I open a tab which market this visit is for. I open the reference site for that market and only that market. I copy an address, paste, front page, sign in, do the small thing, close the window.

If I want to visit the other market next, I close the browser, open it fresh, and start over. The gap between the two visits is a small friction and the friction is what enforces the separation.

The nexus specific piece of the separation

For nexus, the reference is this site. The three onion addresses at the top of any article are the ones I use. My nexus visits go through this site every time.

The other market has its own reference and its own three addresses or however many it publishes. Those live on that market's directory, not on this site, and cross referencing between the two is exactly the contamination I am trying to avoid.

What breaks the separation, in practice

A shared password is the fastest way to break it. If both markets have the same password, they are already the same account in my head.

A shared note is second. If a note about market A also mentions market B, the note lives in a place that touches both, and my brain will start to treat them as one.

A shared visit is third. If I check both markets in a single sitting, without closing the browser between them, the sitting is the shared context.

Small habits that keep the separation clean

• One market per browser session. Ever.
• One paper note per market. Not shared notes.
• One manager entry per market. Not a single entry with two passwords in it.
• Different first names of my accounts if I am going to use human sounding names. The names should have nothing in common.

What the separation is trying to preserve

It is trying to preserve the ability to walk away from one market without affecting the other. If the two are separate in my head and on my machine, a decision to stop using one is small. If they are entangled, the same decision becomes big.

The separation is a form of leaving room to change my mind. That is worth doing on any activity, and it is doubly worth doing when the activity is small on any single visit but adds up.

What this article is not. This is not a claim that the markets know I am the same person. It is a claim about what my setup does to keep them separate on my end.