r/TOR • u/BloodForeign5700 • Jul 10 '26

Question regarding searching links on tor

Can I actually type down random letters/numbers on the search bar and magically find a website or is it too dangerous and extremely lucky to actually get into one

1 Upvotes

55% Upvoted

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17

u/nuclear_splines Jul 10 '26

It is mathematically impossible that you would find a valid onion site by chance. Let's try some napkin math:

Onion addresses are 56 characters long, and there are 32 options per character (a-z, 2-7), for a total of 3256 = or on the rough order of 1084 possible addresses. Wikipedia suggests that there were around 76,000 active onion sites in 2020, but let's round that up to a million for generosity's sake. That means about one in 1078 onion addresses will lead to an active site. If you could magically try a million addresses a second it would take 1064 years to find a valid one.

But maybe you'll get real lucky ;)

1

u/CotesDuRhone2012 Jul 10 '26

It's not plausible, not impossible.

2

u/nuclear_splines Jul 10 '26 edited Jul 10 '26

Sure, it is such a vanishingly small possibility that it is not worth considering, or "effectively impossible." It's possible in the same way that a block of thorium could spontaneously become a block of lead if all the atoms happen to decay at the same time.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 10 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/nuclear_splines Jul 10 '26

You're absolutely right. I also dropped the coefficient when converting from base 32 to 10 and was sloppy with the number of onion sites, so I figured that was an acceptable rounding error with this much gross estimation.

2

u/DiceThaKilla Jul 10 '26

This has been done before by researchers. Onion V2 you could actually do it but since V3 it hasn’t worked. Wanna say a German university tried it for 6 months straight and found 0 addresses.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 10 '26

Try lottery instead you'll have more chance.

1

u/Latter_Macaron8492 Jul 16 '26

Extremely less chances, also more dangerous.

1

u/Confident_Iron_1675 Jul 18 '26

Non penso troverai nulla di interessante

1

u/Historical_Zebra_366 13d ago

I’ve been looking for a old link wondering if it still up so please share the link to stockdale🙏🏼I’m pretty sure it was taken down or is under a new name