Home / Onion Explained / Address anatomy
Anatomy of a Torzon onion address, character by character
The long string is not a password or a random ID. It is a compact encoding of a public key.
Fifty-six characters
A v3 onion address is 56 base32 characters, using only the letters a to z and the digits 2 to 7, followed by .onion.
What is inside
Those characters encode the service public key, a two-byte checksum and a one-byte version number, all packed together.
Why it cannot be shortened
Because the address is the key, any shorter form would point to a different service. There is no official short version of a torzon onion.
What this means for you
If two addresses differ by a single character, they are two unrelated services, however similar they look.
A Torzon onion address is a public key in disguise; one changed character means a different service.