First visit

An account on Black Ops has three locks on it from the moment it is created: PGP, 2FA, and escrow. Set them up in this order and the first week is boring, which is the goal.

Step one: a PGP keypair, before you arrive

Generate a keypair before you open the market. GPG on the command line, or any GUI wrapper that speaks the same format. You will paste the public half at registration and keep the private half somewhere you control.

The market sends you mail: login confirmations, password resets, support answers, and the odd signed announcement. All of it is encrypted to your public key. A lost private key does not delete the account, but it does make the mail unreadable, and mail is how recovery works. Keep the private key off shared machines and write down where the backup lives.

Step two: registration

Username, password, public key. There is no email field, because the key is the email address: the market writes to the address inside your public key block.

• The password is the long one. You will not be able to change it later without PGP mail, so make it one you can keep, not one you can remember from a song.
• Choose a username you can live with. It is public to every vendor you ever trade with, and it is the string other people search when they check whether you are who you say you are.

Step three: 2FA

An authenticator app, the standard time based kind. The market shows a QR code once at setup. Scan it, enter the six digits, done. The seed it gives you is worth more than the account balance, and it is the second thing to write down in the encrypted place, next to the PGP private key.

Step four: the first deposit

Settlement is Monero. Your account shows a deposit address; your wallet does the rest. Two habits from the start: deposit an amount you can recognize in the ledger history, and never send from a wallet that has ever touched a clearnet exchange you do not fully trust. The deposit itself is free; the fee, if any, is whatever your wallet side charges.

Step five: the first order

Look at three things before confirming anything: the vendor's feedback, the bond figure on the shop page, and the shipping times the vendor states in the listing. The bond is the vendor's own money, staked before selling, and it is what a confirmed dispute draws from. A shop with a bond you would not be sad to see disappear has something to prove; one with a modest bond and a long feedback history is the normal, healthy kind.

Confirm receipt when the parcel actually arrives and the goods actually match. Escrow releases on your word, and the market trusts the word you type. What the market charges along the way is on the fees page.