Okay, so I'll be honest with you. For years I assumed the dark web was basically a place where cartoon villains sold nuclear weapons to each other. That's genuinely what I pictured. Embarrassing, I know. Then one afternoon — it was raining, I had nothing better to do — I started actually reading about it. Not sensationalist YouTube videos. Actual stuff. Research papers, journalist accounts, court documents from real dark web prosecutions. And what I found was... weirdly complicated? Not what I expected at all. So I wrote this. Not because I'm an expert. Honestly, I'm just a curious person who spent a lot of time on this and wanted to put together something that wasn't completely full of nonsense. First Things First — What Even Is the Dark Web? Here's the thing nobody explains properly. The internet you use every day — Google, Instagram, your bank's website — that's called the surface web . It's what search engine...