How long it takes on Zion Market, and what happens while you wait

This site does one thing. It takes each wait you can run into on Zion Market, gives that wait a card of its own, and files the card by how long it lasts. Nothing else about the market is covered. There is no walkthrough here, no ranking of anything against anything, no advice about what to buy, and no account of one person's session presented as if it were everybody's.

The filing is by duration because duration is the question people actually arrive with. Nobody opens a page to ask what a captcha is. They ask whether a screen that has been still for a while is still doing something. A topic index cannot answer that, because it groups by subject and the subject is the part you already know. A duration index can answer it, because the answer is already in the heading: this is a wait that finishes while you watch, or this is a wait that will still be running tomorrow.

The five bands are not measurements and nothing here was timed. Each band is an argument about mechanism. A wait sits in the shortest band because the work behind it is one exchange over a circuit that already exists, and nothing built that way can take an evening. A wait sits in the longest band because nothing in its mechanism sets a ceiling at all. Where the mechanism does not support a band, the card says so plainly rather than guessing at a figure that would sound better.

Each card is written to stand on its own. The intended reader landed on it from a search while staring at something that will not move, and wants to know whether to keep waiting, what is happening out of sight, and what would make the wait longer. That reader should be able to close the page after one card and be better off.

The five bands

A band is a claim about what has to happen before the screen can change. Read the one that matches your situation and you will land among cards that share a mechanism, not merely a subject. If you are unsure which band you are in, where the bands come from sets out the reasoning behind each boundary.

The bands are not evenly spaced, and they were not meant to be. They are cut where the mechanism changes hands. The first cut is between an answer that already exists and an answer that has to be made. The second is between work your machine is part of and work happening somewhere your machine cannot see. The third is between a day and a calendar. The last is between a process that ends and a situation that has no end built into it. Those four cuts are the whole design, and every card sits on one side of each of them.

The two rules everything here follows

The first rule is that no number is invented. There is no average here, no percentage, no count of confirmations, no typical duration. If a length cannot be defended from the way a thing works, it is not written down. This is a harder rule to follow than it sounds, because invented numbers are what make writing of this kind feel authoritative, and leaving them out costs a certain kind of confidence. The trade is worth it. A page that gives you a figure it cannot support has taught you nothing and has cost you your ability to tell when it is right.

The second rule is that nothing here is monitored. This site contacts no address, runs no check, and observes no service. It is a set of written pages served from a server that knows nothing about the market. That is why you will not find a status indicator anywhere on it, and why the address panel above says what it says. A site about waiting has a particular duty here, because a page that appears to be watching something live is exactly the page a person will trust while they are anxious.

Both rules are set out at greater length, with the reasoning and the cases where they bite hardest, on why there are no numbers. If you only read one page here besides your own band, read that one.

Ways into the register

The cards can be reached five ways. Which one suits you depends on whether you know what you are looking at.

• The whole timelineEvery card laid end to end, shortest band first, so you can see where one wait sits relative to all the others.
• Every waitThe full register in a single table, grouped by band, with a line on what each card is waiting for.
• How to read a cardWhat the fixed headings on a card mean, and which one to read first when you are in no mood to read all of them.
• Where the bands come fromThe reasoning behind each of the five bands, and what would have to be true for a card to move between two of them.
• What to do meanwhileThings that are safe to do while a wait runs, and the ones that quietly restart it.

Who this is for, and who it is not for

It is for someone who is already in front of a screen and wants to know whether the stillness in front of them is normal for the thing they asked for. It is also for someone who is not in front of a screen at all, and is trying to work out whether tonight or tomorrow is the right time to look again. Both of those people are answered by the same set of cards read in the same way.

It is for one more reader, and this one matters most. Somebody who has already started pressing things. The cards are written with that person in mind, which is why so many of them spend as much space on what a wait costs when you interrupt it as on what the wait is. Knowing what a screen is doing is useful. Knowing what your own next keystroke will undo is more useful, and much harder to find written down anywhere.

It is not for someone who wants to be told a market is up. This site cannot tell you that and does not try. It is not for someone looking for a review, a comparison or a recommendation, because none of those appear anywhere on it. And it is not for someone who wants a single figure to plan around, because the honest version of that figure is a band, and a band is what every page here gives you instead.