Zion How long it takes

Ground rules

Why there are no numbers

A specific figure reads as authority. On a site like this it would be invention with a decimal point attached.

Zion Market addresses

markz73ffpnbidkldppsj5cjnkfujdsy3rkpi5inqw3ikt4omwsldlqd.onion
zionm3fshzgd5pin3yrc5ueltoykozprcsggrgbl6b3dzbpdtfphv2id.onion

Printed as they were given to this site. Nothing here opens them, so none of this says either string is answering at the moment you read it.

You will not find an average on this site, or a percentage, or a typical time in minutes. That is a deliberate refusal and it is worth explaining, because the absence of numbers is the first thing people notice and the easiest thing to mistake for vagueness.

A number on a page about waiting would have to come from somewhere. There are only three places it could come from, and none of them survives inspection.

The three places a number could come from

Measurement
This site measures nothing. Nothing here opens either published address, sends a request to a market, or records how long anything took. There is no collector, no log and no history. A figure presented as measured would be a lie about the site as much as about the market.
Somebody else's measurement
Figures do circulate. They are almost always unattributed, undated, and taken on somebody else's connection at an hour you do not know, on a network whose whole design makes one person's timing a poor guide to another's. Repeating a figure like that launders a guess into a fact by quoting it.
Estimation
This is the honest one, and it is what this site does. The difference is that an estimate should be reported at the precision it actually has. The precision available here is a band. Writing that band as a number would be adding significant figures that do not exist.

What a band costs you and what it buys you

A band is less satisfying than a number. It does not tell you when to come back. It tells you which order of magnitude you are in, and that turns out to be the decision most people actually need to make: keep watching, go away and come back later, or stop treating it as a wait at all.

A number would not have told you more. It would have told you the same thing with false confidence, and false confidence during a wait is what produces the retry, the second submission, the duplicate order and the support ticket written on the first afternoon.

The rule about uptime

There is no uptime figure anywhere on this site, no status light, no green dot, no last checked timestamp and no claim that any address is working. This matters doubly here. A site organised around duration looks like a site that is watching a clock somewhere, and it would be easy to leave that impression by accident.

So it is worth being blunt. The two addresses on every page of this site are strings that were supplied to it. They are printed exactly as they were given, without labels, without numbering and in no order of preference. Nothing on this site has contacted either of them. If one of them is not answering for you, this site did not know that, and if one of them is answering perfectly, this site did not know that either.

A status light that is not backed by a check is the single most dishonest thing a page like this can carry, because it is the one element people trust without reading. Its absence here is not an omission.

What is counted

Two kinds of figure do appear. Counts of things on this site are real: the register holds a fixed number of cards, they are numbered, and the numbering is arithmetic rather than a claim about the world. Ordinal language is also used freely, because comparing two waits is something the mechanism supports. Saying that a screen painting is shorter than a gate screen is defensible. Saying either takes a specific length of time is not.

Everything else is qualitative on purpose. Where a card needs to be precise it is precise about mechanism, which is knowable, rather than about duration, which here is not.

The failure mode a number would have caused

Give someone a figure and they will treat it as a deadline. When the deadline passes they will act, and the acting is what costs them. That is the whole chain, and it runs the same way every time.

A person told a specific length will press the button again shortly after it elapses. On a page view that is free. On anything that writes, it is a duplicate, and duplicates are the most expensive category of mistake in the whole register. The order going through and the pause after you press sign in both spend most of their length on this.

A band does not produce that behaviour, because a band does not elapse. It tells you what kind of wait you are in and leaves the decision about acting where it belongs, which is with the second column of the card rather than with a stopwatch.

The same rule applied to everything else

What this card is not. This page is not an argument that precision is bad. It is an argument that precision you have not earned is worse than an honest range.

Everything on this site