DEPENDS
This is the section that took the work. Anyone can list what is impossible. Saying it depends is only useful if you then say on what, and that is the contract every page in here signs.
What each page owes you
- The variables, by name.
- Which way each one pushes.
- Which ones are visible from where you sit.
- Which ones you control.
The last two are the useful part. A lot of these outcomes turn on something you cannot observe, and knowing that saves you from refreshing a page for an hour.
The ten
- How long a deposit takes
- How many confirmations are needed
- Whether a slow page means anything
- Whether one mirror beats another
- Whether a dispute succeeds
- Whether account age predicts behaviour
- What you actually pay
- What a refund comes back as
- Whether you need PGP for this step
- Whether lost access comes back
The shape of a bad answer
Bad answers to these questions share a look. They are a single number with no unit of doubt attached. Twenty minutes. Three confirmations. Two percent. The number is usually a real memory of a real event, which is why it sounds convincing, and it carries none of the conditions that produced it.
When you see one, the fix is not to find a better number. It is to ask which variable the speaker had held constant without noticing. Usually it is the fee they paid or the hour of the day they tried.
Visible, invisible, yours
Sorting the variables into those three groups changes what you do next more than any estimate would.
| Group | What to do with it |
|---|---|
| You control it | Change it, then measure again. |
| You can see it but not change it | Use it to decide whether to wait. |
| You cannot see it | Stop trying to infer it from the symptom. |
Most frustration around an awazon darknet market comes from treating group three like group one. Refreshing a page does not reveal server load. Waiting harder does not raise a fee that was already paid.
Why not just give ranges
Ranges look responsible and hide the same problem. A range still asserts a distribution, and we have no data to build one from. We do not run the market, we do not connect to it, and we would be quoting other people's anecdotes with error bars drawn on.
Naming variables is weaker and true. If a page here does give a number, it says on the page that the number is a judgement and whose judgement it is.
How a DEPENDS page is built
Start from the sentence somebody actually said. Strip it down to the claim it makes. Find the two or three situations where it holds and the two or three where it does not. Whatever is different between those situations is the variable, and there is usually more than one.
Then the harder half. For each variable, work out whether the person asking the question can observe it. A variable you cannot observe is not useless, but it changes the advice from adjust this to stop guessing about this.
The pages that surprise people
Two of them tend to. Account age, because a lot of people treat it as a proxy for honesty when it is mostly a measure of how long a name has been in use. And refund form, because the assumption that value comes back in the same shape it went out is doing quiet work in a lot of plans.
Neither page tells you what to do. Both tell you what the answer hangs on, which is the most a page written by strangers can honestly offer about your particular order.