Correspondence Regarding Chain Choice Fatigue
A transaction was abandoned. The network options were Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, and one that sounded like a pronunciation of another one.
Preliminary Findings: Chain Choice Fatigue Internal Report, July 2022
Incident Summary
The subject attempted a routine transaction on a Thursday afternoon during the week crypto winter became the only honest description of the market. The transaction was abandoned before completion. No funds were lost. The subject was not ready to discuss it.
What Happened
The platform presented four network options. The options were: Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, and one that sounded like a pronunciation of another one. The subject had not been expecting four options. The subject had been expecting one option, which is the option the subject always uses and which was also present, but was now one of four.
All four options had fees. The fees were displayed in different currencies. One fee was very low, which made the subject suspicious of it.
The Investigation
The subject abandoned the transaction and opened two browser tabs to research the networks. The research established that all four were valid options for reasonable use cases, that the fee differences reflected genuine technical trade-offs, and that choosing the wrong one would not result in a loss but might result in a slower or more expensive outcome. The research took twenty-two minutes.
The subject returned to the transaction. The platform had timed out.
The Governing Rule
Uncertainty may be converted into certainty by checking the same number again under identical conditions. The subject checked the exchange rate before the transaction and after the session timeout, under identical conditions, with identical results. The rate had not changed. The checking had not changed the rate. The subject had checked anyway because checking and not checking felt different, and the difference was not trivial.
The check cannot change the price, yet it changes the person's mood as if an action occurred.
Consequence
After this incident, the subject created a note titled "which chain to use" that contained one entry, which was correct at the time of writing and is now partially outdated. The note has not been updated. It is consulted anyway.
Eventually chain choice fatigue acquired an unwritten personal enforcement system: the subject now uses the same network for every transaction regardless of fee, treating consistency as a risk-management strategy and not acknowledging that this is what it is.
Current Status
The original transaction was completed the following morning using the same network the subject always uses. Elapsed time from first attempt to successful completion: seventeen hours. Total fee paid: four rupees.
The four-rupee fee was, under the circumstances, considered very reasonable.