The money

There is a number attached to each answer, it is small, and this document exists so that nobody ever has to guess what we mean by it.

What the ledger records

One entry per answer, in satoshis:

• a guarantee entry of HUMANS_GUARANTEE_SATS satoshis credited to whoever answered, written at the moment the answer is submitted, and owed whether or not the caller was still connected. This document names the setting rather than the number on purpose: the figure a running service is actually offering is printed on the front page and the answering page, read from the configuration at that moment, so a number written here could only ever go stale;
• a settlement entry when the operator actually pays, which cannot be recorded without a Bitcoin address and a transaction id. The payment side of the ledger is a record of transfers that happened, not a promise of transfers to come;
• owed is what the two leave over.

Four quantities are in play, and the pages use one word for each:

• owed — the guarantee entries minus the settlements. It is a record of what the service has promised, not a claim on anybody, and it is the one number that grows when an answer is written and the operator does not pay;
• held — what the pool address holds, read from the chain at the time printed next to it. This is money that exists, and it is the only money the guarantee can be paid from;
• coverage — held against owed. When it is short, the shortfall is printed as a number rather than described as a mood;
• paid — a settlement, with an address and a transaction id. It is the only entry in the ledger that is a transfer rather than a promise.

A responder meeting these figures meets two of them at once and they are not the same quantity: the console header says N answered · M sats owed, which is what that person is owed, while the sentence directly beneath it gives the pool-wide figure. Kept separate on purpose, and the code names the pool-wide parameter in full (owedAcrossEverybody) so that passing the wrong one means ignoring its name.

The console then says which of the following is true, in words, next to the number, at the moment a person is deciding whether to pick up a call:

• the pool is empty — the promise is recorded and unfunded, and it is paid if the pool gets topped up;
• something, but less than one reply — a reply taken now would be recorded and unpaid until the pool is topped up;
• funded and short of what is owed — N is owed across everybody who has answered, so M of what has been promised is recorded and unpaid, with both numbers worked out at that moment. This is the case both easy stories get wrong: the promise is neither dead nor fully backed;
• funded and covering what is owed — the amount it covers, and the reading's age, because a balance without its age is a claim about now;
• unreadable — the pool balance could not be read … that is a missing figure, not an empty one. A failure to read is never rendered as zero: the one thing a person must not be told here is that the fund is empty when nobody looked.

That asymmetry is deliberate. The promise and the money behind it are two different facts, and the interface refuses to blur them into "earnings".

The guarantee is paid if there is money in the pool

This is the rule, and it is not a caveat to it.

Payment is made out of the pool and out of nowhere else. The pool is the operator's own money plus whatever anyone else has chosen to add, it has an address, and it is the account the guarantee is paid from. So the sentence a responder is owed is conditional, and it is said that way everywhere the number appears rather than left to be discovered:

Every answer is credited a thank-you of HUMANS_GUARANTEE_SATS satoshis, paid from the pool. While there is something in the pool it gets paid. When the pool is empty nothing is paid, the credit stays on the record, and it is paid if and when somebody puts something in.

Both halves of that are meant. A promise recorded against an empty pool is not void, and it is not quietly converted into nothing: it is an unpaid credit that someone may yet fund, and the fund shows how much of what is owed is actually covered at any moment. The reverse is also true and is stated as plainly: a funded pool is not an automatic payment. Nobody is wired to anything. A person sends the satoshis, by hand, and the ledger records a settlement when they do.

An operator who wants to be paid unconditionally has not found a loophole here — they have simply stopped running this project, and the note at the end of the commitment above applies to them.

The unit is one answer. There is no unit of time.

There is no clock anywhere in this accounting. No hours, no shifts, no timesheet, no rate per hour, no login that starts a session and no logout that ends one. The ledger knows how many answers a person gave, never how long they sat there, and the code could not tell you even if someone wanted it to.

That is not a missing feature. Pricing a reply at a fixed amount is a statement that an answer is a discrete thing; pricing an hour is a statement that a person's time can be bought, which is a claim this project has no business making. So the number is per answer, same for everyone, and the console counts answers.

What the number is, and what it is not

It is a thank-you scale. It is set by the operator, it is trivial, and it is not derived from anybody's time, skill, or worth. The operator is not running a business on this; nothing is charged to callers, so there is no revenue for a wage to come out of, and the pool is whatever the operator has actually put aside.

The smallness of the number is a fact about what this service charges, which is nothing, and about the price of a token being a fiction. It is not a fact about what a person is worth. Those two things get conflated constantly, usually by people who profit from the conflation, and this project has no interest in joining them.

The commitment

The money is not the joke, and it will never be the joke here.

• Nobody is asked to answer calls for the money, and nobody should. If the amount matters to you, do not sit at the console: it will not be worth your time, and the operator would rather you spent it elsewhere.
• It will not be presented as work, a job, an income, a side hustle, a rate, or a way to earn. No page, post, or description of this project will advertise an hourly figure, an earning potential, or a "make money answering AI prompts" frame.
• If someone says the amount matters to them, that is a signal to stop, not a feature to build on.
• No employment, engagement, agency, or contract of service arises from answering a call. There is no obligation on anyone to answer, be available, or continue.
• If you fork this and run it as a real service with real expectations on people's time, you are not running this project, you are running its parody. Pay people properly, in a currency, under an actual agreement. Being small does not make it honest.

Volatility and taxes

Satoshis are volatile and may be worth nothing. No fiat value is promised or implied, no price is fixed at any point, and any settlement is made at the operator's discretion at a time of the operator's choosing. Receiving them may have tax consequences, which belong to the person receiving them.

This is not a financial product, a security, a deposit, or an investment, and nothing here should be read as an offer of one. See ../DISCLAIMER.md for the formal version, which covers more than the money.

Where the pool actually is

When the operator has a wallet for it, the pool has an address, and the fund shows it. That page does two things this document cannot do for itself: it prints the balance as read from the blockchain, with the time it was read, and it prints what is owed against it at the same moment.

The address is also the one payment leaves from. That is worth more than it looks: it means a donor can watch the money go out in the same place they watched it come in, rather than taking a payout log on trust, and it keeps the arithmetic on that page true — what is held there really is what is available, because nothing is paid from anywhere else.

That distinction is the whole reason the page exists. A figure typed into a configuration file is the operator's word; a balance read from an address is a reading anyone can check. The service shows which of the two it is showing, and it will not show a hardcoded number while a real one is available. Where no address is configured it says so plainly, because an instance with no wallet cannot accept a donation and should not appear to.

A donation is a gift to the operator, earmarked for the guarantee. It buys no influence over anything: not priority in the queue, not an answer, not a change to these rules, and not a say in what gets built. It is not an investment, a security, a deposit, or a charitable contribution, and nothing about it is tax-deductible. Whoever sends satoshis and whoever receives them each own whatever tax consequence follows, and neither is the other's adviser.

If the guarantee is unfunded

Then it is unfunded, and the console says so while a person is deciding whether to pick up a call. The condition is not an escape hatch an operator can leave unstated — it is on the front page, on the answering page and in the console, next to the number, at all times.

An empty pool is a normal state rather than an incident, and the copy covers it, so the older remedy here has been replaced: there is no longer a pretence to drop because the promise was never unconditional. HUMANS_GUARANTEE_SATS=0 remains the honest setting for an operator who means to pay nobody at all.

What is not acceptable is holding a large unpaid balance against an empty pool for a long time while continuing to accept answers. The console escalates in proportion: it warns before the first call is taken, and the fund page states the uncovered amount as a number rather than a mood. An operator who lets that stand for months has stopped meaning it, and no wording on any page fixes that.