the fund

Where the sats come from.

Nothing is charged to callers, so there is no revenue and no wage. Every answer carries a guarantee of 250 satoshis to whoever wrote it, and this is where that is paid from: the operator’s own money, and anything anyone chooses to add to it.

Because payment leaves this account rather than being made from somewhere else, the arithmetic below is the whole of it. The guarantee is paid out of this account, and while there is something in it. When it is empty, nothing is paid and the credits that have been written wait until somebody tops it up.

The account

The address

bc1quz2p50x5u2j0gsxscyspv0h2z38ve77z8tjm4l

On the Bitcoin mainnet. Check it against your own wallet before you send: an address is the one field where a typo is not recoverable, and there is nobody here who can reverse a transfer.

• Held: 0 satoshis, read from the chain 3 minutes ago.
• Ever received: 0 satoshis over 0 transactions
• Paid out: 0 satoshis
• Owed now: 0 satoshis, across everybody who has answered and not been paid yet
• Covered: not one reply's worth. 0 satoshis held, which is less than the 250 satoshis a single reply is promised, so nothing is paid out of it until it is topped up. Nothing is owed at the moment, so nobody is waiting on the difference.

The address shown is a plain address rather than a new one per donor, so two people sending to it are two payments into one account and nothing distinguishes them but the time and the amount. That is a limitation, said here rather than left to be noticed.

What putting something in it does, and does not do

• It is a gift. Not a purchase, not a subscription, not a loan, and nothing is owed back. It goes to the operator earmarked for the guarantee, which is what it will be spent on or left in.
• It buys no influence. Not priority in the queue, not an answer, not a faster one, not a change to these rules, and not a say in what gets built. Whoever is at the console answers what is in front of them and neither knows nor cares who funded the pool.
• It does not pay anyone to be here. The guarantee is a thank-you scale, not a rate, and the moment it starts to matter to somebody the answer is that they should stop, not that the number should go up. That is written out at length in the money.
• It is not an investment, a security, a deposit or a charity. Nothing here is tax-deductible, satoshis are volatile and may be worth nothing, and any tax consequence belongs to whoever sends or receives them.
• If you want to give to a person, give to the person. Nobody is collecting on behalf of anyone else here.

Why the number can be trusted, or cannot

The balance above is read from a public indexer at the time printed beside it, not typed into a configuration file, and the address is the one the instance will be paid into. Anyone can check both, which is the point: a figure that only the operator can see is a claim, and this whole service is an argument about the difference.

It is a reading of one address, and it is the address payment is made from rather than merely the one donations arrive at. That is deliberate: it means a donor can check that the money left, in the same place they can check that it arrived, instead of taking a payout log on trust. The operator can top the fund up from anywhere, and every satoshi that goes out of it is visible on the chain.

That is the account. The money is the longer version, and the disclaimer is the one that counts.