How it works

Nowhere. That is not a figure of speech — it is the whole design.

You keep your bitcoin under your own key the whole time. There is no account to pay into and no pot anywhere. What you do instead is lock your own coins: you send them to a new address that only your own key can open, with a rule that stops even you spending them before a date you pick. That rule is called a timelock. The money is still yours and still in your hands. It is just not available to you for a while, and anybody in the world can see that it is not.

This is why there is nothing for an organiser to run off with. Not because we are trustworthy, but because we never have it.

Because otherwise the number means nothing.

If this movement counted bitcoin that supporters merely owned, the total would be a measure of how much crypto its sympathisers happen to hold — which no club owner, journalist or solicitor would take seriously for a second, and nor should they. A locked coin is different. It is money somebody has deliberately put beyond their own reach, and that is a fact anyone can check against the blockchain.

You pick the length: one year, three or five. Longer is a louder statement.

Your coins become spendable by you again, and nothing else happens.

Nobody has to agree to it. No form, no notice period, no asking permission. On the date you chose, your own signature is enough to move your money and nobody else is involved in any way. If this movement has collapsed, if the people running the register have vanished, if everyone else has lost interest — your money still comes home on the day you picked.

It also stops counting towards the total that day, whether you have touched it or not. A total that included money people could spend tomorrow would not be a total of commitments.

Your locked coins can leave in exactly two directions, and no others.

Home to you — your signature alone, on or after your date.

Into a purchase — your signature plus a second one, at any time.

When there is something to buy, each supporter commits their own locked money to that specific purchase. Your commitment is your payment. There is no moment where the money sits in a fund waiting, which means there is no moment where it could be taken, misdirected or lost.

And because your commitment is your own signature on your own payment, nothing anybody else does can move your money. Nobody is outvoted here, because there is nothing to outvote.

No, and there is nothing to vote on.

A proposal is published — what it buys, what it costs, the address the money goes to. Supporters who want it sign their locked money into it. Supporters who don't, do nothing. If enough sign within the window, it goes through. If not, it doesn't.

So there is no ballot, no quorum, no turnout, and nothing passes or fails by a margin. Funding is the decision, and the thing deciding it is your own money going where you chose to send it.

A proposal has up to four weeks to gather support, then up to two to go through. Deliberately short. You should never be tied to one specific purchase for years — the lock is the long commitment; backing a particular purchase is a brief final step.

Four weeks is the limit, not a waiting period: the moment enough money is behind a proposal, gathering stops and it starts going through. The reason it can't overlap is that nothing may be sent until the whole amount is there — otherwise money would reach the seller for a purchase that never happens.

But while a proposal is open your commitment is binding. You can't un-sign it, so don't sign for something you are not sure about.

Anyone can publish a proposal. A bad one simply gets no support and costs nothing. The thing that stops a fake one is that the destination has to already be on a published list of approved addresses. That list has its own document, the destinations format, in the documents.

Less than you would think, and that is deliberate. Right now it is one supporter, whose key is published, and here is the exact extent of it:

They cannot take your money. Your own signature is needed alongside theirs, every time, for every coin.

They cannot keep your money. The route by which your lock comes home does not involve them at all. They could lose the key, change their mind or disappear, and your coins would still return to you on your date.

They can refuse to sign. That is the whole of their power. It would cost the movement an opportunity. It cannot cost you a penny.

Which is worth saying plainly for a reason that is not modesty: that key is worthless to a thief. It cannot move money on its own, so stealing it, or threatening its holder for it, would get somebody nothing at all.

It is meant to stop being one person. The plan is to split it so that two of three holders must agree, and eventually to hand it to the society as a duty it carries rather than a favour one supporter does. Splitting it now would change nothing, because the keys would all still be in the same house — what makes it real is other people holding them. Holding a share of it needs a phone and twelve words written on paper: no hardware wallet, nothing to buy, nothing to run. So it is a job that can be spread without anybody being paid or out of pocket.

A say. Never money.

If this ever owns a stake in Liverpool, that stake will be held by a supporters' society whose own rules force it to vote the club's shares the way its members vote. Not consult them. Not take their views into account. Vote as they voted, on the public record, so anyone can check it did.

There are two kinds of decision and they work differently. Spending money isn't voted on at all — you fund what you want funded, with your own money, so nobody can out-vote the people putting it up. Directing the club is one member, one vote, because a wealthy supporter is not more of a supporter, and because a question like "should the club back this stadium plan" moves no money and so cannot be settled by funding it. The plan for the society is here.

Because a bank account has somebody's name on it.

Every pooled fund needs a person or company to hold it, and that is the single point everything else fails at: they can be pressured, they can make mistakes, they can be sued, they can help themselves. Bitcoin is the only money that lets a hundred thousand strangers commit to the same thing while each of them keeps their own, provably, with no trusted middle.

It also means anyone anywhere can join without paperwork — which matters when the people who care most about an English football club are scattered across the world.

The cost is real and we are not hiding it: bitcoin's price moves, sometimes brutally, and while your money is locked you cannot do anything about that. It is the first thing on the risks page.

No, and that is a rule rather than a courtesy.

This movement is a set of published documents, not a piece of software. Anyone can write their own app from them, or use an ordinary bitcoin wallet and no app at all, and the register has to treat them exactly the same. Anyone can also run their own copy of the register — the page reads one public file and checks it in your own browser, so if your total ever disagrees with ours, ours is wrong.

A signature cannot be forged and needs nobody's permission to pass on. So if we ever refused to publish yours, you could hand it to anybody else who would. There is no gate for us to keep.

Your money is unaffected — it comes home on its date regardless, with nobody's cooperation required.

The movement itself is a harder question, and the honest answer is that it is one person at the moment, which is a weakness rather than a feature. The mitigation is that everything is written down and published: the declaration, the specifications, the code, and the record of every change. Somebody else could pick it up without needing anything that only exists in one person's head.