What you are risking
Signing the declaration risks nothing. Committing money is a different decision, and this page is the part nobody enjoys writing.
That is the honest version. There is no compensation scheme behind this, no protection if it goes wrong, and nobody to complain to.
This is not an investment
You are not buying a share, a token, or a right to anything. There is no return and there is never going to be one — not a dividend, not a profit share, not a payout of any kind beyond your own money being released to you unspent.
If any part of you is hoping to make money here, you have misread what this is, and you should not take part.
Bitcoin falls as well as rises
It has halved before and it will again. If you commit money and the price drops, the money you committed is worth less — and because it is locked, you cannot do anything about it until your lock ends.
That is the deal, and it is the price of a commitment the blockchain can enforce rather than one everybody has to be trusted to honour. Bear markets have lasted two and three years, which is longer than a one-year lock.
So: do not commit money you might need, and do not commit money you could not bear to watch fall by half. Pick your lock length with that in mind rather than to look impressive on a register.
You are responsible for your own money
Nobody holds your coins, which is the great strength of this design and also means nobody can help you if you lose access to them.
If you lose the key to your wallet, your bitcoin is gone. There is no password reset, no account recovery, no support line, and no technical trick that brings it back. Not us, not anybody.
If you have never held bitcoin before, learn how backups work properly before you commit anything. Practise with a small amount first. The movement will still be here.
Backing a purchase cannot be taken back
Locking money and backing a specific purchase are two separate decisions, and the second one is the one with no undo button.
When you sign your locked money into a proposal, you cannot un-sign it. There is no withdrawal, no cooling-off and no cancel. A proposal's window is deliberately short — up to four weeks to gather, then up to two more to go through — so the most you are ever bound for is six weeks, and usually far less, because gathering stops the moment enough money is behind it. But while it is open, you are bound. Do not back something you are not sure about.
A mechanism to take a commitment back was designed and thrown out, because it would have needed the co-signer's permission — which makes it useless in the only situation where you would want it.
There is also a tail to this that you should know about. A commitment stays technically valid for as long as the coins it points at have not moved, so a dishonest co-signer could in principle complete one belonging to a proposal that already closed unfunded. It could only ever go to the destination you signed for, which is on a published list, so it is a premature payment to a named recipient rather than theft. Your real protection is your lock's own date: once it passes, you can move those coins yourself and every old commitment over them dies on the spot.
Which means a five-year lock carries a longer tail of this than a one-year lock. Longer locks count for more and expose you for longer. That is a genuine trade and it is yours to make, not ours.
It costs money to take part
Two separate costs, and the first is the bigger one:
| What | Roughly | Paid to |
|---|---|---|
| Buying bitcoin, if you do not already hold any | Varies a lot — often 1.5–4.5%, plus a flat charge | The exchange you buy from |
| Making a lock | £1.50–£7 | Bitcoin miners, not us |
| Renewing a lock when it expires | £1.50–£7 again | Bitcoin miners, not us |
| Your money actually going into a purchase, if one succeeds | £1–£5 | Bitcoin miners, not us |
About those figures. The three bitcoin fees are paid to miners, are set in bitcoin, and are the same wherever in the world you are — the pounds here are only a rough guide at recent prices, so read them as "about the price of a round of coffees" and convert to your own currency. What you pay an exchange, on the other hand, genuinely does differ from country to country, and so does what buying bitcoin involves at all. We cannot tell you what it will be where you are.
None of it comes to this movement. We take nothing, charge nothing and earn nothing from your participation.
But it does mean small amounts are poor value. On the equivalent of £100, fees might be eight to thirteen per cent of what you commit. On £500 they are a couple of per cent. Fewer, larger commitments cost far less than many small ones — and a five-year lock costs one fee where five annual locks cost five.
It may simply fail
Nobody has done this before. Any one of these ends it:
We never raise enough to buy anything meaningful.
No owner is ever willing to sell a stake to a body like this.
Football's regulators decide a movement with anonymous members cannot hold a stake in a club.
A solicitor finds a flaw in the legal structure that cannot be worked around.
Interest fades and nobody renews their lock.
In every one of those cases the outcome is the same: locks run to their dates and every supporter's money is released back to them, unspent. There is no pot to lose, no company to go bust and no administrator to appoint, because at no point was your money anywhere but your own wallet.
You would have tied up some money for a while, got it back, and ended up with nothing to show for it but the attempt. That is the realistic worst case, and it is worth being clear-eyed that it is also the most likely one.
Risks in the software
The code holding the locks has been written and tested, including against a real Bitcoin network, and tested code is not the same as safe code.
At the time of writing, nobody outside this project has reviewed it. A mistake in how a lock is built could in principle make coins unspendable — not stolen, but stuck. Before this movement asks anyone to commit a meaningful sum, that code needs eyes that are not ours, and anyone considering a large commitment should wait for that.
Everything is published so that it can be checked rather than believed. That is not the same as it having been checked.
Tax is yours
In many countries, spending bitcoin on something counts as disposing of it, and a disposal can be taxable. What your country does is your own to find out — the rules differ everywhere and we are not in a position to tell you. If your locked bitcoin goes into a purchase, treat it as something you have to account for until you know otherwise.
Getting your money back is a different thing. Leaving a lock moves coins from one address you control to another address you control. You hold the same bitcoin you held before; nothing has been sold and nothing has been spent. Selling that bitcoin for cash afterwards is your own separate decision and nothing to do with this fund.
We do not collect your details, so we cannot and will not report anything on your behalf. Keep your own records.
And the obvious one
Nothing on this site is legal or financial advice, and nobody involved in writing it is qualified to give you any. If a decision here matters to your finances, speak to somebody who is.
If any of this makes you want to walk away, that is the page doing its job rather than failing at it. Signing the declaration still costs nothing and commits you to no payment, ever.