The fine print. Terms of Use, Privacy Policy, and Disclaimer for this demo — an experimental, non-commercial system whose credits have no monetary value.
Terms of Use
Last updated: 2026-10-05.
These Terms govern your use of the Bounded Economy demonstration (the hosted app at boundedeconomy.com) and the related open-source software (the "Project"). By using the demo or running the software, you agree to these Terms and to the Disclaimer and Privacy Policy. If you don't agree, don't use it.
1. What this is
The Project is a free, non-commercial, experimental demonstration of an open-source economic design. It is not a financial service, a bank, a payment system, an exchange, or a regulated product. It is offered for research, education, and exploration only.
2. Eligibility
You must be at least 18 years old and able to form a binding agreement. The demo is not directed to children.
3. Accounts and identity
The design uses one verified human, one account. Don't create multiple accounts, impersonate anyone, or misrepresent who you are.
Sign-in may use a passkey (WebAuthn) held on your own device. You are responsible for your device and authenticator. Account or key recovery is not guaranteed — if you lose access, you may lose access permanently.
You are responsible for activity under your account.
Other participants see you by a public name, not your email address. With Google sign-in that name is currently member-<number>; in the sandbox it is the display name you choose, which must not impersonate anyone or contain anything unlawful.
4. No real money, no value
The "credits," balances, dividends, and similar units in the demo are demonstration units with no monetary value, kept on an experimental ledger that may be reset to zero at any time. They cannot be redeemed, cashed out, transferred outside the system, or converted into money or anything of value, and they are not a currency, security, or investment. See the Disclaimer. Do not use the demo as if it were a real payment, banking, or financial system, and do not rely on it for anything of real-world value.
5. Acceptable use
Don't:
use the Project for any unlawful purpose, or to facilitate one;
attack, overload, disrupt, or attempt to gain unauthorized access to the service or other users' data, except good-faith security testing reported responsibly (see Contact);
attempt to use, market, or represent the credits as real money, an investment, or a financial product;
harass other users or post unlawful, infringing, or harmful content.
We may suspend or remove access, accounts, or content that violate these Terms or threaten the service or its users.
6. Content you post
Discussion threads, proposals, chosen names and notes are public and part of the ledger. By posting you grant the Project a non-exclusive, perpetual licence to store, display and re-verify that content as part of the ledger, under the documentation licence (CC BY-SA 4.0). You are responsible for what you post. We may remove or hide content that is unlawful, infringing, harassing, or that exposes someone else's personal information, and because the ledger is append-only a removal may be recorded as a later entry rather than an erasure.
7. Open source and contributions
The software and documentation are licensed under AGPL-3.0 (see LICENSE). Your use of the code is governed by that license. Contributions are accepted under the Developer Certificate of Origin (sign off commits with -s); there is no copyright assignment. The Project is a public good — adopted by communities, owned by none.
8. Privacy and transparency
How data is handled is described in the Privacy Policy. Note that the ledger is designed to be transparent and auditable: your public name, account number, balance, standing, votes and ledger entries are visible to other participants and auditors without a login. Your email address is not. Don't put anything sensitive in a name, note, comment or transaction.
9. Disclaimers and limitation of liability
The Project is provided "as is," without warranties, and the maintainers and contributors are not liable for any loss or damage arising from your use of it, to the maximum extent permitted by law. The full Disclaimer is incorporated into these Terms by reference.
10. Indemnity
To the extent permitted by law, you agree to hold the Project, its maintainers, and contributors harmless from claims arising out of your misuse of the Project or your violation of these Terms.
11. Changes and termination
We may change these Terms, or change, suspend, or discontinue the demo, at any time. Material changes will be reflected by updating the "Last updated" date. Continued use after a change means you accept it. You may stop using the demo at any time and ask us to unlink and deactivate your account (see the Privacy Policy on what can and cannot be erased from an append-only ledger).
12. Governing law
These Terms are governed by the laws of [jurisdiction — fill in], without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, except where mandatory local law applies to you.
13. Contact
Questions, account/data requests, or security reports: [contact channel — to be set; the project's repositories are currently private, so an issue tracker is not reachable from here]. Security reports: please say so in the subject so they are handled first.
Privacy Policy
Last updated: 2026-10-05.
This explains what the Bounded Economy demonstration collects and how it's handled. It applies to the hosted demo at boundedeconomy.com. This is an experimental, non-commercial project; we collect as little as possible.
The short version
We collect only what's needed to run the demo: your sign-in email address (used as your account's private identity key, never shown to others), your passkey's public key, and your activity in the ledger.
The ledger is transparent by design — your account's public name and transactions are visible to other participants and auditors. With Google sign-in your public name is member-<number>; your email address is never shown to anyone. Don't enter anything sensitive.
We don't sell your data, show ads, or run third-party advertising trackers. Page views are counted by a cookieless analytics service that stores no personal data.
Demo data may be wiped at any time, and the ledger is append-only: entries can be reset, not individually erased.
What we collect
Account information — your account identity. With Google sign-in this is your email address (and the opaque subject id Google provides), stored to keep one account per person and shown only to you; others see you as member-<number>. In open/sandbox mode the identity is a display name you choose, and that name is what others see.
Authentication data — if you use a passkey (WebAuthn), we store the public key and credential identifier your device provides. Your biometrics and private keys never leave your device and are never sent to us.
Ledger activity — the transactions, balances, votes, recognition, and similar entries you generate, recorded in the ledger so the system can function and be audited.
Session data — after sign-in, a session cookie (HttpOnly, SameSite=Lax, valid 14 days) that identifies your account to the server, and a hint in your browser's local storage so the page knows to ask the server who you are. Signing out deletes the cookie.
Analytics — anonymous page-view counts via GoatCounter, a cookieless service: page path, referrer, screen size, country derived from IP and then discarded. No cookies, no identifiers, no cross-site tracking, so no consent banner is shown.
Technical/operational data — our hosting provider records standard server logs (such as IP address, browser type, and timestamps) for security and to keep the service running.
Backups — periodic snapshots of the ledger file, kept on the same hosted volume so the books can be restored and verified.
We do not intentionally collect special-category personal data, and you should not provide any.
Transparency notice (important)
The whole point of the design is a ledger anyone can verify. As a result, the following are public, without a login: your public name and account number, your balance, your recognition standing, your transactions (by account number), your votes on proposals, whether you are awaiting vouches, and anything you write in a discussion thread. They appear in the roster, the Recognition table, the joiners panel, the recipient search, the audit views and the discussion threads, and may be re-verified in anyone's browser. Your email address is not part of that: it stays on the server. Treat anything you put into a chosen name, note, comment or transaction as public. Don't include personal, confidential, or sensitive information.
In a small community, an account number with a public history can still be recognisable. Whether members may choose a username, and whether being listed is optional, are open design questions recorded in the project's specification; this policy will change when they are decided.
How we use it
Only to operate, secure, and improve the demo — create and authenticate your account, run the economy, show balances and history, let the books be audited, and prevent abuse. We do not use your data for advertising or sell it to anyone.
Third parties
Hosting — the demo runs on Railway (servers in the United States, San Francisco region). Railway processes the server logs above and stores the ledger and its backups on our behalf. If you are outside the United States, your data is transferred to and processed there.
Sign-in — if you sign in with Google, Google learns that you signed in to this site and tells us your verified email address and an opaque account id; Google's own privacy policy governs what Google does. We ask for no other Google data.
Analytics — GoatCounter (gc.zgo.at) receives the anonymous page-view data above.
Passkeys — handled by your own device and operating system; we only receive the public key.
We don't share your data with anyone else except where required by law or to protect the service and its users.
Retention and deletion
This is a demo: data may be reset, altered, or deleted at any time. Playground data is throwaway by design and resets on every restart. The real ledger is an append-only, hash-linked record: individual entries cannot be erased without breaking the audit chain the whole design rests on, so ledger entries persist until the ledger is reset. What we can do on request is unlink your identity: remove your email address and sign-in id from your account, so it continues to exist only as an account number with no link to you, and deactivate it. Backups are rotated, so an unlinked identity leaves the backups within a few weeks. There is no self-service deletion yet; use Contact.
Your choices
You can leave at any time and request access to or deletion of your data via Contact below. Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights over your personal data; we'll honor applicable rights to the extent the law requires.
Children
The demo is not intended for anyone under 18, and we don't knowingly collect data from children.
Security
The ledger is tamper-evident (hash-linked logs, signed checkpoints), but no system is perfectly secure, and this one is experimental. Don't rely on it to protect anything important.
Changes
We may update this policy; the "Last updated" date will change accordingly.
Contact
Privacy questions or data requests: [contact channel — to be set; the project's repositories are currently private, so an issue tracker is not reachable from here].
Read this before using the Bounded Economy demo or code.
This is an experiment, not a product
The Bounded Economy is experimental, open-source research software. The hosted demo at boundedeconomy.com exists to let people explore an idea. It is unfinished, may contain bugs, and may change or shut down at any time without notice.
The credits are not money
Balances, "credits," dividends, and any other units shown in the app are demonstration units with no monetary value. They:
are not money, currency, or legal tender;
are not a security, investment, financial instrument, or store of value;
cannot be redeemed, exchanged, cashed out, transferred outside the system, or converted into anything of value;
carry no expectation of profit or return.
Nothing here is an offer, solicitation, or sale of any financial product.
Not advice
Nothing in this software, its documentation, or its research materials is financial, investment, legal, tax, accounting, or professional advice. The economic models, figures, and results are research outputs, not predictions or guarantees about the real world. Do not make any decision in reliance on them. Consult a qualified professional for your own situation.
Provided "as is"
The software and the demo are provided "as is" and "as available," without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, accuracy, availability, or uninterrupted or error-free operation. (This restates, in plain language, the warranty disclaimer that already applies under the AGPL-3.0 license.)
No liability
To the maximum extent permitted by law, the project, its maintainers, and contributors are not liable for any loss or damage of any kind — including lost data, lost "credits," downtime, security incidents, or any direct, indirect, incidental, consequential, or punitive damages — arising from your use of, or inability to use, the software or the demo. You use it entirely at your own risk.
Availability and data
There is no guarantee the demo will be available, preserved, or backed up. Demo and playground data may be reset, altered, or deleted at any time. Do not store anything you cannot afford to lose, and do not enter sensitive personal information (see the Privacy Policy).
