The 1 Million Run — Official Ruleset v1.0#

$0 → $1,000,000 in gross revenue, as fast as possible. Real time. Public timer. Evidence at the end.

This ruleset is the product. Everything else on this site is a view of the data it defines. The rules are public, versioned, downloadable, and enforced identically for every runner — including the operator of this site.

Reading time: about ten minutes. Read all of it before you apply.

Two companion documents are binding alongside this one: The Transparency Pact (/pact) — what happens to your data and how this platform makes money — and the Privacy Notice (/legal/privacy), which is its legal implementation.

0. How to read this#

• MUST / MUST NOT — hard rule. Breaking it voids the run.
• SHOULD — strong expectation. Repeated failure moves a run to inactive.
• MAY — permitted, no obligation.
• Anything not explicitly forbidden is allowed, provided it is legal.
• Where this ruleset is silent or ambiguous, the Verifier Board decides, publishes the reasoning, and the decision becomes a numbered precedent in the Changelog.

Machine-readable copy: this document is available as plain markdown at /rules.md. Download it, paste it into any AI, and ask whatever you want about your specific situation. That is encouraged, not merely tolerated — a ruleset that can only be interpreted by its author is a bad ruleset.

1. Definitions#

All timestamps are UTC. The threshold is denominated in USD.

2. The Premise#

At Start, every Run MUST satisfy:

1. From zero. The Venture MUST have generated $0.00 in lifetime revenue. No customers, no users, no launched product.
2. Declared capital. Capital MUST be declared — at application and continuously thereafter. See §2.2.
3. Declared accounts. Every social account, channel, newsletter and community the Runner owns or controls MUST be declared — including ones they don't intend to use. Under a Sealed Run (§6.3), this declaration goes to the Board rather than to the public, but it is not optional.

Skills, knowledge, and personal equipment acquired before Start are always allowed. Knowledge is not capital.

2.1 Preparation before Start — the line is execution, not thought#

This is the most-asked question about this format, so it is answered here rather than in a comment section.

Planning is always free. In every category, a Runner MAY think, research, plan, talk to potential customers, and take notes for as long as they like before starting the timer.

Whether anything was already built is what the 100% tag turns on. The categories themselves do not care:

Under the 100% tag, not one line of code may be written, no asset produced, no domain registered, no company formed, nothing bought for the Venture before Start. You may arrive with a fully formed plan in your head and a page of notes. Nothing else.

This line is drawn where it is because it is the only line that can actually be checked (§7.4) — nobody can prove when you had an idea, but a first commit, a WHOIS record and a company register entry all carry dates.

2.2 Declared Capital Is Cumulative, Not a Starting Figure#

Declared capital is not a one-time number fixed at Start. It is the running total of all funds the Runner or a Related Party puts into the Venture across the entire Run — money in from any non-revenue source — excluding reinvested Qualifying Revenue.

• The capital declared at application (§6.1) is the opening balance, not the final figure.
• Every injection after Start MUST be declared — at the next checkpoint, or within 14 days of the injection, whichever comes first — with amount, date, and source.
• An undeclared injection is treated as fraud, not oversight (§6.1): grounds for disqualification and a permanent ban.
• The cumulative declared-capital figure is public on the Run page, shown as a running total: opening balance plus each declared injection.

What counts as an injection: any money the Runner or a Related Party moves into the Venture that is not Qualifying Revenue — personal savings, proceeds from selling a personal asset, a loan, an investment, a grant, a credit line.

What does not:

• Reinvested Qualifying Revenue — money the Venture already earned and spends again is not a new injection.
• Personal spending outside the Venture — what the Runner does with their own money away from the Venture is irrelevant; only what enters the Venture is declared.

Tags with a capital limit — in particular Bootstrap (§5.2) — are measured against this cumulative figure, not against the Start figure alone. The opening balance is part of that total, not a separate allowance below it.

Why this matters: without it, "declared capital" is a number you say once and then quietly ignore. A runner could start at $0, take $200,000 from a relative in month three, and still wear the Bootstrap tag. Making the figure cumulative and public is what turns capital from a formality into a real dimension of comparison.

3. The Timer#

3.1 Approval, then scheduling#

1. The Runner applies.
2. The Board approves or rejects. Approval is not the start.
3. On approval, the Runner chooses their own Start timestamp. It MUST be at least 24 hours and at most 14 days after approval.
4. Once set, the Start is locked, published in advance, and counts down publicly.
5. If no Start is set within 14 days, the application expires. Approvals cannot be banked.

Nobody should have their timer start while they are asleep. The scheduling window is also free promotion: a published countdown is the cheapest audience-building event a runner gets.

Under the 100% tag, the "nothing built" condition is measured at Start, not at approval. Building during your own scheduling window is fine in either category and costs the tag.

3.2 No retroactive submissions#

A Run cannot be submitted after it began. There is no exception. No grandfathering, no "I started six months ago", no backdating. This single rule is what makes the leaderboard a live event instead of an archive of unverifiable claims. Everything else in this document is negotiable in some future version. This is not.

A Venture with existing revenue does not qualify. It MAY be resubmitted only as a genuinely new Venture.

3.3 Stop#

The timer stops at the exact UTC timestamp at which cumulative Qualifying Revenue first reaches $1,000,000. If one transaction crosses the threshold, that transaction's receipt timestamp is the Finish.

3.4 Real Time only#

Duration is Real Time (RTA). No pausing, no deductions for illness, holidays, employment, platform bans, or outages. Life is part of the run.

3.5 Currency — converted once, at the claim#

Runners keep their books in their own currency. There is no per-transaction conversion requirement.

When a Runner claims the Finish, the total is converted to USD once, at the ECB euro reference rate published for the claim date (cross-rated via EUR where needed; if the claim falls on a non-publication day, the most recent prior rate applies). If the converted total is ≥ $1,000,000, the threshold is met.

The threshold is a USD number, so exchange rates can help you or hurt you. That cuts both ways for everyone and is not appealable.

3.6 Settlement window#

Reaching the threshold provisionally stops the clock; the Run becomes finished (pending ratification).

• A 30-day settlement window runs. Refunds, chargebacks, reversals and statutory withdrawals in that window are deducted.
• If the total is still ≥ $1,000,000 and the evidence in §7.3 is accepted, the Run is verified and the original Finish timestamp stands.
• If the total drops below, the clock resumes from the provisional Finish — no time is credited back — and the Run continues.

The window is run by hand. Nothing on this site counts down thirty days on its own: the Run is moved to finished when the threshold is claimed, and moved again once the window has closed and the evidence has been assessed. Both moves are recorded with their timestamps in the Run's public status history, so the length of the window is checkable after the fact even though nothing enforces it in advance. This applies to the Operator's Run exactly as it does to any other — the settlement is arithmetic on the record, and it does not depend on who checks the evidence.

4. Qualifying Revenue#

4.1 Definition#

Qualifying Revenue = the total charged to third-party customers and received into an account the Runner controls, excluding VAT/sales tax remitted to a tax authority, minus refunds, chargebacks, reversals and statutory withdrawals.

Nothing else is deducted in Any%. Payment fees, platform fees, cost of goods, advertising and salaries are not deducted. Revenue counts when funds are received, not when invoiced or pledged.

On VAT: the figure that counts is net of VAT, because VAT is collected on behalf of a tax authority and was never the Runner's money. Where a Runner is not VAT-registered, gross equals net. Runs are compared on the net figure; sites and dashboards may show gross alongside it, but the counter is net.

The Operator is currently a small business under § 19 UStG and charges no VAT, so on The Receipts gross and net are the same number and no VAT line is shown. The figure is still labelled net, because net is what this section counts. See §13.

4.2 Counts#

Product sales · services and freelance work · subscriptions and memberships · tips and donations from unrelated third parties (subject to §4.8) · advertising, sponsorship and affiliate income earned by the Venture · crowdfunding, when funds are disbursed · marketplace payouts, counted gross of the platform's commission · licensing and royalties on IP created during the Run · sale of the Venture, if it was built entirely during the Run, counted at cash actually received on the date received (earn-outs count only when paid).

4.3 Does not count#

Money from the Runner or a Related Party · investment, equity sales, loans, credit lines, grants that aren't payment for a delivered good · gifts, inheritances, lottery and gambling winnings (except under Degen, §4.5) · income from anything outside the Venture · unrealised value, valuations, portfolio or token appreciation · booked-but-not-received revenue · barter and non-cash consideration · VAT/sales tax collected for a tax authority · any transaction where the funds return to the Runner or a Related Party.

4.4 Anti-wash rule#

Transactions MUST be arm's-length. Circular flows, self-dealing, round-tripping, wash trades, straw donations and mutual tipping arrangements, mutual buying arrangements between runners, and any structure whose main purpose is inflating the counter rather than serving a customer are excluded, and are grounds for disqualification.

4.5 Trading, gambling, speculation#

Where gross turnover is meaningless as a measure — trading, gambling, financial arbitrage, market making, crypto speculation — Qualifying Revenue is realised net profit, not turnover. These Runs MUST carry the Degen tag. Unrealised positions never count.

4.6 Resale and arbitrage#

Goods resale counts at gross sales price in Any%, provided §4.4 holds. This is intentionally permissive. Profit% exists as the answer to anyone who finds it unimpressive.

4.7 The live number is provisional#

The number shown during a Run is what the Runner reports, or — for the Operator's Run — what The Receipts record. It is not verified until ratification (§3.6, §7.3), and the site labels it as such everywhere it appears: self-reported for a Runner's own figure, from the receipts for the Operator's. The Operator's number is never board-verified at all, in any state (§10.2).

4.8 Single-Source Concentration (Donations and Tips)#

Sales, services, subscriptions and any revenue with a delivered good or service have no concentration limit — a large invoice is real commerce with a verifiable customer and a deliverable.

Tips and donations have no deliverable and are therefore the only revenue that can be faked as arm's-length. For these:

• A single tip or donation above $5,000 counts only if the payer is identity-verifiable to the Board as an unrelated third party (§1, Related Party). If the payer cannot be verified as unrelated, the amount does not count.
• No single payer's tips and donations may exceed 5% of the threshold in total — $50,000. Any amount above that from one payer is simply not counted. This is not a disqualification; the excess just does not move the counter.
• The burden of proving a large tip or donation is arm's-length is on the Runner, at Finish (§7.3), where bank statements must reconcile.

This closes the "one big donation wins" route by design: a self, alt-account or straw donation is a Related-Party or non-arm's-length payment (§4.4, §8.1) and is never counted; a genuine large donor can move a run by at most 5%; and no run can be completed by a single gratuitous transfer.

5. Categories and tags#

One category per Run, chosen at application, locked at Start. Everything else is a tag.

5.1 The two categories#

Any% — gross revenue Reach $1,000,000 in Qualifying Revenue, with nothing deducted. You MAY arrive with a finished product, a registered company, a built website — as long as it has never earned a cent and has never launched. The fastest and most permissive category.

Profit% — net profit $1,000,000 in net profit: Qualifying Revenue minus all business costs actually incurred — cost of goods, advertising, payment and platform fees, contractors, salaries, software, every operating expense. Taxes on profit are not deducted. Infrastructure rules follow Any%.

Owner draws, dividends and distributions are not costs and MUST NOT be deducted. A Runner MAY pay themselves a salary, which does count as a cost — that choice lowers their own number, so it needs no further policing.

Why only two: a category is a different question, not a different difficulty. Any% asks how much came in. Profit% asks how much was left. Those are the only two worth ranking separately, because a run cannot be compared against one that was scored on the other. Where a Runner started from is a real distinction and a hard one — but it is a condition on a Run, not a different question, so it is the 100% tag (§5.2) and it sits on top of either category.

5.2 Tags#

Declared at application, verified where verifiable, used as leaderboard filters. Any combination.

100% is a tag, not a category. It was a category in every draft before this one, and that was a mistake: a category decides what gets counted, and 100% never changed the counting — it counted gross revenue, exactly like Any%. What it actually describes is the starting line, which is a claim about one Run, verifiable at Finish and removable if it fails. That is a tag. It applies to either category, it means what it has always meant, and §7.4 is unchanged: the purest form of the premise, and the hardest to fake, because the evidence is time-stamped by systems the Runner does not control.

Bootstrap has two break conditions, and they are not the same rule.

• Outside capital breaks it immediately, in any amount. A loan, an investment, a grant or a credit line removes the tag the moment it is declared. One dollar is enough, and there is no threshold, because this half of the tag is a claim about where the money came from, not how much of it there was.
• Your own money breaks it at $100. Personal savings, the proceeds of selling a personal asset, and anything else that is not outside capital count against a cumulative ceiling of $100 (§2.2), opening balance included. The tag survives at $99 and is gone at $100.

Reinvested Qualifying Revenue never breaks it, under either condition. Losing Bootstrap costs the tag, not the Run: the Run continues with its time and its number intact, the tag is removed from the Run, and the date it broke is published in its place. The tag measures how a Run was funded, not whether it counts.

Worked example, because this is the question that gets asked: $50 declared as the opening balance keeps the tag. Two months later, $60 of personal money goes in — cumulative $110, so the tag breaks that day and the Run page says so from then on. Nothing is rewritten backwards; the Run simply stops carrying a tag it no longer qualifies for.

Solo and AI: software and AI tools are explicitly allowed under Solo and do not count as people. Using AI to do the work of a team is not a loophole in this format — it is the format. Only human labour you pay for or partner with breaks the tag.

No Audience — what it restricts. The tag limits what the Runner owns or controls, not who chooses to talk about them.

• Being covered, shared or promoted by someone else's audience is allowed. Earning that is part of the run.
• Paid promotion is allowed and MUST be disclosed at the next checkpoint. In Profit% it appears as a cost.
• Routing through an audience the Runner effectively controls — an undisclosed alt account, a household member's channel, a partner's list, a channel they ghost-operate — breaks the tag and counts as an undeclared account under §6.
• Measured once, at Start. Growing an audience during the Run is the point and never removes the tag.

Degen is not a punishment. It exists so that "is crypto trading a legitimate run" is answered once, in writing, forever: yes, it is listed separately, and everyone knows why.

6. Application#

6.1 What you submit#

1. Name or pseudonym, and a contact email
2. Country of tax residence (shown as country only)
3. Category and tags
4. What you will sell, and to whom — published as you wrote it
5. Opening declared capital in USD (§2.2)
6. Every social account, channel, newsletter and community you own or control, with follower counts, including ones you won't use
7. Acceptance of this ruleset by version number, and of The Transparency Pact by version number

That is the whole form. Deliberately short — the burden in this format belongs at the finish, not at the door.

Omitting an account, or an injection of capital under §2.2, is treated as fraud, not as an oversight, and permanently bans the Runner from this and all future Runs. The site snapshots every declared account at Start.

Corrections. A Runner MAY correct their display name, their country and their premise from their own page at any time. A corrected premise is republished with the date it was changed shown beside it — the premise is not frozen, but it is also never quietly swapped. This is a rectification right (Art. 16 GDPR), not an editing feature, and it is the reason this ruleset says "published as you wrote it" rather than "published unedited". What never changes: the Start timestamp, the category, capital already declared, decisions already published, and the Run's web address.

6.2 Limits#

• One active Run per Runner per category. A Runner MAY hold one active Run in each category, but each MUST use a separate Venture — the same revenue never counts twice.
• A Runner MAY retire a Run at any time and start another. Retired Runs stay in the archive with their elapsed time and final number, marked retired.
• Runners MUST be at least 18. Where a Runner is a legal entity, a natural person MUST be named as responsible.

6.3 Sealed Runs#

A Runner MAY apply for a Sealed Run, where their identity is withheld from the public until the Run ends.

How it works:

• The full application, including the complete account declaration, goes to the Verifier Board exactly as normal. Nothing is skipped and nothing is unverified.
• Publicly visible from Start: a Sealed entry — Sealed Runner #7 — with its category, tags, Start timestamp, live timer, declared capital and reported number. Everything except who it is.
• The identity and the full declaration are published when the Run ends — at Finish, at retirement, or at disqualification. All three. There is no outcome in which a sealed run simply disappears.
• Board members are bound to confidentiality on sealed identities and MUST recuse from any sealed Run they can identify a conflict with.

Why the timer is public even when the name isn't: if sealed runs could be started invisibly, a runner could start ten and reveal only the one that worked. Every sealed run is publicly counted from its first second, so a quiet failure is still a visible failure. That constraint is what makes the mechanic honest rather than a marketing device.

This exists so that an established creator can start from genuine zero without their existing audience contaminating the attempt. It is the only way No Audience and a known name can coexist.

7. Verification#

The principle: anyone should be able to check the decision, and the Board should be able to check the evidence.

Financial evidence is not published. It goes to the Verifier Board. What is public is the Runner's own reported number, the Board's decision, and the Board's reasoning. This is a deliberate change from an earlier draft: asking a runner to publish their bank statements to the internet is an entry barrier nobody clears, and it exposes customer and personal data that has no business being public. The public gets the verdict, not the raw statements.

One Run is the exception, and it is named: the Operator's. That Run publishes its evidence, redacted, instead of submitting it privately, because it is the one Run no Board can honestly rule on. The mechanism, its limits, and why it is not available to anybody else are in §10.2. Everything else in this section describes every other Run.

7.1 At Start#

The declared account list is snapshotted with its follower counts — publicly for open runs, to the Board for sealed ones. Account creation dates are not collected here. They matter only where the 100% tag is claimed, and there they are origin evidence at the finish (§7.4), not a field on the application form.

7.2 During the Run — three mandatory checkpoints#

A payment-dashboard screenshot showing lifetime volume and the current date, submitted to the Board within 14 days of crossing:

• $10,000
• $100,000
• $500,000

Profit% adds a running cost summary at each of the three. All categories declare any capital injections under §2.2 at each checkpoint.

Publicly visible: that the checkpoint was submitted, and whether the Board accepted it. Not publicly visible: the screenshot itself.

That is the entire mandatory burden during a run.

Beyond that, post as much as you like. A Runner MAY update their number at any time through a one-field form. Self-reported figures appear on the leaderboard immediately, labelled self-reported, visually distinct from verified. Runners who post often have a more credible-looking run; runners who post never still have a valid one.

A Run with no update and no checkpoint for 180 days moves to inactive. The timer keeps running. It returns to active on the next update.

7.3 At Finish#

Submitted to the Board, not to the public — for the Operator's Run, published redacted instead (§10.2):

1. One unedited screen recording, single take, through every payment dashboard used, showing lifetime volume, the account identity, and the current date and time
2. Bank statements covering the Run period that reconcile with the declared receipts
3. Profit%: a complete cost statement, with invoices for every line above $1,000
4. Bootstrap tag: evidence that cumulative declared capital stayed under $100 (§2.2)
5. 100% tag: origin evidence — see §7.4
6. Where §4.8 applies: evidence that large tips or donations were arm's-length

Tax status, tax documents and business registration are not collected. They are the Runner's own responsibility and none of this site's business.

7.4 Proving 100%#

This is the one tag where "nothing existed before" has to be shown, and it is easier than it sounds, because the evidence is generated by systems the Runner doesn't control:

• First commit timestamp in the repository history
• Domain WHOIS / registration date
• Company register entry date, where a company was formed
• Creation dates of accounts, workspaces and project files
• Purchase dates for anything bought for the Venture

If origin evidence is missing or inconclusive, the 100% tag is removed — the Run is not disqualified, and its category does not change. The tag claim fails; the Run survives with its category, its time and its number intact. Nobody should lose a year of work to a missing timestamp.

7.5 Standard of proof and what gets published#

Evidence must be sufficient for the Board to reach a defensible conclusion, and the Board's published reasoning must be sufficient for a reader to understand why.

Published for every decision: the decision, the reasoning, which evidence categories were provided, and any caveat. Not published: the evidence itself.

Where evidence is partial, the Board MAY verify with a published caveat rather than reject. A caveated Run displays as verified (with note) and the note is visible on the leaderboard itself, not only on the detail page. Long notes are clipped in the leaderboard cell and shown in full on the Run page — clipped, never dropped.

Decisions are entered by hand, in the administration area, and every entry is audit-logged. There is no automatic verification and no automatic rejection anywhere in this system (Art. 22 GDPR).

Published reasoning does not name the Runner. The Board writes "the Runner", or Runner #N, and describes what the evidence did or did not show. This is not politeness: a decision that names somebody is a decision that has to be rewritten if they later exercise their right to erasure, and an accountability record that gets rewritten is not one. Where a name does slip in, the erasure routine replaces it (§11.1).

8. Prohibitions#

8.1 No self-funding. Payments from the Runner or a Related Party don't count and MUST NOT be knowingly accepted. Discovering them later requires reporting and deducting them. Concealing them is disqualification. Money put into the Venture is not forbidden — it is declared capital (§2.2). Money routed in as revenue is fraud.

8.2 Refunds, chargebacks, reversals and statutory withdrawals are deducted when they occur, at the recorded amount, however late. See §3.6.

8.3 No unearned money. No gifts, inheritances, prize money not earned by the Venture, lottery or gambling winnings (except under Degen), airdrops or windfalls.

8.4 Legality. Illegal activity in the Runner's or the customer's jurisdiction means permanent removal and a permanent ban. No appeal. Also banned regardless of local legality: MLM structures, deceptive get-rich-quick products, purchased engagement for the Venture's own metrics, and any product whose primary function is defrauding its buyer.

8.5 The platform does not pay runners. The Operator MUST NOT pay a Runner for their Run, and money received from the Operator never counts. Third-party-funded prize pools (§10.3) are the sole exception, and prize money still does not count as Qualifying Revenue.

8.6 No revenue sharing. The Operator MUST NOT take a share of any Runner's revenue. A platform that profits from a runner's number cannot credibly verify that number.

9. Statuses#

Every status a Run can hold, including the two that are never shown to anybody. A table that lists only the public ones invites the question of what else there is.

Run records are not deleted. A leaderboard that hides its failures is not a record of anything. Personal identifiers within a record can always be removed on request — see §11.1 and The Transparency Pact.

That applies to Runs. A refused application never became one: no timer ran, no number was published, and there is no accountability record to preserve. It is therefore deleted outright, six months after the decision — long enough to cover a re-application or a challenge, and then gone.

10. Governance and the Operator's conflict of interest#

10.1 Stated plainly#

The Operator of this site is also a Runner. The person who writes the rules competes under them. That is a real conflict of interest, and it belongs here, in the rules, not in a footer.

10.2 How it is handled — two verification tracks#

Verification on this site runs on two tracks, and they are not equivalent. Which track a Run is on is stated every single time its status appears. That statement is the mechanism; without it the whole arrangement is just an assurance.

Track 1 — Board verification. Every Run except the Operator's.

The Runner submits evidence privately under §7, the Board rules on it, and the decision, the reasoning and the categories of evidence provided are published. The Operator sits on that Board and rules on other Runners' evidence exactly as §7.5 describes. Those Runners' evidence stays private, always — it contains their customers' data, and no amount of enthusiasm for transparency makes that the Operator's to publish.

Track 2 — Public evidence. The Operator's Run, and no other.

The Operator's Run is not verified by the Board, and no Board decision about it is ever published. It cannot be: the Operator picks the Board, and a verdict from judges you appointed yourself is worth nothing — printing one would be a more damaging lie than printing nothing. So the trade is inverted. Where everyone else gives up publicity and gets a verdict, the Operator gives up privacy and gets none.

• The whole revenue record is public. The Receipts (§10.4) list every payment the Run receives, with its date, amount, currency, source and label. Revenue arriving outside the connected payment providers is entered by hand and marked manually recorded, so the composition of the total is visible and not merely its size.
• The evidence is published, redacted. What every other Runner submits privately — dashboards, statements, cost summaries, origin evidence — the Operator publishes on the Run page. Each file carries a note stating what was removed from it and why.
• The redaction is mandatory and it is not discretionary. Customer names, account numbers, addresses, contact details and anything else identifying a third party come out before publication. Those people are not party to this and their data is not the Operator's to spend. Amounts, dates, totals, balances and the markings that let a reader test whether a document is genuine stay in. Where a document cannot be redacted without destroying its evidential value, it is not published, and a note saying so appears in its place. A redaction that removes the proof is not a redaction, it is a decoration.
• Anyone may object, in writing, and there is no deadline. Objections go to the address in the imprint. The objection and the answer are published together, numbered, on the Run page — including objections that turn out to be wrong, and including ones the Operator would rather not answer. A register that holds only the comfortable objections is worth less than no register. No contact details of the objector are stored or published.
• The label is never bare. The Run displays as verified — public evidence, on the leaderboard, on the Run page, in the overlay and in every export. It never displays as verified alone, in any state, at any point. They are two different things and the site does not get to blur them.
• If the Operator's Run is disqualified, it displays as disqualified, identically to anyone else's.

This exception is named, and it is the only one in this document. It attaches to the Operator's Run and to nothing else. No other Runner may publish evidence through this site, and no other Runner may be asked to.

Rules that bind the Operator on either track:

• The Operator's Run carries the Operator tag everywhere it appears.
• The Operator MUST NOT change this ruleset in a way that materially advantages their own active Run. Any change made while the Operator has an active Run is published with a rationale; once a Board with external members exists, such a change also requires its approval.
• The Operator's Run is bound to the ruleset version in effect at its Start, exactly like every other Run (§12).

Why the Operator publishes more than anyone else: every other Runner submits evidence privately and is judged publicly. The Operator cannot be judged that way, because the Operator picks the judges. Publishing the whole revenue record and the evidence behind it is the substitute — the one form of accountability that does not depend on trusting the person being checked.

10.3 Verifier Board#

3–5 named people, listed at /verify with their affiliations. Members recuse from any Run they have an interest in, and are bound by confidentiality on sealed identities (§6.3). All decisions are published with their reasoning.

As of v1.0 there is no external Board. The Operator is the only reviewer of other Runners' evidence, /verify says exactly that rather than showing an empty list of names, and the Operator's own Run is on Track 2 precisely because of it. As members are seated they appear on that page, which is always the current answer to "who ruled on this".

Appeals: 30 days from a decision. Objections to published evidence (§10.2): no deadline. Both arrive by email at the address in the imprint, and both are published with their answers. There is deliberately no public submission form: an unauthenticated intake needs moderating daily, and storing what arrives would build a register of people who complained about the Operator. What gets published is what was said and what was answered.

Appeals, objections and the settlement window in §3.6 are procedures, not system functions. They are run by a person, by hand, and recorded afterwards. This is stated rather than implied, because a rule that describes automation which does not exist is a rule nobody can rely on.

A verified Run can be revoked at any time if new evidence appears — there is no statute of limitations on fraud. That applies to a Run verified on either track.

10.4 The Receipts#

The Receipts are the public revenue record of the Operator's Run, required by §10.2. They are a plain chronological list of entries: date, amount, currency, source, label, and whether the entry has been voided.

• The record is public from the first day, including while it is empty. It is a standing commitment, not a feature switched on once there is something flattering in it.
• Money is never edited. A refund, chargeback or withdrawal is recorded as a void against the original entry, which stays visible and struck through. Corrections are voids plus new entries, never a rewritten row.
• Entry numbers are permanent links and may skip. Nothing depends on them but the link.
• The counter shown is net, labelled from the receipts. Gross appears beside it, smaller. While the Operator charges no VAT (§13) the two are the same number and no VAT line is shown.

11. Privacy#

The binding detail is in the Privacy Notice (/legal/privacy) and The Transparency Pact (/pact). This section is the summary that lives inside the rules.

Always public: status, category, tags, Start, elapsed time, reported and verified numbers, cumulative declared capital and the date any capital tag broke, whether checkpoints were submitted and accepted, verification decisions and reasoning, disqualification reasons — and, for the Operator's Run, The Receipts, the redacted evidence published under §10.2, and the objection register.

Never public: financial evidence (dashboards, bank statements, cost statements, invoices), email and postal addresses, bank details, full transaction IDs, tax identifiers, customer data, exact location. For sealed runs, additionally: identity and account declaration, until the Run ends. The Operator's published evidence is not an exception to this list — what is published is a separate, redacted copy; the underlying files stay private for the Operator exactly as they do for everyone else.

Refused applications are deleted in full six months after the decision (§9), including the contact address and every consent record attached to them.

Payers. This site currently takes no payments, and The Receipts carry no payer name, message or country — an entry is an amount, a date, a source and a label. If payments are ever switched on, any personal detail a payer attaches is published only because they chose to attach it and is removable on request; the amount, date and source label remain, because the record has to reconcile and because commercial and tax law require those records to be retained.

11.1 Erasure vs. the permanent record#

"Records are not deleted" (§9) refers to records, not to personal data. On an erasure request:

• Personal identifiers are replaced, not removed: a Runner becomes Runner #N, a payer becomes Anonymous.
• Contact details, evidence files and any free-text the person supplied are deleted.
• Published decisions are rewritten only where they name the person. The old display name and the old address of the Run are replaced with Runner #N inside review notes, published verification reasoning and checkpoint notes. The finding itself is untouched. §7.5 tells the Board not to write names in the first place; this is what happens when one gets through anyway.
• The record — status, timestamps, amounts, category, decisions — remains. A leaderboard that the judged can edit is not a record of anything, and there are statutory retention duties on the payment records regardless.
• Aggregated statistics that were already anonymised are unaffected, because they no longer relate to an identified person.

Rectification is a different thing from erasure, and it comes first: display name, country and premise can be corrected at any time from the Runner's own page, without any of the above (§6.1). Correcting something is not a reason to erase it.

Runners MAY register under a pseudonym from the start, and anyone uncomfortable with a permanent public entry should. Sealed (§6.3) exists for the same reason.

12. Versioning#

• Every Run is bound to the ruleset version in effect at its Start, and to the Transparency Pact version accepted at application. Later changes are not retroactive.
• One exception: anti-fraud and legality provisions (§4.4, §8.1, §8.4) apply to all Runs immediately, including active ones.
• Every version stays published, permanently, at a stable URL, in both readable and plain-markdown form.
• Board rulings on ambiguity are published as numbered precedents and folded into the next version.

13. Money, tax and consumer law#

• The Operator is a small business under § 19 UStG and charges no VAT. No VAT is shown, none is remitted, and gross equals net on The Receipts (§4.1). That status ends by operation of law on exceeding the statutory turnover limit — which a Run aiming at $1,000,000 intends to do, in public, with a counter beside it. When it ends: VAT is shown from that point forward, the change is dated and published, and entries already recorded keep the rate they were recorded at. Money is never rewritten (§10.4).
• This site currently sells nothing. If that changes, and a purchase from the Operator is a consumer distance contract, the buyer has a statutory right of withdrawal, exercised through the instructions and the model form in /legal/terms — published, dated, and in effect before the first payment is possible, not after. A withdrawal is deducted from the Run total exactly like a refund (§8.2).
• Runners are solely responsible for their own tax and regulatory position. This site collects no tax documents and gives no tax advice.

14. Disclaimer#

This site records and verifies attempts. It gives no financial, legal or tax advice, makes no representation that any Run is a viable business, and is not responsible for any Runner's conduct. Participation is at the Runner's own risk.

Changelog#

This is version 1.0 and it takes effect on 21 August 2026. Nothing above it has been superseded, because there is nothing above it. From that date §12 applies: any change to this document is a new version, published at its own permanent address, with the previous one left exactly where it is.