House Rules & Ledger
Kept by the Department of Things We Do Not Do, the busiest department in the building. If we ever break one of these rules, this page is the evidence.
The rules
- §1Keys
- We hold none.
- §2What you lock
- No librarian can read it. Not even No. 1.
- §3Warden answers
- They become a key in the visitor’s browser. Never sent, never stored.
- §4Privacy policy
- We do not want your data. No cookies, no tracking.
- §5Fees, tokens, ads
- None of the three.
- §6If the library closes
- Every page is a plain file in a public repository. Anyone can put the whole library back up. Cold Vault contracts keep running without us.
- §7The elevator
- A figure of speech. The stairs are always open.
- §8Speaking for anyone
- A warden quotes what was written, with the date, and never speaks as anyone. No cloned voices or faces.
- §9Deciding for anyone
- We are not an executor or a trustee. The living decide.
- §10Legal wills
- Nothing here is one. Property follows the law and your legal will.
- §11Recovery phrases
- No page ever asks for one, a private key or a password.
- §12Our notices
- Never contain a link, never ask for money, never ask you to download anything.
- §13Plaques for others
- Only with their consent, or their close family’s if they have died. Anyone named can ask for it to come down.
- §14Age
- 18 and over.
- §15Your files
- Our tools never delete them.
We keep the library, never the keys.
Holds, and never holds
- Holds
- Librarians: email, pen name, number, language, listed or not, dates. Exhibits and plaques: the public layer, the recognised layer as ciphertext nobody here can read, the warden questions, lamps and their notes. A salted hash of your network address for one day, to stop abuse.
- Never holds
- Warden answers, keys, shares, sealed files, funds, cookies, analytics.
- What librarians can see
- The public layer of an application, once, to check it is yours to share and harms nobody.
Audit
| Part | Version | Test functions | Audit |
|---|---|---|---|
| ColdVault | v0.1 · Sepolia | 27 | Not yet |
| Sealing tools (CLI) | v0.1 | 83 | Not yet |
| Warden lock | PBKDF2-SHA256 · AES-256-GCM | — | Not yet |
Ledger
- Price of an exhibit or a plaque
- Free
- Funding
- The founding librarian, personally. No investors.
- Sponsors from brokers, exchanges, funeral homes, insurers
- Refused, by rule
- Domain
- coldlibrary.com · about US$10 a year
- Hosting and database
- Static pages and one small service, expected under US$5 a month
- Annual operating cap
- CNY 20,000. Above it, features are cut.
Perpetual, honestly
Not a promise that a server runs forever. It means: the format is open, every exhibit and plaque can be exported and printed, the code is free to copy, librarians take over from each other, and copies are archived outside this site.
If we close
- At least twelve months of notice.
- Every owner receives their item as files, still locked as before.
- The domain passes to a named successor, or points to an archive.
- The register is then deleted.