About Cairn
What a cairn is
For as long as there have been travelers, a cairn has been more than a pile of stones. It is the quiet sign that someone was here.
So that the path would not be lost on the mountain. So that direction would not be lost in the wilderness. So that the dead would not be forgotten. So that one traveler could leave something for the next.
Someone places one stone. Someone who comes after places another. So cairns, by the hands of nameless people, rose slowly into the air — gravestones and waymarks and prayers, all at once.
Through rain, through wind, through snow, the stones remained. A cairn is the oldest form of memory — what passing-away humans entrusted to what passes away more slowly.
Let us leave our stones here, to last centuries to come.
This service
This service is a cairn made of sentences — three sentences from each person, once in a lifetime, placed at the writer's own pace. Each stone is fifty characters.
The first stone is laid at purchase. The other two can be placed any time within fifty years from purchase. The three stones carry a small fee. You never come back to add a fourth.
Why it exists
Most places on the internet ask you to speak often, quickly, and loudly. Cairn asks you to speak only three times in your life, and carefully. The question is simple: if the person coming after you could read a few sentences of yours from across the years, what would they be?
Three stones
One stone felt too rigid for a single life. Three is enough to mark seasons — a stone now, one in a few years, one near the end. The window is fifty years from purchase. Stones not placed by then lapse silently, with no refund for unused stones.
How it is run
Cairn is operated independently. No investors, no ads, no tracking cookies. The operator's legal contact information is published in the Commercial Disclosure page (required under Japan's Act on Specified Commercial Transactions).
Money
Three stones cost $15, $9, or $3, depending on the country you write from. The price is shown as a clean per-stone × 3: $5 × 3, $3 × 3, or $1 × 3. PPP-based tiered pricing — the three tiers reflect differences in local purchasing power, so the burden of writing feels roughly the same wherever you are. You can optionally add a donation at checkout.
Cairn donates up to 50% of net profit — that is, revenue minus payment processing fees, infrastructure costs, taxes, and other necessary operating expenses — to public-interest organizations. The remainder covers operator compensation and future expansion of the Service.
Voluntary donation amounts are donated in full (100%), less only payment processing fees.
Stones not placed within the fifty-year window lapse silently. There is no refund — for unused stones, or if the service is shut down.
Where donations go
Selection criteria: independent audit and transparent reporting, diverse missions, non-political and non-religious, internationally recognized or meaningfully active in Japan.
The current recipients are listed below (eight, currently planned). The list may change or be added to over time, decided by writer votes. Suggestions are welcome at support@c4irn.net.
- Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) — emergency medical care in conflict and underserved areas
- UNHCR — protection of displaced people
- Internet Archive — long-term preservation of the human record
- Wikimedia Foundation — continued access to free knowledge
- GiveDirectly — unconditional direct cash transfers to people living in extreme poverty
- Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) — defending civil liberties in the digital world
- AAR Japan (難民を助ける会) — Japan-based humanitarian NGO: refugees, disability inclusion, mine action
- Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) — bed nets in malaria-endemic countries; per-net public ledger
The set is reviewed every six months. Any change is announced in advance through the Terms and on this page.
Note: Cairn donates a portion of its net profit to public-interest organizations as the operator's voluntary commitment, but Cairn itself is neither a charity, donation organization, nor a registered non-profit entity. It is operated as an online text-archive service.
Donation cycle
Donations begin once enough writers have placed stones and operations are stable. The first donation cycle anchors a half-yearly schedule of voting and reporting. At each cycle, the operator publishes a summary of revenue, voluntary donations, and operating costs, and finalises recipient allocations based on writer votes.
The split between recipients is decided by the writers themselves. When your stone is laid, you receive a proof key — a 32-character private hash known only to you. With it, sign in to the vote page with your full name and proof key and allocate across the recipients. Distribution is computed proportionally from the sum of all allocations: not majority vote, so minority preferences are reflected in full. Once you have placed a stone, you may take part in every future allocation.
Distribution
Identity
At the moment of writing, you provide your full name (Latin letters), email, year of birth, and country by self-attestation. Your name and email are kept private and used only to verify it is you when you return to the ledger to vote.
To prevent the same person from writing more than once, registrations are matched against existing email addresses, real names, and payment-card fingerprints; a match on any axis is rejected. No other identity check is required up front. The operator may still request ID documents afterward where there is reasonable cause (suspected fraud, duplicate registration, etc.).
Contact
support@c4irn.net