Frequently asked questions

A place where you leave three 50-character sentences in your lifetime — placed at your own pace within a fifty-year window. You cannot edit them. You cannot delete them. Three sentences, for whoever comes after.

Cairn is operated independently. No investors, no advertisers, no tracking cookies. The operator's legal contact information is published in the Commercial Disclosure page.

Most of the internet asks you to speak loudly, often, and quickly. Cairn asks you to lay three stones, quietly. The question is simple: if someone walking the same road after you could read your words across time, what would you leave?

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. Note: Cairn is operated as an online text-archive service; donations are the operator's voluntary commitment, not the basis for any charitable status. See the "Money" and "Where donations go" sections of About.

One felt too rigid for a single life. Three is enough to mark seasons — a stone now, perhaps one in a few years when something has changed, perhaps one near the end. The three stones share the same ledger key and the same writer identity, but they may be placed at different times and from different countries.

Sign in at Your stones with your full name and proof key. The page shows what you have placed so far, how long the window is still open, and a form to write the next stone. There is no additional charge — you paid when you bought your three stones.

Wages and prices vary widely between countries, so paying $9 means very different things in different places. Paying $9 from Tokyo feels different from paying $9 in a country where it equals a meaningful share of a month's income.

So Cairn uses three tiers ($15, $9, $3 for three stones — i.e. $5, $3, $1 per stone × 3) to keep the burden of writing roughly equal wherever you are. The lower tiers are not "lesser" — they're simply the prices that make writing feel comparable from those regions.

Yes. Registration is rejected if your email, real name, or payment-card fingerprint matches a previous registration on any axis.

Asking someone else to write on your behalf (proxy submission) is also prohibited by the Terms.

Stones not placed within the fifty-year window lapse silently. There is no refund for unused stones. The purchase is non-refundable in general — including if the service is shut down. By purchasing, you accept that what you pay for is the right to place up to three stones, not a guarantee that you will.

That is intentional. Brevity forces the line that actually matters. If you want to write more, somewhere else is the right place.

Anyone, anywhere, no account required. Beside the entry you'll see your display name (you choose: real name / pen name / anonymous), year of birth, country, and the date you wrote.

Your real name, email, payment info, and IP address are never public.

A 32-character hex token (e.g. 8F3C-2A91-7E4D-B068-1F5A-9C26-D437-E058) issued to you when your stone is laid. Only you know it. It is the key that lets you vote on how the donation pool is split when the half-yearly report is published.

It cannot be re-issued. You won't be able to vote in the half-yearly ledger. The entry itself remains.

The proof key is shown on the success page and sent to your email. Save it somewhere safe — a password manager or a paper note.

Don't. Anyone who has your proof key can vote in your place at the half-yearly ledger. Combined with your real name, it lets them impersonate you.

The operator selects a set of recipients across diverse missions — humanitarian medicine, refugee protection, knowledge preservation, digital rights, and other registered public-interest organizations. Writers then decide how the pool is split among them by vote.

Mechanism: every six months, each writer allocates 0–100 across the recipients (summing to 100). The donation pool is split proportionally to the sum of all allocations — not majority vote, so minority preferences are reflected in full.

The full list with descriptions is on the About page under "Where donations go". Recipients are reviewed every six months; any changes are announced in advance on the About page.

After the operator publishes a half-yearly report, voting opens for a window (typically two weeks to a month). Within the window, you can recast as many times as you like — only your last vote counts.

Yes. Every six months on the About page under "Donation cycle": number of entries, gross revenue, fees, server costs, donation pool, per-recipient share, and actual amount sent.

Per Terms §4.4, up to 50% of net profit and 100% of voluntary donations are remitted to recipients.

Guardians may submit a proxy entry for a child aged 15 or younger. The display reads "[country] [year]'s child, submitted by [guardian]". Details in Terms §10.

In principle, entries cannot be deleted. Under specific conditions, with the operator's approval, deletion is possible for a $100 fee (once per lifetime). See Terms §11.

Deletion does not free up the page number for anyone else — the page remains as "(retracted)".

The operator commits to making reasonable efforts to preserve entries in a permanently accessible form (e.g., Internet Archive, donation to national libraries). Even if c4irn.net disappears, the goal is for your sentence to remain readable from another archive.

A digital fingerprint of your entry text. Changing even one character changes the hash entirely. By comparing against a third-party archive, anyone can verify the entry has not been altered.

Contact details are at the bottom of About. Reach out anytime.