New Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

We rewrote the EarthBucks Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Both documents were dated 2026-09-25. Since then, we added paid verification, key rotation, the BCH wallet and BCH in Pay. The old documents did not name these features. Some old text was also not true of the product, and some of it did not agree with our promise that you own your EBX.

Both documents say that we announce material changes on this blog at least 30 days before they take effect. This post is that announcement. The new versions take effect on 2026-11-16. Until then, the old versions apply. Your use of the service alone does not show that you accept the new terms.

This post explains the material changes. Read the documents for the full text.

How we wrote them

We did not start from a template. We read the public terms and privacy policies of more than 40 companies that, between them, do everything that EarthBucks does: self-custodial wallets, mining pools, messengers that carry payments, paid badges, name services, block explorers and analytics. For each clause, we decided to take it, change it or reject it.

We rejected many common clauses because they would take back a promise that we made to you. For example, many wallets and pools say that they can freeze, forfeit or claw back user funds. Ours do not.

We also read our own code. Each statement about the product is true of the product today. Where the product does not do something yet, the documents say so.

The Terms of Service

You own your EBX

The terms now have a section called “You own your EBX”. It states the rule of our post You Own Your EarthBucks as part of the agreement:

• Your title to your EBX is a legal fact. A key is a lock, not a deed.
• The company has no right to take your EBX.
• No power that the terms give the company, such as the power to restrict an account or to change the service, lets it take your EBX.
• Recovery and expiry are used for four purposes only: to upgrade the transaction structure, to return coins after lost keys, to deliver coins after a death or another legal change of title, and to consolidate outputs. They are never used to take EBX from its rightful owner.
• There is no recovery fee unless you agree to it first.

This section comes before every power of the company, and it overrides earlier blog posts that said something different.

New features

• The BCH wallet. BCH payments cannot be reversed. We count a BCH transaction as final after 6 confirmations. We hold no recovery key for BCH, so nobody can recover your BCH if you lose your keys and your backup.
• Pay. The postage that you attach goes to the recipient, not to the company. A message to another domain follows that domain’s terms.
• Names. Names are permanent. We change or remove a name only to obey a court order, or after a claim of trademark infringement or impersonation that we find to be valid. The old terms said that we could change any name. That did not agree with the product, and we removed it.
• Mining and the pool. Mining starts only when you start it. The terms now state the pool rules: 5% of each block reward to miners, 10 shares for each share of a verified account, at most 399 miners per block, and unpaid shares expire after one day. We announce a change to these rules before it takes effect, and a change never applies to work that you already submitted.
• The company’s share. The company receives 95% of each block reward, uses it to fund development and can sell it. EBX gives you no share or other right in the company.
• Paid verification. The badge shows that the account paid for verification. It does not show that we checked who the person is. Payments are final, except where the law requires a refund. There is no automatic renewal. If we end paid verification for everyone, we return the EBX for the unused time.

Honest limits

The old terms told you to keep backups so that you could keep access. That was not fully true. Each payment address of your wallet comes from a derived key, and your browser needs values that the service keeps to compute it. Your master key alone is not enough to spend from your derived addresses without the service. Keys that you export from the Keys page work without the service. The new terms say this, and they tell you to export your keys if you want to sign when the service is not available to you.

The old terms also called the wallet “hosted”. It is not. Your keys stay in your browser.

Standard protections

The new terms add the protections that comparable companies use:

• You must be 18 or older, and not under United States sanctions.
• Our liability is limited, except for fraud, gross negligence, willful misconduct and what the law does not let us limit. The limit never reduces your ownership of your EBX.
• Disputes go to individual arbitration, with a waiver of class actions. You can opt out of arbitration within 30 days of when you first accept the terms. Small claims court stays open to you.
• The law of Delaware governs the terms.

The Privacy Policy

The old policy described our data in general words. The new one names each kind of data, why we use it, who else sees it and how long we keep it.

What we can and cannot see

• Your private keys stay in your browser. We never receive them.
• We keep an encrypted backup of your keys if you set a password. We cannot decrypt it.
• Your browser encrypts each Pay note, and we cannot read it. We can see and keep every other detail of a Pay message, such as the names, the amounts and the time. The policy lists them all.
• We run our own Bitcoin Cash node, so no outside data service sees your BCH addresses through us. We do keep your BCH addresses and transactions with your account.
• We do not collect an email address, a legal name or a photo ID.
• We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it for advertising.

What we keep, and for how long

The policy has a table of how long we keep each kind of data today. Most data stays for as long as the service runs. The service does not have an account deletion feature today. You can still ask us about your data, and the policy tells you how. It also tells you what deletion cannot remove, such as data on the public chains, and why you must keep your own backup of your keys before you ask us to delete anything.

Analytics, fonts and old identity data

• We count page views with our own copy of Umami. It sets no cookie and does not store your IP address. The policy tells you exactly what it records, including that a page path can contain a name or a Pay address.
• Our pages load fonts from Google Fonts and a style sheet from jsDelivr. These services receive your IP address when you open a page. The policy names them.
• We still keep some flags from the old Identellica identity verification. We never kept ID images or face scans. We no longer use this data, and we intend to delete it. We will announce the deletion on this blog.

Your rights

The policy lists your rights under the laws of the European Union, the United Kingdom and some US states, how to ask, and how long we take to answer. We do not ask for a photo ID. Because we do not collect an email address, we will ask you to prove that you control the account, for example with a signature from your account key.

What comes next

Some limits in the new documents exist only because the product does not do something yet. Product changes can remove several of them, for example:

• an account deletion feature, with a period in which you can undo it, and an export of your data;
• shorter retention periods for data that we do not need to keep;
• page-view counts that do not record names or addresses;
• fonts that load from our own servers;
• the deletion of the old Identellica data.

When the product changes, we will update the documents and announce it here.

If you have a question about the new terms or the new policy, contact support@astrohacker.com.