Privacy Policy for EarthBucks
2026-10-17 · Astrohacker
About this policy
Astrohacker Inc. (“we” or “us”), a Delaware corporation, operates EarthBucks at earthbucks.com. This policy tells you what personal data the service uses, why, who else sees it, how long we keep it and what you can ask us to do. We are the controller of this data. The Terms of Service use the same names for the parts of the service.
The short version
- Your private keys stay in your browser. We never receive them.
- If you set a password, we keep an encrypted backup of your keys. We cannot decrypt it.
- Your browser encrypts each Pay note. We cannot read notes. We can see and keep all other details of a Pay message, such as the names, the amounts and the time.
- We keep your EBX and BCH wallet records with your account, including the BCH addresses and transaction IDs.
- 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.
- Most data stays for as long as the service runs. The service does not have an account deletion feature today. You can ask us about your data.
- Using a wallet does not make your activity anonymous.
Data that we use
Account and keys
- Account. Your name, your public keys, the date that you made the account, your account status and counters, such as the number of blocks that you mined. We use them to run your account. Your name is an account name, not your legal name.
- Keys in your browser. Your browser keeps your private keys in its storage, without encryption by the application. We never receive them. Any person with access to your browser or device can get them.
- Encrypted key backup. If you set a password, your browser encrypts your keys with a key that comes from your password before it sends them to us. We cannot decrypt the backup. We also keep a verifier made from your password to check sign-in attempts.
- Derived keys. For each payment address, we keep a random value and the public key. Your browser uses them with your master key to compute the private key of that address.
- Sign-in. Records of the proof of work and the challenges that protect signup and sign-in, and a record for each signed-in session.
EBX wallet
The EBX transactions that you send and receive, with their keys, amounts and dates, and your balances. We use them to run the ledger and to show your history.
BCH wallet
- The BCH addresses of your account, each BCH transaction in and out, its transaction ID (txid), amount, fee and state, the address that you send to, and the signed transaction.
- When you open the Receive page, we watch your newest address for 10 minutes. When you look up a txid, we record the time of the lookup to limit how often you can do it.
We run our own Bitcoin Cash node. Our servers read the BCH network through it and link the payments to your addresses to your account. No outside node or data service sees your addresses through us. Our node sends your signed BCH transactions to the public BCH network, where other nodes see our node, not your device. We read the BCH price from Coinbase once each minute. That request carries no data about you.
Pay
- The note. Your browser encrypts the note of each message. We keep the encrypted note and cannot read it. The recipient can read it.
- Everything else. We can see and keep both addresses and names, the domains, the public keys of the message, the EBX and BCH amounts, the proof-of-work level, the txids, the signed transactions, the message header and its signatures, the time and the read state. We need them to check the postage and to deliver the message.
- Your Pay settings. Your minimums and your contacts list. Other users cannot see your contacts list.
Names, profiles and avatars
Your profile shows your name, your avatar, your verification badge, your counters and the date that you made the account. If you upload an avatar, we make four sizes of it and remove its image metadata.
Block messages
The text of each block message, with your account and the time.
Mining
For each share of work: the work itself, its difficulty and duration, your account, your session and whether the pool paid it. For each block: the account that mined it.
Paid verification
Each verification payment: the txid, the number of years, the amount, the state and the date to which verification is active.
Old identity verification (Identellica)
Until July 2025, accounts could verify through Identellica. We deleted the data that we kept from that time: the Identellica user ID and name, the flags that showed whether a membership, an email address, a phone number or a government ID was verified, their dates, and the request tokens. We never kept ID images, face scans, the email addresses or the phone numbers.
One flag on each account remains. It shows whether the account verified through Identellica, and it keeps that verification active until 2026-11-08. Copies of the deleted data can stay in database backups until the backups expire.
Analytics
We run our own copy of Umami, a page-view counter. For each page view, it
records the path of the page, the referrer, the title, the screen size, the
language, and the browser, operating system, device and approximate
location that it finds from the request. It sets no cookie and does not
store your IP address. It makes a session ID from a hash of the request
data, and the session ID stays the same for one calendar month. A page path
can contain a name or a Pay address, for example /pay/<address>. We use
these counts to see how people use the service.
Logs
Our application logs hold errors and sometimes a txid. They do not hold your IP address. Our firewall keeps samples of requests, which include the IP address, for 3 hours, to stop abuse.
Support
If you contact us, we use your message and your contact details to answer you. Do not send us a private key or a password.
Data that we do not collect
We do not collect an email address, a legal name, a phone number, a postal address or a photo ID. We do not store your IP address in our database.
Why we use data
| Purpose | Legal basis |
|---|---|
| Run your account, wallets, Pay, names, mining and paid verification | To perform our contract with you (the Terms of Service) |
| Protect the service from abuse, with proof of work, rate limits and the firewall | Our legitimate interest in a secure service |
| Count page views with Umami | Our legitimate interest in improving the service |
| Keep the ledger and payment records | To perform the contract, and to meet legal duties |
| Answer support requests and legal requests | Our legitimate interest, and legal duties |
Who else sees data
Other users
- Everyone, without sign-in: your avatar images, by their URLs, and the BCH transactions that you make on the public BCH network.
- Signed-in users: your profile, your block messages, your verification badge and the blocks that you mined.
- The other party of a payment: the details of the payment and the note.
Other domains
Pay delivers a message from the sender’s server to the recipient’s server. When you send to a name on another domain, that domain’s server receives the message details, the encrypted note and the signed transactions. That server follows its own law and policy. We cannot make it delete its copy.
Service providers
| Provider | What it does | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon Web Services | Hosting, logs, avatar images, the firewall, our BCH node and our Umami | United States |
| PlanetScale | Our database | United States |
| Google Fonts | Fonts for each page | Google’s servers |
| jsDelivr | The style sheet for math on each page | jsDelivr’s network |
Google Fonts and jsDelivr receive your IP address, your browser type and your language each time that you open a page, because your browser loads files from them. Their own policies apply to that data.
We do not sell personal data. We do not share it for advertising.
Law enforcement
We give data to a government or court only when a valid legal process requires it. We check each request, give only the data that it requires, and can contest it. We tell the user about the request, with a copy, unless the law or a court order does not let us, or a life is at risk. In an emergency that puts a person at risk of death or serious injury, we can act before a court order. Send legal requests to support@astrohacker.com.
We cannot give anyone your private keys, your password or the text of your Pay notes, because we do not have them.
Public and permanent data
Some data stays when we delete our copy:
- The BCH network keeps every BCH transaction in public.
- The EBX ledger keeps every EBX transaction and the account that mined each block, for the life of the chain. We keep them because the ledger needs them and because they protect your rights to your EBX under the Terms of Service, such as recovery after lost keys.
- Block messages. The EBX blocks keep a hash of each block message. The hash does not name you, but a person who has the text can match it to the block. We can delete the text from our service, but not the hash.
- Copies by other people. The other party of a payment, other domains’ servers and people who saved or cached your content keep their copies. Avatar images can stay in caches for up to one year.
How long we keep data
| Data | How long |
|---|---|
| Account, name, public keys, derived keys, current key backup | As long as the service runs. No feature deletes them today. |
| Old key backups | Until your next password change |
| Session records | Until you log out; expired records are not deleted today |
| Session cookie | Up to 2 years, or until you log out |
| Signup challenges | One day; a passed challenge stays until the account exists |
| Keys in your browser | Until you log out or clear your browser storage |
| EBX transactions and blocks | The life of the chain |
| BCH addresses, transactions, watches | As long as the service runs |
| BCH txid lookups | One day after your next lookup |
| Pay messages and their details | As long as the service runs |
| Pay messages waiting for delivery | 10 minutes |
| Contacts list | Until you remove an address |
| Avatar images | Until you replace the avatar; the old sizes are then deleted |
| Block message text | As long as the service runs |
| Mining shares | One day |
| Verification payments | As long as the service runs |
| Identellica flag on the account | As long as the service runs; it has no effect after 2026-11-08 |
| Umami page views | No time limit today |
| Application logs | 30 days |
| Firewall request samples | 3 hours |
| Database backups | As our database provider keeps them |
Your rights
Depending on where you live, you can ask us to:
- tell you what personal data we have about you and give you a copy;
- correct data that is wrong;
- delete your data;
- limit how we use it, or object to a use that is based on our legitimate interest;
- give you your data in a form that a computer can read.
How to ask
Send your request to support@astrohacker.com with your name on EarthBucks. We do not ask for a photo ID. We will tell you how to prove that you control the account, for example with a signature from your account key. If you have lost every key and your password, you cannot prove the account, and we cannot act on the request.
We answer within one month. For a complex request, we can take two more months, and we tell you why. Under some US state laws, we answer within 45 days, and we can take 45 more days. If we refuse a request, we tell you why, and you can ask us to review the decision. You can also complain to the data protection authority where you live, such as the Information Commissioner’s Office in the United Kingdom or your national authority in the European Union.
What deletion can and cannot remove
The service does not have an account deletion feature today. If you ask us to delete your data, we delete what we can and tell you what stays. Read these limits first:
- We cannot delete data from the public BCH network, the EBX ledger or the hash of a block message.
- We keep the other party’s copy of each payment, because it is their record too.
- Your name stays reserved, so that nobody else can use your address.
- We can keep payment records for as long as the law requires.
- If we delete your encrypted key backup, and you have no other copy of your keys, you lose access to your coins through the service. If we delete the link between your account and your keys, we may not be able to return your EBX to you through recovery. Keep your own backup first.
Children
The service is not for anyone under 18, as the Terms of Service say. If we learn that an account belongs to a person under 18, we can restrict it and delete its profile, avatar and block messages. We do not take or destroy the coins of that account.
Security
We protect data with encryption in transit, access controls and the firewall. Your keys never leave your browser, and your key backup is encrypted before we receive it. No system is perfectly secure. If a security incident puts your data at risk, we tell the authorities and the affected users as the law requires. Report security problems to support@astrohacker.com.
International transfers
We store data in the United States. If you use the service from another country, your data goes to the United States, where the law can give different protection than the law where you live.
Cookies and browser storage
| Item | Kind | What it does | How long |
|---|---|---|---|
__session | Cookie, necessary | Keeps you signed in | Up to 2 years, or until you log out |
privKey, pubKey, masterKeys | Browser storage | Your keys; not encrypted by the application | Until you log out or clear storage |
signupPublicKey | Browser session storage | Continues your signup | Until signup ends or the tab closes |
ebxcom.motion-mode.v1 | Browser storage | Your motion setting | Until you clear storage |
We use no advertising or analytics cookies. Umami sets no cookie. A content
blocker that blocks umami.astrohacker.com stops the page-view counts.
Changes to this policy
We announce material changes on the EarthBucks blog and its RSS feed, at least 30 days before they take effect. Your use of the service alone does not show that you accepted a change.
Contact
For questions about this policy or your data, contact support@astrohacker.com. Never include your private key or your password in a message.