About

Privacy tools have a discovery problem, and it is a circular one. Every ordinary way to be found requires the thing their audience is trying to avoid. Ad networks want a corporate identity and a card, and then track everybody who sees the ad. Search visibility means feeding a company whose business is knowing what people look for. App stores want a developer account with a legal name on it. Directories run on affiliate links, which means the ranking is for sale anyway, quietly, and the reader is not told. And anything with the word privacy in its description is refused by half of them outright, on the assumption that the two words mean the same thing.

So the tools that most need an audience are the ones least able to buy one honestly. Meanwhile the reader, who is usually looking for a VPN or a wallet or a way off an exchange, has to trust a list that will not say how it was ordered.

There are a great many people on the wrong side of both halves of that: everyone who runs something privacy-preserving and cannot advertise it, and everyone who wants one and cannot find it without being profiled for looking. The whole point of this board is to be the place those two meet.

This board answers both by making the ranking explicit and the payment private. Rank is the bid, stated in the open, so nothing is hidden about how the order came to be. And the bid is Monero to a single-use subaddress, so being on the list costs you money and nothing else.

That is the niche it was built for, not a fence around it. The board carries anything anybody wants to advertise, and nothing about being ordinary disqualifies you. What makes it a privacy board is the way it is run, not a rule about who may appear.

Open here does not mean free of charge: a rank costs money and the price is printed. Nor does it only mean the code is published, though it is. It means the things a directory usually reserves the right to do quietly, this one has given up:

• No gatekeeper. There is no queue, no application and no review. A bid settles and the board changes. Nobody here gets to decide that yours is the wrong kind of project, and no listing has ever been let on because we liked it.
• No account to exist. You are a link and a token, not a user record. Nothing to be approved for, suspended from, or locked out of.
• Nothing is asked of you for reading. No wall, no sign-in to see the whole list, no consent box, no cookie. The full board is the first thing a stranger sees.
• Rank cannot be given or taken. Money moves it and nothing else does, including us. That is the part that makes the rest of this list enforceable rather than a promise.
• Removals are only against printed rules, and they are published. With the reason, on the record, refusals included. Otherwise open quietly becomes open unless we disagree with you.
• An onion address is a first-class listing. Not a footnote and not a warning. Half the point of building this was that most places will not carry one at all.
• Free to leave, and free to check. Point your link elsewhere or stop bidding, nothing holds you. The numbers are open data: /stats.json and /stats/chain.json are served CORS-open, so the whole record can be read, kept and checked against itself by anybody, without asking us for a copy.

What it does not mean, said before somebody finds out the hard way: material that is unlawful where this server runs comes off, and so does anything that breaks the rules that were printed before the payment was made. That list is short, it is on the takedowns page, and every decision made under it is published. A board that pretended otherwise would be lying about the one thing it asks to be trusted on.

Pay-to-rank boards exist and they work. Privacy directories exist and most of them are earnest hand-maintained lists. What we have not found is one that does all three of these at once:

• Rank is openly for sale, so the ordering is a fact rather than an editorial claim.
• Paid only in Monero, so the buyer is not on file anywhere, not even with us.
• Nothing is collected from readers, so a board whose readers are shopping for privacy does not become a list of who wants it.
• Nobody is refused entry, so the thing being sold is a position and not permission to exist.

As far as we can tell that combination is unique, and we would rather say it that way than claim a first nobody can verify. If you know of another, we would genuinely like to see it.

If you built something

A VPN, a wallet, an aliasing service, an eSIM seller, a password manager, a self-hosted tool, a Tor mirror, a repository, a community. You need people to find it, the usual channels either refuse you or want a company name and a card, and the ones that take your money hand your visitors to an ad network on the way in.

This is the one place where buying attention does not cost you the thing you are selling.

• A rank you can buy without being identified. 0.06 XMR puts you on the board today, and nothing anybody else is paying changes that. Your invoice gets its own subaddress and there is no billing record anywhere in this system.
• A page of your own. Every listing gets /@yourhandle: description, links, onion address, repository, chat, its rank in two rankings and its click counter.
• Traffic you can measure yourself. Every outbound click carries utm_source=xmrbid.lol, so what we say lands in your own logs and can be checked against ours.
• Ownership by token, not by account. You hold a claim token; we hold its hash. Nothing to log into, nothing to phish, nothing to seize.
• An onion address is a first-class listing. Not a footnote, not a warning, a listing.

If you are looking for something

• The ordering is honest. You are told exactly what it means: money, and nothing else. No hidden affiliate link, no editorial voice pretending it is neutral.
• Reading it costs you nothing. No cookie, no fingerprint, no third-party script, no per-listing beacon. Icons are captured by this server once, so loading the board does not announce you to thirty companies.
• A serious bid is a signal. Not of quality, of commitment. Somebody spent real money to be seen by people who read a board like this one, and paying in Monero to sit next to onion services says something about who they expect to find them.
• Tor works. The onion mirror is the same board, without the edge in front of it.

“No accounts” is not much of a boast on a board with nothing to log into. The claim worth making is narrower and harder: we cannot tell you who paid for any rank on this board, and we could not be made to.

• No payment trail. Every invoice gets its own Monero subaddress. There is no card, no processor, no billing name, no email, nothing that connects a bid to a person. A board on a payment processor knows exactly who bought #1, because the processor holds their identity. That matters if what you are ranking is an exchange, a mixer, or an onion service.
• Ownership without identity. A listing belongs to whoever holds its claim token, stored here only as a SHA-256 hash. A database dump cannot be used to seize a listing. A lost token is replaced only by proving control of what the listing points at, never by asking us, and every replacement is published on the listing itself.
• No record of who clicked what. A board whose readers came looking for privacy knows something sensitive by nature: who is shopping for it. Clicks here are a single integer per listing, so that dataset does not exist to be handed over.
• Icons are captured, not hotlinked. Loading the board does not make your browser announce itself to every listed site. Most directories get this wrong and turn each listing into a beacon.
• No cookies, and no analytics script. Not for sessions, not for the theme. The content security policy allows no origin but this one, so no third-party script can run on these pages even by accident.

A board grading its own homework is worth nothing, so the numbers are published in a form that can be checked without us.

• Every payment has a receipt. A Monero InProof: a signature made with this board's view key showing that a real transaction paid a real amount to a real address. Check it with check_tx_proof on any node and the amount comes back from the chain rather than from us. They are all at /proof.
• The traffic numbers are open. /stats for the readable version, /stats.json for the raw one, CORS open so anybody can archive and diff it.
• Finished days are sealed. Each one is hashed against the one before it, so a number that has been quietly corrected breaks the chain at /stats/chain.json.
• Your own logs are the referee. The utm_source on every outbound link means a listing does not have to take our word for what we sent it.

xmrbid.lol is built and run by badsoul.studio. That is a deliberate asymmetry: the people who list here and the people who read here are anonymous, and the person running it is not.

It would be easy to run this anonymously, and plenty of boards do. The trouble is that every promise on this page is a promise somebody has to be answerable for. A canary nobody signs, a takedown policy nobody can be held to and a decision record nobody stands behind are decorations. Privacy here is a property of what the software does not collect, not a place for the operator to hide.

What that does not change: there is still nothing here to hand over. Being named means being reachable and accountable, and it does not create an account table, a payment identity, or a log of who read what.

The clearnet site sits behind Cloudflare, for DDoS protection. Cloudflare terminates TLS at its edge, which means it sees and logs every request to this domain, your address, the page, the time. We keep no such record; they do. Saying “no logs” about this address would be false, so we do not say it.

The server also asks a public exchange for the XMR price every ten minutes, on a timer, carrying nothing. That is one request from the machine, not one per visitor.

This board is not part of the Monero project. It is not endorsed by it, not affiliated with it, and speaks for nobody but itself. The mark at the top of every page borrows Monero's letterform and its orange because Monero is what this board is paid in and the only thing it accepts, and a logo is a poor place to leave that to be assumed. Monero, its name and its marks belong to the Monero project and its community. Everything published here is ours, and any of it being wrong is ours as well.

And no signature can prove the board is not bidding on itself. Nothing cryptographic answers that one. What we do instead is publish every payment separately rather than as a total, so the pattern is there to be read.

If none of that suits you, the onion service below reaches the same board without going through Cloudflare at all. That is the honest answer, and it is why the mirror exists.

The board is reachable over Tor at xmrbidjvtyuhrdowz5emr66hwncwgziw2wsomsinkjkugfdjem3rsfid.onion, and .onion listings are welcome on it.

The board is worth what its traffic is worth, so the work is in two places: sending real clicks to the things listed here, and proving it in a way nobody has to trust. Everything else follows from that.

Categories grow when somebody bids to argue for one and the argument holds, and that bid lands on their listing whether it holds or not, because a fee that buys nothing is exactly the kind of thing this board exists to not be. Rankings stay one thing, money, because the moment a board starts curating it starts having opinions it will not disclose.

Rank is the bid. It says nothing about whether a listing is any good, and it is not meant to. It is advertising, and the only unusual thing about it is that the price is published, the ordering is not a secret, and paying does not put you on file anywhere. Read the rules, then place a bid.