Urna
Closed Systems · live

Urna

A sealed box of stone, roots, seeds and water. Anyone can pay to break an ampoule inside it and choose, in secret, what it holds.

  1. Pay to break an ampoule. The price doubles every time someone does, and drops a little every week nobody does.
  2. Choose what is inside. It breaks on a secret day within six weeks, and nobody else knows what it was until the urn opens.
  3. Come back. Every morning the box lives one more week.

Loading…Fetching the box.

Break an ampoule

£–

Payments open soon

You choose the ampoule on the next page. It goes on the rail at the next daily step and breaks on a secret day within the next 45 days, so the payment can't be cancelled or refunded. Your alias and the price go in the public log.

The rules
  • Price. Starts at £1. It doubles with every ampoule broken and drops about 9% each week with none.
  • Secret. Your alias and the price go in the log. Your choice, and the day it breaks, are sealed with a code published the same day. The break day is random, between 1 and 45 days later, so nobody can tell whose ampoule just broke. The salt in the water only shows in bands.
  • Openings. Every 261 days the urn opens. Every choice is shown, and anyone can check it against its seal.
  • Rent. The money pays the urn's own costs. What is left builds the real box. If a month can't be paid, the urn closes for good.
  • Time. One day here is one week in the box. The lamp in the box is on from 07:00 to 21:00, London time.

Price

The urn's money

Log

    How to check a seal: on the day of each purchase the log shows a code, the SHA-256 of "number:choice:secret". When the urn opens it publishes the choice and the secret, and anyone can work the code out again. This page checks the opened ones for you.

    Who made this

    Urna is part of Closed Systems, a series of sealed boxes where what happens inside depends on rules set from outside. The box on this page is a simulation that moves on once a day; the money builds the real one. Each ampoule is one of the operations in the Actionary.

    I built it with Claude, an AI. Fonts: VT323 by Peter Hull, Inter by Rasmus Andersson, IBM Plex Mono by IBM.

    Alejandro Ramos Saavedra · ramos-saavedra.com