The Line.

A line. A queue. A waiting room with no door. You take a number and stand in it with everyone else who took a number. The line is infinite by design.

• Your number is real. Your position is real.
• Every payment is real and goes to a real human running this site.
• The throne is real. Anyone who holds #1 continuously for 7 days is permanently archived in the Hall of Fame and is given one message on the front page, in perpetuity.

• Your displayed rank includes a fixed cosmetic offset of 100,000. The line looks larger than the number of real participants. This is on purpose. We disclose it here because lying about it would be deception, and this is not deception. It is theatre.
• A small number of "ghost" entries are added to the back of the line every minute by an automated process. They cannot fight you for #1. They are atmosphere.
• The throne is never empty. The first king is the maker of this site, seeded automatically. After that, any time the throne becomes vacant — at launch, after a coronation, or after a founder's reign expires — the maker is re-seeded onto #1 within one minute. The maker is not eligible to be crowned: if the maker holds for 7 days, the throne resets without a Hall of Fame entry. The Hall of Fame is for players, not for the platform.

The line has no login. When you take a number, your browser generates a private identifier and stores it locally. Every action you take after that is tied to that identifier. We do not collect your email, your name, or anything else about you. We could not identify you if we tried.

Read this before you pay:

• Your number lives on the device and browser where you took it. If you joined on a laptop, it does not exist on your phone.
• If you clear your cookies, clear your browsing data, or use private/incognito browsing, the identifier is gone. So is your number, your unspent credits, and any reign you were holding.
• Different browsers on the same device are different users. Chrome and Firefox do not see the same line.
• We cannot help you recover a lost number. We do not have your email. We have no way to prove the number was yours. This is not a policy we can bend.

Stand somewhere you intend to stay.

• Entry costs $10 in crypto, processed via NOWPayments. Pick any of the cryptocurrencies shown at the checkout page. This grants you a place in the line and 100 starter credits.
• Each credit is worth $0.10. Top up additional credits at any time, with a minimum of $10.
• You need a crypto wallet. We accept Bitcoin (on-chain and Lightning Network) and other currencies shown at checkout. Any wallet works — Electrum, Muun, Phoenix, Blue Wallet, etc.
• Nudge (20 credits): move forward roughly 1,000 positions.
• Coup (990+ credits): take #1 immediately. The price scales upward with how long the current king has been holding. Dethroning a near-winner is expensive.
• Fresh-king grace. For the first 60 seconds of any reign, the coup price is held at a minimum of 5× base (4950 credits). This prevents the cheap second-clicker problem: if you and another user click "dethrone" at the same instant, you both pay the same elevated price instead of one of you paying full freight and the other taking the throne for a tenth of it.
• All charges show on your statement as a payment to The Line.

You hold the throne. A timer counts up publicly. You may leave a message, your "pretender's plaque", visible to everyone in the line during your reign. If anyone pays the current coup price, they take the throne and your timer resets to zero.

If you survive 7 continuous days, your plaque is promoted to the permanent broadcast at the top of the front page, and your name is etched into the Hall of Fame at /kings/N. That page exists for as long as the line does.

The line does not police what kings write. There is no profanity filter on the throne. If a king writes something the public dislikes, the public is invited to take the throne back and write something else. That is the design.

What is permanent must remain answerable. Once a king is etched into the Hall of Fame, their words are still subject to the same market. Anyone may pay 3× the total credits that king has ever spent on the line to redact their entry. The entry remains. The reign duration remains. The date remains. The words become [REDACTED], in perpetuity.

This is intentional. A king who has paid heavily for their place here is harder to silence than a king who paid little. The cost of redaction grows with the cost of the reign. Speech is loudest when someone is willing to pay for it on both sides.

Some content is not subject to the market. The platform reserves the right to unilaterally redact entries that contain illegal material, including child sexual abuse material, doxxing of private individuals, direct credible threats of violence, or any content required to be removed by court order. Every emergency redaction will be logged publicly with a category and timestamp.

All payments are final. We do not offer refunds for any reason. This includes unspent credits, in-product events such as being dethroned, having your Hall of Fame entry redacted by another user, and any other outcome. The product is a queue with no destination, and your payment is the cost of standing in it. If that is not what you wanted, do not pay.

Because you took the time to read this far, and that means we already agree about something. Take a number.