I am 25, I write software for a living, and I am not climbing this ladder

In 2005 a student in England needed to pay for university, so he drew a grid of a million pixels and sold them for a dollar each. It worked. He raised over a million dollars in five months, and then the internet moved on and nobody tried it again at a price that made sense.

A dollar in 2005 is not a dollar now. Run the same idea through the consumer price index and the number comes out at $1.66, and the front page shows the working – the source, and the month it is pinned to. In euros that is €140 for a block of a hundred pixels, and €1,400,000 if every one of them sells.

I am not raising it to sit on. There is a list of things I want to build and a job I want to leave, and the two are related. A zome on a piece of land near Bratislava that people can sleep in. A Land Cruiser turned into something that can cross a continent slowly. A small bistro on a cycling route where there is currently nowhere to stop. A trading system I have been writing for years. A studio, eventually, so the software I write is mine.

Money from the grid goes into one pool, not into earmarked buckets, because pretending otherwise would be theatre. I am not going to promise you an audited account of where each euro lands – that is a bookkeeping product, and this is not one. What the site does show, permanently and without my editing it, is who paid for what: every backer, what they own, and what they paid, read straight off the grid.

That is the whole offer. You get pixels that outlive the campaign, or you get to lift the fog off a picture nobody has seen. I get a runway.