How sealed posts work

openmog lets you put part of a post behind money. The feed shows the tease, a live panel shows the terms, and what happens next depends on which of two doors the creator chose. The rest of this series walks each door in detail, and the about page covers the network the post lives on. This post is the map.

What is a sealed post?

You write a post, then mark the parts that are the payoff: an image, a clip, an audio track, the paragraph that gives it away. What you marked is hidden. What you did not stays public as the tease, and the post goes into the feed like any other, wearing a panel that shows how its campaign is going.

Hidden means hidden, not decorated. The payload is not blurred in the browser or tucked behind a trick a curious person could undo; the server simply never sends it to anyone who has not unlocked it, and sealed media lives in storage that public URLs do not reach. Search is held to the same line: a sealed post is indexed on its public parts only, so search can show that the post exists and what it teases without ever having touched what is inside.

A sealed post can also be anonymous, like any other post here. The public post carries no author; the money side privately keeps the real creator so the payout can still reach them.

What are the two ways a sealed post opens?

The creator picks one of two modes at sealing time, and the choice is permanent for that post.

• Crowdfund. The post gets a goal, a deadline and, off by default, a bonus. Backers pledge toward the goal, and if it is reached before the clock runs out, the payload joins the public post for everyone, including the people who paid nothing, though opened media still sits under its veil until a reader taps it once. If it is not reached, no backer is charged a cent. With the bonus off, that is the whole deal: plain all-or-nothing crowdfunding. With it on, backers on a post that falls short are also paid a bonus for having shown up, out of a pool other supporters filled, so a post nobody bonded pays none.
• Pay to reveal. The post gets one fixed price, anywhere from $5 to $1,000. Anyone who pays it sees the payload for themselves. There is no goal, no deadline and no bonus, and the post never goes public however many people buy it.

One question picks the mode: do you want this to end up public? If yes, crowdfund it, and let the network open it together. If no, price it, and let each person decide what it is worth to them.

Who sits at the table?

A pay-to-reveal post has two seats, creator and buyer, and nothing about either needs explaining twice. A crowdfund has three, and the third is the interesting one.

• The creator puts work behind a goal and collects the goal in full, minus the bonus pool that filled, when the post opens.
• Backers pool money to open the post for everyone. Their pledge is a hold, never a charge, until the goal is reached.
• Bonders stake their own money on one claim: this post will hit its goal. If they are right they are credited exactly what they staked. If they are wrong, their pool is what pays the backers their bonuses.

The bonder seat is what makes early backing safe, and it is strange enough to deserve its own post. It has one.

When does money actually move?

Backing and bonding place holds: authorizations that reserve an amount on your card without charging it. A hold is captured only at the moment the outcome is decided, and only from the side the outcome says should pay. A backer on a post that falls short, and a bonder on a post that opens, are never charged at all.

A reveal is the exception, because it has no later outcome to wait for. Paying is one step, the charge settles immediately, and the post opens for you on the spot.

The creator sets what they receive and receives all of it. openmog’s fee, 10% of each payment with a 75 cent minimum, is included in the price the payer sees, and it rides whichever side the money is captured from. A released hold is never charged anything. Credits land as pending, become withdrawable seven days later, and withdrawals start at $50; the wait is a buffer that absorbs card disputes while the money is still here. The practical limits, so nothing surprises you: goals run $20 to $1,000, stakes and reveal prices $5 to $1,000, and a crowdfund runs one hour to five days, because a card authorization dies after seven and settlement needs the gap. The FAQ answers the rest of the money questions in one place.

Where should you start reading?

In this order, each post standing on the one before it:

1. One sealed post, two endings runs a real crowdfund through both outcomes with actual dollars: who is charged, who is credited, and exactly how much, in each ending.
2. Who pays when a post stays sealed is the mechanism underneath: a 1998 economics idea called the dominant assurance contract, and the two things openmog changed about who pays.
3. Why bond a post you may never see sits in the strangest seat at the table: the only position on openmog paid purely for being right.
4. Pay to reveal is the mode with no crowd in it, for posts that want a price instead of a public.

The vocabulary for all of it, money words included, lives in the glossary. Or skip the theory entirely and look at what is sealed right now.