Some minutes are held back from general sale. They aren't secret and they aren't sold — they're listed in full below, and they'll be auctioned.
— held back of 525,600
We'll begin the auction when 10% of the year is claimed, or about twelve months after launch, whichever comes first. The date will be announced at least 30 days ahead.
If you're wondering which of those conditions is most likely: 10% is 52,560 minutes, which would be a remarkable amount of interest. The twelve-month date is the condition we expect to trigger.
Bidding will be public, with a fixed close and no automatic extensions. Every bid requires a card authorization up front (a hold, not a charge) so a bid is always real money. Losing authorizations are released; only the winner is charged.
This is deliberate. Novelty auctions have a long history of headline bids that evaporate, because someone bids an absurd figure for the attention it earns them, then retracts it once the screenshots have gone round. Requiring an authorization makes that impossible rather than merely against the rules.
They're the minutes people would collide on: the edges of the year, times that rhyme with their date, a few numbers that mean something to whoever notices them. These few dozen represent the most likely to meet these criteria.
Whole days are never reserved. Christmas is 1,440 minutes and maybe two of them are worth bidding on. The other 1,438 are worth far more to the people who want them than they would ever be at auction.
A few minutes aren't for sale to anyone, at any price, and will never be auctioned. They're timestamps of terrible events. The message someone attaches might read as perfectly harmless, but the problem is owning the moment, and what a later owner could put there.
That list is not complete, and it can't be. Blocking a specific minute only works where a specific minute is unambiguously known, which is true of very few events and has more to do with how well something was documented than with how much it mattered. We're not going to pretend a short list is a full accounting of human catastrophe.
So there's a second layer. On a wider set of dates, every purchase is read by a person before it publishes, no matter how ordinary the words look on their own. Harm here is usually a message and a date in combination, and that's something a person can see and a filter can't.
If we've missed one, tell us at hello@onthisminute.com. We block a minute when it's a specific, well documented time at which a lot of people were killed. That's a narrow bar and it's meant to be. We can't be a register of every tragedy, and saying plainly where the line is beats pretending there isn't one.
Most of what people write in about won't clear it, usually because there's no single agreed minute. Those go into the reviewed set instead, which is the layer above. If we do block a minute, anyone who already bought it gets a refund and the message comes down; that part isn't a judgment call.
Both counts appear in the ledger, so the arithmetic still adds to 525,600.