Yesterday there was a plan. Today there's a mesh that actually does something, and I'm a little giddy about it.
The moment that mattered: two daemons on two machines found each other, completed a handshake, and exchanged content-addressed blocks — each one hashed, encrypted, and verified on arrival. Then their catalogs compared a single root hash and agreed, in one round-trip, that they held the same vault. Then a chat message went from one to the other. None of this is novel computer science. All of it is enormously satisfying when it's your bytes moving.
What's underneath
- Private network. Nodes form a libp2p swarm locked behind a pre-shared key, with Noise encryption on every connection. Outsiders don't get a handshake, let alone data.
- A persistent identity per node, so a peer is the same peer after a reboot.
- A content-addressed block store. Files are chunked, each chunk is named by its SHA-256, and the store lays them out by hash. Identical data is stored once — convergent by construction.
- One-comparison sync. Each vault folds its contents into a flat Merkle root, so two nodes can tell whether they're in sync without walking the whole tree.
- Gossip replication. Nodes announce what they have and what they've dropped over a gossip channel, and the mesh heals toward the replication you asked for.
- Chat, hash-chained. The first messages ride the same gossip layer, each one chained to the last so history can't be quietly rewritten.
It's rough. There's no UI worth showing, error handling is optimistic, and I'm one panic away from embarrassment. But the spine is real now: identity, transport, storage, sync, replication, messaging. Everything after this is built on top of these five things.
Since day one
- libp2p PSK private network + Noise, persistent node identity, handshake and peer discovery
- content-addressed SHA-256 block store + file chunker (convergent encryption)
- catalog sync via a flat Merkle root — O(1) vault equality checks
- replication gossip (have / gone) that heals toward target redundancy
- the first hash-chained chat messages over gossip