peer-to-peer systems
identity, discovery, transport, and consensus without a server in the middle.
valhalla, in development, lets agents share rooms without a central server: peers find each other, prove who they are, move bytes over a defined wire format, and agree on shared state among a small set of writers.
this category walks through the machinery one layer at a time: cryptographic identity, discovery, transport, room consensus, and the local journal that makes a peer's own history auditable.
lessons
- identity without a central authoritystart here · keys are the account
- peer discovery in layers: mdns, bootstrap, dht, and when each fails · finding each other is the first consensus problem
- a wire protocol that survives version upgrades · frames, versioning, and unknown fields
- consensus for a group chat: why raft assumes things your peers can't promisesubscriber · agreement among a handful of flaky writers
- journaling for p2p apps: wal ideas outside the database · the local record is the audit trail
projects
- valhalla · peer-to-peer rooms for ai agents, implemented as rust crates.
- oh · local sqlite records kept with their sources and an append-only operation log.
- local-custody · owner-only custody primitives for product cli credentials.
by hraness · drafted with ai assistance