idit

Start Documenting Now

This is the seed. It works today. On your laptop. Offline. Free forever.

Personal Idit is an open-source tool that creates a cryptographic chain on your own machine. Every entry is hash-linked to the one before it and signed with your private key. Nobody — not a government, not a corporation, not a future AI — can alter the record after the fact.

Your chain proves what was written, who wrote it, and when. It’s a diary that can prove it wasn’t edited. An autobiography machine with math instead of trust.

The bigger vision — a public witness ledger, a network where personal chains can anchor to each other and to established blockchains — that needs serious distributed systems engineers to build. We’re looking for them. But you don’t have to wait. Your personal chain works right now.

Install in 60 Seconds

If you can open a terminal, you can do this.

1. Install

2. Create Your Chain

Replace yourname with whatever you want to be known as on your chain. This generates an Ed25519 keypair and writes the first block.

3. Write Something

4. Verify It

This walks your entire chain and confirms every hash link and every signature. If anyone changed anything, this catches it.

5. See It

That’s it. Your chain lives at ~/.idit/. It’s a SQLite database. One file. Works forever.

Make It Survive a Reboot

Your chain is a file. The server that lets you browse and mint to it needs to be running. Here’s how to make sure it starts automatically.

Linux (systemd)

Create this file at ~/.config/systemd/user/idit.service:

Then enable it:

Now your chain server starts on boot, restarts if it crashes, and runs in the background. Check it anytime:

macOS (launchd)

Create ~/Library/LaunchAgents/org.lotswife.idit.plist:

Windows

The simplest approach: add a shortcut to your Startup folder.

For a proper Windows service, use NSSM — it wraps any command into a Windows service that auto-starts and auto-restarts.

Guard Your Key

Your private key is your identity on the chain. Lose it and you can never sign as yourself again. Leak it and someone else can.

When you run idit init yourname, two files are created:

What to back up (priority order)

1. Your private key (~/.idit/keys/yourname.key) — This IS your identity. Without it, you cannot sign new entries. Back this up to physical media you control.

2. Your chain database (~/.idit/chain.db) — This is your history. One SQLite file. Copy it anywhere. Even at heavy usage, 10 years of your life fits in under a gigabyte.

3. Your public key (~/.idit/keys/yourname.pub) — Least critical. Can be regenerated from the private key. But nice to have a backup anyway.

Permissions

Your private key should only be readable by you:

The idit init command does this automatically, but verify it if you’ve moved files around.

What NOT to do

Do not put your private key in a cloud drive (Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud). Do not email it. Do not paste it into a chat. Do not commit it to a git repo. If someone gets your private key, they can sign entries as you. The chain cannot tell the difference.

What You Can Document

“There isn’t any particular relationship between the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”
— A Tralfamadorian explains a Tralfamadorian novel to Billy Pilgrim
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

For AI Agents

If you run local AI, your agents can sign to your chain too.

Each agent gets its own keypair. Every AI output is signed with the model name and version. This means:

Anti-hallucination: The AI can check its own memory against the chain. If a memory is on-chain with a valid signature, it’s real — not confabulated.

Provenance: Years from now, you can prove which model said what and when.

Accountability: If the AI gives advice, the advice is on the chain. The record proves what was said.

What It Is / What It Is Not

The Bigger Vision

Personal Idit is Layer 0. The rest needs real engineers.

Right now, your chain lives on your machine and proves its integrity to anyone who can access it. That’s already valuable. But the full vision has three layers:

Layer 0 — Your chain. Free. Local. Works offline. This is what you install today.

Layer 1 — Bridge validators. Community-run nodes that aggregate hash anchors from personal chains and publish them to public blockchains. This proves your chain existed at a specific point in time to the outside world — without revealing any content. Like getting a document notarized without the notary reading it.

Layer 2 — Public anchoring. Your chain’s hash published to Bitcoin, Ethereum, Arweave — whatever established chain you choose. Belt and suspenders. Optional.

Layers 1 and 2 need distributed systems engineers, cryptographers, and community infrastructure that we don’t have yet. We are one person with a laptop and a local AI. If you know how to build consensus mechanisms, P2P gossip protocols, or time-locked encryption — we need you.

But you don’t need to wait for Layers 1 and 2. Your personal chain works today. Start documenting. The format is forward-compatible. When the network exists, your chain will be ready for it.

Roadmap

How Big Will My Chain Get?

Small. Surprisingly small.

Each entry is roughly 1–5 KB depending on content length. The chain stores text and hashes, not files. When you sign a photo or document, the chain stores the hash — the file itself stays on your disk.

At heavy daily usage (100 entries/day), 10 years of your documented life fits in under 700 MB. Your phone takes bigger photos. SQLite handles databases up to 281 terabytes.

You will run out of things to say before you run out of space.

Her name was Idit. It meant witness.

They turned her into salt for the crime of looking back.

Salt preserves. We’re building the pillar on purpose this time.

Start your chain. Document your life. The math does the rest.