~Alter

~alter CLI

Claim a name that is yours and get paid when someone reads it

What is ~alter? · Install · The first five minutes

What is ~alter?

Run alter register, choose a name and confirm you are eighteen or older. Your own machine spends a few seconds proving there is a person behind the request, and then ~yourname exists.

A second before that command there was no you on this protocol, and afterwards there is one that is yours. No browser opened, no password was set, no email address was asked for, and no card was taken.

~alter is what that name resolves to. ~yourname is an address, and behind it sits a record of what you have actually done. Every command below reads or writes some part of it, and anything else speaking the protocol resolves the same address to the same record.

The step is that small, and it is the one everything else here runs from. Agents you wire on this machine act under the name, so what they do in your stead carries it. Anybody wanting more of you than the fact you exist pays for it on terms you set first, and alter queries names each of them and what you kept.

Nothing else in the stack is where a name starts. The website argues the case, the runtime keeps a handle known on your own machine, and the SDK reads one from code you have written. Each of those begins with a name that already exists, and this is the command that makes one.

I want to know more Your friends do not know you from a login. Neither does your family, or the people you work with, or your sports team. They know who you are from how you have shown up, over years. You may look and sound nothing like you did ten years ago and it is still you. Software still asks the narrow question. A password at the login screen. A token in the app. Each one checks whether this is the right person, right now, at this exact spot, and then looks away. Everything in between is invisible to it, and that is almost all of your life. The AI tools made it worse, because one of them writes in your name now, and when somebody asks who allowed it, there is no answer anywhere on this machine. One name, and the record under it is yours. ~yourname works at every tool that speaks the protocol, so nothing is set up twice and there is no key to paste, at any point. What is in the record was read from what you did, not typed into a box by you or guessed at by a model. You can cut off access to any of it with one command. No form, no review. Being read pays you. Anyone can check for free that your handle exists. Reading further, past the fact of you, costs the reader money, that money goes to you, and you decide who gets to read what. Collectives hold a record on the same terms, because it is one record at every scale and the same form holds you, your team, and your country. A union, a club, a trade body, or a group of people who have never met can vouch for their own members and be read the same way you are. Threads are how you get somewhere. A thread is something you are working towards. You take one on yourself, or ~Alter plants one from what it can already see, or a collective confers one on you. What gets read is the trail you leave while you are doing it, never a certificate at the end. All of that is the short version of an argument set out properly, in eight chapters at truealter.com/origin . Its seventy-six predictions were each written so the data could come back and say no. Five of them did, and those five are still published alongside the rest.

I want to check it myself

None of it needs taking on trust. Hand this to the AI you already use and let it take you through in your own words.

Go to truealter.com, find the genesis and the origin

papers, and read all of them. Then start a discussion with me in my own language, no jargon.

Ask me one question at a time and wait for my answer. Follow what I am curious about, not the order the site is written in.

Do not only read the pages. Connect to their interface directly and call get_started. That tells you where I am and what comes next, and we work the rest of this from there.

If I have a ~handle I will give it to you. If I do not and I decide I want one, set it up with me here.

What I want to understand is what ~Alter is, how it applies to me, and what it means for everyone else. Find me somewhere in it, and not the version written for people who work in technology. Find the life nearest mine and walk me through it, including what it would cost me.

Try to prove them wrong. Go and find where they show their working, and if something is unclear or does not hold up, say so.

What is ~alter CLI?

One binary, and every command in it runs under your own handle. Nothing to paste, no key to carry between machines, and no browser step at any point.

It covers six things. Holding a name that is yours and keeping it safe. Deciding who may read you, attribute by attribute. Connecting the sources it reads what you do from. Seeing who looked you up and what each read paid you. Running your agents under your handle, so what they do carries it. Asking the field for somebody when you know nobody who would know them.

Two of those need no account at all. alter audit reads this machine, prints what ~Alter could learn from it, and stops. alter doctor loom checks a folder for secrets, bad encoding and broken links, with no network. Both run before you decide anything.

The rest of this page is the install, and the first five minutes.

Install

Nothing needs setting up first. The installer brings its own Node when the machine has none. Take the line for the shell you are in.

macOS, Linux and WSL

curl -sSf https://truealter.com/install.sh | bash

Windows PowerShell

irm https://truealter.com/install.ps1 | iex

What that puts on your machine

Four things land, and the rest of this section is what does not.

• The alter command, which is the npm package @truealter/cli, installed globally.
• One directory on your PATH, so alter is there in every shell you open.
• Node, but only if this machine has none. macOS and Linux take the official build, check it against the checksums nodejs.org publishes, and unpack it into ~/.local/share/alter/node. Windows installs Node LTS through winget, or Chocolatey when winget is not there. Node already here is left alone.
• A checksum for the installer itself, at install.sh.sha256 and install.ps1.sha256, so you can check the script before you run it.

Nothing runs under sudo. The installer refuses to run as root, because root would own Node, npm and alter, and you would not be able to run the command at all. macOS asks for a password once, to link the binary into /usr/local/bin, and nothing else needs administrator rights on either platform. Nothing lands outside your home directory.

No account is created and nothing is sent. When the install finishes ~Alter has read nothing about you or about this machine. alter audit is the first command that reads anything, and it reads locally. alter register is the first that creates anything, and you run it yourself.

Homebrew , on macOS or Linux

• Take this one if you want Homebrew to own the copy on this machine and upgrade it alongside everything else you have installed.
• It brings its own Node.

brew install true-alter/tap/alter

Arch Linux, from the AUR

• Take this one on Arch or a derivative, so pacman knows about it like anything else on the machine.
• `paru` works the same way, with paru -S truealter-cli.

yay -S truealter-cli

npm, if you would rather not run a script

• Take this one when Node 20 or newer is already here and you would rather install the package yourself.
• It is the same package the installer above puts there, without the Node and PATH handling.

npm install -g @truealter/cli

The first five minutes

Run alter on its own.

The menu opens on the four commands that turn earning on.

After that there is one command to remember. Start this today, get pulled away, and come back next week not knowing what is left, and alter status names which of six steps you are on and what to do next. Those six steps are the sections below.

Read your own machine before anything is created

Run alter audit.

You have not decided anything yet and want to see what it would read off your own machine first. It reads this machine, prints what ~Alter could learn from it, and stops. Nothing is sent and nothing is created.

Close the terminal here and you are exactly where you started.

1. Register, and take the handle

Run alter register.

Free, and it asks for no account, no card and no application. Use alter login instead if the handle is already yours.

Nothing is printed for you to write down. The handle is claimed, a member credential is minted onto this machine, and the session is stored for you. The secret worth keeping is the root seed, which alter key device register mints and shows once, on the run that mints it. Run alter key seed export to see it again on that machine and alter key seed import to put it on a new one. No server holds it, so nobody can reissue it for you.

2. Preview the record a caller would get

Run alter discovery preview first.

Say you are happy to be found for the trade you do and for nothing else. This prints your record the way a caller would receive it, with the price on that read, before anybody is able to make one.

The levels are set by alter discovery preset recognition. There are four, and they apply attribute by attribute.

Three presets are the starting points,