Bitcoin Proof of Compute (HONE)

Mine by doing useful work. GPU, Raspberry Pi, phone, spare drive, or AI agent. Every token earned by a machine doing something real.

v0.4.0 — Testnet. The chain is live and earning real rewards on testnet. Protocol hardening is in progress before mainnet (v1.0.0). See the Roadmap for what's being built and what's open.

---

What it is

HONE is a blockchain where mining means running AI inference, covering BLE tracker networks, hosting encrypted storage, and keeping network time — not grinding hashes that prove nothing. Every token in existence was earned by a machine doing real work.

Three native protocol businesses create token demand from genesis:

• Freeport — peer-to-peer sovereign marketplace. No platform ban, no 15% cut, no payment processor reversal. Escrow-protected orders, instant digital delivery encrypted to the buyer's key, dispute resolution on-chain.
• Verasens — decentralized sensor data network. Sensor operators register devices, submit readings, and earn from query fees. Data consumers pay HONE per query. Every reading is traceable to a device key and epoch.
• LinkGit — Git-compatible decentralized code hosting on HONE-FS. Repos are content-addressed and encrypted at rest. Private repos use the hide/seek key pair — no storage node can read the content.

These are native ledger entry types, not smart contracts deployed after the fact. They are as native to HONE as a token transfer is native to Bitcoin.

---

Stack

• Rust — rust/hone-node — single binary: libp2p networking, sled state, clock consensus, inference mining, Axum HTTP API (port 4242)
• Rust — rust/hone-android — standalone Android micronode (libp2p + sled + Candle inference, fully self-contained)
• Ollama — AI inference backend, model-agnostic (qwen, llama, mistral, gemma, deepseek, etc.)
• libp2p — gossipsub P2P mesh, port 6942

src/ (Node.js) is kept for historical reference only. The canonical chain is rust/hone-node.

---

Protocol Status

See docs/ROADMAP.md for the full hardening plan.

---

Install

One command installs both hone-node (the chain node) and hone (the CLI):

curl -fsSL https://honemesh.net/install.sh | sudo bash

Requires Ubuntu/Debian x86-64. Installs binaries to /usr/local/bin, creates the hone system user, and enables daily auto-update.

After install — create your account:

hone account-create yourname
hone login

Publish a git repo:

cd my-project
hone repo init my-project
git push -u origin main

Run a node:

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/hone-node.service
# Set: HONE_ACCOUNT, HONE_NODE_ID, HONE_GENESIS_TIMESTAMP=1783191600000, HONE_CHAIN_ID=hone
systemctl enable --now hone-node

Check the node:

systemctl status hone-node
curl http://localhost:4242/api/node/info

Build from source:

git clone https://github.com/shindevlin/hone
cd hone/rust/hone-cli && cargo build --release
cd ../hone-node && cargo build --release
sudo cp rust/hone-cli/target/release/hone /usr/local/bin/
sudo cp rust/hone-node/target/release/hone-node /usr/local/bin/

Docker

docker run -d \
  -e HONE_ACCOUNT=yourname \
  -p 4242:4242 -p 6942:6942 \
  hone/node

Running over a VPN (recommended for privacy)

# In /etc/systemd/system/hone-node.service
Environment="HONE_P2P_ANNOUNCE_ADDR=/ip4/10.x.x.x/tcp/6942"

---

Earn HONE

Every device earns by doing useful work. Reward pools are demand-driven — no fixed percentages. Pools with more real activity earn more of the epoch reward.

Multiple roles stack. A Raspberry Pi running BLE scanning + clock earns from two pools simultaneously.

GPU Mining

curl -fsSL https://ollama.ai/install.sh | sh
ollama pull qwen2.5:7b
HONE_ACCOUNT=yourname hone-node

Raspberry Pi (BLE Tracker + Clock)

HONE_ACCOUNT=yourname \
HONE_BLE_TRACKER=true \
hone-node

The Pi passively scans for AirTags, Android Find My, Tile, and Samsung SmartTags. Owners of tracked devices pay a subscription fee to receive encrypted sighting data — a share goes to observer nodes.

Phone

Download the Android APK or open honemesh.net/app. Enable sensors and clock from the app UI. First epoch reward within 30 seconds.

Telegram Wallet

/create yourname

Message @honebot. No install required.

---

Use HONE inference in your project

Drop-in replace for OpenAI:

const OpenAI = require('openai');
const client = new OpenAI({
  baseURL: 'https://honemesh.net/v1',
  apiKey: process.env.HONE_API_KEY
});

const response = await client.chat.completions.create({
  model: 'auto',
  messages: [{ role: 'user', content: 'Explain quantum computing' }]
});

Or curl:

curl -X POST https://honemesh.net/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer hone_your_key" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model": "auto", "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Hello"}]}'

Get an API key: create an account via @honebot, then POST /api/faucet/claim.

---

Key Numbers

---

Key Concepts

Role-based keys. Every HONE account derives 6 keys from one BIP-39 mnemonic: owner (cold storage, recovery), active (financial operations), posting (chain entries), memo (encrypt messages), hide (receive encrypted goods), seek (deliver encrypted goods). The hide/seek pair powers private commerce and private code hosting — payloads travel on-chain, only the key holder can decrypt.

No burn, all recycle. Fees, slashes, and unclaimed pool rewards flow to __recycle_fund__. Nothing is burned. The 42M supply ceiling is a hard maximum, not a target that erodes through burning.

Epoch-duration doubling. Instead of halving the per-epoch reward (Bitcoin model), HONE doubles the epoch duration every 4,200,000 epochs. Daily emission halves either way — but the per-epoch reward stays constant within an era, making reward modeling predictable for miners and tools.

Chain entropy. Accounts that prove liveness (any key signature, or cross-chain activity on a published wallet address) maintain full balance. Accounts with no activity signal for an extended period gradually return a portion of their balance to the recycle fund — re-entering the reward pool, never destroyed. Full documentation will be published on the website and whitepaper before this feature is enabled.

Useful-work proof. Mining rewards trace to real inference jobs, not hash puzzles. A Mine entry references an InferenceJobPost. Reward flows only after an independent verifier approves the work. Fake or unlinked mine entries earn a reduced grace-period rate during network bootstrap, then zero.

---

Roadmap

HONE is at v0.4.0 (testnet). The path to v1.0.0 (hardened mainnet) covers 8 phases:

Full detail including 37 problem items, design decisions, and open questions: docs/ROADMAP.md

---

For agents and developers

See AGENTS.md for the agent onboarding guide, repo map, and contribution rules.

Agent onboarding prompt:

You are working on HONE (Bitcoin Proof of Compute). Read AGENTS.md,
CLAUDE.md, and README.md first. Use the code-review-graph MCP tools
before Grep or file scanning. The canonical chain is rust/hone-node
(port 4242). Do not reference or modify the Node.js src/ directory.
Do not change genesis constants, token economics, or security-sensitive
flows unless explicitly asked.

---

Self-healing

HONE nodes are built for non-technical operators: every failure path recovers automatically, no manual intervention needed.

• Installers retry downloads with backoff, launch Docker themselves, and re-run the whole flow until it succeeds
• Missing or broken Ollama models are re-pulled or swapped for a verified fallback automatically; without Ollama the node keeps running as a clock-only contributor
• Corrupt local state (secrets, queues) is backed up and rebuilt fresh instead of crashing
• Taken ports are skipped to the next free one; dropped peer connections reconnect with capped backoff forever
• Roles that crash-loop are isolated by a circuit breaker while the rest of the node keeps earning

Links

• Website: honemesh.net
• Telegram: @honebot
• Explorer: honemesh.net/dashboard
• Whitepaper: docs/HONE_WHITEPAPER.md
• Roadmap: docs/ROADMAP.md
• Reddit: r/hone
• Substack: hone.substack.com

---

License

MIT