Hone Home

This is the Hone homepage. Find all documentation in the links on the left.

What is Hone?

Hone is a codename for a DHT protocol that acts as a framework for application developers who want to build decentralized applications. A big issue with almost all current applications on the internet is that they are centralized, i.e. using a few central servers. There are multiple problems with that:

A security breach of a central server exposes hundreds of thousands of accounts if they are not properly secured.
A single server can easily be monitored. If the communication is not properly encrypted it is easy to determine who is online where, when, who they are interacting with etc. The same can be achieved if the communication is encrypted, by observing timings, packet sizes and source/destination addresses.
A single server or service or company can be forced by secret courts to install wiretaps or provide access to personal information of their users without the users noticing. A single server can also easily be taken offline, rendering the whole service unusable.

Hone aims to provide a framework for building secure versions of common applications. What is often not realized is that many applications do not need a central server to work, and instant messaging, voice and video chats are an example for this. Many applications actually gain resilience and scalability by using a distributed network instead of a centralized service, think of video broadcasting or sensor networks. The Internet itself is, after all, relatively decentralized.

What is it not?

It is not a "distributed internet", or a distributed version of a social network, or a peer-to-peer file sharing network.

Specification

The current specification of the protocol can be downloaded here.

Why is there nothing else here?

There is a lot here that you can not see. We will publish specifications when they are closer to being finished. An proof-of-concept of the Hone DHT is being developed in Go at the moment.