Qui adest, habetwho is present, has
Your money, on a radio in your pocket.
No account, no company, nobody to ask.
A wallet is your money
It is a radio that fits in your hand, and the money is on it. Not in an account. Not on our server. Not inside a company that can close on a Friday.
There is nothing to sign up for and no name to give. We could not freeze it or hand it over if a court ordered us to, because we are not holding it and never were.
And on the bad day, the one you have already thought about, it does not need the internet, or the bank, or us. It shows your balance on its own little screen, in your hand, with nothing else switched on anywhere in the world.
This is it. About thirty dollars. Board, screen, antenna, done. The red and black lead is for a battery you do not need.
It is called a Heltec LoRa 32 V3. Buy the 915 one.
Heltec makes a lot of boards that look almost the same. Other sellers sell this one under their own name, and ours came that way, which is fine. What matters is the two words in the middle: LoRa and V3. A board with no LoRa in the name has no radio in it at all.
The one thing to check when you buy
These radios are built for different parts of the world, and the two halves cannot hear each other at all. Europe is on one frequency, North America is on another.
On the listing, look for 915, or a range that covers it such as 863 to 928. Plenty of boards cover both and those are perfectly fine. The one to avoid is sold only as 868 or EU868.
Get that wrong and nothing will ever tell you. The board lights up, the screen works, it looks flawless, and it goes its entire life without finding one single neighbour.
Two more things, and you are done
- Antenna on before power. Every single time. Nothing attached and the radio cooks itself.
- A cable that carries data. The one in the box usually will not, and a dead cable looks exactly like a dead board. A blue USB 3 one always works.
If what is in the drawer is a V2, a T-Beam, or an RFM95 on an Arduino, this will not run on it yet. A V4 probably works and nobody has tried it.
What a wallet does not do
It does not earn on its own, and we would rather you heard that from us than found it out.
Money is made by two radios measuring the air between them, so a wallet needs something to answer. That something is a bookkeeper: a small box that stays on, keeps the book, and does the earning. Yours or somebody else's, it only has to be in range.
So a wallet by itself is real and it is yours and it will sit there holding nothing. If there is no bookkeeper near you, you are going to want to build one.
And the software for the board
Here is where it stands, plainly, because the rest of this page will not help a board that has never run our firmware. Everything below talks to a board that already does, and yours is running whatever you last put on it.
The firmware goes up on 12 December, with the manifest and the listener. If you want to be told the hour it does, the box at the bottom of the front page is the only list there is and it is used about twice a year.
If you just want to look at your wallet
Plug it into your computer with a cable that carries data, open this page in Chrome or Edge, and press connect. Nothing to install and nothing to download. That is the ten second version and most days it is all anybody needs.
Safari and Firefox cannot talk to a USB board at all. They will open the page and quietly do nothing.
If you would rather own your copy
Then you take it from a station. Not from this website. A station is a small computer somebody keeps running with a radio on it, and handing out the software is one of the things it does.
From anywhere in the world
You will need Tor, because a station has no address on the ordinary internet and does not want one.
sudo apt install tor git
git -c http.proxy=socks5h://127.0.0.1:9050 \
clone http://sd7nbwzbo5plnvg5kl4d5sgfncomnyd6omdkuccdffd54ro5xexg3pad.onion:9419/wallet.git
That gives you a folder called wallet. To bring it up to date later, from inside that folder:
git -c http.proxy=socks5h://127.0.0.1:9050 pull
If you are in the same building as a station
Then you do not need Tor at all. Ask the person whose station it is for its address on your network and take it straight off them.
git clone git://192.168.1.132/wallet.git
If you have no git and no wish to get one
Take the folder as a single file from the same place. wallet.tar.gz sits next to the repository at both addresses above.
curl -O --socks5-hostname 127.0.0.1:9050 \ http://sd7nbwzbo5plnvg5kl4d5sgfncomnyd6omdkuccdffd54ro5xexg3pad.onion:9419/wallet.tar.gz
You lose one thing by doing it this way, and it is worth knowing what: a repository tells you exactly which version you have and exactly what changed since the last one. A file in a folder tells you nothing. If you ever want to know whether you are current, that is the reason to use git.
Why it comes from a radio and not from us
A station cannot write to you. It only hands out. Pushing anything back is refused by the protocol itself, not by a password we could lose or be made to hand over.
And there is nothing here that only we can do. Every station serves the same folder at its own address. If you stop trusting us, take your copy from somebody else's station, or serve it from your own and let your neighbours take it from you. That is not a promise about our behaviour. It is the shape of the thing.
What we have not finished yet, said plainly: there is no signature on any of this. Today you are trusting the station you took it from. The fix is a signed version that you can check against a key you got some other way, so the station carrying the software stops having to be trusted at all. It is not built. Until it is, take it from a station belonging to somebody you would lend a key to.
Then what
Open the folder and double-click START HERE.html. It is a document, not a program, so your computer has no opinion about it. Everything else is explained in the file called READ ME FIRST, which is in there with it.
Your money is not in that folder. It is on the board, and the board is the only thing that can spend it. You can delete the folder and take it again whenever you like.
Listen near me and we both earn.
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