Human Exchange Protocol

First, let us secure your thread. Choose a PIN that you will remember. This is the only key to your identity. There is no recovery process, no reset email, no customer service. If you lose your PIN, your thread cannot be accessed by anyone, including you. This is by design. Your thread belongs to you completely.

Take a picture of yourself. It does not need to be perfect. This is not social media. It is just you.

By taking this photo now, you anchor an image of yourself at the very beginning of your encrypted chain. The original is sealed in your genesis record and cannot be changed. From this moment forward, no one can ever say this chain belonged to anybody but you.

When you exchange with someone later, they can compare your current photo to this anchor and see that you are the same person who started this chain. It protects you. It also protects the people who exchange with you.

What should people know you by? You can use your real name, a nickname, an alias, whatever feels right. There is no authority here, no verification, no rules about this. Most people use what the people in their life already call them, but you decide.

You can change this anytime. Life changes. People change. Names change. That is all part of being part of a community, and it is all welcome here.

Make your first declaration

Declarations are things you record about yourself that help people understand who you are. This is yours to write. There is no authority to please, no profile to optimize, no algorithm reading it.

You can come back and add more anytime. Most people start small and build over time as they remember the things that matter.

How value works here

Long before money, when people made decisions about whether to help each other, they weighed cost against benefit in their minds. Was it worth the time? Was the trade fair? They measured these things using whatever was at hand: the hours they had, primitive weights, a stick, a shared sense of effort. Two people would arrive at some sense of what was reasonable, or they would not, and the cooperation either happened or it did not.

That same principle is alive in HEP. You weigh cost against benefit yourself. The system records the result; it does not compute it for you.

HEP uses a shared scale from 0 to 1,000,000. Everyone who uses HEP uses this same scale. When your sense of a thing's worth meets someone else's sense, you are comparing numbers on the same ruler.

The rare, exceptional things one person can do for another, like curing a disease or saving a life, sit at or near the top of the scale. The simplest, most effortless help sits near the bottom. Most everyday cooperation lives much closer to zero than to a million.

As you start using HEP, your sense of where things sit on this scale becomes your personal measuring stick. It is how you decide whether what someone is offering or asking is worth carrying on your chain. Whoever asks for a lot, the other person carries that weight on their own chain. You decide whether the trade makes sense for you.

If this sits comfortably with you, continue. If you would like a moment to think it through with examples, the worksheet walks you through three small valuations to help you find your own sense of the scale.

Show that your phone is a phone

Real phones, held by real people, behave in ways software cannot fake. They move around. The temperature changes. They connect to networks that come and go. They sit in a pocket, then on a desk, then in a car. The pattern of those signals is what proves a person is real, not the signals themselves.

We do not need to know who you are. We do not need to read your data. We just need your phone to behave like a phone. The signals are hashed before storage. Raw data never leaves your device.

You have just created the beginning of your thread.

Right now it has one entry: you, declaring who you are. Everything that follows, every cooperative act, every exchange, every moment of real effort recognized, builds on this foundation.

As your life evolves, new skills, new experiences, new things you want to declare about yourself, you can add them anytime. Your photo can be updated. Your declarations can grow. Your thread grows with you.