~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.

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.

brew install true-alter/tap/alter

yay -S truealter-cli

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.