LocalGhost - Private Local AI Server | Your AI, Your Data, Your Hardware
THE MANIFESTO
"Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world."
— A Cypherpunk's Manifesto, 1993
The Cypherpunks told us to write code. We didn't write enough. Today, your phone is a tracker, your cloud is an informant, and your AI is a spy. Every click is logged. Every query is sold. Every interaction trains a model you will never own.
LocalGhost inverts this. We move everything you need—your AI, your data, your digital self—from their servers to yours. A private server where nobody can see you. Where nobody even knows you exist.
We do not ask you to trust us. We ask you to verify that you don't have to.
WHAT YOU CAN DO
Everything is open source. No black boxes except the one on your desk.
We are not gatekeepers. We are blueprint makers. The mission is bigger than the company.
Buy the parts. Flash the OS. We'll still high-five and support you.
If we go bankrupt, you lose nothing. Your box keeps running. Someone else can pick up where we left off.
WHAT WE CANNOT DO
We do not have it. Your data lives on your hardware. We are architecturally blind.
We cannot charge a subscription. There is no server to cut you off from. What you buy, you keep.
Unplug the ethernet and we cannot reach you. No backdoor. No kill switch.
Your journals, photos, biometrics, secrets—they exist only on your desk.
No analytics. No telemetry. The box does not phone home. We don't know who you are.
When the subpoena comes, we have nothing. The architecture is our legal defense.
This is not a promise backed by goodwill. This is not a privacy policy written by lawyers. This is code. This is math. This is code you can read.
You do not choose us because you trust us.
You choose us because you can verify that trust is unnecessary.
Zero remote dependencies. Zero server-side computation.
Zero ways to betray you.
THE FLEET: LOCAL DAEMONS
Six daemons run locally on the hardware. Each handles a specific job—ingesting data, finding patterns, keeping backups alive. No cloud callbacks. No external dependencies. Just processes on your box, working for you.
SURVIVAL PROTOCOL: "THE MIST"
We do not have a server. If we go bankrupt tomorrow, your data survives. LocalGhost relies on a Distributed Hash Table (DHT).
┌──────┐ ┌──────┐ ┌──────┐ │ NODE │────▶│ NODE │────▶│ NODE │ └──┬───┘ └──┬───┘ └──┬───┘ │ │ │ ▼ ▼ ▼ ┌──────┐ ┌──────┐ ┌──────┐ │ NODE │◀────│ NODE │◀────│ NODE │ └──────┘ └──────┘ └──────┘ NO CENTRAL NODE. NO MASTER. JUST THE MESH.
THE PACT: Dedicate 20% of your drive to the network. Gain immortality for your data.
THE ECONOMICS OF INDEPENDENCE
Why we will never ask for a subscription.
The modern technology industry is built on a single, toxic premise: Rent-seeking.
They don't want to sell you a product; they want to trap you in a monthly payment. They want you to be a tenant in your own digital life. If you stop paying, the lights go out. If you stop paying, they lock the doors to your memories.
We reject this. Not everything needs to be a subscription.
At LocalGhost, our business model is boring, archaic, and honest:
1. WE MAKE MONEY WHEN WE SELL YOU HARDWARE
If you choose to buy a pre-built LocalGhost box from us, we charge you a 30% margin on the parts and assembly. That is our profit. It pays for our engineers, our electricity, and our coffee.
2. WE MAKE MONEY WHEN WE SELL YOU UPGRADES (SOFTWARE)
We treat software like a tool, not a service. If we develop a breakthrough new Agent—say, a "ghost.voiced v2" with better reasoning, or a "ghost.medicald" module—we will put it in a package and put a price tag on it.
3. WE NEVER MONETIZE YOU
We cannot sell your data because we do not have it.
We cannot train AI on your life because we cannot see it.
We cannot show you ads because the box has no ad server.
⚡ CODE, NOT PROMISES
The Guarantee: If you don't buy an upgrade, your current version will keep working forever. We will never throttle, brick, or degrade your existing system to force an upgrade.
Why? Because we can't.
Once you unplug the ethernet cable or block the port, this box is an independent island. We have no "backdoor." We have no "remote kill switch." We have no "admin access." Even if we wanted to force an update, the architecture prevents us from reaching you.
We have designed ourselves out of the loop. You are not relying on our goodwill; you are relying on the fact that we are technically powerless to stop you.
THE COMPARISON
| FEATURE | THE "BIG TECH" WAY | THE LOCALGHOST WAY |
|---|---|---|
| Payment Structure | Infinite Monthly Rent | One-Time Purchase |
| If You Stop Paying | You lose access to your data | Nothing happens. It keeps working. |
| Data Privacy | They scan it for ads/training | We physically cannot see it |
| Upgrades | Forced UI changes you hate | Optional packages you choose |
| Hardware | A locked black box you can't open | Standard parts. Repairable. Upgradeable. |
| Relationship | User / Product | Owner / Tool |
When you pay for something once, you own it.
When you pay for it monthly, it owns you.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Okay, but what actually IS it? +
It's a small, silent box that sits on your desk or shelf. You plug it into power, connect it to your Wi-Fi, and insert the two hardware security keys that come with it. That's the setup.
Once connected, you access it through a local web interface (like http://ghost.local) when you're home,
or through a secure tunnel when you're away. No cloud account. No login. Just your box, your network, your data.
From there, you can sync anything to it: photos from your phone, journals, bank exports, health data, browser history, notes, voice memos—whatever you want to track. The box stores it all locally, tags it, indexes it, and runs AI analysis entirely on your hardware.
Think of it as a private server for your life, with an AI that actually works for you because it literally cannot work for anyone else.
How do I get my data onto it? +
Multiple ways, depending on what you're syncing:
- Mobile app: Automatically syncs photos, health data, location history, and notes in the background
- Browser extension: Captures bookmarks, reading history, and saved articles
- File drop: Drag and drop anything into the web interface—PDFs, exports, backups
- API imports: Connect to services that offer data exports (banks, fitness trackers, etc.)
- Manual uploads: For the privacy purists who want to move files by hand
Everything syncs over your local network first. If you enable remote access, it goes through an encrypted tunnel directly to your box—never through our servers, because we don't have servers.
What does the AI actually do? +
The AI runs locally on the box's NPU (Neural Processing Unit). It does several things:
- Tagging & Organization: Automatically categorizes your photos, documents, and notes without you lifting a finger
- Pattern Recognition: Finds correlations you'd never spot—like how your sleep affects your spending, or how your mood tracks with your exercise
- Goal Tracking: You tell it what you're working toward, and it holds you accountable with actual data, not vibes
- Honest Reflection: Ask it questions about your life and it answers based on evidence, not what you want to hear
- Search: Find anything you've ever saved, even if you forgot what you called it
The key difference: this AI has zero incentive to manipulate you. It can't sell you anything. It can't show you ads. It can't optimize for "engagement." It just tells you the truth.
How does "The Mist" backup system work? +
The Mist is a peer-to-peer backup network. Here's the simple version:
Step 1: Shred. Your data gets encrypted with a key only you hold. Then it gets chopped into thousands of tiny pieces called "shards." Each shard is meaningless on its own—like confetti from a shredded document.
Step 2: Scatter. Those shards get distributed across other LocalGhost boxes in the network. Your shards live on dozens of strangers' drives. Their shards live on yours.
Step 3: Rebuild. When you need your data back, your box collects the shards from the network and reassembles them. Only your encryption key can make sense of them.
The beauty: The people storing your shards can't read them—they're encrypted and incomplete. You can't read theirs either. Nobody knows whose data they're holding. The network doesn't even know you exist.
If your house burns down, your data survives. If LocalGhost goes bankrupt, your data survives. The network has no central point of failure.
Technical note: This uses erasure coding similar to how Ethereum's PeerDAS works for data availability sampling. We use Reed-Solomon encoding so you only need ~50% of shards to reconstruct your data, making the system resilient even if half the network goes offline.
How do the boxes find each other without a central server? +
This is the magic of distributed hash tables (DHT). Here's how it works in plain English:
The Bootstrap Problem: When your box first connects to the network, it needs to know at least one other box. We publish a small list of "bootstrap nodes"—these are just regular LocalGhost boxes run by volunteers who've agreed to be discoverable. Your box contacts one of these to get introduced to the network. After that, it never needs us again.
The Address Book: Every box on the network has a unique ID (a long random number). Each box maintains a partial "address book" of other boxes it knows about. But here's the clever bit: you don't need to know everyone. You just need to know boxes whose IDs are "close" to yours in the mathematical sense.
The Hop Game: When you need to find a specific shard, you ask the boxes you know: "Who's closest to this shard's ID?" They point you to someone closer. You ask that box the same question. Within 3-4 hops, you've found what you're looking for—even in a network of millions.
No Phone Book Server: There's no central directory. The network IS the directory. If any box goes offline, the others route around it automatically. The more boxes join, the more resilient it gets.
Think of it like asking for directions in a city with no street signs. You ask a local, they point you to someone who knows better, and within a few asks you're at your destination. No map company required.
Technical note: We use a Kademlia-style DHT, the same algorithm that powers BitTorrent and IPFS. Node distance is calculated using XOR on node IDs. Each node maintains k-buckets of peers at exponentially increasing distances, giving O(log n) lookup time. The protocol is UDP-based for speed, with optional QUIC tunneling for NAT traversal.
What if I lose my encryption key? +
Then your data is gone. Forever. This is not a bug—it's the point.
We cannot recover your data because we never had access to it. There is no "forgot password" flow. There is no customer support ticket that can help you. The math doesn't care about your feelings.
The good news: Every LocalGhost box ships with two hardware security keys. When you first set up the box, you plug both keys in simultaneously. The box generates your master encryption key and splits it between the two keys using Shamir's Secret Sharing—neither key alone can decrypt anything.
How to use them:
- Key 1: Keep this one with your box for daily use. Plug it in to unlock your data.
- Key 2: Store this somewhere safe and separate—a bank vault, a trusted friend's house, your parents' place. This is your recovery key.
If you lose Key 1, you can use Key 2 to generate a new pair. If your house burns down with both the box and Key 1 inside, Key 2 can restore everything to a new box. But if you lose both keys? Game over.
Real ownership means real responsibility. Two keys. Two locations. No excuses.
Technical note: The keys are FIDO2-compliant hardware tokens with secure elements. The master key never leaves the secure enclave—only the derived decryption keys are used at runtime. We use 2-of-2 Shamir's Secret Sharing for the split, with an optional 2-of-3 mode if you purchase an additional backup key.
Can I access my box when I'm not home? +
Yes. The box comes with an encrypted VPN that you can choose to enable for remote access.
Option A: Encrypted VPN (included)
Every LocalGhost box ships with a built-in encrypted VPN. When enabled, your phone or laptop connects directly to your box
over the internet through an end-to-end encrypted tunnel. It's like being on your home network, but from anywhere.
Your traffic never touches our servers—because we don't have any.
Option B: Air-Gap Mode
For the truly paranoid: disable all remote access. The box only works when you're physically on your home network.
When you leave, it's a black hole. When you return, it's there waiting.
There is no Option C where your data goes through our servers. We don't have servers. We couldn't offer that option even if we wanted to.
What happens if LocalGhost (the company) disappears? +
Nothing. Your box keeps working.
The software is open source. The hardware is standard parts. The Mist network is decentralized. There is no license server to phone home to. There is no authentication service to validate your purchase.
If we go bankrupt tomorrow:
- Your box continues running the last version you installed
- The Mist network continues operating (it doesn't need us)
- Someone else can fork the code and continue development
- You can maintain it yourself if you're technical
We have deliberately designed ourselves out of the critical path. Your independence does not depend on our survival.
Is this legal? +
Yes. Running a private server in your home is completely legal. Encrypting your own data is legal. Storing backups on a peer-to-peer network is legal.
We're not helping you hide anything from the law. We're helping you exercise your right to privacy—a right that exists in most democracies but has been quietly eroded by decades of "free" services that monetize your attention and data.
If law enforcement comes to us with a warrant, we'll comply. But compliance looks like this: "We have no data. We have no logs. We don't know who uses our hardware. Here's our open-source code. Good luck."
The architecture is the legal defense.
THE BLACK BOX
We do not manufacture silicon. We do not print circuit boards in a secret facility. We source the best off-the-shelf components we can find, verify them for backdoors, flash our OS, and bolt them into a case.
This is a "Bill of Materials" product. We use standard parts you could buy yourself. The value we add is the integration, the thermal engineering, the OS configuration, and the guarantee that the components work together flawlessly. Final specs will be published before launch.
Believe in the mission? You can always support development directly.