Design

Design is where you understand — and, in time, shape — how Tally works: one cross-linked, status-tagged place for the whole project.

What Tally is

Tally is money returned to its root as bookkeeping of trust: peer-to-peer IOUs between friends, extended to strangers along routes of mutual trust. No bank, no central ledger — each device keeps its own record and peers reconcile directly. The Purpose page tells the full story.

How these docs are split

The sidebar groups mirror the anatomy of the project. Start anywhere:

• Purpose — what Tally is and why: the trust economics and routed payments.
• Glossary — the shared vocabulary; short entries that link into the rest.
• UI — what people see and do: pages, flows, presence, and the render flow behind them.
• P2P — the peer-to-peer core: the local-first ledger, state and storage, and how peers connect and sync (WebRTC, the relay, envelopes).
• Security — identity, keys, encryption, authorship, and the privacy model.
• TIPs — Tally Improvement Proposals: design docs with an implemented/draft lifecycle.
• Tooling — how the project is built, tested and maintained, including this site.

Conventions

Everything is authored text-first as plain HTML: each page reads cleanly as raw source for a human or an AI, and works with JavaScript off. The shell only adds navigation, never content. Every page carries a status so its maturity is explicit:

• implemented — exists in the code today
• planned — decided, not built yet
• proposal — a draft or open question
• reference — background or a spec

Pages that describe implemented behaviour say when they were last checked against the code. Two pages are original notes, kept verbatim for their reasoning rather than as a description of the code — they carry a banner saying so. The TIP pages are generated from the Markdown under TIPs/; everything else is authored here. See the Design roadmap for where this site is headed.