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Glossary

Every term the docs use, one line each. The same definitions appear inline as hover-glosses on the pages where each term is introduced; this page collects them in one place to look up or link to. For depth, follow the term into the page that uses it.

~Alter: A member’s identity record on the protocol: the part of someone that handles being known, measured from how they actually work and decide. Owned by the member, read only with their consent.
~alter: The reading voice of an identity record. With the member’s consent, it answers when an agent asks who they are. It is a record you read, not an agent that acts for anyone.
Argon2id: The memory-hard password hash ~alter stores credentials with. Deliberately slow to compute, which is what makes large-scale cracking impractical.
Belonging Probability: A measured estimate of how well a person fits a particular context, surfaced as a tier label rather than a raw score.
Connector: A word the docs use in two senses. Sign-in sense: the connection between your AI client (Claude, ChatGPT, Le Chat, or Perplexity) and ~alter, added at mcp.truealter.com, where you sign in and choose your ~handle. Data-source sense: a surface you pair (GitHub, Obsidian, Discord, and Wallet are live; others are coming soon) to deepen your identity vector. Pairing a data source is not signing in.
cursor pagination: Paging by an opaque cursor that points at the next page, rather than by offset, so results stay stable as data changes underneath.
engagement levels: The depth of a member’s relationship with their record, from Explorer through Learner and Augmented to Deployed. Consent and what a reader may see widen with each level.
four-fifths rule: A fairness threshold: if any protected group’s outcomes fall below four-fifths the rate of the highest, the result is blocked. A hard release gate, not a warning.
~handle: An identity address on ~alter, written with a leading tilde (~example). It resolves to a person, organisation, or agent the way a domain name resolves to a host.
HMAC: A keyed hash used to sign webhook payloads. Recompute it over the canonical JSON serialisation of the body (sorted keys, compact separators) with your signing secret and compare to prove the delivery came from ~alter.
idempotency key: A caller-supplied identifier that lets a write be retried safely: the same key returns the original result instead of acting twice.
Identity Income: The member’s 75% share of every paid read of their identity. Each query pays the member directly, at the moment of the read.
MCP: Model Context Protocol: the open standard one AI agent uses to call another. ~alter exposes its identity tools and resources over MCP.
RS256: RSA signature with SHA-256: the algorithm ~alter session tokens are signed with. Verify them against the published JSON Web Key Set.
verifiable credential: A tamper-evident, cryptographically signed claim about a member that a reader can check without calling back to ~alter.
x402: The HTTP 402 payment standard agents use to pay per request. No invoice and no subscription: the charge settles at the moment of the call.