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Background

The principle idea that drove the creation and development of telehash is the belief that any application instance should be able to easily and securely talk to any other application instance or device, whether they are two instances of the same application, or completely different applications. They should be able to do so directly, and in any environment, from servers to mobile devices down to embedded systems and sensors.

By enabling this freedom for developers as a foundation for their applications, telehash enables the same freedom for the people using them - that the user can connect, share, and communicate more easily and with control of their privacy.

The challenges and complexity today in connecting applications via existing technologies such as APIs, OAuth, and REST is only increasing, often forcing fundamentally insecure, centralized, and closed/gated communication platforms. By adopting telehash in any application, that application immediately has a powerful set of open tools for not only its own needs, but can then also enable connectivity to and from applications created by others easily. These tools include the ability to have friends, sharing, feeds, tagging, search, notifications, discovery, and other social patterns.

Telehash has a fundamental requirement to remain simple and light-weight in order to support applications running on networked devices and sensors. The design goals also include not forcing any particular architectural design such as client-server, centralized/federated/distributed, polling/push, REST, streaming, publish-subscribe, or message passing... any can be used, as telehash simply facilitates secure reliable connectivity between any two or more applications in any networking environment.

# The Name

The name is a simple combination of tele from telegraph, and hash from hashtable, and pronounced as the parts of those words normally would be.

It is usually used in all lower-case to re-affirm the long term vision of it being used as a modern version of the word "telephone", both as a generic private communication system that is federated and compatible, and the act of two application instances communicating privately and directly.

The name and first version of the protocol was established in 2009 by Jeremie Miller and was a research project until 2013 (v2) when it was significantly updated with a privacy focus.

See this blog post for some more history on its development.