For visitors who'd rather read than walk.
# Smart home that reports to you
You're a homeowner. Your house is full of smart devices. Your block
has had two recent doorbell-footage incidents in the news. You are
tired of vendor policies deciding what your devices broadcast and to
whom.
The hook on Merkle Trust's landing: the device is in your house.
The data should report to you first. The substrate is the small box
on your shelf that makes that arrangement possible.
Four real paths exist. For a homeowner running a smart-home hub, the
order is operator-first or GitHub-first depending on the homeowner's
comfort.
Subscribe to a regional operator. Operator-managed hub for
households who would rather not run servers. The path most
homeowners take.
Clone GarrisonNode from GitHub. Self-install on a Raspberry
Pi-class device on the household network. Open source. The path
for households with technical capacity.
Paste the markdown into your LLM. Lightest path; useful when
considering an HOA or block-level policy.
Join the mesh. GitHub install plus mesh anchoring with peer
households. The deepest path.
A sandboxed Merkle Trust loads the synthetic Chen residence: eleven
device categories, six months of data. The hub runs on a
Raspberry Pi-class device on the household network. Each device's
data is sealed at the moment of recording. Retention is controlled
by the household.
The walk works through five representative devices, flipping each
between three policy postures, and watching the data-flow
visualization update.
```
═══════════════════════════════════════════════
DEVICE POLICY POSTURES — Chen residence
═══════════════════════════════════════════════
POSTURE A: vendor cloud only
data → vendor (current default)
household: read-only via vendor app
POSTURE B: hub-mediated
data → household hub → vendor (filtered)
household: full access; vendor:
service-essential subset
POSTURE C: hub-only
data → household hub
vendor: cannot reach the device
Vendor service quality remains.
Vendor surveillance ends.
═══════════════════════════════════════════════
```
The walk also shows what happens when a subpoena arrives. Subpoenas
arrive at the household's door, not at the vendor's. The household
responds on its own terms — and the chain has the response sealed,
just as it has every device action sealed.
The walk also shows net-metering reconciliation. The household's
solar and electricity-meter data, sealed at the meter, makes
disputes with the utility a chain-comparison instead of a
testimony question.
Each device's data is sealed at recording. The hub holds the
seal; the device's stream is hashed before any vendor cloud sees
it. A vendor cannot edit what they never held in the clear.
Three policy postures, per device, by the household. The
homeowner picks. A vendor's policy change does not override the
household's choice; the hub is upstream of the vendor.
Subpoenas land at the household. The household has a path to
respond — with the chain as the substrate of the response. The
vendor is no longer the de facto custodian of the household's
business.
The .md button puts the smart-home pattern summary into your
tag-along bundle, including the policy-posture slab. Comment field
routes a specific subpoena-procedure question to your own
claude.ai session.
Run the household ceremony. This is a real public ceremony — the
cursor halts on approach to the run button.
Every device's six months of data, the per-device policy decisions,
and the household audit log all roll into a fresh anchor. Real
SHA-256 fires in your browser. Progress bar reads "done — 11 device
streams sealed, 6 months of data anchored, policy log verified, new
household anchor at " followed by the first eight hex characters
of the root.
Sealed: "Every device action is sealed. Every policy decision is
sealed. Subpoena response posture is current."
The most useful close for a homeowner is the local install plus
the partner kit for the next block-association meeting — especially
in any block where doorbell-footage incidents have been recent. The
package, the cert, the recovery seed — all ride along.
<!-- finish_text -->
That was the simulated path through the Chen residence and the
small box on the shelf. The full card breaks out the
policy-postures pattern, the subpoena-at-the-door mechanic, and a
household-sovereign-by-default prediction that's yours to test.