Your code.
Your machines.
No middleman.

Three groups, roughly: (1) solo developers who want version history and cross-device sync without a subscription or uploading unfinished work to someone else's servers; (2) small teams who don't want a per-seat bill and an org to administer just to share code with people they already trust; (3) enterprises where compliance or contracts mean code legally can't leave the network.

Every connection uses Ed25519 mutual authentication: both sides cryptographically prove their identity before any byte of code crosses the wire. The wire itself is Tor (.onion hidden services), so the bytes are encrypted end-to-end and relays only ever see ciphertext. Pairing a new device requires explicit confirmation on both sides; trust never happens by accident. The same cryptographic primitives we use are the ones Signal, Tor, and OpenSSH ship: not new crypto, but well-audited crypto.

No. Code transfer is always peer-to-peer; your machines talk directly to your teammates' machines through Tor circuits. There is an optional small "coordinator" service that helps peers discover each other across the internet, but it never sees a single byte of your code, only "peer X says they host project Y." You can run it yourself on a $35 Raspberry Pi, or skip it entirely: peers reach each other over Tor by default, with no coordinator in the loop.

Yes. Knot uses git's real object format underneath, so a Knot-managed folder is also a real git repository. Every git command you already know, `git log`, `git diff`, `git branch`, `git checkout`, works on it. Knot is the layer above git that automates the save-commit-push ritual and removes the central server. It doesn't replace git; it makes git invisible when you don't need it.

Nothing transfers until they come back online, same as any peer-to-peer protocol. Your commit lives safely on your machine; once your collaborator's daemon connects, the queued commits sync automatically. Common workaround: a third peer that's always online (a home server, a $5/month tiny VPS) holds a copy and bridges the gap. It runs the same free Linux build, reachable over Tor with no ports to forward. It pairs like any other peer, so it's a better-connected teammate, not a central server.

The same thing that happens if you lose your SSH key today: you generate a new keypair and your collaborators issue you a new pairing code. There is no central account to "recover" because there is no central account. Your local repository is untouched. You can still read everything on your machine. You just have to re-establish trust with your peers, which takes about thirty seconds per peer.

Yes. Knot doesn't care what's in the folder: design assets, documents, datasets, screenplays, anything you want versioned and synced across machines. The one practical caveat is large binary files (videos, multi-gigabyte datasets): they'll work, but git's storage model is tuned for text, so very large binaries can bloat the history. Same caveat as git itself.