Lockbox Appliance

Mainstay is the application. Lockbox is the appliance.

Lockbox is the hardware-first deployment that gives Mainstay and its supporting services a dedicated local home. It is intended for people and communities that need durable storage, predictable service operation, local networking, and hardware-backed controls.

Initial platform direction

FreeBSD on Raspberry Pi 4
with a physical keypad and TROPIC01 HSM

• FreeBSD provides a small, inspectable, service-oriented base.
• Raspberry Pi 4 supplies a low-power initial hardware target.
• TROPIC01 provides a future hardware-backed key and signing boundary.
• The keypad supplies local presence for unlock, approval, and recovery.

Appliance profile

A Lockbox deployment can run:

• Mainstay as the unified user application;
• Safebox Web as the current application foundation;
• Acorn for keys, records, proofs, signing, and recovery;
• Stroma as Acorn's narrow Nostr wire-format library;
• Spurline for local Nostr event continuity;
• Grove for encrypted blob storage; and
• optionally, Clear for a locally governed currency or voucher system.

Not every Lockbox needs every component. Clear in particular must be an explicit organizational choice: operating an appliance must never silently make someone a currency issuer.

Stroma is packaged with the software that uses it rather than operated as a separate appliance service. It keeps Acorn's Nostr protocol dependency small and inspectable while Spurline remains an independently replaceable relay.

Local authority

Network services can assist. Local presence controls authority.

Remote services may improve availability, but high-risk local actions should eventually be constrained by hardware-backed policy and physical approval. The web app can request an operation; the local boundary decides whether it may proceed.

Appliance, not general-purpose server

Lockbox should boot predictably, expose clear health information, use stable local service addresses, keep data in documented locations, and support safe backup, migration, restart, and shutdown behavior.

The first goal is a coherent local profile for the existing sibling products, not a generic home-server platform or a monolithic rewrite.