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So ignoring the abstruseness and pretentiousness for a moment [x], what I don't like is this model of immutable networking Urbit has. Maybe I am in a minority p

So ignoring the abstruseness and pretentiousness for a moment [x], what I don't like is this model of immutable networking Urbit has. Maybe I am in a minority position, but I fear the future where everything is cryptographically signed, verifiable and irrefutable. I want to be able to go on a website and post bullshit that I'll regret 15 years later. And if after 15 years someone unearths that post, I want to be able to say "that proves nothing, anybody with a text editor could have forged that". You might say a prospective employer wouldn't buy that argument even now, but I want to live in a world where people do buy that argument. Where you can post party pictures on the internet, because it's trivially easy to fake pictures, and everybody has accepted that pictures have no proving power, so everybody feels free to post them, even my boss. Let technology drive society to be more laissez faire. A similar thing with bitcoin. My utopia doesn't involve cryptographically secure, ideal money - it rather involves no money at all. I'd rather put my energy into developing a new kind of society based on free association (rather than labor & money) than using algorithms to cement this society. I believe cryptography is great for being CRYPTic, i.e. providing anonymity. But using it to prove identity etc. should be used very sparingly and not without thinking about the consequences. [x] And I don't want to denigrate this project. It seems to be a great technical and theoretical achievement - it's just that their ideals are not necessarily mine.

urbit 10y ago
I'd say this problem is best solved not by having no cryptographic identities, but by using disposable identities. If you bound an identity cryptographically to your real name, that's permanent -- no getting around it. We all make mistakes. However, one of the benefits of Urbit is that you can build a reputation around a pseudonym that isn't linked to your real-life identity. There's a place for the 4chans of the world, with totally disposable one-time identities. You can do this with Urbit as well -- use a 128-bit self-signing identity (comet). But most people tend to want a little more stability and permanence.
- tzs 10y ago
  > I'd say this problem is best solved not by having no cryptographic identities, but by using disposable identities. A problem with disposable identities as usually implemented is that they are too cheap and easy to make. This makes it easy to make a new identity every place you want to be an asshole. The end result is that places get tired of this, and ban such identities from their spaces. I think what we might need are semi-disposable identities. You can make a new one whenever you want, but it costs something to make a new one, and that cost goes up with each new semi-disposable identity you make.
  - urbit 10y ago
    This is exactly the way Urbit works. (It's sincerely hard to tell from your post whether you've read the documentation, or you just had the same simple idea yourself.) Anyone can create a 128-bit comet. But once the comet system starts being abused by assholes and bots, signs will go up all over Urbit. These signs will say "humans only" and deny admission to comets -- essentially blocking anyone who has not invested any real stake in their identity. The normal quantum of reputation and of human identity is the planet (32 bits, like an IPv4 address). Ideally a virgin planet would cost about $10. Basically, if this cost is far above the amount of money that a spammer can make before a reputation system catches up with the swine, there will be no commercial abuse. This leaves reputation systems to deal with the much easier job of wrangling random creeps and weirdos. So if you invented this design yourself, yes, it's a very good one...
    - Gaelan 10y ago
      There are eight billion people in the world. There are 4 billion possible planets. What is your plan for when urbit takes off and reaches internet-scale? BTW, ~bitret-worwyd here. ;)
      - yarvin9 10y ago
        ~bitret, I remember you from a while back! A planet is like a car -- it's not a toy, it's a tool for a responsible grownup. There are about 4 billion adults in the world. And not all of them are even Internet users. Of course, the population keeps growing. Eventually either people have to learn to share, or the price will go up, or humanity will learn how to stop expanding exponentially. Think of a planet as a unit of autonomy and reputation, not of personality. The global supply of autonomy is 2^32 units. That's not perfect in any sense, but if the supply is infinite the network is ungovernable, and the value of each unit is zero. It's also an improvement on a world in which there's one unit of autonomy, and its name is Mark Zuckerberg. Urbit does a lot for digital freedom, but we're not in the miracle business here. No one can do infinity for digital freedom.
- captainmuon 10y ago
  That's a good point! One favorite idea of mine is that you have a trusted identity provider, that knows you, and hands out pseudo-anonymous identities. E.g. Facebook vouches User123 is female, 20-25 years old, has been active for 2 years, and is likely not a spammer. This gives you disposable identities and the benefits of proven identity. The problem with any kind of long-lived pseudonymous identity though is that it is really hard to do proper opsec and keep it distinct from your real identity, but I'm not sure there is a technological solution for that. I mean even your grammar can give you away (stylometry).
ZenoArrow 10y ago
> "a new kind of society based on free association (rather than labor & money)" I'm all for that, but for that to really work you'd have to change what people understand about ownership of material goods, and I suspect that'll be a hard battle to win. Perhaps a good place to start would be experiencing life in an ecovillage, some of them work with a minimal reliance on money.
- captainmuon 10y ago
  That's true. Thing is, I don't have a great thought-out plan. I sympathize with a couple of ideas from the corner of anarchism or communism (that's why I dropped the term free association), but I would strongly hesitate to call myself e.g. a communist, because there has been so much crap running under that term that I can't really identify with it. I find interesting that sometimes technology wants to push society in a certain direction - that can be good, bad, or neutral - and society resists with new technology, and this creates an curious interplay. Like file-sharing made it trivial to share music. Either we change society, everybody can access music for free, and we find a new way to feed and reward musicians. Or we keep society the way it is, invent DRM, and pretend files are material goods. Or for an older, more drastic example, think of the effect of widespread contraception on sexual morality. About changing people, I think a widespread objection against utopias is to say they are trying to create new people, and I think this objection is not entirely unfounded. I'd personally try to change society, so that what's between people and not the people themselves, if you know what I mean. I wouldn't even want to try to put everybody through an ecovillage or a kibbutz etc., although I'm sure it's a valuable experience. Rather make small, incremental changes, and set incentives such that people automatically do the 'right' thing. But, as I said, I have no concrete plans, and fixing human society is a really really hard problem :-)
  - ZenoArrow 10y ago
    Sounds like you have similar ideas to me when it comes to moving towards a new type of society, I like to describe it as evolution over revolution. I recognise that it's not easy, but I do have ideas about how it can be done. The first thing is to start building alternative living arrangements where people can get what they need to survive without relying on money. I do think ecovillages are a good model to start with, though I'd ideally like to see the culture of each self-sustaining village be more diverse. After you have a network of these self-sustaining villages, you move from providing the bare essentials to sustainable versions of luxuries. To give you an example of this, you could class medicine as a luxury (though some would class it as essential). The idea is to make the alternative lifestyle more attractive by making it so people don't have to give up as much. By doing this, more and more people will choose to live in this new way of their own free will, as not only will you be able to live in a sustainable way without giving up on technological progress, you'll also have a diverse range of settlements to live in, and you'd be free to move between them as long as the new village had capacity. Buckminster Fuller once said "In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.", that's the best way forward IMO. I do think the existing network of ecovillages is a good starting point, and I think it's possible to extend this base to cover more of what people want. That's the way I could see a moneyless society emerging.
mroll 10y ago
Refutability is a quality of many a good crypto system Edit: spelling

urbit 10y ago

I'd say this problem is best solved not by having no cryptographic identities, but by using disposable identities. If you bound an identity cryptographically to your real name, that's permanent -- no getting around it. We all make mistakes. However, one of the benefits of Urbit is that you can build a reputation around a pseudonym that isn't linked to your real-life identity. There's a place for the 4chans of the world, with totally disposable one-time identities. You can do this with Urbit as well -- use a 128-bit self-signing identity (comet). But most people tend to want a little more stability and permanence.

tzs 10y ago
> I'd say this problem is best solved not by having no cryptographic identities, but by using disposable identities. A problem with disposable identities as usually implemented is that they are too cheap and easy to make. This makes it easy to make a new identity every place you want to be an asshole. The end result is that places get tired of this, and ban such identities from their spaces. I think what we might need are semi-disposable identities. You can make a new one whenever you want, but it costs something to make a new one, and that cost goes up with each new semi-disposable identity you make.
- urbit 10y ago
  This is exactly the way Urbit works. (It's sincerely hard to tell from your post whether you've read the documentation, or you just had the same simple idea yourself.) Anyone can create a 128-bit comet. But once the comet system starts being abused by assholes and bots, signs will go up all over Urbit. These signs will say "humans only" and deny admission to comets -- essentially blocking anyone who has not invested any real stake in their identity. The normal quantum of reputation and of human identity is the planet (32 bits, like an IPv4 address). Ideally a virgin planet would cost about $10. Basically, if this cost is far above the amount of money that a spammer can make before a reputation system catches up with the swine, there will be no commercial abuse. This leaves reputation systems to deal with the much easier job of wrangling random creeps and weirdos. So if you invented this design yourself, yes, it's a very good one...
  - Gaelan 10y ago
    There are eight billion people in the world. There are 4 billion possible planets. What is your plan for when urbit takes off and reaches internet-scale? BTW, ~bitret-worwyd here. ;)
    - yarvin9 10y ago
      ~bitret, I remember you from a while back! A planet is like a car -- it's not a toy, it's a tool for a responsible grownup. There are about 4 billion adults in the world. And not all of them are even Internet users. Of course, the population keeps growing. Eventually either people have to learn to share, or the price will go up, or humanity will learn how to stop expanding exponentially. Think of a planet as a unit of autonomy and reputation, not of personality. The global supply of autonomy is 2^32 units. That's not perfect in any sense, but if the supply is infinite the network is ungovernable, and the value of each unit is zero. It's also an improvement on a world in which there's one unit of autonomy, and its name is Mark Zuckerberg. Urbit does a lot for digital freedom, but we're not in the miracle business here. No one can do infinity for digital freedom.
captainmuon 10y ago
That's a good point! One favorite idea of mine is that you have a trusted identity provider, that knows you, and hands out pseudo-anonymous identities. E.g. Facebook vouches User123 is female, 20-25 years old, has been active for 2 years, and is likely not a spammer. This gives you disposable identities and the benefits of proven identity. The problem with any kind of long-lived pseudonymous identity though is that it is really hard to do proper opsec and keep it distinct from your real identity, but I'm not sure there is a technological solution for that. I mean even your grammar can give you away (stylometry).

ZenoArrow 10y ago

> "a new kind of society based on free association (rather than labor & money)" I'm all for that, but for that to really work you'd have to change what people understand about ownership of material goods, and I suspect that'll be a hard battle to win. Perhaps a good place to start would be experiencing life in an ecovillage, some of them work with a minimal reliance on money.

captainmuon 10y ago
That's true. Thing is, I don't have a great thought-out plan. I sympathize with a couple of ideas from the corner of anarchism or communism (that's why I dropped the term free association), but I would strongly hesitate to call myself e.g. a communist, because there has been so much crap running under that term that I can't really identify with it. I find interesting that sometimes technology wants to push society in a certain direction - that can be good, bad, or neutral - and society resists with new technology, and this creates an curious interplay. Like file-sharing made it trivial to share music. Either we change society, everybody can access music for free, and we find a new way to feed and reward musicians. Or we keep society the way it is, invent DRM, and pretend files are material goods. Or for an older, more drastic example, think of the effect of widespread contraception on sexual morality. About changing people, I think a widespread objection against utopias is to say they are trying to create new people, and I think this objection is not entirely unfounded. I'd personally try to change society, so that what's between people and not the people themselves, if you know what I mean. I wouldn't even want to try to put everybody through an ecovillage or a kibbutz etc., although I'm sure it's a valuable experience. Rather make small, incremental changes, and set incentives such that people automatically do the 'right' thing. But, as I said, I have no concrete plans, and fixing human society is a really really hard problem :-)
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  Sounds like you have similar ideas to me when it comes to moving towards a new type of society, I like to describe it as evolution over revolution. I recognise that it's not easy, but I do have ideas about how it can be done. The first thing is to start building alternative living arrangements where people can get what they need to survive without relying on money. I do think ecovillages are a good model to start with, though I'd ideally like to see the culture of each self-sustaining village be more diverse. After you have a network of these self-sustaining villages, you move from providing the bare essentials to sustainable versions of luxuries. To give you an example of this, you could class medicine as a luxury (though some would class it as essential). The idea is to make the alternative lifestyle more attractive by making it so people don't have to give up as much. By doing this, more and more people will choose to live in this new way of their own free will, as not only will you be able to live in a sustainable way without giving up on technological progress, you'll also have a diverse range of settlements to live in, and you'd be free to move between them as long as the new village had capacity. Buckminster Fuller once said "In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.", that's the best way forward IMO. I do think the existing network of ecovillages is a good starting point, and I think it's possible to extend this base to cover more of what people want. That's the way I could see a moneyless society emerging.

mroll 10y ago

Refutability is a quality of many a good crypto system Edit: spelling