11 ms·

Urbit crowdsale is now live

28 points by daxorid 10y ago

Kinnard 10y ago
Surprised they are taking USD or any fiat for that matter.
- dogma1138 10y ago
  They need to get paid, and they need to buy the IPv4 addresses that would actually make Urbit functional. What did you expect them to take shiny sea shells?
  - Kinnard 10y ago
    Many companies are paying their teams in BTC these days. Why do they need to buy IPv4 addresses? I haven't read the whitepaper.
    - dogma1138 10y ago
      I haven't seen many companies paying people in BTC, especially considering that it's not trivial to cash in large sums of BTC these days in many places. As for the Addresses Urbit needs to run on something, the projec it so vague and the terms they are using are so for lack of better words ludicrous that I can't even understand what they are selling even after reading the white paper. Data lifestreams, Digital reputation, all of that sounds like complete technobabel to me.
- wmf 10y ago
  They're not cypherpunks; almost the opposite.
Kinnard 10y ago
Surprised this is not on the front page. HN, did it get flagged?
- minimaxir 10y ago
  [edited]
  - Kinnard 10y ago
    What makes you say that?
- vox_mollis 10y ago
  Not to get too conspiratorial, but Urbit's founder is not a very popular figure around here. Mass autoflagging of * urbit * would not be surprising.
  - Kinnard 10y ago
    Interesting, which one? why is that?
    - arcadeparade 10y ago
      Moldbug.
- networked 10y ago
  "Please don't tweet [the sale] or post publicly until 9am PDT on the 29th. But feel free to share privately with friends." Perhaps dang et al. are helping the founders maintain this?
  - daxorid 10y ago
    Gah! I didn't even notice that. Sincere apologies to any Urbit staff for posting this. Sorry.
    - networked 10y ago
      If the title hasn't been edited by the HN crew you can still delete the story.
whackedspinach 10y ago
What is the benefit of owning a star right now? Why is owning a star better than a planet?
- kyrre 10y ago
  "A star is not anyone's personal address. It's a block of network infrastructure. A personal address in Urbit is a 32-bit planet. Your star's main value is its power to create 65,535 planets." so it's a block of addresses
- artlogic 10y ago
  In IPv4 terms, imagine owning a class B block of addresses.
daxorid 10y ago
They have already sold 230 out of 1020 stars within an hour of opening up the sale. Unexpectedly high demand.
- arcadeparade 10y ago
  I
  - the_common_man 10y ago
    So, you spent 200 USD or something you don't understand? What's the gigantic return here?
    - arcadeparade 10y ago
      I didn't understand bitcoin either but i bought at $40. Plus it's fun to part of something new.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
the_common_man 10y ago
Am I the only one skeptical in thinking that they didn't really sell 200 stars worth 200 USD each and they are making this up?
- mangeletti 10y ago
  You're absolutely not the only one. And, now the number sold is up to 340... Edit: Make that 361 (2 min later). Edit: Make that 421 (9 min later). Edit: Make that 471 (11 min later)
  - artlogic 10y ago
    At this rate, they'll be sold out by the time it's supposed to go "public".
    - networked 10y ago
      I suspect to test whether that would happen was (a large part of) the intention. :-)
  - callahad 10y ago
    Looks like it completely sold out some time between 18:30 and 18:45 PDT, roughly three hours after your comment.
- callahad 10y ago
  I have a few planets from back in 2013, and I bought a star today as a way of thanking ~zod, et al. for the three years of intellectual amusement I've derived from watching Urbit as it developed. So at least one of those sales is legitimate.
dogma1138 10y ago
"Datalife streams", Stars and planets... This sounds more like Scientology than a product... I really don't understand all these things about "building a new internet", especially when they are building it on top of the existing one. If the existing internet is so broken what the hell would Urbit do to fix it?
- azeirah 10y ago
  Just from watching the video, they're not exactly saying the existing internet is broken, they're confusing terms. They're claiming the web is broken (that is, tim berners lee's http web), the hardware-internet-network is fantastic (that is, all cables, routers, everything but the software layers). For some reason, they also claim to dislike tcp/ip. All I can gather from their video is that they're trying the internet again with a different approach (built-in encryption, tools to far more easily build decentralized applications, your data is yours, and a point about API stuff that I don't quite grasp yet.) Their goal is to be a self-governing digital republic, whatever that might mean. As the guy says in the end, it's not up to them what urbit will become, it's up to us (the people who develop for urbit). That's how I understood their video Soooo... I'm not too sure why building (arguably?) better tools would result in a "better" internet. Additionally, I'm not too sure what the advantages are for end-users for decentralized applications. So to conclude, it's up to the developers to find valid use-cases for urbit. Just like how it's up to developers to find valid use-cases for ethereum. Decentralized toolchains (like ethereum, other blockchain-things and urbit) are in their infancy, nobody really knows if they'll sprout useful use-cases or not. Tl;DR Experimentation and uncertainty
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    From watching their video i couldn't understand anything it was utter techno babel. From reading the whitepaper it seemed like they were building a distributed network where everything is somewhat abstracted. I thought Ethereum was silly and pointless but I at least somewhat understood what it tried to be, this is like literally something that looks to me that came off https://www.reddit.com/r/VXJunkies/ https://www.reddit.com/r/VXJunkies/
Kinnard 10y ago
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11998052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11998052
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
davidgerard 10y ago
Urbit is MIT-licensed. Even on the unlikely assumption that Urbit turns out useful for anything ever, why use this rather than an alt-Urbit? The same way altcoins do an end-run around limited numbers of bitcoins.
- davidgrenier 10y ago
  The value of Urbit is connected to peoples desire to use it, you are correct in assuming that if an alt-Urbit is started using the same code base it would have value in the same manner. What gives Urbit address space value is the notion of reputation tie to it's addresses which is current IPv4/6 infrastructure where addresses can be reassigned. If you ruin a Planet (read address) by using it to issue spam (just an example) on the Urbit network, services will likely have been designed to stop servicing bad actors and the Planet will become useless. You will have to ruin more planets to continue your bad behavior. This can be extended to many more examples like trolling on Urbit-hosted forums for instance. You may end up getting the benefit of the social pressure that currently exists in our society on the internet, which you currently cannot benefit from (however plenty of people benefit from the lack of such pressure). Therefore, we can speculate citizens will attribute value to Urbit (and not the Alt-Urbit) based on the fact that we've already done much work in filtering out bad actors. You can imagine automated phone calling machine to push Ads to you on top of a Twilio based service layer on Urbit to have no chance of thriving freeing you from having to waste bandwith and time on such calls in an idealized future.
  - davidgerard 10y ago
    > This can be extended to many more examples like trolling on Urbit-hosted forums for instance. See, it seems nobody understood that the very first thing people do in a new social space is see how it actually works (not just how it's claimed to work) and how the social boundaries work. For an example of fully rampant typical mind fallacy in Urbit, see the original 2013 version of the security chapter: http://archive.is/UK8So http://archive.is/UK8So About two-thirds of the way down, you can actually watch Yarvin transmute into Moldbug as he starts pontificating on how humans communicating on a network should work, and never mind the observable evidence of how they’ve actually behaved whenever each of the conditions he describes have obtained; oblivious that the very first thing people will do with Urbit is mess with its assumptions, in ways that its creator literally could not foresee (due to typical mind fallacy), though he might reasonably have been expected to (given the entire history of people on the internet). Yarvin doesn't seem to understand this. He explicitly stated in his blogging as "Moldbug" his belief that order is good and chaos is bad as a universal principle, a visceral belief. (in http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/02/from-mises-to-carlyle-my-sick-journey.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/02/from-mi... ) The trouble is that the real world doesn't work like that, and literally all the interesting stuff happens at the boundary between order and chaos. (Phil Sandifer's recent book Neoreaction a Basilisk goes into this point about Yarvin's belief system in some detail.)
nikolay 10y ago
Yet another greed-fueled crowdsale...
nikolay 10y ago
So, their "distributed" system is a centralized identity (and hosting)?

28 points by daxorid 10y ago

Kinnard 10y ago

Surprised they are taking USD or any fiat for that matter.

dogma1138 10y ago
They need to get paid, and they need to buy the IPv4 addresses that would actually make Urbit functional. What did you expect them to take shiny sea shells?
- Kinnard 10y ago
  Many companies are paying their teams in BTC these days. Why do they need to buy IPv4 addresses? I haven't read the whitepaper.
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    I haven't seen many companies paying people in BTC, especially considering that it's not trivial to cash in large sums of BTC these days in many places. As for the Addresses Urbit needs to run on something, the projec it so vague and the terms they are using are so for lack of better words ludicrous that I can't even understand what they are selling even after reading the white paper. Data lifestreams, Digital reputation, all of that sounds like complete technobabel to me.
wmf 10y ago
They're not cypherpunks; almost the opposite.

Kinnard 10y ago

Surprised this is not on the front page. HN, did it get flagged?

minimaxir 10y ago
[edited]
- Kinnard 10y ago
  What makes you say that?
vox_mollis 10y ago
Not to get too conspiratorial, but Urbit's founder is not a very popular figure around here. Mass autoflagging of * urbit * would not be surprising.
- Kinnard 10y ago
  Interesting, which one? why is that?
  - arcadeparade 10y ago
    Moldbug.
networked 10y ago
"Please don't tweet [the sale] or post publicly until 9am PDT on the 29th. But feel free to share privately with friends." Perhaps dang et al. are helping the founders maintain this?
- daxorid 10y ago
  Gah! I didn't even notice that. Sincere apologies to any Urbit staff for posting this. Sorry.
  - networked 10y ago
    If the title hasn't been edited by the HN crew you can still delete the story.

whackedspinach 10y ago

What is the benefit of owning a star right now? Why is owning a star better than a planet?

kyrre 10y ago
"A star is not anyone's personal address. It's a block of network infrastructure. A personal address in Urbit is a 32-bit planet. Your star's main value is its power to create 65,535 planets." so it's a block of addresses
artlogic 10y ago
In IPv4 terms, imagine owning a class B block of addresses.

daxorid 10y ago

They have already sold 230 out of 1020 stars within an hour of opening up the sale. Unexpectedly high demand.

arcadeparade 10y ago
I
- the_common_man 10y ago
  So, you spent 200 USD or something you don't understand? What's the gigantic return here?
  - arcadeparade 10y ago
    I didn't understand bitcoin either but i bought at $40. Plus it's fun to part of something new.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

the_common_man 10y ago

Am I the only one skeptical in thinking that they didn't really sell 200 stars worth 200 USD each and they are making this up?

mangeletti 10y ago
You're absolutely not the only one. And, now the number sold is up to 340... Edit: Make that 361 (2 min later). Edit: Make that 421 (9 min later). Edit: Make that 471 (11 min later)
- artlogic 10y ago
  At this rate, they'll be sold out by the time it's supposed to go "public".
  - networked 10y ago
    I suspect to test whether that would happen was (a large part of) the intention. :-)
- callahad 10y ago
  Looks like it completely sold out some time between 18:30 and 18:45 PDT, roughly three hours after your comment.
callahad 10y ago
I have a few planets from back in 2013, and I bought a star today as a way of thanking ~zod, et al. for the three years of intellectual amusement I've derived from watching Urbit as it developed. So at least one of those sales is legitimate.

dogma1138 10y ago

"Datalife streams", Stars and planets... This sounds more like Scientology than a product... I really don't understand all these things about "building a new internet", especially when they are building it on top of the existing one. If the existing internet is so broken what the hell would Urbit do to fix it?

azeirah 10y ago
Just from watching the video, they're not exactly saying the existing internet is broken, they're confusing terms. They're claiming the web is broken (that is, tim berners lee's http web), the hardware-internet-network is fantastic (that is, all cables, routers, everything but the software layers). For some reason, they also claim to dislike tcp/ip. All I can gather from their video is that they're trying the internet again with a different approach (built-in encryption, tools to far more easily build decentralized applications, your data is yours, and a point about API stuff that I don't quite grasp yet.) Their goal is to be a self-governing digital republic, whatever that might mean. As the guy says in the end, it's not up to them what urbit will become, it's up to us (the people who develop for urbit). That's how I understood their video Soooo... I'm not too sure why building (arguably?) better tools would result in a "better" internet. Additionally, I'm not too sure what the advantages are for end-users for decentralized applications. So to conclude, it's up to the developers to find valid use-cases for urbit. Just like how it's up to developers to find valid use-cases for ethereum. Decentralized toolchains (like ethereum, other blockchain-things and urbit) are in their infancy, nobody really knows if they'll sprout useful use-cases or not. Tl;DR Experimentation and uncertainty
- dogma1138 10y ago
  From watching their video i couldn't understand anything it was utter techno babel. From reading the whitepaper it seemed like they were building a distributed network where everything is somewhat abstracted. I thought Ethereum was silly and pointless but I at least somewhat understood what it tried to be, this is like literally something that looks to me that came off https://www.reddit.com/r/VXJunkies/ https://www.reddit.com/r/VXJunkies/

Kinnard 10y ago

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11998052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11998052

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

davidgerard 10y ago

Urbit is MIT-licensed. Even on the unlikely assumption that Urbit turns out useful for anything ever, why use this rather than an alt-Urbit? The same way altcoins do an end-run around limited numbers of bitcoins.

davidgrenier 10y ago
The value of Urbit is connected to peoples desire to use it, you are correct in assuming that if an alt-Urbit is started using the same code base it would have value in the same manner. What gives Urbit address space value is the notion of reputation tie to it's addresses which is current IPv4/6 infrastructure where addresses can be reassigned. If you ruin a Planet (read address) by using it to issue spam (just an example) on the Urbit network, services will likely have been designed to stop servicing bad actors and the Planet will become useless. You will have to ruin more planets to continue your bad behavior. This can be extended to many more examples like trolling on Urbit-hosted forums for instance. You may end up getting the benefit of the social pressure that currently exists in our society on the internet, which you currently cannot benefit from (however plenty of people benefit from the lack of such pressure). Therefore, we can speculate citizens will attribute value to Urbit (and not the Alt-Urbit) based on the fact that we've already done much work in filtering out bad actors. You can imagine automated phone calling machine to push Ads to you on top of a Twilio based service layer on Urbit to have no chance of thriving freeing you from having to waste bandwith and time on such calls in an idealized future.
- davidgerard 10y ago
  > This can be extended to many more examples like trolling on Urbit-hosted forums for instance. See, it seems nobody understood that the very first thing people do in a new social space is see how it actually works (not just how it's claimed to work) and how the social boundaries work. For an example of fully rampant typical mind fallacy in Urbit, see the original 2013 version of the security chapter: http://archive.is/UK8So http://archive.is/UK8So About two-thirds of the way down, you can actually watch Yarvin transmute into Moldbug as he starts pontificating on how humans communicating on a network should work, and never mind the observable evidence of how they’ve actually behaved whenever each of the conditions he describes have obtained; oblivious that the very first thing people will do with Urbit is mess with its assumptions, in ways that its creator literally could not foresee (due to typical mind fallacy), though he might reasonably have been expected to (given the entire history of people on the internet). Yarvin doesn't seem to understand this. He explicitly stated in his blogging as "Moldbug" his belief that order is good and chaos is bad as a universal principle, a visceral belief. (in http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/02/from-mises-to-carlyle-my-sick-journey.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/02/from-mi... ) The trouble is that the real world doesn't work like that, and literally all the interesting stuff happens at the boundary between order and chaos. (Phil Sandifer's recent book Neoreaction a Basilisk goes into this point about Yarvin's belief system in some detail.)

nikolay 10y ago

Yet another greed-fueled crowdsale...

nikolay 10y ago

So, their "distributed" system is a centralized identity (and hosting)?