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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

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.)

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.)