12 ms·

Urbit Is Building a 'Virtual Galaxy' for Bitcoin Nodes

105 points by beefman 10y ago

astrodust 10y ago
"The project is composed of several parts: a virtual machine (dubbed "Nock"), an operating system ("Arvo"), a programming language ("Hoon") and a peer-to-peer network ("Ames")." You can introduce any one of those and possibly survive. Doing all four at once? You're doomed. Sorry.
- danpalmer 10y ago
  Interestingly, their whole "thing" seems to be that you can't re-invent one of them well without doing the others, so they appear to see themselves as doomed if they don't re-invent all of them.
- frou_dh 10y ago
  What's that quote ... people who say something cannot be done should not interrupt those doing it ?
  - astrodust 10y ago
    I'm not saying it isn't worth trying, but for every additional disruption built into this offering the probability of success plunges dramatically. Do we really need a new everything? What problems do these new things solve that couldn't be addressed through other mature technologies used in new and novel ways? Maybe we do, but if that's the case they've done a terrible job of articulating why. Most importantly: How can you possibly secure all these things given the complex nature of interactions between all of them?
  - yongjik 10y ago
    Personally, I prefer this quote from Hannessy and Patterson: > The level below main memory contains rotating magnetic disks that take millions of clock cycles to access. Because of the great discrepancy in access time, no one has yet built a virtual memory operating system that writes through main memory to disk on every store by the processor. (This remark should not be interpreted as an opportunity to become famous by being the first to build one!)
  - zeven7 10y ago
    "As an older friend, I must advise you against it, for, in the first place you will not succeed, and even if you succeed, no one will believe you" (Max Planck to Einstein on his pursuit to develop a new theory of gravity).
- mahyarm 10y ago
  Feels like remaking unix
- dnautics 10y ago
  I don't think so. I struggle to understand the things they are building, but one of the very nice features is that each of them is structured in a way to make them provably correct. That's definitely a potential value-add, and it needs to be in at least Nock, Arvo, and Hoon.
danpalmer 10y ago
I might be misunderstanding Urbit (quite easy it seems), but this idea of selling off what is essentially "land" seems to go against some of the ideas that it pushes - i.e. the democratisation of the web. Also, they appear(?) to have sold off rather large chunks/the address space seems small, is it going to need a "v6" to bring it out of beta like the internet did?
- 4ad 10y ago
  You misunderstand. Urbit is not democratic, it's feudal. The namespace is scarce by design.
- Avshalom 10y ago
  ... I don't know the Urbit team all that well, but Yarvin is in particular publicly anti-democratisation of anything. So I'm assuming this is in fact according to plan.
- haldean 10y ago
  Here's a pretty good synopsis of why the namespace is set up the way it is: https://urbit.org/posts/principles/ https://urbit.org/posts/principles/
- JonnieCache 10y ago
  Look into the intellectual background of the creator and all will become clear.
- throwanem 10y ago
  Democratization is I think a poor metaphor; a better one would be emancipation. Right now, if you use Facebook, Facebook owns you. If you don't use Facebook but all your friends do, Facebook still owns you, but you're worthless to it, and it punishes you for failing to generate value by making you as close to socially invisible as it can - which is pretty damn close. (Ask me how I know!) None of this is deliberate, in the sense of an evil conspiracy cooked up by cackling villains. But all of it is true. The purpose of Urbit is to make it possible for people to own themselves. Doing so is not free of charge. (Should it be? Are you worth nothing?) But it is, or will be once (if) it's possible at all, as cheap as can be made practical - which is very cheap indeed, or free, if you don't mind opting out of guaranteed and durable identity. The tradeoff is that people who don't opt out may not be as quick to trust people who do. But that's a choice you get to make, instead of, as now, a choice that Facebook makes for you. I can't speak for anyone else (especially Tlön), but I've had enough of Facebook making choices for me. Have you?
wille92 10y ago
Can someone give a synopsis of Urbit? Every time Urbit comes up, I skim their website but get pretty lost in marketing-speak. I see a lot of "control your data", "digital freedom", and "general purpose computing" without any short, to the point explanation of what the heck it's all about.
- Avshalom 10y ago
  It's just an application server. It's a VM, it connects to other VMs, they run programs, sometimes locally, sometimes remotely, sometimes distributed. This is all apparently very novel.
  - mahyarm 10y ago
    So something like sandstorm with an autoscaler?
    - api 10y ago
      That's like saying a snowmobile is a horse on skis. This is more like a total re-implementation of computing based on a functional model and a re-implementation of networking based on a feudal/federated shared/distributed/content-addressable model.
      - Avshalom 10y ago
        Meh, it's a new VM and a dumb network topology. I don't know sandstorm so I'm not sure which of these you think is the horse in this analogy.
  - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
    Also, it's been under development for the better part of a decade.
  - vertex-four 10y ago
    The novel bits are: * Everything on the VM is purely functional, and inputs essentially cause transactions which can fail/succeed - the result being that it's supposedly easier to implement certain types of network protocols, specifically the ones that Ames implements * A somewhat decent revision-controlled filesystem with push/pull/merge, static typing of files, and a built-in build system of sorts And last but not least... * Feudalism built into the core p2p protocol as an explicit design decision
smellf 10y ago
Sounds kind of like an evil Second Life. I predict it will go as Second Life did - prepare for the Urbit dick-based economy.
JeremyBanks 10y ago
Where are these actually for sale? The website still says they'll be for sale "soon".
- haldean 10y ago
  They were for sale here, when there were any left: https://sale.urbit.org/ https://sale.urbit.org/
- hault 10y ago
  urbit dev here: the sale site is sale.urbit.org. Unfortunately, we're sold out for now. There will be another crowdsale, but we do not yet know the details. The first announcement will always go out to our mailing list (see urbit.org). This sale sold out before we announced it anywhere other than the list.
  - zekevermillion 10y ago
    I got your email, but not until I checked after dinner so missed the very brief window. A couple observations -- The stars were underpriced, by how much it's hard to know. If your goal is to seed the owner class with random giveaways, this was a success, I suppose. Second, 1020 stars was a HUGE amount to give away. I thought perhaps you would pre-sell one star's share of planets for $1 /ea. $205 for a star is nothin. From my armchair, what I would suggest is to focus on developing a secondary market for urbit addresses PRIOR TO any further crowdsale. That way you can get some indication of demand before pricing another Tlon-organized event. Presumably $209k is not interesting money, even to Tlon. It's a shame you gave away 1% at that price but maybe will work out in the end as a way to bootstrap the network with early enthusiasts.
    - erikpukinskis 10y ago
      If they just give away 1% every time they can do 70+ sales before they even use up half.
  - granfalloon 10y ago
    Just a heads-up, I signed up for the mailing list a few weeks ago and didn't receive the notice. I suppose there could be some kind of filter on my end blocking it, but just wanted you to be aware! Tried a different email address yesterday and didn't get a confirmation email, so not sure if it worked.
internaut 10y ago
Weren't people on the mailing list supposed to receive notifications about sales of Urbit land/namespace? The article doesn't say where this crowdsale took place. The articles makes it sound like it was offered to the public, if so this is the first I've heard of it.
- striking 10y ago
  They did. The people on the mailing list, at least.
- hault 10y ago
  We did send a notification out to our announcements list (see urbit.org), but have heard that it went to some people's spam or promotions folders. In retrospect, we should have also sent it out to urbit-dev (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/urbit-dev https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/urbit-dev), but the sale was over before we got around to it.
kristjansson 10y ago
So it's stars, comets, and galaxies now? What happened to the battleships, carriers, destroyers, ...?
- chc4 10y ago
  The classes were renamed shortly before leaving "unlaunch" status. They felt that having everyone own military class vessels instead of neutral celestial bodies gave the wrong impression. Also, saying "destroyers" a billion times outloud would probably get annoying. "Planets" is easier.
- gagege 10y ago
  For a while everything was "submarines".
  - jpt4 10y ago
    Which are now comets, and yachts are now moons, for the record.
amasad 10y ago
I'm curious as to why the HN story[1] about the sale was flagged yesterday? [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11997773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11997773
- haldean 10y ago
  They specifically asked for it to not be publicly posted until this morning; yesterday was mailing-list-members-only. See also this subthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11997925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11997925
  - Daviey 10y ago
    That doesn't seem to be a good reason for it to be flagged.
    - jessaustin 10y ago
      Those with flagging powers can flag for any reason they like. Apparently there are a number of urbit true believers on HN.
- throwanem 10y ago
  The sale was initially announced only via email to those who subscribed to a specific list, and the announcement included a request to keep it quiet until 9pm PDT (midnight Eastern).
- zgotsch 10y ago
  The sale was supposed to be on the down-low until today. I suspect someone flagged it for that reason. The stars sold out before it was announced outside the mailing list.
- chc4 10y ago
  The email announcing it from the mailing list said not to talk about it publicly until today; it was supposed to be an early backer pre-sale type deal yesterday, with a price of $205 instead of $256. Instead, it sold out entirely hours in, before the actual sale started... All things considered, that's a pretty awesome problem to have.
throwanem 10y ago
A recent HN discussion including Tlon principals and discussing Urbit in some length and detail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11817721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11817721
res0nat0r 10y ago
From the Github README: > Urbit is a clean-slate system software stack defined as a deterministic computer. An encrypted P2P network, %ames, runs on a functional operating system, Arvo, written in a strict, typed functional language, Hoon, which compiles itself to a combinator interpreter, Nock, whose spec gzips to 340 bytes. Geez.
beefman 10y ago
More info here: https://sale.urbit.org/ https://sale.urbit.org/
whamlastxmas 10y ago
I thought this was going to be real estate and bitcoin merged together. Would be interesting to see how those two concepts might merge. Maybe the ability to buy land using bitcoin, and instead of holding a deed/title issued by the state, it remains with a holding company and you prove ownership with a digital private key. Useful for people who want to be anonymous but still sort-of-directly own real estate.
- holychiz 10y ago
  this is fairly trivial to implement conceptually in Ethereum. What's hard is to integrate that system with existing legal and social framework.
  - asgardiator 10y ago
    Ethereum, if Solidity were Haskell
blntechie 10y ago
I get their goal of users having control over their data but limiting the identities artificially sounds pointless to me. Spam accounts are part of the internet and it's time we acknowledge and consider them as part of the overall user base. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding their reason for limiting the identities.
- davidgrenier 10y ago
  I may misunderstand your statement, it sounds like you are saying spam is just part of the world and we just have to live with it. I do not share that to be an axiom, clearly they are trying to solve, among many other, that one problem specifically.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
groby_b 10y ago
P.T. Barnum comes to mind. There's a sucker born every minute.
Animats 10y ago
What did they sell? Apparently, some (all?) of their potential user ID space. Urbit, under all their jargon, is a base for a federated social network. Sort of like Diaspora. (Right now, they say they have chat, so it's sort of like IRC.) They recognize that a big problem with social networks is spam. If you can freely create user IDs, it's hard to stop spammers. But if user IDs cost money, then spam blocking costs spammers money (their purchased online identities lose value) and spamming is no longer cost-effective. So their solution is to create a market in user ID space. It's not clear if this will work out, but it's something. If you buy an ID, you own it, in the Bitcoin sense. That is, you're not at the mercy of some service provider, and can freely move from one service provider to another without their permission. (I think this is right. Not entirely sure.) It's not clear if this will work in the social space. They have the underlying machinery, but nobody has built the Facebook or WhatsApp or Dropbox killer on top of it yet, so it's useless to end users at this stage. The concepts are interesting; it's good to see people trying original ideas. If someone builds an easy to use social application on this and gets some services to host it (like Wordpress hosting), this could get actual users. Right now, it's a developer toolkit.
- hault 10y ago
  urbit dev here: we completely agree that we need to have useful apps on top of it. We have an alpha for super simple wordpress-like hosting (in fact, the urbit.org site uses it!). All you have to do is drop a few md files into a tree and you're ready to go. See http://urbit.org/docs/using/web/ http://urbit.org/docs/using/web/ Joey Krug, founder of Augur, had a great post on how he could see Urbit as being a great compliment to the blockchain[0]: "If the blockchain is useful in those areas where [almost] no trust exists, Urbit has the potential to be useful for essentially everything else. To give a concrete example, this would be useful for any Ethereum app that doesn't want to store data on a central server (which most cannot do whether for legal, security, or ideological reasons). The idea to me is that the internet wasn't built very well to run decentralized apps [which is definitely the case if you've ever tried building one without having to rely on central servers for caching, storing accounts, comments, etc.]. It's, imo, a nice complement to blockchain tech like Ethereum and Bitcoin. Long term once it's out and running I see dapps like Augur [a decentralized prediction market which I work on - http://augur.net http://augur.net] using it so users can securely store their private keys, report data, market data, trade history, etc. and easily go across/between devices as opposed to just using localstorage [which is a pain to migrate using] or fetching it from ethereum every time [which is very time consuming and has lots of overhead]. If we're going to seriously move in this direction of decentralization, at scale we need something like urbit. No one else is really tackling the same set of problems. Came across this quote on it by Alan Kay: "They have verve, and that's generally a good thing. In this case there are a lot of details that need to be grokked to make any reasonable comment. The use of combinators (a kind of dual of lambda calculus) harks back to an excellent thesis by Denis Seror at the University of Utah in the 70s that produced a safe, highly scalable and parallel implementation. I haven't looked at it more deeply (and probably should)." [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11810177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11810177] - very cool!" And finally, another idea: https://urbit.org/posts/objections/#killer https://urbit.org/posts/objections/#killer [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11817721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11817721
theseatoms 10y ago
Is there a secondary market?
- wmf 10y ago
  No, and they're kind of discouraging it. "We're resistant to any technical measure that would effectively "securitize" or "monetize" Urbit ships — either rendering them fungible and/or trivially transferable, or defining them as fractional claims against some shared asset." On a more practical level, since most of the address space is unallocated it seems simpler/cheaper to buy fresh space from Tlon than secondhand space. Like how nobody was buying IP addresses when ARIN was giving them out for free.
  - tinco 10y ago
    When transferring ownership of a planet, is it done through a cryptographic transaction like in Bitcoin, or is it a plain transfer of a private key that manages the planet? If it's the latter I can see how 'second hand space' really is a bad idea as there's no way to enforce the transfer of a private key.
    - jpt4 10y ago
      Namespace transfer is more like creating a new PGP key and revoking the old. You broadcast the new key and can prove that the old key is invalid via the revocation certificate, but there is no distributed consensus mechanism, e.g. a blockchain; the new information simply is propagated throughout the routing network.
fowkswe 10y ago
Is this like Pied Piper?
_pmf_ 10y ago
> "Implicit valuation" is not the same as the "actual value" SV accounting.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- jerf 10y ago
  Wall Street accounting, and a lot of other accounting besides. "Market capitalization" is a bit of a fiction. If you understand it, it's not a lie, but it's a bit of a fiction.
- dang 10y ago
  No empty dismissals, please. If you have a point to make, please make it civilly and substantively. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12004187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12004187 and marked it off-topic.
davidgrenier 10y ago
I'm curious to know how the Urbit team went about choosing the stars to distribute, it seems the 1020 stars amount to almost the address space of 4 galaxies. Have 4 galaxies been picked or are said stars distributed across various galaxies. If the galaxies have been hand picked, could we know their names?
- state 10y ago
  This is a great question. We haven't yet picked which galaxies to use, but they'll come from Tlon's allocation. You can find the whole list in here: https://github.com/urbit/arvo/blob/master/arvo/ames.hoon https://github.com/urbit/arvo/blob/master/arvo/ames.hoon. Since we have buyers in the order they came in, I think it'd be fun to distribute stars sequentially across sequential galaxies. But we really aren't sure yet.
  - davidgrenier 10y ago
    I think "fun" would be letting people choose their galaxy if it doesn't matter to galaxy owners (which it very well might). Can you confirm that all galaxies save ~zod are signed by ~zod? I'm presuming here ~zod isn't self-signed.
    - privong 10y ago
      I can't speak to the other galaxies, but ~zod is "self-issued": http://zod.urbit.org/ http://zod.urbit.org/
    - juped 10y ago
      Every galaxy is an apex in the PKI, with the apex of apexes being the hardcoded public keys for each one in the kernel. ~zod is not special (well, it's a tiny bit special, because it's the parent of things without parents).
darawk 10y ago
Though I don't have a whole lot of confidence in this project...I do appreciate the Borges reference in the company's name. Truly a wonderful story, and highly relevant to the project they are attempting to undertake. http://art.yale.edu/file_columns/0000/0066/borges.pdf http://art.yale.edu/file_columns/0000/0066/borges.pdf I'll never forget the first time I read the opening few sentences. I don't think i've ever had a literary experience like it before or since: > I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. The mirror troubled the depths of a corridor in a country house on Gaona Street in Ramos Mejia; the encyclopedia is fallaciously called The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1917) and is a literal but delinquent reprint of the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1902. The event took place some five years ago. Bioy Casares had had dinner with me that evening and we became lengthily engaged in a vast polemic concerning the composition of a novel in the first person, whose narrator would omit or disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few readers - very few readers - to perceive an atrocious or banal reality. From the remote depths of the corridor, the mirror spied upon us. We discovered (such a discovery is inevitable in the late hours of the night) that mirrors have something monstrous about them. Then Bioy Casares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had declared that mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of men.
dwb 10y ago
Loving the creepy Boards of Canada vibe in the video.
davidgrenier 10y ago
Urbit being already able to host website, I presume it's possible for me to get a web domain name that will somehow direct to urbit.org and resolve through the planet name to my Urbit?
- chc4 10y ago
  If you start an urbit, it binds a webserver to localhost:8080. You can just point a DNS entry to the server hosting the urbit, plus a cache and reverse proxy or whatever so it doesn't die (*.urbit.org is behind a Varnish cache). No need to use urbit.org as a resolver, which proxies all HTTP traffic through ~doznec.
jobeirne 10y ago
This project is reinventing a bunch of stuff that's completely orthogonal to the goal of a decentralized app platform. They've written an OS, a filesystem, a networking layer -- all in a completely new language that looks incomprehensible (https://github.com/urbit/arvo/blob/master/arvo/clay.hoon https://github.com/urbit/arvo/blob/master/arvo/clay.hoon). I doubt very much this project will get much traction due to the enormous conceptual overhead of working within its ecosystem. There's a huge learning curve approaching something like this from the Unix/C ecosystem, and I don't think it's merited.
- dmix 10y ago
  The language designer must be a fan of writing assembly language, combined with some LISPy syntax, or something... that's the closest analogy I can think of from looking at it. Maybe it requires some IDE type of editor to make it comprehensible. From the authors: Its syntax is entirely novel and initially quite frightening. [...] If I can summarize Hoon's goal, it's to be the C of functional programming. [...] On the other hand, the apparent complexity of Hoon is very high. When you open a Hoon file, you are confronted with an enormous avalanche of barely structured line noise. Again this reminds us of C, which makes no attempt at the kind of abstract prettiness we expect from a Pascal or a Haskell. Learning Hoon involves learning nearly 100 ASCII digraph "runes." Is this a harsh learning curve? Of course it is. On the other hand, it is not a mathematical task, but a mechanical one. It is trivial compared to the task of learning the Chinese alphabet, memorizing the Qu'ran, etc, all rote mental tasks routinely performed by normal human 11-year-olds. From the languages even more confusing documentation: https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit/blob/master/doc/book/0-intro.markdown https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit/blob/master/doc/book/0-int...
  - state 10y ago
    I think you're probably better off reading the current docs: http://urbit.org/docs/ http://urbit.org/docs/
    - smellf 10y ago
TylerE 10y ago
Proof-of-concept near-vaporware to suck in gullible VCs. Just like all other dumb crypto startups.
- dang 10y ago
  This breaks the HN guidelines, which ask you not to call names in comments here. Please (re)-read and follow them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html Nasty dismissals are of negative value to this site even if there's a legit point locked within them. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12003805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12003805 and marked it off-topic.
Animats 10y ago
Their take on namespace management is interesting. The trouble with most kinds of online namespace (IP addresses, domain names) is that somebody has control over it, and they can jack prices up. You don't really own it; you're just renting. [What follows is how I think Urbit works. This may be incorrect.] Urbit seems to actually sell user IDs. Once you own one, some blockchain like system registers this, and you own them forever (unless and until you lose your private key, as with Bitcoin wallets). So Urbit doesn't have the problem of domain registrars raising renewal prices. Your user ID leads to an online presence on some hosting service, but the system enforces number portability - you can move to another service without the consent of the leaving service. So having an online presence will be price competitive. Somehow, the hosting services which host user IDs have a distributed directory system so that they can find any given user ID. Unclear how this works, and if it both scales and is secure against attacks. If Urbit can actually do all that, it's useful as a distributed directory management system. This is useful. Once you have that, you can do chat (this is apparently supported now) and that can be extended to voice and video calls. All without central control. So, is this a Skype killer? You have to buy a user ID, and then you have to buy hosting. That's going to cost a few dollars a month. It's nice that it's federated and presumably ad-free, but it competes with everybody else's ad-supported chat program. It's hard to compete with free.
davidgerard 10y ago
All of urbit.org is in robots.txt, by the way - if there's anything interesting on there that catches your eye, make sure it's in archive.is.

105 points by beefman 10y ago

"The project is composed of several parts: a virtual machine (dubbed "Nock"), an operating system ("Arvo"), a programming language ("Hoon") and a peer-to-peer network ("Ames")." You can introduce any one of those and possibly survive. Doing all four at once? You're doomed. Sorry.

danpalmer 10y ago
Interestingly, their whole "thing" seems to be that you can't re-invent one of them well without doing the others, so they appear to see themselves as doomed if they don't re-invent all of them.
frou_dh 10y ago
What's that quote ... people who say something cannot be done should not interrupt those doing it ?
- astrodust 10y ago
  I'm not saying it isn't worth trying, but for every additional disruption built into this offering the probability of success plunges dramatically. Do we really need a new everything? What problems do these new things solve that couldn't be addressed through other mature technologies used in new and novel ways? Maybe we do, but if that's the case they've done a terrible job of articulating why. Most importantly: How can you possibly secure all these things given the complex nature of interactions between all of them?
- yongjik 10y ago
  Personally, I prefer this quote from Hannessy and Patterson: > The level below main memory contains rotating magnetic disks that take millions of clock cycles to access. Because of the great discrepancy in access time, no one has yet built a virtual memory operating system that writes through main memory to disk on every store by the processor. (This remark should not be interpreted as an opportunity to become famous by being the first to build one!)
- zeven7 10y ago
  "As an older friend, I must advise you against it, for, in the first place you will not succeed, and even if you succeed, no one will believe you" (Max Planck to Einstein on his pursuit to develop a new theory of gravity).
mahyarm 10y ago
Feels like remaking unix
dnautics 10y ago
I don't think so. I struggle to understand the things they are building, but one of the very nice features is that each of them is structured in a way to make them provably correct. That's definitely a potential value-add, and it needs to be in at least Nock, Arvo, and Hoon.

danpalmer 10y ago

I might be misunderstanding Urbit (quite easy it seems), but this idea of selling off what is essentially "land" seems to go against some of the ideas that it pushes - i.e. the democratisation of the web. Also, they appear(?) to have sold off rather large chunks/the address space seems small, is it going to need a "v6" to bring it out of beta like the internet did?

4ad 10y ago
You misunderstand. Urbit is not democratic, it's feudal. The namespace is scarce by design.
Avshalom 10y ago
... I don't know the Urbit team all that well, but Yarvin is in particular publicly anti-democratisation of anything. So I'm assuming this is in fact according to plan.
haldean 10y ago
Here's a pretty good synopsis of why the namespace is set up the way it is: https://urbit.org/posts/principles/ https://urbit.org/posts/principles/
JonnieCache 10y ago
Look into the intellectual background of the creator and all will become clear.
throwanem 10y ago
Democratization is I think a poor metaphor; a better one would be emancipation. Right now, if you use Facebook, Facebook owns you. If you don't use Facebook but all your friends do, Facebook still owns you, but you're worthless to it, and it punishes you for failing to generate value by making you as close to socially invisible as it can - which is pretty damn close. (Ask me how I know!) None of this is deliberate, in the sense of an evil conspiracy cooked up by cackling villains. But all of it is true. The purpose of Urbit is to make it possible for people to own themselves. Doing so is not free of charge. (Should it be? Are you worth nothing?) But it is, or will be once (if) it's possible at all, as cheap as can be made practical - which is very cheap indeed, or free, if you don't mind opting out of guaranteed and durable identity. The tradeoff is that people who don't opt out may not be as quick to trust people who do. But that's a choice you get to make, instead of, as now, a choice that Facebook makes for you. I can't speak for anyone else (especially Tlön), but I've had enough of Facebook making choices for me. Have you?

wille92 10y ago

Can someone give a synopsis of Urbit? Every time Urbit comes up, I skim their website but get pretty lost in marketing-speak. I see a lot of "control your data", "digital freedom", and "general purpose computing" without any short, to the point explanation of what the heck it's all about.

Avshalom 10y ago
It's just an application server. It's a VM, it connects to other VMs, they run programs, sometimes locally, sometimes remotely, sometimes distributed. This is all apparently very novel.
- mahyarm 10y ago
  So something like sandstorm with an autoscaler?
  - api 10y ago
    That's like saying a snowmobile is a horse on skis. This is more like a total re-implementation of computing based on a functional model and a re-implementation of networking based on a feudal/federated shared/distributed/content-addressable model.
    - Avshalom 10y ago
      Meh, it's a new VM and a dumb network topology. I don't know sandstorm so I'm not sure which of these you think is the horse in this analogy.
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago
  Also, it's been under development for the better part of a decade.
- vertex-four 10y ago
  The novel bits are: * Everything on the VM is purely functional, and inputs essentially cause transactions which can fail/succeed - the result being that it's supposedly easier to implement certain types of network protocols, specifically the ones that Ames implements * A somewhat decent revision-controlled filesystem with push/pull/merge, static typing of files, and a built-in build system of sorts And last but not least... * Feudalism built into the core p2p protocol as an explicit design decision

smellf 10y ago

Sounds kind of like an evil Second Life. I predict it will go as Second Life did - prepare for the Urbit dick-based economy.

JeremyBanks 10y ago

Where are these actually for sale? The website still says they'll be for sale "soon".

haldean 10y ago
They were for sale here, when there were any left: https://sale.urbit.org/ https://sale.urbit.org/
hault 10y ago
urbit dev here: the sale site is sale.urbit.org. Unfortunately, we're sold out for now. There will be another crowdsale, but we do not yet know the details. The first announcement will always go out to our mailing list (see urbit.org). This sale sold out before we announced it anywhere other than the list.
- zekevermillion 10y ago
  I got your email, but not until I checked after dinner so missed the very brief window. A couple observations -- The stars were underpriced, by how much it's hard to know. If your goal is to seed the owner class with random giveaways, this was a success, I suppose. Second, 1020 stars was a HUGE amount to give away. I thought perhaps you would pre-sell one star's share of planets for $1 /ea. $205 for a star is nothin. From my armchair, what I would suggest is to focus on developing a secondary market for urbit addresses PRIOR TO any further crowdsale. That way you can get some indication of demand before pricing another Tlon-organized event. Presumably $209k is not interesting money, even to Tlon. It's a shame you gave away 1% at that price but maybe will work out in the end as a way to bootstrap the network with early enthusiasts.
  - erikpukinskis 10y ago
    If they just give away 1% every time they can do 70+ sales before they even use up half.
- granfalloon 10y ago
  Just a heads-up, I signed up for the mailing list a few weeks ago and didn't receive the notice. I suppose there could be some kind of filter on my end blocking it, but just wanted you to be aware! Tried a different email address yesterday and didn't get a confirmation email, so not sure if it worked.

internaut 10y ago

Weren't people on the mailing list supposed to receive notifications about sales of Urbit land/namespace? The article doesn't say where this crowdsale took place. The articles makes it sound like it was offered to the public, if so this is the first I've heard of it.

striking 10y ago
They did. The people on the mailing list, at least.
hault 10y ago
We did send a notification out to our announcements list (see urbit.org), but have heard that it went to some people's spam or promotions folders. In retrospect, we should have also sent it out to urbit-dev (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/urbit-dev https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/urbit-dev), but the sale was over before we got around to it.

kristjansson 10y ago

So it's stars, comets, and galaxies now? What happened to the battleships, carriers, destroyers, ...?

chc4 10y ago
The classes were renamed shortly before leaving "unlaunch" status. They felt that having everyone own military class vessels instead of neutral celestial bodies gave the wrong impression. Also, saying "destroyers" a billion times outloud would probably get annoying. "Planets" is easier.
gagege 10y ago
For a while everything was "submarines".
- jpt4 10y ago
  Which are now comets, and yachts are now moons, for the record.

amasad 10y ago

I'm curious as to why the HN story[1] about the sale was flagged yesterday? [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11997773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11997773

haldean 10y ago
They specifically asked for it to not be publicly posted until this morning; yesterday was mailing-list-members-only. See also this subthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11997925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11997925
- Daviey 10y ago
  That doesn't seem to be a good reason for it to be flagged.
  - jessaustin 10y ago
    Those with flagging powers can flag for any reason they like. Apparently there are a number of urbit true believers on HN.
throwanem 10y ago
The sale was initially announced only via email to those who subscribed to a specific list, and the announcement included a request to keep it quiet until 9pm PDT (midnight Eastern).
zgotsch 10y ago
The sale was supposed to be on the down-low until today. I suspect someone flagged it for that reason. The stars sold out before it was announced outside the mailing list.
chc4 10y ago
The email announcing it from the mailing list said not to talk about it publicly until today; it was supposed to be an early backer pre-sale type deal yesterday, with a price of $205 instead of $256. Instead, it sold out entirely hours in, before the actual sale started... All things considered, that's a pretty awesome problem to have.

throwanem 10y ago

A recent HN discussion including Tlon principals and discussing Urbit in some length and detail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11817721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11817721

res0nat0r 10y ago

From the Github README: > Urbit is a clean-slate system software stack defined as a deterministic computer. An encrypted P2P network, %ames, runs on a functional operating system, Arvo, written in a strict, typed functional language, Hoon, which compiles itself to a combinator interpreter, Nock, whose spec gzips to 340 bytes. Geez.

beefman 10y ago

More info here: https://sale.urbit.org/ https://sale.urbit.org/

whamlastxmas 10y ago

I thought this was going to be real estate and bitcoin merged together. Would be interesting to see how those two concepts might merge. Maybe the ability to buy land using bitcoin, and instead of holding a deed/title issued by the state, it remains with a holding company and you prove ownership with a digital private key. Useful for people who want to be anonymous but still sort-of-directly own real estate.

holychiz 10y ago
this is fairly trivial to implement conceptually in Ethereum. What's hard is to integrate that system with existing legal and social framework.
- asgardiator 10y ago
  Ethereum, if Solidity were Haskell

blntechie 10y ago

I get their goal of users having control over their data but limiting the identities artificially sounds pointless to me. Spam accounts are part of the internet and it's time we acknowledge and consider them as part of the overall user base. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding their reason for limiting the identities.

davidgrenier 10y ago
I may misunderstand your statement, it sounds like you are saying spam is just part of the world and we just have to live with it. I do not share that to be an axiom, clearly they are trying to solve, among many other, that one problem specifically.

deleted 10y ago

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groby_b 10y ago

P.T. Barnum comes to mind. There's a sucker born every minute.

Animats 10y ago

What did they sell? Apparently, some (all?) of their potential user ID space. Urbit, under all their jargon, is a base for a federated social network. Sort of like Diaspora. (Right now, they say they have chat, so it's sort of like IRC.) They recognize that a big problem with social networks is spam. If you can freely create user IDs, it's hard to stop spammers. But if user IDs cost money, then spam blocking costs spammers money (their purchased online identities lose value) and spamming is no longer cost-effective. So their solution is to create a market in user ID space. It's not clear if this will work out, but it's something. If you buy an ID, you own it, in the Bitcoin sense. That is, you're not at the mercy of some service provider, and can freely move from one service provider to another without their permission. (I think this is right. Not entirely sure.) It's not clear if this will work in the social space. They have the underlying machinery, but nobody has built the Facebook or WhatsApp or Dropbox killer on top of it yet, so it's useless to end users at this stage. The concepts are interesting; it's good to see people trying original ideas. If someone builds an easy to use social application on this and gets some services to host it (like Wordpress hosting), this could get actual users. Right now, it's a developer toolkit.

hault 10y ago
urbit dev here: we completely agree that we need to have useful apps on top of it. We have an alpha for super simple wordpress-like hosting (in fact, the urbit.org site uses it!). All you have to do is drop a few md files into a tree and you're ready to go. See http://urbit.org/docs/using/web/ http://urbit.org/docs/using/web/ Joey Krug, founder of Augur, had a great post on how he could see Urbit as being a great compliment to the blockchain[0]: "If the blockchain is useful in those areas where [almost] no trust exists, Urbit has the potential to be useful for essentially everything else. To give a concrete example, this would be useful for any Ethereum app that doesn't want to store data on a central server (which most cannot do whether for legal, security, or ideological reasons). The idea to me is that the internet wasn't built very well to run decentralized apps [which is definitely the case if you've ever tried building one without having to rely on central servers for caching, storing accounts, comments, etc.]. It's, imo, a nice complement to blockchain tech like Ethereum and Bitcoin. Long term once it's out and running I see dapps like Augur [a decentralized prediction market which I work on - http://augur.net http://augur.net] using it so users can securely store their private keys, report data, market data, trade history, etc. and easily go across/between devices as opposed to just using localstorage [which is a pain to migrate using] or fetching it from ethereum every time [which is very time consuming and has lots of overhead]. If we're going to seriously move in this direction of decentralization, at scale we need something like urbit. No one else is really tackling the same set of problems. Came across this quote on it by Alan Kay: "They have verve, and that's generally a good thing. In this case there are a lot of details that need to be grokked to make any reasonable comment. The use of combinators (a kind of dual of lambda calculus) harks back to an excellent thesis by Denis Seror at the University of Utah in the 70s that produced a safe, highly scalable and parallel implementation. I haven't looked at it more deeply (and probably should)." [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11810177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11810177] - very cool!" And finally, another idea: https://urbit.org/posts/objections/#killer https://urbit.org/posts/objections/#killer [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11817721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11817721

theseatoms 10y ago

Is there a secondary market?

wmf 10y ago
No, and they're kind of discouraging it. "We're resistant to any technical measure that would effectively "securitize" or "monetize" Urbit ships — either rendering them fungible and/or trivially transferable, or defining them as fractional claims against some shared asset." On a more practical level, since most of the address space is unallocated it seems simpler/cheaper to buy fresh space from Tlon than secondhand space. Like how nobody was buying IP addresses when ARIN was giving them out for free.
- tinco 10y ago
  When transferring ownership of a planet, is it done through a cryptographic transaction like in Bitcoin, or is it a plain transfer of a private key that manages the planet? If it's the latter I can see how 'second hand space' really is a bad idea as there's no way to enforce the transfer of a private key.
  - jpt4 10y ago
    Namespace transfer is more like creating a new PGP key and revoking the old. You broadcast the new key and can prove that the old key is invalid via the revocation certificate, but there is no distributed consensus mechanism, e.g. a blockchain; the new information simply is propagated throughout the routing network.

fowkswe 10y ago

Is this like Pied Piper?

_pmf_ 10y ago

> "Implicit valuation" is not the same as the "actual value" SV accounting.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jerf 10y ago
Wall Street accounting, and a lot of other accounting besides. "Market capitalization" is a bit of a fiction. If you understand it, it's not a lie, but it's a bit of a fiction.
dang 10y ago
No empty dismissals, please. If you have a point to make, please make it civilly and substantively. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12004187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12004187 and marked it off-topic.

davidgrenier 10y ago

I'm curious to know how the Urbit team went about choosing the stars to distribute, it seems the 1020 stars amount to almost the address space of 4 galaxies. Have 4 galaxies been picked or are said stars distributed across various galaxies. If the galaxies have been hand picked, could we know their names?

state 10y ago
This is a great question. We haven't yet picked which galaxies to use, but they'll come from Tlon's allocation. You can find the whole list in here: https://github.com/urbit/arvo/blob/master/arvo/ames.hoon https://github.com/urbit/arvo/blob/master/arvo/ames.hoon. Since we have buyers in the order they came in, I think it'd be fun to distribute stars sequentially across sequential galaxies. But we really aren't sure yet.
- davidgrenier 10y ago
  I think "fun" would be letting people choose their galaxy if it doesn't matter to galaxy owners (which it very well might). Can you confirm that all galaxies save ~zod are signed by ~zod? I'm presuming here ~zod isn't self-signed.
  - privong 10y ago
    I can't speak to the other galaxies, but ~zod is "self-issued": http://zod.urbit.org/ http://zod.urbit.org/
  - juped 10y ago
    Every galaxy is an apex in the PKI, with the apex of apexes being the hardcoded public keys for each one in the kernel. ~zod is not special (well, it's a tiny bit special, because it's the parent of things without parents).

darawk 10y ago

Though I don't have a whole lot of confidence in this project...I do appreciate the Borges reference in the company's name. Truly a wonderful story, and highly relevant to the project they are attempting to undertake. http://art.yale.edu/file_columns/0000/0066/borges.pdf http://art.yale.edu/file_columns/0000/0066/borges.pdf I'll never forget the first time I read the opening few sentences. I don't think i've ever had a literary experience like it before or since: > I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. The mirror troubled the depths of a corridor in a country house on Gaona Street in Ramos Mejia; the encyclopedia is fallaciously called The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1917) and is a literal but delinquent reprint of the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1902. The event took place some five years ago. Bioy Casares had had dinner with me that evening and we became lengthily engaged in a vast polemic concerning the composition of a novel in the first person, whose narrator would omit or disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few readers - very few readers - to perceive an atrocious or banal reality. From the remote depths of the corridor, the mirror spied upon us. We discovered (such a discovery is inevitable in the late hours of the night) that mirrors have something monstrous about them. Then Bioy Casares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had declared that mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of men.

dwb 10y ago

Loving the creepy Boards of Canada vibe in the video.

davidgrenier 10y ago

Urbit being already able to host website, I presume it's possible for me to get a web domain name that will somehow direct to urbit.org and resolve through the planet name to my Urbit?

chc4 10y ago
If you start an urbit, it binds a webserver to localhost:8080. You can just point a DNS entry to the server hosting the urbit, plus a cache and reverse proxy or whatever so it doesn't die (*.urbit.org is behind a Varnish cache). No need to use urbit.org as a resolver, which proxies all HTTP traffic through ~doznec.

jobeirne 10y ago

This project is reinventing a bunch of stuff that's completely orthogonal to the goal of a decentralized app platform. They've written an OS, a filesystem, a networking layer -- all in a completely new language that looks incomprehensible (https://github.com/urbit/arvo/blob/master/arvo/clay.hoon https://github.com/urbit/arvo/blob/master/arvo/clay.hoon). I doubt very much this project will get much traction due to the enormous conceptual overhead of working within its ecosystem. There's a huge learning curve approaching something like this from the Unix/C ecosystem, and I don't think it's merited.

dmix 10y ago
The language designer must be a fan of writing assembly language, combined with some LISPy syntax, or something... that's the closest analogy I can think of from looking at it. Maybe it requires some IDE type of editor to make it comprehensible. From the authors: Its syntax is entirely novel and initially quite frightening. [...] If I can summarize Hoon's goal, it's to be the C of functional programming. [...] On the other hand, the apparent complexity of Hoon is very high. When you open a Hoon file, you are confronted with an enormous avalanche of barely structured line noise. Again this reminds us of C, which makes no attempt at the kind of abstract prettiness we expect from a Pascal or a Haskell. Learning Hoon involves learning nearly 100 ASCII digraph "runes." Is this a harsh learning curve? Of course it is. On the other hand, it is not a mathematical task, but a mechanical one. It is trivial compared to the task of learning the Chinese alphabet, memorizing the Qu'ran, etc, all rote mental tasks routinely performed by normal human 11-year-olds. From the languages even more confusing documentation: https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit/blob/master/doc/book/0-intro.markdown https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit/blob/master/doc/book/0-int...
- state 10y ago
  I think you're probably better off reading the current docs: http://urbit.org/docs/ http://urbit.org/docs/
  - smellf 10y ago

TylerE 10y ago

Proof-of-concept near-vaporware to suck in gullible VCs. Just like all other dumb crypto startups.

dang 10y ago
This breaks the HN guidelines, which ask you not to call names in comments here. Please (re)-read and follow them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html Nasty dismissals are of negative value to this site even if there's a legit point locked within them. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12003805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12003805 and marked it off-topic.

Animats 10y ago

Their take on namespace management is interesting. The trouble with most kinds of online namespace (IP addresses, domain names) is that somebody has control over it, and they can jack prices up. You don't really own it; you're just renting. [What follows is how I think Urbit works. This may be incorrect.] Urbit seems to actually sell user IDs. Once you own one, some blockchain like system registers this, and you own them forever (unless and until you lose your private key, as with Bitcoin wallets). So Urbit doesn't have the problem of domain registrars raising renewal prices. Your user ID leads to an online presence on some hosting service, but the system enforces number portability - you can move to another service without the consent of the leaving service. So having an online presence will be price competitive. Somehow, the hosting services which host user IDs have a distributed directory system so that they can find any given user ID. Unclear how this works, and if it both scales and is secure against attacks. If Urbit can actually do all that, it's useful as a distributed directory management system. This is useful. Once you have that, you can do chat (this is apparently supported now) and that can be extended to voice and video calls. All without central control. So, is this a Skype killer? You have to buy a user ID, and then you have to buy hosting. That's going to cost a few dollars a month. It's nice that it's federated and presumably ad-free, but it competes with everybody else's ad-supported chat program. It's hard to compete with free.

davidgerard 10y ago

All of urbit.org is in robots.txt, by the way - if there's anything interesting on there that catches your eye, make sure it's in archive.is.