4 ms·

> Urbit's distribution and sponsorship hierarchy of galaxies, stars and planets is not designed as a political structure, or even a social structure. The actual

by geofft 8y ago

> Urbit's distribution and sponsorship hierarchy of galaxies, stars and planets is not designed as a political structure, or even a social structure. The actual social layer is in userspace -- one layer up. Socially and politically, Urbit is a flat network of planets. Galaxies and stars are plumbing. Here are some statements about how the plumbing is done, from Urbit's own website, that I suppose must be non-political: "...most theories of property agree that anyone whoever creates or discovers new property starts out by owning it. Because galaxies are premined, Urbit starts as a centralized system. But it has two strong motivations to decentralize. One, the more decentralized Urbit is, the more Urbit is worth. Two, the only way for Urbit to fund its own development is to homestead its own real estate." From a page on "Common objections to Urbit," under "Urbit doesn't have enough planets for every human being.": "A 32-bit planet is a tool, not a toy. Like a car, it's a device for a responsible and independent adult. There aren't 4 billion cars in the world, nor 4 billion independent adults. If you aren't an independent adult, and you don't need or even shouldn't have unconditional digital freedom (no one's 8-year-old daughter needs unconditional digital freedom), a moon from someone else's planet is fine." (They redid their website apparently but the posts are archived at http://web.archive.org/web/20181214175456/https://urbit.org/posts/address-space/ http://web.archive.org/web/20181214175456/https://urbit.org/... and http://web.archive.org/web/20181214190532/https://urbit.org/posts/objections/ http://web.archive.org/web/20181214190532/https://urbit.org/... respectively.) Moldbug thinks he's being non-political. I don't think we should trust him to even know what that means. This might be a good chance to recover whatever interesting ideas are in Urbit (if there were any; it's not clear to me that there are any) for the common good, but there are almost certainly deep-seated assumptions that weren't even publicly stated in the FAQs about who gets to control what and who doesn't. ... edited to add: > When you live in Manhattan, you simply don't worry about who owns it or why; and nor does it matter. Are they Jews? Muslims? Christians? Communists? Italians? You don't care and you don't have to. That's hardly my experience, but, sure.

Barrin92 8y ago
>This might be a good chance to recover whatever interesting ideas are in Urbit I haven't really looked much into this space, but Tim Berners Lee's Solid tries to tackle essentially the same problem without all the reactionary politics, no? Yarvin's controversial personality aside, I just don't see the use case for this. Handing everyone a server / pod/ starship and then trying to share this across machines with some common protocol reminds me of the semantic web which already attempted this a long time ago.
- wmf 8y ago
  One key difference is that Urbit apps execute on your server but in Solid you have no control over the code, just the (canonical copy of the) data.
  - miguelrochefort 8y ago
    Solid is open source and you do have control over its code.
    - wmf 8y ago
      Solid is a protocol. If you use Solid to expose your data to, say, Facebook you have no control over Facebook's code.
zozbot123 8y ago
> ... If you aren't an independent adult, and you don't need or even shouldn't have unconditional digital freedom (no one's 8-year-old daughter needs unconditional digital freedom), a moon from someone else's planet is fine." What's wrong with this? A 32-bit namespace for full-blown "server-like" identities still beats today's world where everyone and their dog just crowds onto a single centralized service like Facebook, enjoying an equivalent "not an independent adult" status. Besides, the IPv4 address-space is 32-bit, and is nowhere near efficiently utilized - so Urbit's projected "neo-feudal dystopia" is already here even in the best possible case. (No, IPv6 rollout is not helping practically, at least not yet.)
- geofft 8y ago
  Nothing's wrong with it per se, it's just 100% a political opinion encoded in the bit width of the protocol.
  - zozbot123 8y ago
    Isn't the exact same political opinion "encoded" in IPv4, and/or the continued use thereof? It seems weird to complain about Urbit specifically when it's just perpetuating such a long-standing practice, and even mitigating it (to the extent that its address space sees more efficient use than IPv4 itself).
    - sebastos 8y ago
      Great minds and all that.
    - wmf 8y ago
      Perhaps the difference is that IPv4 was an experimental protocol that was supposed to be replaced while Urbit seems to explicitly plan to remain 32-bit forever.
      - yebyen 8y ago
        Everyone who makes this argument seems to be plainly ignoring a good half of the address spec, that Urbit's 32-bit namespace is part of a total 128-bit address space. If I told you that IPv6 has 32 of its 128 address bits reserved as markers for making top-level subnets out of them (this is not true, but for argument's sake, pretend it was) would you say "Oh no, there's not enough IPv6 for everyone to have their own subnets" ? Of course you wouldn't, because addresses are 128 bits long and there's enough address space for "EVERY ATOM ON THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH, and still have enough addresses left to do another 100+ earths." per the first StackOverflow post I could find on the subject. Is there enough address space for every atom on the surface of the earth to be neatly organized into subnets according to ownership rights? Well that's debatable, and if you want to compare apples to apples, you should ask that question. If Urbit runs out of planets, then it will have roundly surpassed the expectations of anyone who makes this argument. You don't solve these problems on Day 1, it's really enough to have a plan that would allow 20-50% of people on the planet to have a stake in ownership of Urbit at this stage. When it starts getting cramped, how about THEN we spend some time and tackle scaling past a usership base of 50% of the population of humans that are alive? There was actually a point to the scarcity, it's meant to solve the spam problem. "Planet" identities are meant to be precious. If your identity was worth $10, you probably wouldn't use it to engage in spamming unless you were sure that you could get more than $10 from the campaign before landing your address on a blackhole list. (And if it was possible to reliably achieve a profit like this, it would undoubtedly drive the price of a planet up, as others figured out how to compete with you at doing that.) And even that is a naive assessment of the scope of the idea and how it prevents spamming. The identities are provisioned in a hierarchical fashion, such that if you landed more than a couple of planets on such a spam list (none exists today, but...), you would probably find out pretty quickly that nobody with inventory is willing to sell you another one. (Lest they wind up getting their whole "star system" banned from polite society for association with spammers.)

by geofft 8y ago

Barrin92 8y ago

>This might be a good chance to recover whatever interesting ideas are in Urbit I haven't really looked much into this space, but Tim Berners Lee's Solid tries to tackle essentially the same problem without all the reactionary politics, no? Yarvin's controversial personality aside, I just don't see the use case for this. Handing everyone a server / pod/ starship and then trying to share this across machines with some common protocol reminds me of the semantic web which already attempted this a long time ago.

wmf 8y ago
One key difference is that Urbit apps execute on your server but in Solid you have no control over the code, just the (canonical copy of the) data.
- miguelrochefort 8y ago
  Solid is open source and you do have control over its code.
  - wmf 8y ago
    Solid is a protocol. If you use Solid to expose your data to, say, Facebook you have no control over Facebook's code.

zozbot123 8y ago

> ... If you aren't an independent adult, and you don't need or even shouldn't have unconditional digital freedom (no one's 8-year-old daughter needs unconditional digital freedom), a moon from someone else's planet is fine." What's wrong with this? A 32-bit namespace for full-blown "server-like" identities still beats today's world where everyone and their dog just crowds onto a single centralized service like Facebook, enjoying an equivalent "not an independent adult" status. Besides, the IPv4 address-space is 32-bit, and is nowhere near efficiently utilized - so Urbit's projected "neo-feudal dystopia" is already here even in the best possible case. (No, IPv6 rollout is not helping practically, at least not yet.)

geofft 8y ago
Nothing's wrong with it per se, it's just 100% a political opinion encoded in the bit width of the protocol.
- zozbot123 8y ago
  Isn't the exact same political opinion "encoded" in IPv4, and/or the continued use thereof? It seems weird to complain about Urbit specifically when it's just perpetuating such a long-standing practice, and even mitigating it (to the extent that its address space sees more efficient use than IPv4 itself).
  - sebastos 8y ago
    Great minds and all that.
  - wmf 8y ago
    Perhaps the difference is that IPv4 was an experimental protocol that was supposed to be replaced while Urbit seems to explicitly plan to remain 32-bit forever.
    - yebyen 8y ago
      Everyone who makes this argument seems to be plainly ignoring a good half of the address spec, that Urbit's 32-bit namespace is part of a total 128-bit address space. If I told you that IPv6 has 32 of its 128 address bits reserved as markers for making top-level subnets out of them (this is not true, but for argument's sake, pretend it was) would you say "Oh no, there's not enough IPv6 for everyone to have their own subnets" ? Of course you wouldn't, because addresses are 128 bits long and there's enough address space for "EVERY ATOM ON THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH, and still have enough addresses left to do another 100+ earths." per the first StackOverflow post I could find on the subject. Is there enough address space for every atom on the surface of the earth to be neatly organized into subnets according to ownership rights? Well that's debatable, and if you want to compare apples to apples, you should ask that question. If Urbit runs out of planets, then it will have roundly surpassed the expectations of anyone who makes this argument. You don't solve these problems on Day 1, it's really enough to have a plan that would allow 20-50% of people on the planet to have a stake in ownership of Urbit at this stage. When it starts getting cramped, how about THEN we spend some time and tackle scaling past a usership base of 50% of the population of humans that are alive? There was actually a point to the scarcity, it's meant to solve the spam problem. "Planet" identities are meant to be precious. If your identity was worth $10, you probably wouldn't use it to engage in spamming unless you were sure that you could get more than $10 from the campaign before landing your address on a blackhole list. (And if it was possible to reliably achieve a profit like this, it would undoubtedly drive the price of a planet up, as others figured out how to compete with you at doing that.) And even that is a naive assessment of the scope of the idea and how it prevents spamming. The identities are provisioned in a hierarchical fashion, such that if you landed more than a couple of planets on such a spam list (none exists today, but...), you would probably find out pretty quickly that nobody with inventory is willing to sell you another one. (Lest they wind up getting their whole "star system" banned from polite society for association with spammers.)