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I like the idea but it does seem like you're setting up a poll tax to participate fully in the internet, simultaneously having it high enough to deter or at lea

by rtkwe 6y ago

I like the idea but it does seem like you're setting up a poll tax to participate fully in the internet, simultaneously having it high enough to deter or at least raise the bar on scams and low enough to be affordable to the whole world is a hard ask.

fossuser 6y ago
They have free IDs too, but groups can block them to reduce spam. The free IDs have some other negatives too I think (long names, harder to recover, etc.). The price is quite low ~$10 for a 'planet' or standard ID. Maybe in the developing world that price is too high, but I'd suspect if it succeeded to the point where that was an issue it could be solved without too much trouble. The ID solution is cool because it fixes the spam issue which is one of the core incentives behind centralization. The other core reason to centralize is server management and finding other users. If you design an OS that has this bit baked into it from the start you can make this complexity invisible to the user. You can have apps be p2p by default without the user having to know about it, you can make it easy for users to send photos or messages directly to each other rather than always having to interoperate with a middleman company (FB, Google etc.). Their approach of starting as a VM that runs in linux is a good idea, it allows iteration on something that's immediately usable. Their initial focus on chat too I think is smart - it gets people using it while they improve it and immediately seeing changes. Long term goal would be getting urbit running on its own hardware without the virtual layer, but I think if they started trying to do that they wouldn't succeed. With the current approach they might.
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> I like the idea but it does seem like you're setting up a poll tax to participate fully in the internet, simultaneously having it high enough to deter or at least raise the bar on scams and low enough to be affordable to the whole world is a hard ask. It's not actually that hard, because ordinary users can generate one ID and use it for many years, but spammers have to generate a new ID every five minutes because they immediately get blocked and have all content associated with the blocked IDs get retroactively dumped in the spam folder. So the cost to spammers is literally a million times higher than it is for ordinary users, which is exactly the sort of thing that actually works.
- olah_1 6y ago
  > So the cost to spammers is literally a million times higher than it is for ordinary users, which is exactly the sort of thing that actually works. The law-abiding user is the one that incurs the real cost. Spammers pump and dump millions of IDs. This drives up the cost of getting an ID. The normal user that just needs a new ID for some reason is the one that suffers the most here. I don't care if it's expensive for a scammer. If it's cost-prohibitive for grandma to get a new ID, then it defeats the purpose.
- rtkwe 6y ago
  It's still important to think about how much $10, the current Urbit ID price, represents in some parts of the world. The World Bank has a poverty line of ~$3-4 per day and over half of India lives (or did in 2017) on less than that and the official rural poverty line is around $6-7 a month. If we're setting up the next internet we really shouldn't be locking out anyone due to price.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    Even for someone living on $3/day, paying $10 once every ten years represents 0.09% of their income. You could also plausibly impose alternative costs, like making someone solve captchas for an hour. Then people in rich countries pay $10, people in poor countries spend an hour (which to them is significantly less than $10 of their time).
    - ddalex 6y ago
      that's like 500-1000 USD for the average middle class american - a steep price to pay for a membership with no obvious benefits I wonder why can't score IDs by page-rank them - one's identity gets credibility based on the social score - hacker news manages to be quite effective at preventing spam using this technique
      - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        > that's like 500-1000 USD for the average middle class american Which would be $50-$100/year, i.e. still not very much. Recall that it costs significantly more than that to have internet access. > a steep price to pay for a membership with no obvious benefits The obvious benefit being that you get to be in the same network as the people in rich countries, and that network is not overrun by spam or controlled by a multinational conglomerate that uses its ownership of the means of communication to cost you significantly more than $10. > I wonder why can't score IDs by page-rank them - one's identity gets credibility based on the social score - hacker news manages to be quite effective at preventing spam using this technique What do you do with new IDs that have no reputation? If they can't post they can't earn a reputation, if they can post they can spam.

by rtkwe 6y ago

fossuser 6y ago

They have free IDs too, but groups can block them to reduce spam. The free IDs have some other negatives too I think (long names, harder to recover, etc.). The price is quite low ~$10 for a 'planet' or standard ID. Maybe in the developing world that price is too high, but I'd suspect if it succeeded to the point where that was an issue it could be solved without too much trouble. The ID solution is cool because it fixes the spam issue which is one of the core incentives behind centralization. The other core reason to centralize is server management and finding other users. If you design an OS that has this bit baked into it from the start you can make this complexity invisible to the user. You can have apps be p2p by default without the user having to know about it, you can make it easy for users to send photos or messages directly to each other rather than always having to interoperate with a middleman company (FB, Google etc.). Their approach of starting as a VM that runs in linux is a good idea, it allows iteration on something that's immediately usable. Their initial focus on chat too I think is smart - it gets people using it while they improve it and immediately seeing changes. Long term goal would be getting urbit running on its own hardware without the virtual layer, but I think if they started trying to do that they wouldn't succeed. With the current approach they might.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago

> I like the idea but it does seem like you're setting up a poll tax to participate fully in the internet, simultaneously having it high enough to deter or at least raise the bar on scams and low enough to be affordable to the whole world is a hard ask. It's not actually that hard, because ordinary users can generate one ID and use it for many years, but spammers have to generate a new ID every five minutes because they immediately get blocked and have all content associated with the blocked IDs get retroactively dumped in the spam folder. So the cost to spammers is literally a million times higher than it is for ordinary users, which is exactly the sort of thing that actually works.

olah_1 6y ago
> So the cost to spammers is literally a million times higher than it is for ordinary users, which is exactly the sort of thing that actually works. The law-abiding user is the one that incurs the real cost. Spammers pump and dump millions of IDs. This drives up the cost of getting an ID. The normal user that just needs a new ID for some reason is the one that suffers the most here. I don't care if it's expensive for a scammer. If it's cost-prohibitive for grandma to get a new ID, then it defeats the purpose.
rtkwe 6y ago
It's still important to think about how much $10, the current Urbit ID price, represents in some parts of the world. The World Bank has a poverty line of ~$3-4 per day and over half of India lives (or did in 2017) on less than that and the official rural poverty line is around $6-7 a month. If we're setting up the next internet we really shouldn't be locking out anyone due to price.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  Even for someone living on $3/day, paying $10 once every ten years represents 0.09% of their income. You could also plausibly impose alternative costs, like making someone solve captchas for an hour. Then people in rich countries pay $10, people in poor countries spend an hour (which to them is significantly less than $10 of their time).
  - ddalex 6y ago
    that's like 500-1000 USD for the average middle class american - a steep price to pay for a membership with no obvious benefits I wonder why can't score IDs by page-rank them - one's identity gets credibility based on the social score - hacker news manages to be quite effective at preventing spam using this technique
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      > that's like 500-1000 USD for the average middle class american Which would be $50-$100/year, i.e. still not very much. Recall that it costs significantly more than that to have internet access. > a steep price to pay for a membership with no obvious benefits The obvious benefit being that you get to be in the same network as the people in rich countries, and that network is not overrun by spam or controlled by a multinational conglomerate that uses its ownership of the means of communication to cost you significantly more than $10. > I wonder why can't score IDs by page-rank them - one's identity gets credibility based on the social score - hacker news manages to be quite effective at preventing spam using this technique What do you do with new IDs that have no reputation? If they can't post they can't earn a reputation, if they can post they can spam.