3 ms·

> Urbit has more sinister motives, not least of which is to separate fools from their money by selling them "real estate" in the Urbit cyberworld. How is payin

by defen 6y ago

> Urbit has more sinister motives, not least of which is to separate fools from their money by selling them "real estate" in the Urbit cyberworld. How is paying $20, once, for an Urbit planet different than paying $20/month to play an online game? How else would you propose to have at least some minimal level of protection against spammers / bad actors? My take is that they went with all their bizarre design decisions in order to keep normies and entryists out for as long as possible.

lisper 6y ago
The original parcels of Urbit address space went for a lot more than $20.
- tripledunit 6y ago
  You have no idea what you're talking about. The original parcels of urbit address space were given away for free or as contest prizes. Then there were two crowdsales in 2016 and 2017 which both priced address space at less than one cent! There were a few early seed investors as well. I'm not sure what their terms were, but I highly doubt they were massively worse than the crowdsales which occurred later in the project
  - lisper 6y ago
    I have some idea what I'm talking about. I was pitched on Urbit by Curtis himself on April 20, 2012, long before it launched, and before it was even called Urbit. He tried to sell me a block of Urbit address space at the time. I don't remember the asking price, but it was substantial, many thousands of dollars. I declined. Yes, the crowdsales priced individual addresses at less than one cent, but it's a 64-bit address space, so even at one cent that puts the gross valuation of Urbit at many orders magnitude greater than the gross planetary product since the dawn of human history. I'd say that's overvalued. Also, the addresses are not sold individually but in large blocks, with part of the pitch being that people who get in early can turn around and sell parts of their holdings to greater fools. If memory serves, the first crowdsale raised $500k. So even at 1 cent per, someone ended up writing some pretty big checks.
    - tripledunit 6y ago
      No, you don't have any idea what you're talking about and you continue to display this ignorance >He tried to sell me a block of Urbit address space at the time. I don't remember the asking price, but it was substantial, many thousands of dollars Okay, many thousands of dollars for how big a block of address space? I'm guessing it was FAR, FAR less than $20 per planet. Because, you know, that's how technical projects like this work. The price of address space has been going up over time as development of the project and engagement with the network increases and risk decreases >Yes, the crowdsales priced individual addresses at less than one cent, but it's a 64-bit address space, so even at one cent that puts the gross valuation of Urbit at many orders magnitude greater than the gross planetary product since the dawn of human history Oh boy. No, the price I quoted you there was less than one cent per planet, because that's the unit that we're talking about here. Planets are the 32 bit level of the address space, so that puts the gross valuation at around $40 million Maybe you think that's still overvalued; I have no interest in speculating myself. But the point is that you are absolutely wrong about the $20 per planet figure above being a lot less than earlier figures >the addresses are not sold individually but in large blocks, with part of the pitch being that people who get in early can turn around and sell parts of their holdings Which is true of pretty much any digital asset, corporate stock investment, etc. Yes, people investing money early in an experimental software project with explosive growth potential are probably speculating to try and make money down the line. You think this is shocking news to anyone?
    - Splined 6y ago
      You're either confused or the details have changed since you looked at it 8+ years ago. The address space for sale is 32-bit. There is also a 128-bit space that is free https://urbit.org/blog/the-urbit-address-space/ https://urbit.org/blog/the-urbit-address-space/
      - lisper 6y ago
        Actually, it's just a 128-bit address space (so I was wrong about it being 64-bit, but this just makes the problem that much worse). Parts of this space are divvied up IP-address style into 96-bit-wide blocks (and some other parcel sizes as well), so that carves out a 32-bit sub-space. But no matter how you slice it, the fact remains that they are selling a digital asset at a valuation that exceeds the total economic output of the known universe by several orders of magnitude. If that's not a scam, I don't know what is.
weare138 6y ago
>My take is that they went with all their bizarre design decisions in order to keep normies and entryists out for as long as possible But it's just complexity for the sake of complexity with no discernible benefit. It's contradictory and self-defeating to encourage developers to adopt Urbit while simultaneously purposely designing it just so developers won't adopt it. Urbit makes many weird and contrarian design choices without explanation. It's fine to explore ideas and try different different methodologies but you should at least be able to explain why you're choosing to do it and how it would be beneficial. Here's a good example from the documentation: A loobean is a Nock boolean - Nock, for mysterious reasons, uses 0 as true (always say "yes") and 1 as false (always say "no"). So they create an alternative to booleans that's just a backwards boolean? And their explanation for this? 'mysterious reasons' What?!? The only thing mysterious here is why any developer would use this.
- tripledunit 6y ago
  The mysterious part would be a joke. The actual reasoning, which Yarvin himself has explained, is to unify the underlying data values between booleans and c-style return codes. In C and unix, the convention is that 0 indicates program success and any other value indicates some kind of program failure. It's strange for the fundamental success code to be false when cast as a boolean, so it makes sense to either change the success codes or change the booleans. Changing the success codes would actually be pretty incoherent - what would you do, 0 and >1 values are failure and 1 is success? - so it makes more sense to change the booleans if something is going to change Not saying I agree it's worth the trouble. Even Yarvin agrees it wasn't worth the trouble. But he didn't just pull this idea out of nowhere

by defen 6y ago

lisper 6y ago

The original parcels of Urbit address space went for a lot more than $20.

tripledunit 6y ago
You have no idea what you're talking about. The original parcels of urbit address space were given away for free or as contest prizes. Then there were two crowdsales in 2016 and 2017 which both priced address space at less than one cent! There were a few early seed investors as well. I'm not sure what their terms were, but I highly doubt they were massively worse than the crowdsales which occurred later in the project
- lisper 6y ago
  I have some idea what I'm talking about. I was pitched on Urbit by Curtis himself on April 20, 2012, long before it launched, and before it was even called Urbit. He tried to sell me a block of Urbit address space at the time. I don't remember the asking price, but it was substantial, many thousands of dollars. I declined. Yes, the crowdsales priced individual addresses at less than one cent, but it's a 64-bit address space, so even at one cent that puts the gross valuation of Urbit at many orders magnitude greater than the gross planetary product since the dawn of human history. I'd say that's overvalued. Also, the addresses are not sold individually but in large blocks, with part of the pitch being that people who get in early can turn around and sell parts of their holdings to greater fools. If memory serves, the first crowdsale raised $500k. So even at 1 cent per, someone ended up writing some pretty big checks.
  - tripledunit 6y ago
    No, you don't have any idea what you're talking about and you continue to display this ignorance >He tried to sell me a block of Urbit address space at the time. I don't remember the asking price, but it was substantial, many thousands of dollars Okay, many thousands of dollars for how big a block of address space? I'm guessing it was FAR, FAR less than $20 per planet. Because, you know, that's how technical projects like this work. The price of address space has been going up over time as development of the project and engagement with the network increases and risk decreases >Yes, the crowdsales priced individual addresses at less than one cent, but it's a 64-bit address space, so even at one cent that puts the gross valuation of Urbit at many orders magnitude greater than the gross planetary product since the dawn of human history Oh boy. No, the price I quoted you there was less than one cent per planet, because that's the unit that we're talking about here. Planets are the 32 bit level of the address space, so that puts the gross valuation at around $40 million Maybe you think that's still overvalued; I have no interest in speculating myself. But the point is that you are absolutely wrong about the $20 per planet figure above being a lot less than earlier figures >the addresses are not sold individually but in large blocks, with part of the pitch being that people who get in early can turn around and sell parts of their holdings Which is true of pretty much any digital asset, corporate stock investment, etc. Yes, people investing money early in an experimental software project with explosive growth potential are probably speculating to try and make money down the line. You think this is shocking news to anyone?
  - Splined 6y ago
    You're either confused or the details have changed since you looked at it 8+ years ago. The address space for sale is 32-bit. There is also a 128-bit space that is free https://urbit.org/blog/the-urbit-address-space/ https://urbit.org/blog/the-urbit-address-space/
    - lisper 6y ago
      Actually, it's just a 128-bit address space (so I was wrong about it being 64-bit, but this just makes the problem that much worse). Parts of this space are divvied up IP-address style into 96-bit-wide blocks (and some other parcel sizes as well), so that carves out a 32-bit sub-space. But no matter how you slice it, the fact remains that they are selling a digital asset at a valuation that exceeds the total economic output of the known universe by several orders of magnitude. If that's not a scam, I don't know what is.

weare138 6y ago

>My take is that they went with all their bizarre design decisions in order to keep normies and entryists out for as long as possible But it's just complexity for the sake of complexity with no discernible benefit. It's contradictory and self-defeating to encourage developers to adopt Urbit while simultaneously purposely designing it just so developers won't adopt it. Urbit makes many weird and contrarian design choices without explanation. It's fine to explore ideas and try different different methodologies but you should at least be able to explain why you're choosing to do it and how it would be beneficial. Here's a good example from the documentation: A loobean is a Nock boolean - Nock, for mysterious reasons, uses 0 as true (always say "yes") and 1 as false (always say "no"). So they create an alternative to booleans that's just a backwards boolean? And their explanation for this? 'mysterious reasons' What?!? The only thing mysterious here is why any developer would use this.

tripledunit 6y ago
The mysterious part would be a joke. The actual reasoning, which Yarvin himself has explained, is to unify the underlying data values between booleans and c-style return codes. In C and unix, the convention is that 0 indicates program success and any other value indicates some kind of program failure. It's strange for the fundamental success code to be false when cast as a boolean, so it makes sense to either change the success codes or change the booleans. Changing the success codes would actually be pretty incoherent - what would you do, 0 and >1 values are failure and 1 is success? - so it makes more sense to change the booleans if something is going to change Not saying I agree it's worth the trouble. Even Yarvin agrees it wasn't worth the trouble. But he didn't just pull this idea out of nowhere