4 ms·

FWIW here's an explainer I wrote up a year ago for a friend who asked. I'm not affiliated with urbit, except that I want a product that does what it does (whic

FWIW here's an explainer I wrote up a year ago for a friend who asked. I'm not affiliated with urbit, except that I want a product that does what it does (which at this point means I'm hoping someone reinvents it, because it seems fatally doomed by how hated the founder is). What is Urbit? Urbit is a virtual machine OS for server-side applications. If you imagine a future in which it is common for non-technical people to rent cloud server space on which to host server-side applications (say, a small blog, a mastodon node, a minecraft server, etc), Urbit aspires to be a good platform on which to host them. Urbit features: 1. All input events (http request to an urbit-based api, signed message from another urbit, keystroke from console, etc) are transactions which change the OS state (or don't, if they fail). As a result, it should be impossible for a transaction to fail halfway through and leave the urbit instance hosed. 2. Exactly-once messaging between nodes. This is possible because nodes have persistent connections; disconnection is indistinguishable from long latency. This may sound minor, but it is a huge part of what makes urbit novel and (theoretically) stable and secure. 3. Built-in identity and auth. An urbit instance can't boot without an identity, which serves as username, network-routing address, and also as the public key with which all outgoing messages are encrypted. In practical terms, this means no urbit app or service needs to deal with logins or passwords or crypto. 4. There are only 2^32 first-class identities, which makes urbit a de facto reputation network. This is to minimize malicious behavior; if an identity costs $5, and you can only make $2 from spamming before that identity is blacklisted, no one will spam. 5. The urbit network is hierachically federated, and hence resistant to censorship. (Of course, this is a misfeature if you want to be able to censor people off of the networks you participate in) 6. It's not there yet, but the urbit kernel aspires to be so small and simple and formally-provably-correct that at some point it's done. As in, done done - no features to add, no bugs to fix, done. A lot of the design decisions (some of which are wildly unperformant) make no sense unless you take this goal in to account. More on that here: https://urbit.org/blog/toward-a-frozen-operating-system https://urbit.org/blog/toward-a-frozen-operating-system Main Criticisms: 1. The founder has objectionable politics/beliefs. For its first decade, urbit was the solo project of one Curtis Yarvin, who moonlighted as an alt-right-ish blogger, and flamed out of polite society as a result. I've read a tiny bit, it was pretty dumb. The tl;dr is that he wants to get rid of democracy and bring back feudal monarchies. He also said some pretty racist stuff from time to time and that's the main reason everyone hates him. He left the project several years ago, which accomplished absolutely nothing in terms of anyone hating it any less. 2. The language is very strange and possibly bad. By "language", I mean both the programming language (hoon, the native language you write urbit apps in) and urbit's terms for core concepts, almost all of which have new, made-up names. More info here: https://hooniversity.org/urbit-and-hoon-glossary/ https://hooniversity.org/urbit-and-hoon-glossary/ 3. A lot of people think it's a shitcoin of some kind. AFAICT this is objectively not true. There's no way anyone will make any amount of money speculating on urbit unless it works in the sense that it's a good OS that millions of people want to use. Besides, if it were some kind of scam, it would've fallen apart when the founder left under a black cloud. That didn't happen; it is still chugging along. There are competent programmers who understand it and have worked on it for a year or two and still think it's genuinely good technology and continue to work on it for that reason.

gremlinsinc 4y ago
I want something similar but that has true validated id's, and separate person accounts and business accounts. Person accounts then would have taxation built in and UBI and mutual aid, and there'd be some algorithm that taxes and pays dividends based on how much you hodl and how much you utilize or transfer in a month, etc... essentially if your payment habits are that of a poor person you'd get more UBI if your spending habits are that of Elon Musk you'd pay taxes. There'd also be a cap on how much your account could hold to basically bar billionaires and oligarchs from controlling the system. Maybe something like x amount times the average users' monthly income(transactions received). Starting out it'd aim for like 500 million being a cap, and try to aim to keep some sort of stable price as well. Business accounts wouldn't have the caps because I mean a huge company like walmart has tons of money come in for payroll, etc.. and just there'd be no way to really handle that, and you want businesses to accept the currency as utilization is everything. I think possibly having a dedicated exchange built in as well that basically floods the market with new dollars if stability starts to fade. Say the price of a coin is $10 usd, it would autotax the top 50% of earners and redistribute that to the bottom 50%, or something similar or mint new currency and distribute from that -- essentially to encourage prices to remain stable. Now combine that w/ all the other features of something like urbit os, and I think you've got something. TLDR: Imagine if as a US citizen you were born with an id and a bank account tied to that id. It's the only bank account you can have, it's the only bank. Now imagine there's a cap to that account and every billionaire ceases to exist because they'd be taxed at 100% until they're max holdings are 500 million. You can't hide money, or get separate accounts, etc... There are no loopholes as it's all by smart contract.
olah_1 4y ago
>5. The urbit network is hierachically federated, and hence resistant to censorship. This is not true. Urbit is essentially a proof-of-stake network where the Galaxies and Stars have the authority to ban anyone off the network that they want. After Planets are already routed to some of their friends, they can keep those connections, but if a Planet is refused service by Stars, it will be limited in reach and capabilities. The whole point is that there is accountability in the system and there does need to be a kind of Byzantine (literally it is set up like an empire) consensus. If you're banned by one Star, you can still be served by another Star, but it does affect the reputation (not hard-coded, but actual) of the Star that serves unsavory Planets. It's not far off from the Fediverse in this regard.

gremlinsinc 4y ago

I want something similar but that has true validated id's, and separate person accounts and business accounts. Person accounts then would have taxation built in and UBI and mutual aid, and there'd be some algorithm that taxes and pays dividends based on how much you hodl and how much you utilize or transfer in a month, etc... essentially if your payment habits are that of a poor person you'd get more UBI if your spending habits are that of Elon Musk you'd pay taxes. There'd also be a cap on how much your account could hold to basically bar billionaires and oligarchs from controlling the system. Maybe something like x amount times the average users' monthly income(transactions received). Starting out it'd aim for like 500 million being a cap, and try to aim to keep some sort of stable price as well. Business accounts wouldn't have the caps because I mean a huge company like walmart has tons of money come in for payroll, etc.. and just there'd be no way to really handle that, and you want businesses to accept the currency as utilization is everything. I think possibly having a dedicated exchange built in as well that basically floods the market with new dollars if stability starts to fade. Say the price of a coin is $10 usd, it would autotax the top 50% of earners and redistribute that to the bottom 50%, or something similar or mint new currency and distribute from that -- essentially to encourage prices to remain stable. Now combine that w/ all the other features of something like urbit os, and I think you've got something. TLDR: Imagine if as a US citizen you were born with an id and a bank account tied to that id. It's the only bank account you can have, it's the only bank. Now imagine there's a cap to that account and every billionaire ceases to exist because they'd be taxed at 100% until they're max holdings are 500 million. You can't hide money, or get separate accounts, etc... There are no loopholes as it's all by smart contract.

olah_1 4y ago

>5. The urbit network is hierachically federated, and hence resistant to censorship. This is not true. Urbit is essentially a proof-of-stake network where the Galaxies and Stars have the authority to ban anyone off the network that they want. After Planets are already routed to some of their friends, they can keep those connections, but if a Planet is refused service by Stars, it will be limited in reach and capabilities. The whole point is that there is accountability in the system and there does need to be a kind of Byzantine (literally it is set up like an empire) consensus. If you're banned by one Star, you can still be served by another Star, but it does affect the reputation (not hard-coded, but actual) of the Star that serves unsavory Planets. It's not far off from the Fediverse in this regard.