Urbit crowdsale is now live
sale.urbit.org
sale.urbit.org
All I can gather from their video is that they're trying the internet again with a different approach (built-in encryption, tools to far more easily build decentralized applications, your data is yours, and a point about API stuff that I don't quite grasp yet.)
Their goal is to be a self-governing digital republic, whatever that might mean.
As the guy says in the end, it's not up to them what urbit will become, it's up to us (the people who develop for urbit).
That's how I understood their video
Soooo... I'm not too sure why building (arguably?) better tools would result in a "better" internet. Additionally, I'm not too sure what the advantages are for end-users for decentralized applications.
So to conclude, it's up to the developers to find valid use-cases for urbit. Just like how it's up to developers to find valid use-cases for ethereum. Decentralized toolchains (like ethereum, other blockchain-things and urbit) are in their infancy, nobody really knows if they'll sprout useful use-cases or not.
Tl;DR Experimentation and uncertainty
From reading the whitepaper it seemed like they were building a distributed network where everything is somewhat abstracted.
I thought Ethereum was silly and pointless but I at least somewhat understood what it tried to be, this is like literally something that looks to me that came off https://www.reddit.com/r/VXJunkies/
It's a decentralized internet, where your computer is the server, and it communicates directly with other computers by calling directly to their addresses.
As a result, e.g. your facebook data is stored on your computer, and other facebook users call your computer for posts.
Because the data is stored locally, and called through relatively universal APIs, any app can be written to call and display from those APIs, combine them, and let them inform each-other in any way you desire.
You can put your facebook in your reddit in your gmail.
That all runs inside a VM which ties your data to your address, so your identity (real or pseudonym) is singular, and uniform across all apps. This creates a real cost to ugly behavior, like spamming or trolling, as addresses are too limited to burn through willy-nilly.
Apps running on that VM are coded in a rather confusing functional language. Lots of people think he made it that confusing to stop newbs from writing for it.
I bought a star.
As for the infrastructure, that's a rather more esoteric concern. It needs a distinguishing term.
My new one-line description of Urbit: "Diaspora in INTERCAL on a blockchain by VXJunkies."
Edit: It looks like the story has been [flagged].
What gives Urbit address space value is the notion of reputation tie to it's addresses which is current IPv4/6 infrastructure where addresses can be reassigned. If you ruin a Planet (read address) by using it to issue spam (just an example) on the Urbit network, services will likely have been designed to stop servicing bad actors and the Planet will become useless.
You will have to ruin more planets to continue your bad behavior. This can be extended to many more examples like trolling on Urbit-hosted forums for instance.
You may end up getting the benefit of the social pressure that currently exists in our society on the internet, which you currently cannot benefit from (however plenty of people benefit from the lack of such pressure).
Therefore, we can speculate citizens will attribute value to Urbit (and not the Alt-Urbit) based on the fact that we've already done much work in filtering out bad actors. You can imagine automated phone calling machine to push Ads to you on top of a Twilio based service layer on Urbit to have no chance of thriving freeing you from having to waste bandwith and time on such calls in an idealized future.
See, it seems nobody understood that the very first thing people do in a new social space is see how it actually works (not just how it's claimed to work) and how the social boundaries work.
For an example of fully rampant typical mind fallacy in Urbit, see the original 2013 version of the security chapter: http://archive.is/UK8So About two-thirds of the way down, you can actually watch Yarvin transmute into Moldbug as he starts pontificating on how humans communicating on a network should work, and never mind the observable evidence of how they’ve actually behaved whenever each of the conditions he describes have obtained; oblivious that the very first thing people will do with Urbit is mess with its assumptions, in ways that its creator literally could not foresee (due to typical mind fallacy), though he might reasonably have been expected to (given the entire history of people on the internet).
Yarvin doesn't seem to understand this. He explicitly stated in his blogging as "Moldbug" his belief that order is good and chaos is bad as a universal principle, a visceral belief. (in http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/02/from-mi... )
The trouble is that the real world doesn't work like that, and literally all the interesting stuff happens at the boundary between order and chaos.
(Phil Sandifer's recent book Neoreaction a Basilisk goes into this point about Yarvin's belief system in some detail.)
And, now the number sold is up to 340...
Edit: Make that 361 (2 min later).
Edit: Make that 421 (9 min later).
Edit: Make that 471 (11 min later)
so it's a block of addresses
What did you expect them to take shiny sea shells?
As for the Addresses Urbit needs to run on something, the projec it so vague and the terms they are using are so for lack of better words ludicrous that I can't even understand what they are selling even after reading the white paper.
Data lifestreams, Digital reputation, all of that sounds like complete technobabel to me.