Have you been following Urbit? What are you thoughts on the sale, and will you be buying in or not?
Urbit has the most coherent vision for why decentralized computing is necessary across all other initiatives in this space. They understand the history behind topics of trust, identity, and governance in building new software platforms, in ways that other initiatives (especially blockchain-based communities) sorely lack, or are unable to communicate effectively.
Compare to Ethereum, which has a similar scale of ambition, but with a far less trustworthy and transparent leadership team, who has (despite these problems) still managed to raise huge interest in a currency with a several-billion-dollar market cap. If you just spend time reading Urbit docs vs Ethereum docs, I believe the difference in clarity of vision will become apparent to you.
I bought two stars and am considering buying a third.
Who cares about the ideology behind it? Does anyone pick their linux distro based on the maintainer's political blog? "Oh, one of the devs said something in 2007 about immigrants I didn't like, and..." uh huh. What about the insanely ambitious attempt to replace unix, any comments on that?
Second, people definitely do choose their linux distributions based on ideology. The Debian project, in particular, has a very well established ideology. They also choose which distributions they spend money on or donate money to (the relevant comparison to purchasing stars as discussed here) based on ideology.
Third, Urbit is a different category of thing from a Linux distribution. Urbit is a network. A network designed and organized based on a particular principle can impose that principle on the way that people on the network act, interact, and relate on the network in ways that a Linux distribution cannot. I am not certain whether this accurately describes Urbit. Statements from the project and its developers have suggested to me that this has been a goal, but they may have retreated from that since.
this is certainly the case -- the scarcity of resources (about 4b cryptographic identities called 'planets', along with an associated reputation system) is meant to introduce something like proof-of-stake, where incentives are created that make it more expensive to act in bad faith (trolling[1], spamming) than the bad faith behavior is worth.
this is an interesting read the head developer wrote a few years ago about these subjects: https://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/03/future...
[1] 'trolling' in this case would be determined by local 'communities' on the network, and not a central authority a la the current internet (fb, twitter, etc)
Sure, sorry, I meant that it's not the norm, not that it never happens ever. My post was unnecessarily argumentative in tone, due to frustration with some past urbit discussions here.
> A network designed and organized based on a particular principle can impose that principle on the way that people on the network act
This is a very abstract point, which may be true in the general sense, but I was talking about Urbit in particular. Consider two assertions:
1. Urbit is so amazing and useful and wonderful that it's reasonable to imagine people all over the world using it every day for decades to come 2. The guy who wrote Urbit is racist/authoritarian/something else, as proven from a close textual analysis of his old blog posts
The point I was ranting about is that it seems like the truth or falsity of those two statements is completely separate, and that the former ought to be a lot more interesting than the latter. I don't think that's proven to be the case.
Yes, people pick Linux distributions based on the maintaining organization's ideology (heck, they pick Linux itself for ideological reasons.)
There was no sale link anywhere on the site I could find (and I was there in the throes of the sale).
There was no mention of a need for an invite code to purchase a star. Or how to get one.
Even reading the documentation I'm still very hazy how a star is used other than real estate. There's no documentation about how a star code (assuming its a thing) is redeemed or associated or used.
The price points seem reasonable for the scale of what they're building. I hope they put some of the profit into better marketing and explanation coverage.
People have complained about the documentation forever, but I think it's just hard to explain what it is, because it is pretty novel. If you chew through some of the available stuff and have further questions, reply to me, I'm as likely to give a useful answer as anyone.