Urbit / Primer (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Urbit / Primer (2019)

urbit.org

49 pointsnetworked5 comments

The introduction of this primer and the launch of the Ethereum registry coincides with Urbit's founder, Curtis Yarvin, leaving the company [1]. It's possible that this could increase the reputation of Urbit, accounting for those who have political issues with Yarvin, who used to blog as Mencius Moldbug. At some point a few years ago when some controversy arose, he came into the HN comments to duke it out a bit.

I didn't care about the blog posts that most people cared about, but I did care that he seemed to be set up as some kind of "overlord" of Urbit, with control over development and personally owning a large amount of the address space, combined with the sort of high-tech slave grid mentality envisioned in this post [2] where he argued that putting ankle bracelets on the entire population of say, Iraq, was an appropriate way to run the country. A modest proposal? Probably, but it gave me a bad feeling.

According to Yarvin, he gave up almost all his personal address space to urbit.org, which is intended to be a foundation for future development. The primer emphasizes a diversity of communities without central control. Urbit has always been a very intriguing concept to me, and I hope it finds success.

[1] https://urbit.org/posts/essays/a-founders-farewell/ [2] https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/09/how-to-occu...

I was wondering when these folks would pick up blockchain. Their particular brand of feudalism weirdly synergizes with the general philosophy of the blockchain crowd, despite them appearing to be at odds. Maybe it's the semi sovereign citizen mindset that crops up in both?

In past posts on the fora at urbit.org, it was explained that while identities would be on the blockchain(ie who owns what star or galaxy), OS updates would still flow down from the top hierarchically(with each galaxy or star adding their own modifications). I wonder if things have changed since then? Are operating system updates voted on by the community with hashes of the binaries perhaps stored on the blockchain or in some forum within the community?

Curtis talks about this in his farewell letter

https://urbit.org/posts/essays/a-founders-farewell/#urbit--a...

>Urbit's distribution and sponsorship hierarchy of galaxies, stars and planets is not designed as a political structure, or even a social structure.

>Socially and politically, Urbit is a flat network of planets.

>The sponsorship hierarchy and the senate of galaxies ... are technical governance mechanisms. ... Because sponsorship has an escape mechanism, it is not a feudal bond

AFAICT the hierarchical part (with Azimuth) is essentially just for routing packets while the application layer stuff like chat is effectively peer-to-peer.

I still don’t understand the primary use case. Decentralized cloud? Okay, fine. But what is the value add? It is infinitely easier to use an existing cloud provider than to use Urbit’s system.

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