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Comment by hirsin | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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