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The part you buy is dns that runs on ethereum (iirc), but with artificial scarcity because they want to make money. This part is completely pointless, because the actual system could work as well on ens directly, or even dns.

The actual urbit is like docker with standard API for communication between all apps on different containers, but it runs on a lisp-machine like architecture, except instead of lisp there's a new esoteric language called Hoon.

If not for the scammy wealth extraction attempt with the name system, I would consider it to be in the same general category as TempleOS - a form of art.

That's a bit cynical, I think. The address space has had a few "official" rationales because it serves a handful of duties at the same time; again, explaining a system is different than explaining a product, but pitching a system as a product is difficult. You often end up framing the system-as-product a specific way each time.

> Urbit is a friendly network: a network on which you can assume that a stranger is nice until proven nasty. Friendliness is a direct consequence of scarce, individually owned identities. We're not changing human nature, just creating the right economic incentives.

> Most forms of network abuse are "Sybil attacks": they rely on an infinite supply of fresh identities. Scarcity makes reputation work. Spam is a business; if the cost of a new planet exceeds the amount of money you can make by spamming from that planet until its reputation is trashed, there will be no spam. [1]

While it's true an intent was selling the parts of the address space Tlon has to fund its development, its business model for consumers going forward isn't really to sell you planets; it's more about bootstrapping the project and offering hosting and support.

For investors, purchasing address space (i.e. a galaxy or star within Tlon's ownership) is a way of investing in an asset that could be a source of income while also having some influence over how the network changes in the future, in the way a stockholder would a company.

Essentially the address space is an attempt to create and maintain ideal incentives for the ICANN-esque players (galaxies), down to the ISP-esque players (stars) and the everyday user (planets), and their devices or additional users (moons) in a way that sustains the entire network.

[1] https://urbit.org/blog/the-urbit-address-space/

These sorts of optimistic beliefs that all people have some inherent good inside them, and that good-faith attempts will rule the day, never seem to survive any actual economic incentives.

Some lessons from neoliberalism are worth considering here. Sometimes people want to be fed trashy content. In those situations, planets offering trash will be popular enough to pay for the cost of (renting) the planet. (And make no mistake, rent and landlords are an inherent part of any real-estate offering!) So there will be spam, but it will look and taste like the offerings of Disney and Vicom, of Hasbro and Mattel, of Unilever and GSK.

Some lessons from other distributed systems are also worth considering. Technically, messages are always delivered by peers, despite the fact that the messages may have been composed by faraway unknown senders. This leads to local topological reasoning, and webs of trust based on peer-to-peer acquaintance. This can offer better performance and resiliency against attacks than Urbit's top-down neofeudal hierarchy of reputations.

I don't really want to support Tlon. If this is truly federated, then there ought not need be any corporate control over the system. History has shown that a few extremely ethical and competent hackers are more valuable in terms of software quality and usability than any sort of corporate planning.

I do appreciate that, by explicitly embracing blockchains, Urbit has demystified one part of its design: What makes Urbit property valuable? Only the hidden cryptographic keys at the base of Urbit's own signing system give any scarcity, and thus any value, to otherwise-uninteresting bitstrings. In other words, it's as valuable as ZCash or Bitcoin or any other digital gold; it's a Satoshi scheme.

u'i n'ae lojbo .i ku'i ka'eku https://zod.that.world/giveaway/

Funny, because Urbit’s address space has been around for longer than ENS, and makes different design tradeoffs than DNS. https://urbit.org/blog/pki-maze/

The place where a company puts a paywall is always arbitrary. Google puts it at the ad auction, and tries to give away devices and services for (close to) free. Apple puts it at the device purchase and tries to give away the software for (close to) free.

These decisions are arbitrary. You just make a bet that you can be attractive in a certain light, and you charge money in that light, and try to make every adjacent activity free.

I just read urbit.org's introduction that sounds like a FSF or EFF release on how we are going to take back computers. You seem to be saying this is sleazy Astroturfing (a .org manifesto) by a company that wants to compete in the system it just condemned.

I think I am restating the point you are making, and I agree. If this project finds a way to charge me a fair price and provides me with the services now only available under a surveillance capitalist model, then I'm fine with it. As Tim O'Reilly says: "Money is like gas in the car — you need to pay attention or you’ll end up on the side of the road — but a well-lived life is not a tour of gas stations!" This project shouldn't be left by the side of the road

Urbit “planet” is like a VM, but running an OS developed completely independently from existing computing words. There is a custom language, a custom network layer, a custom cryptography and custom identity system. There are even custom words for common terms. This has no GUI, but it does has a web interface that you can connect to.

From the practical standpoint, you have a linux process running from a data directory. You run it, and the you can access it via CLI and via web interface (which also has a terminal-like webapp). It then uses regular IP to talk to other urbits in P2P fashion.

From what I could find, the whole thing is full of magic and pretty opaque - you are only supposed to interact with it by running it and typing commands there. In particular, you’d probably want to back it up. The only instructions I could find is to stop it and tar it up, and back up manually. Better do it often if you want your “digital life” to be safe.

> custom cryptography

Just lost me.

> you are only supposed to interact with it by running it and typing commands

So, "the last computer you'll ever need" ... other than my phone, because the last time I wanted to type commands on a phone-sized device, was back when I was wet-dreaming over the Sharp Zaurus.

Given the artificial scarcity of the IDs and the semi-mystical woo describing the proposition, my spidey-sense is telling me some smart people have been busy devising an naivety-magnet, all the better to part people from their money ("buy a planet"...um, ok).

Oh man I remember the first time my buddy showed me his Zaurus out front of a bar in NYC - he had some kind of Remote Desktop with a Linux shell in that tiny screen. He had to scroll around to see stuff with the stylus in a not-so-user-friendly a manner and the input was slow as balls but I was absolutely enamored. I at the time was very proud of my newly released Motorola Razr in my pocket yet here was my buddy with this magic device showing me up. Thanks for the trip :)

Each planet can generate 2^32 moons, which are subsidiary processes. Your phone could run one of those.

You can also generate a comet, which is effectively identified by the hash of its public key. Those are free; while eventually planets have some notional advantages, notably a default positive reputation, at the moment there are no downsides.

As far as I’m aware, there is no custom cryptography, and you can interact with it through a web UI now, not just through commands. Not sure where they got that idea.

Re custom crypto: random searches in github show plenty of it. I have no idea if this is an experiment or used in main code, but it is certainly present. Here is one example: [0]

> This raw interface is vaguely modeled on the haskell aos-signature package, but is written in terms of ed25519 primitives instead of general ECC and changes how linkage tags are computed...

Re command line: I was based it off the public docs. Go to "https://urbit.org", click on "install". The very end of the instructions say:

> Type (add 2 2) into the Dojo.

Maybe "install" is wrong section? I went to "docs" instead, from that "operators manual" seems most user-friendly. But it is text only as well:

> Let's join the ~dopzod/urbit-help channel. Use ctrl-x to switch from the Dojo prompt to the Chat prompt. Then:

> ~sampel-palnet:chat-cli/ ;join ~dopzod/urbit-help

The only reference to web UI I found was in "Using Bridge" section, but that seems a pre-requisite to set up the system, not part of the system itself.

If there are web UIs, you really need to document them better. Some screenshots would be great, for example.

[0] https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/7ce50ad75e23fcec0c8cb6ad...

>There are even custom words for common terms.

I think this is like half the problem

Urbit is an overlay OS, a functional VM you can run that does strictly typed p2p networking with other urbits. So, it’s software you run on your computer or on a VPS. The thing you’re looking at buying is the Urbit equivalent of a domain name. You can read more about the design decisions in their PKI blog post. (Most recent one, I think)

Is an overlay OS a program that runs on another OS?

Yes. Not exactly a standard term, but there is no standard term for what Urbit is. It's VM, personal server, yes -- but those don't clearly convey the scope of the project.

How is it a personal server if I need a personal server to run it? Am I buying compute power on other people's computers? Also, why call it an OS if it doesn't replace existing ones?

It’s a personal server OS. MS-DOS was emulated on mainframes before it was run directly on hardware. Urbit wants to do the same, starting by being emulated on traditional computer OSes, and eventually moving to bare metal.

What's a personal server OS? Will I use it to write text documents and browse the web? Can I run the X Windowing system on it? It appears to me it's currently accessed through a browser. Is that temporary?

The primary way you access any web server is through a browser.

You can access your Urbit server by command line, or by web interface.

Ah. I assumed a Server OS was an OS to run servers, not a server that exposes an OS. Thanks for the clarification!

As with basically every distributed or 'cloud' system that claims to provide a solution to storing peoples data, my first question is always "What if my data is in excess of 100TB?" Someone has to have some hardware somewhere that's storing that much data, and it's not cheap to acquire, maintain, or operate that hardware. So if they're claiming I just don't need to worry about data storage any more... I'm going to worry.

> The page "Understanding Urbit" also says that Urbit OS "can never show you ads".

I don't understand this dogma that "ads = bad". At most, they're an annoyance. Not evil. They can influence purchases, but the final act of consumption is solely the individual's.

They're an easy target, but attacking them distracts from the much larger problem of government data collection and censorship.

Urbit is a front for a nascent cult, kind of like Shen Yun is a front for the Falun Gong [1], or "What the bleep do we know?" was a front for Ramtha's School of Enlightenment [2].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/12/shen-yun-falun-...

[2] https://whatthebleep.com/portfolio-item/ramtha/

This is a pretty strong statement. Can you provide details to back it up? I’m interested because Urbit seems at the edge of genius that is ahead of its time and obscure and inaccessible. The hoon programming language seem quite ambitious.

> genius that is ahead of its time

...for anyone who hasn't seen the hoon programming language, take a look (the top is all comments, scroll down a bit); I'll wait: https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit/blob/master/aug/les/arvo/h...

I submit that the line between genius and insanity is sometimes so fine as to be invisible.

The obscurity and inaccessibility are classic cult tactics. The obscurity and inaccessibility and weird terminology is not there to provide functionality, it's there solely to mislead, to make it appear that there's something deep and mysterious going on that only the elect and enlightened can access. (They even admit as much: "Hoon, for the most part, is weird by design...") If you actually dig into the technical details (and yes, I did) you will find that there is no there there. In point of fact, the functional parts of the system are all really written in C (pieces of code which in Urbit-speak are called Jets, again in an effort to obscure the underlying truth).

Other items of evidence:

1. Urbit was founded by Curtis Yarvin, who writes a blog under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. He espouses an extreme right-wing Ayn-Randian political philosophy. Go look him up and read some of his writing (he's quite prolific) and see for yourself. I suggest starting with [1].

2. Urbit makes extreme and unjustified claims about itself. The very first sentence on the web site is (as I write this) "Urbit is your last computer." Well, no, it's not. It's not even a computer at all. It's software. It's a badly designed, badly written, badly documented federated social network. And that's pretty much all it is.

3. Buried deep inside Urbit is a scam to take your money. The scam is quite well hidden, but it's pretty obvious once your attention is drawn to it. Part of the Urbit design is an address space analogous to IP addresses. The Urbit people call this address space "real estate" and they call Urbit "the biggest real estate platform in the world" [2]. They claim that these addresses have value because they are scarce [3]. Except that they aren't. The Urbit address space is 128 bits wide, meaning that there are vastly more Urbit addresses than there are elementary particles in the universe. But this fact is conveniently obscured in their documentation.

If you want what Urbit claims to provide, a computer that you control, just get a Linux machine. Gnu/Linux has its own political baggage attached to it, but it's not a scam. It has its obscure bits, but that obscurity is rooted in history rather than a deliberate attempt to mislead.

---

[1] https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/11/patchwork-p...

[2] https://coinidol.com/urbit-data-the-next-real-estate-revolut...

[3] https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/urbit-id/

Thanks. I did a deep dive. Fascinating how brilliant people like Yarvin can miss the boat on basics like compassion and empathy for other beings.

> Thanks.

You bet.

> I did a deep dive.

That was fast.

> brilliant people like Yarvin

I don't think he's all that brilliant. He does have one extraordinary skill, and that is to make himself appear brilliant by being prolific and obscure and using other psychological tactics. This is a very useful skill (Donald Trump used it to become president) but I think it is very important to distinguish it from actual brilliance. To my knowledge, Curtis has never done anything that is actually brilliant.

your link [2] is totally unrelated to urbit

Heh, you're right. Interesting that there are two things out there both using the label "Urbit" and both with very similar rhetoric, but not at all the same thing.

Here's a better link:

https://steemit.com/crypto-news/@dana-edwards/urbit-and-digi...

and another straight from the horse's mouth:

https://urbit.org/blog/the-urbit-address-space/

looks contradictory: "The obscurity and inaccessibility are classic cult tactics" with "If you actually dig into the technical details (and yes, I did) you will find that there is no there there"

Is inaccessible but you dig into it, is obscure but are pieces of code written in C.