Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane
wejn.org
wejn.org
Definitely the most concerning part of Urbit, for me at least, is the obscurantism of Hoon. Much like the author says, it's totally incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't read through every bit of the (lacking imo) documentation. Even a domain-specific language with a familiar syntax would be better, since at least a first-timer could grok basic logic/structure at first glance. This only compounds the security concerns, since reviewing any Hoon code requires being a domain expert - I doubt any security/crypto researchers will want to take a few weeks to learn Hoon just to audit something as obscure as Urbit. Hoon even has a kind of Lisp-y feel to it and Lisp lends itself well to the purely functional goals of Hoon/Nock, so I don't see why they couldn't have just made Hoon a Lisp.
On the whole however, I'm hesitantly optimistic about the project. Most other works aiming to address Internet centralization just seem like band-aids (federated social networks still have problems with moderation/deplatforming, self-hosting just means running it in someone else's data center, etc.), and Urbit seems to be one of the few things willing to deal with the fundamental problems from the ground up.
Also, I'm kind of glad the author didn't mention Urbit's original author despite most other posts on the topic feeling the need to mention it. He's long since left the project but it seems as though it'll never be rid of his influence. At this point I just feel bad for the maintainers/users that will constantly be associated with the guy from now on.
The major design concersns raised by the above comment and the OP are inseparable from the original author, because he chose an extremely idiosyncratic language and system design that eschews all known standards and practices.
If people want to make the idea work, they should port it to a reputable language.
I think if they insist on not rebranding, they need to make it clearer that they disavow his political stuff, since the project sort of started as a vanity implementation of his ideas about monarchy or whatever.
> Urbit started back in 2002 as Curtis Yarvin’s personal project. Curtis developed the original prototype for Urbit and, separately, wrote a blog on history and politics under the pen name ‘Mencius Moldbug’.
> In early 2019, Curtis left the Urbit project and gave all of his voting interest (both as address space and voting shares in the company) back to Tlon. He retains a non-voting, minority interest in both the address space and the company — but is not involved in the day-to-day development or operations.
> Curtis laid the foundation for Urbit by delivering its first prototype but, since 2013, it has been refined and almost entirely rewritten by a community of developers. No one working on Urbit today had anything to do with Curtis’s writing. For the most part, we couldn’t be less interested in it.
> The community of people who build Urbit have widely varied ways of thinking and looking at the world, but they all share two things: the desire to build neutral infrastructure for all people and to think from first principles about hard problems. We welcome spirited debate and disagreement as a primary tool for refining our work. Successful infrastructure, we think, serves all people — no matter their background, culture, or worldview.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4bxf6f/im_curtis_yarv...
It ends up feeling like a very compact /Forth/ fused with a Lisp. There's some ideas at its core that feel very cool once you understand them, but also lead you to have to jump through a bunch of hoops when implementing normal functionality. It's worth seeing where changed assumptions led its design, and it /is/ intriguing.
But make no buts about it: the obscurantism is 100% intentional and part of the design. From what I recall, it's obscure to prevent shallow novices from being able to jump in an wreck the ecosystem. You want to learn, you have to be dedicated. I get the impulse, I really do, but this is too far in the opposite extreme.
The Urbit team/project has since walked back from this stance somewhat (or at least progressed Urbit also in the more accessible direction), probably due to criticism.
It ends up seeming more like an art project than a new technology.
What is obvious to some can be obscure for others, “metamask” is hardly a household name
On the subject of his views, my opinion is that the only way to really secure liberty is to inform the whole public of its value, and have those ideas of liberty receive a democratic sanction.
That leads to a genuinely libertarian society, that if fragmented, would lead to the emergence of new libertarian micro-states, instead of collections of serfs, who without their master, immediately revert to tyranny.
That's a euphemistic way to say he thought his views should be forced upon other people rather than having to convince them of their correctness in the public sphere.
> I suspect be saw in Urbit a non-political technological means of realizing his ultimate end, which was libertarianism, and not dictatorship.
You should read more about his views. I can't in good conscience recommend his writing because it's riddled with factual errors, but he definitely went far beyond libertarianism. He sees democracy as a failure and believes that absolute rule is more stable and prosperous and even more free than liberal democracy, and he's also unquestionably a racist.
As far as I’ve gleaned, the assertions that he’s a racist are heavily based on an encyclopedic (surface-level) interpretation that essentially boils down to: evolutionary biology is inevitably racist and therefore anybody who entertains the study is associatively a racist, James Damore, Bret Weinstein, style. The assertion is based on postmodern axioms describing what a racist ideology makes, not a western rationalist position that allows complex topics to be, well, complex.
In the current historical context, yes, it is. If you could somehow neutrally float outside context (you can't), or we lived in a different world, then maybe it wouldn't be.
The problem is not that studies and results themselves are racist (data can't be racist). The problem is that parts of society (across the board) want to find racism in the data and draw problematic conclusions, even when the practitioners who just want to explore the data avoid any such narrative conclusion, so they will. They'll even brand the practitioners as racist for engaging in the pursuit of a scientific understanding of the world and generating the data in the first place.
Rather than throw out an entire field of study that's relevant and important in medicine, psychology, biology, real sociology, education, politics, etc. a much more honest/level approach would be to attack the meta-level discussion around how we apply the results even when they might be problematic instead of branding anybody who references the data a racist. For example, if studies show that IQ can be associated at least at some level with gene expression (the reality is it's a complex mix of both biological lottery and social nurturing) then perhaps question the validity of applying IQ tests as gating functions in areas where they may be miss applied. Question whether the traits that IQ tests end up fuzzily measuring are in fact necessary, important, relevant, whatever. Perform your own studies to shed more light on the topic and evolve our understanding. And if the answer is still, "there seems to be a measurable, relevant, practical genetic difference" the fix your fucked up society (if that requires active political patches, so be it) and figure out how to incorporate the reality into your narrative, don't brand the data and anybody adjacent to it as deplorable.
The idea that you can dismiss an entire field of rational study because it yields uncomfortable data or even just asks uncomfortable questions is immensely reductive and frankly harmful to a healthy society. Traditional religious institutions learned how to incorporate science but not before bloody fights and unhealthy/illiberal attempts to brand and silence practitioners, heretics. Regardless, the cults lost and rationalism prevailed. Historical context is dynamic, not static, and attempts to apply anecdotal interpretations based on a first order derivative of the current context really miss a lot of the picture.
Race is a social category, not a genetic one, so his claim is ill-founded from the start. It is scientific consensus that genetics does not explain variations in IQ between racial groups. I don't think evolutionary biology is racist, I think people who believe it supports racism are hiding their basic racism behind scientists who don't agree with them about the nature of race.
There seem to be open questions which I wouldn't expect if there was strong consensus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption...
There are a lot of “problems” with that study and my intention is not to imply anything by linking it. My point is simply that I don’t think it’s honest to say scientists everywhere agree case closed.
I think a more accurate snapshot of the state of the art is: “the subject is incredibly difficult to study at all because we frankly don't really have a clue how the brain works. It seems there is a blend of both biological and social factors that contribute to a person’s perceived intellectual capacity. Whether any of those (genetic or social) factors are specific to a given race is essentially impossible to discern”.
> Totally agree race is a social construct.
Right, and if this is the case, then racial disparities in IQ are describing social differences, not genetic ones, because race is not genetic.
(* did not read the article yet)
I had Curtis pitch urbit to me in the very early days and I can assure you that he did not intend it to be a prank. He was deadly serious about it. I think his true motives were much darker. I think he wanted to start a cult following the model of L. Ron Hubbard. And I think he succeeded.
As someone who has never met Curtis but has been initiated into both the cult of urbit and the cult of lisp, I've sometimes wondered how familiar he was the works of the latter, as you can often see some familiar things when you squint, but it's covered up with strange materials, quite possibly of alien origins.
There is very rarely any externally visible lock-in. That's not how cults work. Cults work by building a community of people who perceive non-members as the enemy. Urbit builds that community by enticing geeks with the promise of something new and interesting and then keeps them in by leveraging the sunk-cost fallacy (people don't like to admit that all the effort they put into learning Hoon was a waste of time) and all the derision that comes from the outside from people who "don't get it".
Where you see nefarious intentions I see someone pursuing their own aesthetics, something that is very admirable and that I think more systems engineers should do. It's obviously not your aesthetic. It's not even really my aesthetic. It's Curtis's. But isn't "radically different from anything that has gone before" just a roundabout way of saying "cool?"
As far as the "cult" goes, I am reminded of that part in Jodorowsky's Dune where he's all "I am looking for my holy warriors!" For any system, whether technological, religious or philosophical to remain living and breathing, it needs its adherents and believers, and I see neither bad intentions nor bad outcomes here. Maybe that's just what happens when you are deep enough in the cult. But the cult is... calm. Cozy, even.
Is that so bad?
One thing I've enjoyed and learned a lot from while participating in blockchain and Urbit communities is the sheer difference in valance of conversations, from "this is entirely useless to the point of being a joke or fraud" to "the rest of the world is insane and finally something makes sense." There is irrational exuberance on both sides, but also deep, grounded takes diametrically opposed in their conclusions.
To be human!
Focus on the value proposition and these paradigm shifts could actually happen and benefit mankind.
I hope one day saner apps will adopt similar concepts, or reuse the urbit identity layer for identity purposes
My experience with spam [1] is that 90% of the non-trivially-filtered-kind comes from either taken over 'mainstream' email provider accounts (eg. gmail, yahoo, ...) or from exploited websites that can send email (eg. a wordpress or prestashop instance). Obviously dedicated 'spam' domains tend to get blocked _very_ fast on a multitutde of RBLs. It's the domains shared between spam and non-spam users that are the real problem.
Making domains more expensive probably won't help fighting spam. It will, however, increase the barrier to having an online identity to people who can't blow a couple months' rent on an urbit identity.
On the other hand, being able to register domain names without _any_ identity checks and oversight from legally responsible registrar entities could possibly increase abuse in some other ways.
[1] - I help run a mail server for a hackerspace.
And I wouldn't say "nobody can ban you" - quite the opposite, in fact: with Urbit every major network node gets to make its own choice about banning, and the system encourages that. And the obvious end state is for a setup like Mastodon (or, frankly, Twitter blocks) where nodes collaborate on identifying spammers, griefers, and other bad actors because nobody wants to do full-time moderation work for their own personal experience on the network. That means your permanent identity can easily be banned across large swaths of the network.
(I think that's actually totally fine, I just don't think it's true to say that nobody can ban you.)
For nearly twenty years now, PGP tutorials have often explained the importance of printing out a copy of your private key in a special OCR-readable font, and putting that in a safe place. Then you won't risk losing your private key even if all the devices it was stored on perish.
It is indeed quite similar to mastodon in the sense that other instances can ban you. The difference is that in mastodon your identity is usually located on an instance, and if that instance bans you, you lose your identity. In Urbit every identity has its own instance so your personal contact list will still be able to reach you.
Of course requiring everybody to run its own instance adds quite some friction for user onboarding, but that is an issue with the urbit network, not with the identity layer. You could imagine having your identity and linking it to a hosted instance, and later switch instance if the needs arise.
This is what I like about the idea of having your identity as a NFT, but clearly the way urbit currently uses it does not exploit the full potential of the idea.
As for losing your keys, if such a system would become widespread, most people would chose to have their keys hosted on a third party service, and only people who really care about maintaining full ownership would keep the keys to themselves.
Second, if you choose to keep your keys on a third-party service, then that third-party service can ban you.
If a star or galaxy wants to refuse to route to a planet, they can. A planet can then look for another star or galaxy which will route packets for them.
Also, if a planet ends up on another planet's personal banlist, that's it: the identities are durable and immutable, no amount of moving around will evade the ban. The annoying user has to either buy a new planet or make a comet.
It remains to be tried at scale, but urbit was carefully designed to solve some of the problems Curtis encountered with Usenet, back at the dawn of time. It might work, we'll see.
And if it is different, I don't know that a system that is carefully designed to solve the "problems" of someone who generally should be banned for good reason is what most of is want.
In mastodon, people all live in big collectivist housings centered around a project, If you get kicked out you become homeless, or you need to start your own collective, where you will be initially alone
In urbit, people all live in individual houses, where they can invite friends over. People can ban you from their house, but you can't get kicked out of your own house
If everyone in Mastodon ran an instance with exactly one user, then sure, it would be possible to ban a user, but not strip the database of all their posts and take their identity away, because both of those things are under the instances control.
But Mastodon doesn't work that way, and urbit does.
But even if you were right about Urbit, it wouldn't change my claim. I understand your claim. I am not trying to claim that Mastodon is just like Urbit. My point is that sometimes, in Mastodon, there is no difference between an instance and a user, just like you claim about Urbit. Yes, sometimes, there is, but Mastodon's norms had to figure out how to handle the case where there is no difference, because that case exists. And yes, when people collectively refuse to peer with an instance, the user(s) on that instance are not stripped of their posts and do not have their identity taken away, because those things are under the Mastodon instance's control... but it would be pretty misleading to say "If you set up your own Mastodon, you can't get banned."
And there's no reason to expect that Urbit, if it grows to the level of popularity as Mastodon, won't develop analogous norms.
I've looked up Urbit a couple times before, and this paragraph is the first time I ever even had an inkling of what it was.
a more elaborate version of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTHg-tGvlJ8
Once you have it running, go to http://localhost:80 to use the web interface (Landscape). The Urbit Community group is the most active. Just hit "Join Group" the main page and enter "~bitbet-bolbel/urbit-community"
There are a lot of other interest groups with varying levels of activity: cat pictures, art, cryptocurrency, tech, emacs, politics, finance, ham radio, weightlifting, cars, tea... All the different kinds of stuff that people discuss on the web.
Re-reading it now, I'm still a little confused.
So, you download a vm emulator, like uxn [0]. This able to use a specific protocol to reach out and communicate with other vm emulators of its kind. But, like the tls namespace, my vm doesn't just reach out to macwrite.com/index.html . It has to go through my switch, through a series of switches of my and other commercial ISP datacenters, until it reaches the server that manages 'com' and then finds the server with the webpage I want. But, that requires people to forward that traffic with their own vm emulators. So, Tlon, the organization that sponsors the urbit ecosystem, sold address space for 'galaxies', which are like the top level domains. They are expected/encouraged to lease out address space to many others, as 'stars', who will relay traffic up and down. Finally, laggards are expected to rent address space and subscribe for bandwidth from the star operators as a 'planet'. A vm without a star, a comet, to, I don't know, sign its traffic, can not communicate with other vms on the network. That is what I've concluded urbit is.
Urbit is sold as the opportunity to reimplement all of computing on top of this system. Like compilers ? They have a language they are building this stuff with. Like OS ? They need to flesh out the vm that you use. Like some application thing ? They probably need that too, reimplement all the things: text editor, web server, build system, and on and on. And you can be pretty sure that your work will be used, because it's a small community and they are apt to need your thing, and it can be a jewel that isn't carrying forty years of compatibility compromises [1] and exploration that was press ganged into production.
[0] https://100r.co/site/uxn.html
[1] http://perfectionkills.com/the-poor-misunderstood-innerText/
Stars and galaxies don't really work as routers. They are more like DNS servers: they provide the peer discovery mechanism, translating from urbit IDs to public hosts and ports. Most communication is peer-to-peer. Software updates still flow down the tree from the root, but as I understand, they are looking to make that more flexible, though this poses some technical challenges.
When you have an urbit planet, it's yours, and no star or galaxy can take it from you. There isn't a "lease" arrangement, it's bona-fide cryptographic ownership.
Comets are currently served by the galaxies and can communicate with any other VMs that are willing to talk to comets, and at this stage in the network, that's basically all of them.
Maybe it's just because it's so much effort to get into it that it acts as a filter (like the old web) and the UI design is great.
With respect to its utility, it's primarily a barebones chat app right now.
The mention of security holes seems to be the only real serious critique. Hopefully some urbit people could address those, since claiming to be a secure personal VM and just exposing your data on disk to the cloud provider is crazy.
Other than that, the author seems to be mostly making fun of urbit for being weird and alien, which is strange because its goal basically seems to be weird and alien. This is actually quite excellent. Computing needs fewer javascript frameworks and more truly weird and alien shit, with a healthy dose of NIH.
On the other hand, I just read the article, and none of it seems particularly bad faith. I vaguely remember something about Urbit using planets and galaxies as some kind of ownership metaphor, so I expected the article to go on at length about how strange this seems. But it seems to be focusing on the technical aspects of Urbit, and is pretty clinically detached.
Which is why I found the point that they've implemented their UI in javascript interesting
On the other hand... is walltime the only criterion worth considering?
Not that I'm flogging Urbit -- or not flogging it, for that matter. I looked at it a while back and decided that I didn't understand it, and wouldn't understand it without spending far more time than I had available. However, that just renders my opinion on the topic useless.
I would encourage them [= someone who only spent a couple of hours on Unix] to dig further... broader. Mostly by demonstrating that there are real world problems for which Unix is better suited than competition.
IMO in Urbit -- there was not much more to explore after the few hours. Short of digging even further into the guts of it... and that was very unappealing.
Other people here in the comments mentioned that there's no killer app for Urbit. So my intuition was probably correct [to stop digging].
A cogent retort would advance the conversation, but it won't happen because what he says is largely correct.
It is unfortunate because we need more weird projects out there, and less articles on javascript framework updates. Given the state of the web and social media today, I think we would do well to encourage projects like this and others like them. Or we can just all download MS Teams, live with FB and uBlock Origin, and say it's all good.
# sha3sum <<< 'textprotocol@github' | urbit | sigil | convert svg:- jpg:- | jp2a -
I loved the promise of Urbit, and was disappointed by the execution.
It seems more likely that you're disappointed by your understanding of the execution, which can be nothing but extremely limited.
- Carl Sagan
1. Deterministic computing seems really interesting. It gives you something that is reliable and portable and replicable. It means you have to be very clear about everything that isn't deterministic, mostly I/O, and that's worth being clear about. I find determinism the more interesting part of pure functional programming, but I don't think you need a functional language to have deterministic computation.
2. Portable identity and communication are also interesting, they are necessary formal concepts if you are going to treat computation abstractly.
3. It's not crazy that you access this abstract concept of an OS using HTTP APIs and out-of-OS web frontends. It feels a little like smoke-and-mirrors since so much of what it "does" is actually the browser and JavaScript, but eh.
That said, Urbit is a terrible expression of these ideas. The expression of computation (Nock) is absurd. Jets seem a little clever, but it's really an fragile extension of the idea of JITs, but based on idioms to make up for Nock being unable to express basic computational concepts (like negative numbers). As a result the Jets are essentially the Real Bytecodes. I guess it's a little like the evolution of CPU microcode, but entirely unnecessary as Nock as no legacy or advantages that need to be preserved.
The language Hoon is the worst obscurantism I've ever seen. People will claim it's productive once you learn it, but I don't believe them one bit, the programs are long-winded, full of weird boilerplate, and just bad. They cover this up by making it seem that the programs _do_ something notable, but they don't. Most of the programs would be 100 lines in Node.js, they are just moving a little data around to rich (browser/JavaScript) clients.
There's no decent abstractions for an OS. The whole concept of the Urbit machine is that it's one big opaque bundle of bytes. There's no documents. There's no applications. There's no separation of concerns. There's no consideration that a usable system requires lots of different parties (OS makers, application developers, API developers, cloud services, etc) coming together, and there's no sense that managing the complexity of that intersection is something an OS should do.
There's no security. There's no permission model. There's no capability model. There's no firewalls between anything. It's like if you ran Python on bare metal and called it an OS.
That said, I bet someone could do something really cool in this general area using WASM, contained in something that acted like an OS but wasn't much more complicated than an execution container.
Fun fact, the creator of Urbit, Curtis Yarvin, is a far-right blogger with some pretty crazy ideas:
http://distributedweb.care/posts/who-owns-the-stars/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin
> Curtis Guy Yarvin (born 1973), also known by the pen name Mencius Moldbug, is an American far-right blogger. Yarvin and his ideas are often associated with the alt-right. From 2007 to 2014, he authored a blog called "Unqualified Reservations", which argued that American democracy is a failed experiment, and that it should be replaced by monarchy or corporate governance. He is known, along with fellow neo-reactionary Nick Land, for developing the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic ideas behind the Dark Enlightenment.
I find there are tendencies among some people in tech to bring upon what I would consider the crypto dystopia. Cryptocurrency is one such idea. Like money, but every bit of democratic control and negotiability is removed. It enshrines a kind of cutthroat capitalism with the ruthlessness of an algorithm. (When it works as indended. Currently it's mostly used as a ponzi scheme or to buy drugs, but that's a different story.)
An immutable publication record and undeniable cryptographic identity is another idea which is dystopic to me. In more benign form you find it in IPFS etc., but the culmination of this idea is certainly Urbit.
My understanding is that most cryptocurrencies intend to be extremely democratic. More democratic than all previously existing currencies, even. (Whether those ideas are feasible or those goals are being achieved is another matter.)
I'm not sure where Yarvin stands on cryptocurrencies. He's indeed very anti-democracy and pro-monarchy, but that's exactly why I think the attempted connection doesn't work. I don't think it's fair or accurate to tie him or his ideology to the general concept of cryptocurrencies or their advocates.
I'd wager the vast majority of advocates probably strongly disagree with him on most things. I think they would largely consider themselves democracy maximalists, even.
Also, no need to add "fun fact"; Yarvin's involvement is by far the most well-known thing about this odd project. If you ask anyone what Urbit is, their answer is very likely either going to be "what?" or "that inscrutable thing that neo-reactionary blogger made". It usually takes up about 95%+ of any Urbit discussion anywhere online.
>An immutable publication record and undeniable cryptographic identity is another idea which is dystopic to me.
Why? Also, there are some cryptocurrencies that don't have either of those things. And for the ones that do, "cryptographic identity" just means "a public key", like a PGP key; not necessarily your real personal information.
>In more benign form you find it in IPFS etc.
Why the need for the equivocative qualifier? What's potentially unethical about the core idea of IPFS or those general categories of ideas? (Perhaps beyond the sorts of illicit activities any sort of decentralized technology, like Tor, can enable.)
I'm not a big cryptocurrency supporter and recognize ~99.9% of it is Ponzi schemes and other varying degrees of hot air - and there are certainly a lot of highly pessimistic ideas I disagree with that are common among the community (e.g. that central banks are malevolent or that the US dollar is likely to collapse in the not-too-distant future) - but it's unfortunate how these things seem to always reduce to two radical poles that are pretty much equivalently ideologically closed-minded.
(I'm certainly pulling a https://xkcd.com/774/, with zero qualms. I 100% agree with the character on the left, in this context.)
What I mean is, imagine 20 people come together in a little society. They use something like Bitcoin as their currency, and one of them has far more wealth than the others combined. They cannot decide by majority vote how to use the wealth democratically. If the one doesn't play along, they can only resort to violence to get his coin. (You could argue that this property of crypto serves to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority, but IRL minorites rarely have crypto riches. And usually the way you'd protect the minority would be by law or constitution.)
Because crypto is not "credit" in a book, but a proven mathematical algorithm, there is no room for negotiation, discussion, redistribution.
I wonder if you could make a cryptocurrency from the opposite principle - everything is up to negotiation, and you could have crypto councils or parliaments which can reallocate resources as neccessary?
> Also, no need to add "fun fact"; Yarvin's involvement is by far the most well-known thing about this odd project
I didn't know until very recently. This piece of information made everything else about Urbit fall into place and make sense for me. It wasn't mentioned here so I thought it was useful to bring up.
> What's potentially unethical about the core idea of IPFS or those general categories of ideas?
Unethical? I don't know. But I don't want to live in a world where we use crypography this way. People are getting into hot water due to stupid stuff they said 10 years ago on Twitter. Imagine how bad this will be when everything is stored immutably in a blockchain or journal. Social mores change, and society might become more error-friendly again. Or in a few years we might be back to Richelieu: "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."
Likewise, I just don't want to use a net ruled by Urbit "dukes" and "earls".
It just comes down to this: Certain uses of technology, especially from people with a libertarian or anarcho-capitalist agenda, give me the creeps. I hope I'm not alone with that fear. A quote from Terminator comes to mind:
> That Terminator is out there. It can't be reasoned with, it can't be bargained with. It doesn't feel pity of remorse or fear and it absolutely will not stop. Ever.
>It just comes down to this: Certain uses of technology, especially from people with a libertarian or anarcho-capitalist agenda, give me the creeps.
I strongly agree with the former and largely agree with the latter. At the same time, I think there are enough interesting aspects of some cryptocurrency technology that it'd be a mistake to write off the whole field. The different cryptocurrencies have different communities; they're not all anarcho-capitalist.
(And, again, I don't think they line up with Yarvin's weird anti-democratic hierarchy and caste ideas at all. I think they're the polar opposite. I think him, his project, and his ideology are completely separate from cryptocurrencies and most other decentralized projects.)
>What I mean is, imagine 20 people come together in a little society. They use something like Bitcoin as their currency, and one of them has far more wealth than the others combined. They cannot decide by majority vote how to use the wealth democratically.
Isn't this the case for just about anything, though? If there's a society of 20 people and one person holds the majority of the wealth in the form of cash or diamonds in a vault in their house, and they refuse to share any of it, what's the difference? Your options are exactly the same whether it's cash or gems or a cryptocurrency: you can threaten or assault them and force them to hand over the cash/gems/private keys; you can expel them; you can try to impose sanctions and penalties; you can just grumble about it and continue trying to ask nicely, etc.
> And usually the way you'd protect the minority would be by law or constitution.
Right. Ideally in this society of 20, all 20 people would be protected by the same laws so that you couldn't just extort someone through violence. Or perhaps the law instates taxes or something, in which case the person would have the option of either paying the taxes or no longer living there. It's the same whether it's cash or Bitcoin or seashells.
>Because crypto is not "credit" in a book, but a proven mathematical algorithm, there is no room for negotiation, discussion, redistribution.
But this isn't how things currently work pretty much anywhere. Credit is a big part of the economy, but it's not the entirety of the economy. The IRS can't remotely wave a magic wand and subtract numbers from your virtual money balance and add it to theirs. They can tell you to pay them and have law enforcement arrest you if you refuse - just like what might happen if in the society of 20 a wealthy person refuses to pay taxes.
If any government or powerful entity had the ability to arbitrarily manipulate anyone's digital money balances at will, don't you think that'd be even more dangerous for democracy than just about any other system? Thankfully, the world doesn't work this way, and hopefully never will.
>I wonder if you could make a cryptocurrency from the opposite principle - everything is up to negotiation, and you could have crypto councils or parliaments which can reallocate resources as neccessary?
There are many Ethereum-based organizations and apps that work exactly in this manner. The currency (ether) operates like cash as well as computational "fuel". The protocol supports smart contracts that allows cash to be automatically redistributed, transferred, donated, destroyed, etc. based on the logic of the smart contract.
If this society of 20 entered into a smart contract that caused wealth to be equally split among the rest once it reaches a certain percentage, this would serve the purpose you desire better than anything you can do with standard cash. Or you could enter a smart contract that relies on voting instead of automation; e.g. some redistribution occurs if 2/3 of the smart contract signees vote for it. Disputes, adjudication, negotiation, and pretty much all other form of social coordination are possible with smart contracts.
That's one example of how certain cryptocurrencies can help create more democratic and more fair systems, and are already doing so. (It doesn't necessarily have to be Ethereum; many other cryptocurrencies also use smart contracts. Ethereum is just the most-used smart contract protocol, at the moment.)
In my opinion, most of the value and interest of cryptocurrencies lies within this new smart contract-based way of managing coordination and addressing certain coordination problems in ways that were much less feasible in the past. The "money" part is just a tiny piece of it.
Ethereum projects you might want to look into:
(Politically, I've found that, on average, the Bitcoin community tends more towards center-libertarianism or right-libertarianism, and the Ethereum community tends more towards left-libertarianism / a fusion of social democracy and libertarianism. Obviously these are crude, sweeping generalizations, though.)
>People are getting into hot water due to stupid stuff they said 10 years ago on Twitter. Imagine how bad this will be when everything is stored immutably in a blockchain or journal
I think this is kind of orthogonal to cryptocurrencies. But, personally, I also think this is kind of looking at it the wrong way. The war is already lost, technologically. It's like saying "imagine how bad things will be if every teenager had a device that could let them watch porn at any time", or "imagine if people could determine your interests based on what websites you visit or social media actions you take". The technology is already here and isn't going away. It's now a policy and sociological problem rather than a technological one.
If you post something online, there's always a risk it's going to be retained somewhere, and that risk will continue to increase, regardless of IPFS, cryptography, cryptocurrencies, decentralization, peer-to-peer networks, etc. It's a matter of being aware of that risk, and of trying to build a society that's less judgmental and more charitable, as well as perhaps associating with people and organizations that one aligns with and being okay with cutting ties to others.
Of course I and many others agree that a world like Richelieu's would be bad, but the answer isn't to go after technology that adds additional availability and integrity guarantees; especially when the technology probably won't be involved with any of the big platforms (since they'll want to retain their centralization).
Do they? They don't seem to be succeeding very well. Bitcoin mining is certainly very concentrated. And a lot the nominal cryptowhatever projects are effectively more centralized than that. Which of them do you see as democratic?
>My understanding is that most cryptocurrencies intend to be extremely democratic. More democratic than all previously existing currencies, even. (Whether those ideas are feasible or those goals are being achieved is another matter.)
I also discussed it a bit in my other reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27270693
In terms of network consensus, democracy indeed isn't universal in terms of network users, since in PoW the huge mining pools have disproportionate votes, and in PoS the huge staking pools and whales have disproportionate votes. However, the "voting" in this case is just "which blockchain is the valid one". Unless a group of powerful entities collude to 51% attack the network, this doesn't actually confer any direct influence over anything. (Though for PoW, miners do have some influence over what transaction fees people will have to pay.)
In terms of systems built on top of the core network - especially if smart contracts are supported - you can create lots of interesting democratic governance systems. You can basically make whatever you want.
So, is network consensus democratic? Not really. Then it's kind of a question of if it's more or less democratic than, say, money in the United States.
One could make an argument it's way more democratic, since two single organizations control money issuance: the central bank and the treasury. (One partial counter-argument is that the Federal Reserve is - as the name implies - federated regionally through 12 sub-organizations. One could potentially say that it still effectively operates as one entity, though.)
Or that it's way less democratic, since at least everyone in the country can vote for the president, and the president appoints the central bank governors and the treasury secretary.
>Skimming that long comment, I still don't see any evidence for your claim.
The claim:
>My understanding is that most cryptocurrencies intend to be extremely democratic. More democratic than all previously existing currencies, even. (Whether those ideas are feasible or those goals are being achieved is another matter.)
My only claim is that they intend to be democratic. At least Bitcoin did. I don't think that's too hard to support; Satoshi initially intended for everyone to be able to mine. I think he had a pretty democratic vision.
The implied emphasis in that paragraph was on "Whether those ideas are feasible or those goals are being achieved is another matter."
I just reread the original Bitcoin paper and there's nothing in there about democracy. From the beginning of the use of computers, computational capacity has been about access to capital and that has not changed. If you're claiming that Satoshi's goal was something democratic, either you're using the word differently or you're suggesting he's the very dimmest of bulbs, unaware of basic facts about access to computation or somehow unable to think through the meaning.
Maybe you want a word more like "individualist"? I can see how one might confuse that for "democratic".
I believe he thought that even if powerful entities bought a lot of CPUs, the end users of the network would still have a lot of consensus power distributed between themselves. As far as I can tell, it seems unclear if he foresaw just how huge of an advantage GPUs, FPGAs, and ASICs would have and that no one else would be mining anymore. Perhaps he was fully aware and knew centralization problems would occur, but it's difficult to be sure.
Again, I don't think we have even vaguely similar definitions of what democracies are.
How would you theoretically create a decentralized, permissionless, pseudonymous/anonymous currency that's more democratic? (I'd argue PoS is more democratic, for example, so you could also think of one that's more democratic than PoS cryptocurrencies. Of course, PoS is still very oligarchical, but it's about relativity.)
I kind of feel like you're just reading a few words in my posts and then ignoring all of the subsequent words in the same sentence.
My post text:
>"one-CPU-one-vote". (Not as good as "one-human-one-vote"
Your reply:
>CPUs are not people.
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My post text:
>My understanding is that most cryptocurrencies intend to be extremely democratic. More democratic than all previously existing currencies, even. (Whether those ideas are feasible or those goals are being achieved is another matter.)
Your reply:
>>My understanding is that most cryptocurrencies intend to be extremely democratic.
>Do they? They don't seem to be succeeding very well.
> How would you theoretically create a decentralized, permissionless, pseudonymous/anonymous currency that's more democratic?
I would not try, because cryptocurrencies are hyper-individualist and hyper-libertarian, and very much antidemocratic. The core notion of any democracy is that a group of humans is in it together. There's a reason America's constitution starts with "We, the people", lays out ambitious collective goals, and then details how we make rules together. The point of an anonymous, permissionless, trustless currency is to sidestep all that, raising a middle finger to democratically chosen regulations. Which is why cryptocurrencies are basically not used for normal commerce, but are instead a haven for scammers, grifters, money launderers, ponzi schemers, thieves, and MMF fools who dream of living in the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
So I again suggest you are not really clear on what democracy is if you keep trying to suggest it's material to the original Bitcoin plan. At best you're applying a very thin coat of lipstick to a very large pig.
Can you truly be woke if a bigot designed your RAM?
- Apple: Elegant, powerful, not much user choice but generally well-thought-out. And every bit is designed such that Apple keeps control of the platform.
- Unix hackers: Powerful command line interface, do one thing and do it well, KISS, adherence to tradtion (manpages etc.)
- Moxie Marlinspike: Concerned about user's privacy, thinks usability is paramount for adoption -> creates Signal
etc.
Now imagine an OS written by the Chinese communist party. Or a file-sharing program written by an anticapitalist group. Or a P2P marketplace by a drug cartel. Or a genealogy service created by white supremacists.
The (political) views of a creator are very relevant, if you believe the creation is used to further their goals!
Agree completely because it shapes the actual intent of the creation.
More just hinting if you could truly do an audit I'm not sure you'd be happy with what you found. For example, an operating system that requires all financial transactions that go through it has to take 30% to go into the wallet of the creators doesn't really seem particularly left leaning...
For example the creators of the first rockets wanted to go to the moon, that was their goal - which eventually happened. But not until well after it was co-opted to create ICBM’s.
The closest I've come across are: https://solidproject.org/ https://polypoly.coop/en-de/polypod
...but these are purely data storage, they expect the processing to happen on other machines. Some powerful scalable server polling everyone's "data pod" to do what it does. Which is much more realistic and efficient than Urbit I suppose but it raises concerns about what the third party software running on somebody else's server's doing with your data.
Running VMs for everyone sounds inefficient indeed. Urbit's opting to provide (what I assume to be) a lightweight OS/runtime for the apps that are accessing your data to run on is reasonable though it's still very much a single process for each single user at the least. Rolling your own OS/runtime allows you to make optimizations for this specific use-case but I don't know how far that'd take you. Maybe you can offload the processing to the client machine when it's available? If you're going to mostly be deploying distributed apps anyways...sounds like an engineering challenge though. Apps written for your platform will be facing interesting requirements (restraining most of it to bits that need to interact with the data stored in the "pod" helps but I suppose that's detail).
But maybe the inefficiency's the toll we'll have to pay to get away from the centralization problem. I personally find the idea of running thousands of VMs used to deploy P2P apps in a data center painful. But maybe that's what we'll have to resort to until we have devices in everyone's pocket that we can reliably deploy P2P apps on.
Besides the distributed chat/forum and social media, I bet you can replace the entire Google suite with this. After all, your Google account is in a sense, a way to access a VM in the cloud where you can run an assortment of apps on. How hard would it be to set up an Urbit clone using software existing today anyways? Top of my head, I can think WASM, WASI, libP2P, IPFS coming in handy.
Yes, it's a cult; no, there is no sekret killer app.
People like to play, like to be exclusive, like to feel holier than though, doubly so when it's dressed up as droll and all in good fun. Or as "locker-room talk."
This is what happens when Robert Anton Wilson fails fast.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin#Views_on_race
This is not a warning for or against, but it's always best to participate (if indeed you do) with eyes open.
The idea that we should do anything in our power to avoid good outcomes for someone that expressed ideas that we don't agree with is worse than hateful and evil: it's stupid and self-destructive.
Not wishing to contribute work to directly financially enrich racists and segregationists is very different from thinking that they should be silenced.
A lot of what Yarvin has written is prescient and extremely incisive. Just because his views and models of the world do not align with the current cultural zeitgeist does not mean that he should be silenced or branded a racist. I get the feeling that most of the people that criticize him have not spent even 10 minutes reading him, but propagate regurgitations they've read/heard. This is not the mark of a healthy society.
I agree. The racist things he's said should be sufficient on their own to illustrate his racism, regardless of any other controversial opinions he may have espoused.
I read lots of stuff on his blog as part of due diligence related to a referral to Urbit. Your claim makes it seem like he's simply misunderstood, or painted with a too-wide brush. I wish that were the case.
Not wishing to contribute work to directly financially enrich Taiwanese nationalists is very different from thinking that they should be silenced.
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I do not think it is stupid nor self destructive to avoid enriching people who use God's name in vain, no. There is diversity of ideas and dissenting views, and he's free to blog about them, but I am also free to go work on other projects/communities that don't enrich landowners who I find morally repugnant.
Not wishing to contribute work to directly financially enrich heretics is very different from thinking that they should be silenced.
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I spent a years traveling and living in different cultures. "Racism" is basically ubiquitous everywhere in the world. Everywhere else, people (even liberal, educated people in big cities) are openly prejudiced. I found this shocking at first, and eventually came to terms with it. This huge stigma about talking about race literally only exists in one culture, and for this one tiny sliver of the history of that culture.
You are in a cult. This is a religion. You are condemning heresy.
can't let a pun like that go.
I wrote for it an "unix-like shell simulator"[2] (see [3] for example session log) and earned honorary title "early adopter". :D
It was not really usable, mostly fantasy console running in another fantasy console, but I learned coroutines while working on it.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20120503001002/http://luaos.net/...