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Comment by c_crank | Hacker News Reader

What benefits does running this system on Ethereum provide compared to something like urbit?

I'm not familiar with Urbit, but a quick glance at their website says that it's owned by the "Tlon Corporation," which I have to assume is a for profit company. Ethereum on the other hand is guided, but not owned or controlled by a non-profit foundation. Ethereum is a public utility and they have a mechanism for community involvement and contribution via Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIP). Hope that helps!

Urbit has always been open source—currently under the MIT license [1]—and same as Ethereum it's also guided by a non-profit foundation, the Urbit Foundation [2] established in 2021.

[1] https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/develop/LICENSE.txt [2] https://urbit.org/overview/people-history

>a quick glance at their website says that it's owned by the "Tlon Corporation,"

Where on the website do you see this?

https://urbit.org/privacy

https://urbit.org/terms-of-service

> Last Updated: September 24, 2018

This is very outdated and Tlon no longer operates/runs urbit.org but, in any case, the ToS says this: "The Site is owned and operated by Tlon", so the reference was to the website "urbit.org", not the Urbit project.

Given Ethereum's network, I'd like to pose the inverse question back to you and ask why urbit would be better

Not having to deal with the distributed computing problems a blockchain provides. No worrying about any proof of stake slowdowns or overhead.

I don't think urbit is all that great, either, but this is coming from someone who decided to increase their investment in face to face conversations following social media starting to crumble.

>Not having to deal with the distributed computing problems a blockchain provides. No worrying about any proof of stake slowdowns or overhead

Ethereum operates perfectly smoothly, with zero downtime since launching 8 years ago. In any case, besides peripheral features like NFT-gated forums and Ethereum Name Service created proxy names, this doesn't use Ethereum's distributed network. Just the public key wallet software built for using Ethereum.

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