I haven't seen many companies paying people in BTC, especially considering that it's not trivial to cash in large sums of BTC these days in many places.
As for the Addresses Urbit needs to run on something, the projec it so vague and the terms they are using are so for lack of better words ludicrous that I can't even understand what they are selling even after reading the white paper.
Data lifestreams, Digital reputation, all of that sounds like complete technobabel to me.
"Please don't tweet [the sale] or post publicly until 9am PDT on the 29th. But feel free to share privately with friends." Perhaps dang et al. are helping the founders maintain this?
Yes, users flagged it. Normally that would also kill the story (i.e. close it to new comments and hide it from users who don't have 'showdead' set to 'yes' in their profile), but once there are enough comments, the software presumes there's an ongoing discussion and spares it.
"A star is not anyone's personal address. It's a block of network infrastructure. A personal address in Urbit is a
32-bit planet. Your star's main value is its power to create 65,535 planets."
I have a few planets from back in 2013, and I bought a star today as a way of thanking ~zod, et al. for the three years of intellectual amusement I've derived from watching Urbit as it developed. So at least one of those sales is legitimate.
"Datalife streams", Stars and planets...
This sounds more like Scientology than a product...
I really don't understand all these things about "building a new internet", especially when they are building it on top of the existing one.
If the existing internet is so broken what the hell would Urbit do to fix it?
Just from watching the video, they're not exactly saying the existing internet is broken, they're confusing terms.
They're claiming the web is broken (that is, tim berners lee's http web), the hardware-internet-network is fantastic (that is, all cables, routers, everything but the software layers).
For some reason, they also claim to dislike tcp/ip.
All I can gather from their video is that they're trying the internet again with a different approach (built-in encryption, tools to far more easily build decentralized applications, your data is yours, and a point about API stuff that I don't quite grasp yet.)
Their goal is to be a self-governing digital republic, whatever that might mean.
As the guy says in the end, it's not up to them what urbit will become, it's up to us (the people who develop for urbit).
That's how I understood their video
Soooo... I'm not too sure why building (arguably?) better tools would result in a "better" internet. Additionally, I'm not too sure what the advantages are for end-users for decentralized applications.
So to conclude, it's up to the developers to find valid use-cases for urbit. Just like how it's up to developers to find valid use-cases for ethereum. Decentralized toolchains (like ethereum, other blockchain-things and urbit) are in their infancy, nobody really knows if they'll sprout useful use-cases or not.
From watching their video i couldn't understand anything it was utter techno babel.
From reading the whitepaper it seemed like they were building a distributed network where everything is somewhat abstracted.
I thought Ethereum was silly and pointless but I at least somewhat understood what it tried to be, this is like literally something that looks to me that came off https://www.reddit.com/r/VXJunkies/
Granted, I may not understand it at all, I only really started reading about it a few hours ago, but here it goes:
It's a decentralized internet, where your computer is the server, and it communicates directly with other computers by calling directly to their addresses.
As a result, e.g. your facebook data is stored on your computer, and other facebook users call your computer for posts.
Because the data is stored locally, and called through relatively universal APIs, any app can be written to call and display from those APIs, combine them, and let them inform each-other in any way you desire.
You can put your facebook in your reddit in your gmail.
That all runs inside a VM which ties your data to your address, so your identity (real or pseudonym) is singular, and uniform across all apps. This creates a real cost to ugly behavior, like spamming or trolling, as addresses are too limited to burn through willy-nilly.
Apps running on that VM are coded in a rather confusing functional language. Lots of people think he made it that confusing to stop newbs from writing for it.
It's a "decentralized" world wide web then.
The internet is already decentralized and since you need the internet for Urbit to work let's stop calling it "the internet" anything.
You'll have to take that up with the public at large. We use "internet" to refer to the world wide web. Try to sell someone a computer that has "the internet", but won't do tcp/IP, you'll get punched.
As for the infrastructure, that's a rather more esoteric concern. It needs a distinguishing term.
Urbit is MIT-licensed. Even on the unlikely assumption that Urbit turns out useful for anything ever, why use this rather than an alt-Urbit? The same way altcoins do an end-run around limited numbers of bitcoins.
The value of Urbit is connected to peoples desire to use it, you are correct in assuming that if an alt-Urbit is started using the same code base it would have value in the same manner.
What gives Urbit address space value is the notion of reputation tie to it's addresses which is current IPv4/6 infrastructure where addresses can be reassigned. If you ruin a Planet (read address) by using it to issue spam (just an example) on the Urbit network, services will likely have been designed to stop servicing bad actors and the Planet will become useless.
You will have to ruin more planets to continue your bad behavior. This can be extended to many more examples like trolling on Urbit-hosted forums for instance.
You may end up getting the benefit of the social pressure that currently exists in our society on the internet, which you currently cannot benefit from (however plenty of people benefit from the lack of such pressure).
Therefore, we can speculate citizens will attribute value to Urbit (and not the Alt-Urbit) based on the fact that we've already done much work in filtering out bad actors. You can imagine automated phone calling machine to push Ads to you on top of a Twilio based service layer on Urbit to have no chance of thriving freeing you from having to waste bandwith and time on such calls in an idealized future.
> This can be extended to many more examples like trolling on Urbit-hosted forums for instance.
See, it seems nobody understood that the very first thing people do in a new social space is see how it actually works (not just how it's claimed to work) and how the social boundaries work.
For an example of fully rampant typical mind fallacy in Urbit, see the original 2013 version of the security chapter: http://archive.is/UK8So About two-thirds of the way down, you can actually watch Yarvin transmute into Moldbug as he starts pontificating on how humans communicating on a network should work, and never mind the observable evidence of how they’ve actually behaved whenever each of the conditions he describes have obtained; oblivious that the very first thing people will do with Urbit is mess with its assumptions, in ways that its creator literally could not foresee (due to typical mind fallacy), though he might reasonably have been expected to (given the entire history of people on the internet).
47 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 109 ms ] threadWhat did you expect them to take shiny sea shells?
As for the Addresses Urbit needs to run on something, the projec it so vague and the terms they are using are so for lack of better words ludicrous that I can't even understand what they are selling even after reading the white paper.
Data lifestreams, Digital reputation, all of that sounds like complete technobabel to me.
Edit: It looks like the story has been [flagged].
so it's a block of addresses
And, now the number sold is up to 340...
Edit: Make that 361 (2 min later).
Edit: Make that 421 (9 min later).
Edit: Make that 471 (11 min later)
All I can gather from their video is that they're trying the internet again with a different approach (built-in encryption, tools to far more easily build decentralized applications, your data is yours, and a point about API stuff that I don't quite grasp yet.)
Their goal is to be a self-governing digital republic, whatever that might mean.
As the guy says in the end, it's not up to them what urbit will become, it's up to us (the people who develop for urbit).
That's how I understood their video
Soooo... I'm not too sure why building (arguably?) better tools would result in a "better" internet. Additionally, I'm not too sure what the advantages are for end-users for decentralized applications.
So to conclude, it's up to the developers to find valid use-cases for urbit. Just like how it's up to developers to find valid use-cases for ethereum. Decentralized toolchains (like ethereum, other blockchain-things and urbit) are in their infancy, nobody really knows if they'll sprout useful use-cases or not.
Tl;DR Experimentation and uncertainty
From reading the whitepaper it seemed like they were building a distributed network where everything is somewhat abstracted.
I thought Ethereum was silly and pointless but I at least somewhat understood what it tried to be, this is like literally something that looks to me that came off https://www.reddit.com/r/VXJunkies/
It's a decentralized internet, where your computer is the server, and it communicates directly with other computers by calling directly to their addresses.
As a result, e.g. your facebook data is stored on your computer, and other facebook users call your computer for posts.
Because the data is stored locally, and called through relatively universal APIs, any app can be written to call and display from those APIs, combine them, and let them inform each-other in any way you desire.
You can put your facebook in your reddit in your gmail.
That all runs inside a VM which ties your data to your address, so your identity (real or pseudonym) is singular, and uniform across all apps. This creates a real cost to ugly behavior, like spamming or trolling, as addresses are too limited to burn through willy-nilly.
Apps running on that VM are coded in a rather confusing functional language. Lots of people think he made it that confusing to stop newbs from writing for it.
I bought a star.
As for the infrastructure, that's a rather more esoteric concern. It needs a distinguishing term.
My new one-line description of Urbit: "Diaspora in INTERCAL on a blockchain by VXJunkies."
What gives Urbit address space value is the notion of reputation tie to it's addresses which is current IPv4/6 infrastructure where addresses can be reassigned. If you ruin a Planet (read address) by using it to issue spam (just an example) on the Urbit network, services will likely have been designed to stop servicing bad actors and the Planet will become useless.
You will have to ruin more planets to continue your bad behavior. This can be extended to many more examples like trolling on Urbit-hosted forums for instance.
You may end up getting the benefit of the social pressure that currently exists in our society on the internet, which you currently cannot benefit from (however plenty of people benefit from the lack of such pressure).
Therefore, we can speculate citizens will attribute value to Urbit (and not the Alt-Urbit) based on the fact that we've already done much work in filtering out bad actors. You can imagine automated phone calling machine to push Ads to you on top of a Twilio based service layer on Urbit to have no chance of thriving freeing you from having to waste bandwith and time on such calls in an idealized future.
See, it seems nobody understood that the very first thing people do in a new social space is see how it actually works (not just how it's claimed to work) and how the social boundaries work.
For an example of fully rampant typical mind fallacy in Urbit, see the original 2013 version of the security chapter: http://archive.is/UK8So About two-thirds of the way down, you can actually watch Yarvin transmute into Moldbug as he starts pontificating on how humans communicating on a network should work, and never mind the observable evidence of how they’ve actually behaved whenever each of the conditions he describes have obtained; oblivious that the very first thing people will do with Urbit is mess with its assumptions, in ways that its creator literally could not foresee (due to typical mind fallacy), though he might reasonably have been expected to (given the entire history of people on the internet).
Yarvin doesn't seem to understand this. He explicitly stated in his blogging as "Moldbug" his belief that order is good and chaos is bad as a universal principle, a visceral belief. (in http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/02/from-mi... )
The trouble is that the real world doesn't work like that, and literally all the interesting stuff happens at the boundary between order and chaos.
(Phil Sandifer's recent book Neoreaction a Basilisk goes into this point about Yarvin's belief system in some detail.)