
Urbit / Primer (2019) - networked
https://urbit.org/primer/
======
urbit-respecter
The introduction of this primer and the launch of the Ethereum registry
coincides with Urbit's founder, Curtis Yarvin, leaving the company [1]. It's
possible that this could increase the reputation of Urbit, accounting for
those who have political issues with Yarvin, who used to blog as Mencius
Moldbug. At some point a few years ago when some controversy arose, he came
into the HN comments to duke it out a bit.

I didn't care about the blog posts that most people cared about, but I did
care that he seemed to be set up as some kind of "overlord" of Urbit, with
control over development and personally owning a large amount of the address
space, combined with the sort of high-tech slave grid mentality envisioned in
this post [2] where he argued that putting ankle bracelets on the entire
population of say, Iraq, was an appropriate way to run the country. A modest
proposal? Probably, but it gave me a bad feeling.

According to Yarvin, he gave up almost all his personal address space to
urbit.org, which is intended to be a foundation for future development. The
primer emphasizes a diversity of communities without central control. Urbit
has always been a very intriguing concept to me, and I hope it finds success.

[1] [https://urbit.org/posts/essays/a-founders-
farewell/](https://urbit.org/posts/essays/a-founders-farewell/) [2]
[https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/09/how-to-
occu...](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/09/how-to-occupy-and-
govern-foreign/)

------
hirsin
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?

~~~
jdhopeunique
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?

~~~
2038AD
Curtis talks about this in his farewell letter

[https://urbit.org/posts/essays/a-founders-farewell/#urbit--
a...](https://urbit.org/posts/essays/a-founders-farewell/#urbit--a-level-and-
neutral-platform-)

>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.

------
0x8BADF00D
I still don’t understand the primary use case. Decentralized cloud? Okay,
fine. But what is the value add? It is infinitely easier to use an existing
cloud provider than to use Urbit’s system.

