
Ask HN: Urbit Sale – will you be buying? - abstractbeliefs
Urbit ( https:&#x2F;&#x2F;urbit.org&#x2F; ), a peer to peer network of personal servers built on a completely new stack. The first sale of Urbit `Stars` (1&#x2F;64th of the network) has just started, priced at 512 USD.<p>Have you been following Urbit? What are you thoughts on the sale, and will you be buying in or not?
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thejohnhenry
Background: I'm a decentralization researcher, I quit my job at Twitch to
report on decentralized web initiatives full-time, and I'm tracking 200+
projects and protocols like this attempting to remake the web. Urbit is near
the top of the list of ones I think will work.

Urbit has the most coherent vision for why decentralized computing is
necessary across all other initiatives in this space. They understand the
history behind topics of trust, identity, and governance in building new
software platforms, in ways that other initiatives (especially blockchain-
based communities) sorely lack, or are unable to communicate effectively.

Compare to Ethereum, which has a similar scale of ambition, but with a far
less trustworthy and transparent leadership team, who has (despite these
problems) still managed to raise huge interest in a currency with a several-
billion-dollar market cap. If you just spend time reading Urbit docs vs
Ethereum docs, I believe the difference in clarity of vision will become
apparent to you.

I bought two stars and am considering buying a third.

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k2enemy
I'm curious, what are the others at the top of your list? IPFS?

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thejohnhenry
IPFS is certainly one of the top initiatives, and Juan Benet in particular
will be involved in whatever future internet architcture takes shape. I need
to investigate them more myself before I endorse the full vision, though.

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yaclamenace
Unlike e.g. Ethereum back then, this still very much looks like an art project
motivated by ideological/political reasons, so 95% chance to fail IMO. That
being said the vision is very big. I still bought a star mostly to track it
and a bit of FOMO.

~~~
ThrowAway123543
Urbit is the most brazenly audacious computer science project on Earth, it's
entirely open source, and yet, every time it gets mentioned on the world's
most popular forum for programmers, virtually all of the discussion is non-
technical.

Who cares about the ideology behind it? Does anyone pick their linux distro
based on the maintainer's political blog? "Oh, one of the devs said something
in 2007 about immigrants I didn't like, and..." uh huh. What about the
insanely ambitious attempt to replace unix, any comments on that?

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ekiru
First, the person above you didn't say anything about caring about the
underlying ideology; they said that they cared that the project seemed to them
to be an art project designed for ideological purposes and unlikely to succeed
as a result.

Second, people definitely do choose their linux distributions based on
ideology. The Debian project, in particular, has a very well established
ideology. They also choose which distributions they spend money on or donate
money to (the relevant comparison to purchasing stars as discussed here) based
on ideology.

Third, Urbit is a different category of thing from a Linux distribution. Urbit
is a network. A network designed and organized based on a particular principle
can impose that principle on the way that people on the network act, interact,
and relate on the network in ways that a Linux distribution cannot. I am not
certain whether this accurately describes Urbit. Statements from the project
and its developers have suggested to me that this has been a goal, but they
may have retreated from that since.

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nyolfen
>A network designed and organized based on a particular principle can impose
that principle on the way that people on the network act, interact, and relate
on the network in ways that a Linux distribution cannot. I am not certain
whether this accurately describes Urbit. Statements from the project and its
developers have suggested to me that this has been a goal, but they may have
retreated from that since.

this is certainly the case -- the scarcity of resources (about 4b
cryptographic identities called 'planets', along with an associated reputation
system) is meant to introduce something like proof-of-stake, where incentives
are created that make it more expensive to act in bad faith (trolling[1],
spamming) than the bad faith behavior is worth.

this is an interesting read the head developer wrote a few years ago about
these subjects: [https://unqualified-
reservations.blogspot.com/2010/03/future...](https://unqualified-
reservations.blogspot.com/2010/03/future-of-search.html)

[1] 'trolling' in this case would be determined by local 'communities' on the
network, and not a central authority a la the current internet (fb, twitter,
etc)

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k2enemy
I bought one star. I've been following the project for a few years and still
have mixed feelings about it. The idea is awesome and the tech seems really
interesting, but I always hit a roadblock with the intentionally opaque naming
of things.

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oriel
A note for the future, if whoever posts this could please link the actual
sales URL, it would help highly confused people. Like me.

There was no sale link anywhere on the site I could find (and I was there in
the throes of the sale).

There was no mention of a need for an invite code to purchase a star. Or how
to get one.

Even reading the documentation I'm still very hazy how a star is used other
than real estate. There's no documentation about how a star code (assuming its
a thing) is redeemed or associated or used.

The price points seem reasonable for the scale of what they're building. I
hope they put some of the profit into better marketing and explanation
coverage.

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ThrowAway123543
It was sale.urbit.org but you needed a ticket. Submit your email address to
get on the list for future notifications, including tickets to future sales,
although they say the next one will be a public auction. What you get when you
buy is a number which can be submitted to urbit in exchange for the key that
proves ownership of a certain star, meaning you would be able to sign messages
that other planets/stars would trust as having come from the owner of that
star. Stars are identical to planets except that they are also able to issue
tickets for planets. So the point of owning a star is that you can give away
or (in some future scenario where anyone wants to buy them) sell planets. For
now, you can get a planet just by emailing the devs and asking for one.

People have complained about the documentation forever, but I think it's just
hard to explain what it is, because it is pretty novel. If you chew through
some of the available stuff and have further questions, reply to me, I'm as
likely to give a useful answer as anyone.

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juancampa
Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe a star is 1/65536th of the network, not
1/64th. Perhaps you meant to say 1/64k?

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nyolfen
well, they sold 1024 stars -- 1/64th of 65536

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tylorr
I was interested in bitcoin before it got really big but I was convinced by
others that it was going to just fizzle out. Now FOMO is driving me to want to
buy a star but it's much I'm less confident in this then I was of bitcoin.

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aethertron
I'm in the same boat. I heard about Bitcoin in the early days too, and didn't
get involved because I was convinced it economically couldn't work. Did you
buy a star? I missed the sale by a few hours, thanks to my hesitation.

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throw479201
I bought 2 stars, mostly because of my Fear Of Missing Out. My understanding
of urbit is very superficial.

