
Urbit crowdsale is now live - daxorid
https://sale.urbit.org
======
dogma1138
"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?

~~~
azeirah
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.

Tl;DR Experimentation and uncertainty

~~~
dogma1138
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/](https://www.reddit.com/r/VXJunkies/)

~~~
hodwik2
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.

I bought a star.

~~~
dogma1138
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.

~~~
hodwik
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.

------
daxorid
They have already sold 230 out of 1020 stars within an hour of opening up the
sale. Unexpectedly high demand.

~~~
arcadeparade
I

~~~
the_common_man
So, you spent 200 USD or something you don't understand? What's the gigantic
return here?

~~~
arcadeparade
I didn't understand bitcoin either but i bought at $40. Plus it's fun to part
of something new.

------
Kinnard
Surprised this is not on the front page. HN, did it get flagged?

~~~
networked
"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?

~~~
daxorid
Gah! I didn't even notice that. Sincere apologies to any Urbit staff for
posting this. Sorry.

~~~
networked
If the title hasn't been edited by the HN crew you can still delete the story.

~~~
daxorid
No delete link, unfortunately.

~~~
networked
You can email hn@ycombinator.com, then. Speaking from my experience, dang does
a great job responding to user email.

Edit: It looks like the story has been [flagged].

~~~
dang
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.

~~~
daxorid
Thanka dang. I'm curious if the HN software has flagging ring detection in the
same way it has voting ring detection.

~~~
Kinnard
That's a great idea. But I imagine it'd be difficult to differentiate between
trash getting flagged rapidly by a lot of people and a flagging ring.

------
davidgerard
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.

~~~
davidgrenier
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.

~~~
davidgerard
> _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](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...](http://unqualified-
reservations.blogspot.com/2010/02/from-mises-to-carlyle-my-sick-journey.html)
)

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.)

------
Kinnard
Dupe:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11998052](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11998052)

------
the_common_man
Am I the only one skeptical in thinking that they didn't really sell 200 stars
worth 200 USD each and they are making this up?

~~~
mangeletti
You're absolutely not the only one.

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)

~~~
artlogic
At this rate, they'll be sold out by the time it's supposed to go "public".

~~~
networked
I suspect to test whether that would happen was (a large part of) the
intention. :-)

------
whackedspinach
What is the benefit of owning a star right now? Why is owning a star better
than a planet?

~~~
kyrre
"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."

so it's a block of addresses

------
nikolay
So, their "distributed" system is a centralized identity (and hosting)?

------
Kinnard
Surprised they are taking USD or any fiat for that matter.

~~~
dogma1138
They need to get paid, and they need to buy the IPv4 addresses that would
actually make Urbit functional.

What did you expect them to take shiny sea shells?

~~~
Kinnard
Many companies are paying their teams in BTC these days. Why do they need to
buy IPv4 addresses? I haven't read the whitepaper.

~~~
dogma1138
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.

------
nikolay
Yet another greed-fueled crowdsale...

