
Urbit and the blockchain wars - amingilani
https://urbit.org/blog/2017.9-critique/
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runeks
> The simplest procedure, with the strongest blockchain, would be just to
> encode each Urbit event as raw (OP_RETURN) data on the Bitcoin blockchain

I don't understand the purpose of this. What's the point of pointing people to
the Bitcoin blockchain to look for public keys? Ultimately, the authority that
puts the relevant information into the OP_RETURN output decides what people
get. How will users know they get the right information unless a) Urbit signs
the relevant data somehow, or b) points them towards a specific Bitcoin
transaction ID? In either case I don't see what the advantage is of putting
something in a blockchain, when that something comes from a central source of
truth -- why not just consume this information directly from the central
source of truth?

> And best of all, you can get your Urbit star or planet entirely through the
> blockchain, without interacting with any centralized database or payment
> mechanism.

Great! So all the slowness of a blockchain without any of the advantages?

To be clear, I'm fully aware of how a blockchain is useful for governing
internal data (e.g. Bitcoin blocks excluding double spends). But I don't see
the point of third parties putting data into blockchains, and pointing other
people there to retrieve it, unless we're talking about some sort of proof-of-
existence (which utilizes the timestamping feature of a blockchain).

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purvis
Does anyone know of a good introduction to urbit? Every few months it pops up,
and I can never quite wrap my head around it.

~~~
throwaway982736
Does this help?:

[https://medium.com/@IsaacSimpson/urbit-and-the-not-so-
dark-f...](https://medium.com/@IsaacSimpson/urbit-and-the-not-so-dark-future-
of-the-internet-400c9b667e2)

------
zajd
A match made in heaven

~~~
Apocryphon
Dark Heaven?

