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Comment by rkobeissi | Hacker News Reader

I searched "Urbit" in the HN archives. The old discussion is still relevant for a project as long-term as this, and the more recent you get the more Urbit is misunderstood or attacked simply for being different.

Years on from the first announcements this hugely ambitious project is finally showing real-world practical application that is already superior to the alternatives in some dimensions, and with great potential for growth. If you're sleeping on this it's like sleeping on the Bitcoin whitepaper. The dimensions for the future of computing are being hashed out in front of you.

A congratulations to everyone involved.

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I've been seeing Urbit on here since like 2011, and it's always been style over substance.

The broad outlines are great (personal servers), but have been attempted by many other projects with many other variations, from Sandstorm.io to Blockstack. Urbit is one of many in this category.

The unique thing Urbit brings to the table is their ability to fleece speculators with techno-mystical obscurantism. If Hoon, Nock, etc, are really so superior, why did it take them a almost a full decade to work up to the "my first CRUD app" portrayed here?

you've been able to download urbit and use it for decentralized chat and forum discussions (in an earlier version) via webui since ~2014. this is the first instantiation of something like a full social software suite, but it's also been basically entirely rewritten since the earliest versions.

> If you're sleeping on this it's like sleeping on the Bitcoin whitepaper. The dimensions for the future of computing are being hashed out in front of you.

I was certainly aware of Bitcoin by 2011, probably much earlier, and I have no regrets about not doing anything beyond learning about it. Should I?

Is there any way to get rich easily if you jump in early and this gets big? (like with bitcoin)

Maybe. You would have to have a star, which is already about $2.000

In my opinion, it's too late for that. However, there are some healthy profits to be made with honest effort, most easily identified in the form of bounties. You can become a star owner by claiming and implementing a bounty listed on https://grants.urbit.org/. Some already claimed examples include: a Tor Nodes Relay Search Tile, an (HTML) Content Saver, and an Ethereum ABI Parser. In general, though, Tlon are very happy and willing to merge good pull requests, and often reward contributors with Urbit address space (which, if this gets big, will be worth quite a lot more than current market rates at, for example, https://urbit.live). Hope that helps.

In a word, no. Single urbit identities can be gotten for free (just show some interest and ask for one), but the only people selling them are people who bought them as investments.

Sure, I will sell you my Urbit star for $16,384.

Could you explain what Urbit’s main goals or purposes are?

I feel like, for Bitcoin, the intent and outcome might not be perfectly aligned, but I get what it was for and how it is used.

The homepage (urbit.org) offers a succinct description:

> Urbit OS is a clean slate reimagining of the operating system as an 'overlay OS.' It runs on any Unix machine with an internet connection.

> It's a compact system for an individual to run their own permanent personal server.

> Urbit ID is a decentralized digital identity system. Your Urbit ID is a username, network address, and crypto wallet.

> Both are designed to work together as a single system, completely open source.

For those who want to dig deeper:

AMA with lead dev https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4bxf6f/im_curtis_yarv...

First appearance on HN 10 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1052795

First HN post with traction https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6438320

Urbit's HN comments https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=urbit

This HNer did a deep dive into Urbit's source, it's the best explanation of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21676792

Another good, more charitable, explanation posted below: https://medium.com/@noahruderman/review-of-urbit-e7cc4c35f14...

How is the first link a "deep dive" or a good explanation of Urbit? He just puts Urbit down for being intentionally obscure and then confuses it with "Urbit Data", some random unrelated shitcoin that was going on at the time.

Nothing they say indicates they even read a single line of source, it's just the same insults you can find in any HN Urbit thread.

The person who wrote it is locally famous.

The medium article has more rational explanations, and covers most of the issues with the system

"Urbit is made to blossom into an endless garden of human cultures, each of which must regulate itself, none of which can bother the others."

What the internet has become is no "garden". Urbit is trying to change the default internet user permissions from slave to master. Its ambition should be applauded, here of all places, especially with its hacker ethos.

The primary explicit goal, as stated by Yarvin in the post where he introduced the idea for Urbit (it might not have been named at that point), is to free user data from "silos" like Facebook and Google by shifting away from a client-server architecture to a more peer-to-peer architecture. Yarvin (and by extension Urbit) has a specific vision for doing this involving scarce identities, federated/feudalist network organization, etc.

> federated/feudalist network organization, etc.

it turns my gears when people describe urbit as 'feudalist'. feudalism is what we have now, where we're serfs on facebook's manor and can't pack our stuff and leave.

That's not feudalism - serfs/peasants generally had freedom of movement. Urbit is pretty close to feudalism. It's also not putting words in Yarvin's mouth - he's been pretty supportive of feudalism in the past. (Some people have a bad reaction to that, but I don't really care.)

Many serfs could not legally leave the land they were attached to and did not have freedom of movement. Part of the value of that land when it was sold or traded was the serfs bonded to it. This shouldn't be particularly surprising because even some knights were owned by Lords and could be traded or given as gifts to other Lords.

Urbit was literally designed as feudalism. This is how Yarvin was discussing it in 2010, before multiple passes of bowdlerisation: https://github.com/mbrubeck/urbit/blob/1bc9086a3fd62594e8bd6...

    3. Fort allocation - digital feudalism

    Lords are only one class of fort.  A fort is always an atom.
    It is classified by the size of that atom:

    >= 2^64, < 2^128 :   wolf (wild fort)
    >= 2^32, < 2^64  :   pawn (civil fort)
    >= 2^16, < 2^32  :   lord (civil fort)
    >= 2^8,  < 2^16  :   earl (civil fort)
    >= 1,    < 256   :   duke (civil fort)
    == 0             :   pope (trivial fort)

Urbit's stars, galaxies, etc., were originally called "czar", "duke", "earl", "king", and "pawn". Your issue is not with "people"; it's with Mencius Moldbug, who wrote Urbit.

https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/cb9977c735f199e143ff58ee...

is america feudalist for having a drug czar?

The main goal of the people working on Urbit, as with most ventures, is to make money.

They make money by selling you an identifier that gives you access to their network for ~$10-$20. They have 2^32 identifiers so they expect to make a lot of money.

Keep in mind that this identifier doesn't mean you "own" or "control" much, as it is folded under a parent identifier of which there are only 2^8, all controlled by the original Urbit creators/their associates.

The rest is a semi-interesting mix of distributed systems + crypto ideas as other commenters have tried to summarize; there are other, less indecipherable, projects with similar ideas.

Could you name some similar projects? Do you mean something like blockstack or dfinity?

holochain

I don't understand Urbit now and then. Is it artwork like TempleOS? Is it over-ambitious vaporware like Xanadu? Is it a revolution attempt like Bitcoin?

The technical details (Hoon and Nock) sound weird like TempleOS. Some claims (see parent) sound like Bitcoin.

"TempleOS, but on the blockchain" is a succinct description, but makes Urbit sound too interesting.

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