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Comment by phnofive | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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

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

"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?

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