(Urbit is explicitly intended to instantiate Yarvin's political views, per the 2013 version of the security chapter: http://archive.is/UK8So )
1.6% of their address space. For $200k. And they sold it all. That puts an implicit current valuation on the entire Urbit address space of $17M.
For a stupid example, say someone makes electricity stop working. But there's lots of things that could make it less valuable in the future than the value implied by the recent sale.
People regularly spend millions on sculptures which are indeed just special rocks. The Guennol Lioness comes to mind.
Then, if you made the rock cost a negligible amount of money given the regular payouts on such ventures, I would really start considering it. Don't be a boob.
Joey Krug, founder of Augur, had a great post on how he could see Urbit as being a great compliment to the blockchain[0]:
"If the blockchain is useful in those areas where [almost] no trust exists, Urbit has the potential to be useful for essentially everything else.
To give a concrete example, this would be useful for any Ethereum app that doesn't want to store data on a central server (which most cannot do whether for legal, security, or ideological reasons). The idea to me is that the internet wasn't built very well to run decentralized apps [which is definitely the case if you've ever tried building one without having to rely on central servers for caching, storing accounts, comments, etc.]. It's, imo, a nice complement to blockchain tech like Ethereum and Bitcoin. Long term once it's out and running I see dapps like Augur [a decentralized prediction market which I work on - http://augur.net] using it so users can securely store their private keys, report data, market data, trade history, etc. and easily go across/between devices as opposed to just using localstorage [which is a pain to migrate using] or fetching it from ethereum every time [which is very time consuming and has lots of overhead].
If we're going to seriously move in this direction of decentralization, at scale we need something like urbit. No one else is really tackling the same set of problems. Came across this quote on it by Alan Kay: "They have verve, and that's generally a good thing. In this case there are a lot of details that need to be grokked to make any reasonable comment. The use of combinators (a kind of dual of lambda calculus) harks back to an excellent thesis by Denis Seror at the University of Utah in the 70s that produced a safe, highly scalable and parallel implementation. I haven't looked at it more deeply (and probably should)." [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11810177] - very cool!"
And finally, another idea: https://urbit.org/posts/objections/#killer
And what is the advantage of this over wordpress? Or even just raw nginx?
I don't necessarily mean what is the advantage of urbit in its current state -- I get that this is an alpha release. What I'm asking is: when urbit becomes what you envision it to be, what tangible advantage should I as a user expect to see from using Urbit over using Wordpress or nginx?
Right now, you can only have two of those at a time. You own your Wordpress install and it's world visible, but your mom needs you to administer it. (Not every mom is lucky enough to have a kid like you.) Your Facebook is world visible and your mom can set one up, but you don't own it (quite the converse). You own what's on your iPhone and your mom can use one, but you can't publish anything with it - you need a separate service with its own set of tradeoffs.
Urbit's USP is that it's designed to be able to provide all three, along with a cryptographically verifiable identity system that can make spamming and shitposting costly enough to be economically inviable.
All this is ambitious as hell, of course, and it's very early days yet - there's every chance Urbit will go down in history as a curious but ultimately doomed also-ran, if it goes down in history at all. But it's easy to understand why people find its design goals appealing.
OK, I am totally down with that set of goals. But...
> You own your Wordpress install and it's world visible, but your mom needs you to administer it.
That's not clear. Have you ever actually used Wordpress? It's actually pretty friendly to non-technical users. But OK, let's accept as a premise that Wordpress is beyond Mom's ability, and that this is a problem that needs to be solved. There are two possible ways to solve it:
1. Modify Wordpress to make it more mom-friendly
2. Throw out everything that has been done in computing to date and start from scratch, rebuilding everything from the ground up (well, except that we're still going to run on unix and hand-compile Hoon to C when performance matters, but we'll let that slide).
Why is approach #1 so unlikely to succeed that we should even try #2?
To use, sure. To install and administer? Not so much. You can get a Wordpress.com account, but that doesn't solve the ownership problem.
Sandstorm.io goes some way toward fixing the specific problem of Wordpress being impossible for non-technical users to install and administer. (Probably quite a long way, in fact.)
And that's great! For Wordpress. But it doesn't do anything to solve the larger problem of ownership of data, which - and I appreciate I didn't make it clear in the comment to which you're responding, but see [1] - is in this case a cipher for ownership of identity, which right now belongs to social media networks, which is another way of saying it belongs to Facebook.
It's not clear that something like Urbit is necessary to solve this problem. But it's also not clear that something like Urbit is not necessary, and I don't know of anyone else who's even trying to attack the problem directly.
I ask again: have you ever tried? Because installing WP can be as easy as:
sudo apt-get install wordpress
after which all the admin is done through a web interface.
> I don't know of anyone else who's even trying to attack the problem directly.
And that matters, because as I learned the hard way, being able to do it just for yourself isn't enough. A social network is social. If you're not on it and everyone else is, you still lose.
(Although tying your fate to Etherium may be a mistake. The contract technology turned out to be insecure, and very hard to secure. Etherium needs to go back into the shop for a major redesign.)
It is entirely unclear this has been demonstrated. Mostly what we see in the cryptocurrency space in practice (not hypotheticals) is scams upon scams: it turns out that a "trustless" system attracts people who can't be trusted.
So, until the chinese mining cartels or coredevs decide you don't?
Comparisons to Bitcoin are bound to fall apart upon closer examination. For instance, Urbit has no blockchain, and Bitcoin's ownership structure is based on computer power, not federated cryptography.
Digging a bit deeper, Urbit is actually more free than Bitcoin, because the latter is easily eaten by the biggest fish in the sea. Urbit, on the other hand, could only ever de-decentralize if all 255 galaxies were owned by a single person, which is about as likely as all of the Eastern Hemisphere being owned by a single person.
How is this supposed to work when some advertisers are willing to spend more on a single ad impression for certain keywords (e.x. "mesothelioma") than the average monthly wage for people in some parts of the world?
I don't have a Facebook account, but my understanding is that it supports app integrations, and that connected apps have access to the account information you choose to share with them. Why wouldn't this work for Urbit? And why, in theory, wouldn't Urbit be able to support a distributed Facebook in the same way that GNU social supports a distributed Twitter?
The concerning part would seem to me to be how you cope with a situation where you have some people hosting their stuff on their urbits, and others still on Facebook; I don't see a solution here that does not require technical cooperation from Facebook, which as you rightly note will not likely be forthcoming.
As I know to my cost, people stick to Facebook because Facebook owns their social lives, so people aren't going to risk trying to emancipate themselves from Facebook unless they can do so without maybe losing all their friends. No one at Tlön has articulated anything like a clear solution to this problem, and I think it would be a very good idea if they did, because it will kill them if they don't watch out.
Urbit is provably effective at generating techie amazement, and I can well believe it created enough for well-off people to spend money on address space for the amusement value (at least one has explicitly said that's why he bought some). Urbit is a legitimate mad art project, an untrammelled 200-proof expression of its creator's personality; that is in fact interesting.
This is not, however, the same as usefulness.
Urbit, under all their jargon, is a base for a federated social network. Sort of like Diaspora. (Right now, they say they have chat, so it's sort of like IRC.) They recognize that a big problem with social networks is spam. If you can freely create user IDs, it's hard to stop spammers. But if user IDs cost money, then spam blocking costs spammers money (their purchased online identities lose value) and spamming is no longer cost-effective.
So their solution is to create a market in user ID space. It's not clear if this will work out, but it's something. If you buy an ID, you own it, in the Bitcoin sense. That is, you're not at the mercy of some service provider, and can freely move from one service provider to another without their permission. (I think this is right. Not entirely sure.)
It's not clear if this will work in the social space. They have the underlying machinery, but nobody has built the Facebook or WhatsApp or Dropbox killer on top of it yet, so it's useless to end users at this stage. The concepts are interesting; it's good to see people trying original ideas.
If someone builds an easy to use social application on this and gets some services to host it (like Wordpress hosting), this could get actual users. Right now, it's a developer toolkit.