It most certainly is not. It's a macOS and Linux userspace application, no more no less[1].
How on earth do you consider that totally separate from any legacy system?
Only a handful of people would rather use something like Urbit than established systems.
> Eventually, one could write a native hardware kernel
When it does, you can call it an OS. For now, it's a user space application.
All puff. The amateurs over at /r/osdev are much closer to running directly on hypervisors or bare metal than Urbit will ever be.
The other difference is that Android has millions of users, Urbit, not so much.
Sounds like the dream of the "lisp machine". Is it more viable than that?
Identities aren't limited as anyone can create a comet, an identity without a parent (self-signed identity). There is a hierarchy of limited identities which serve as a routing network to propagate software updates and network packets. Since in reality you need to choose some computer to receive software updates from and send network packets to. Comets could communicate without the galaxy/star/planet hierarchy but they would have to choose some other way to route packets (DHT or something).
Urbit can function without Ethereum. AFAIK galaxies (super nodes/identities) participate in Ethereum as a consensus mechanism voluntarily. Nothing is stopping them from changing that.
I don't see it disrupting IP/DNS with cryptographic identities. I'd argue that Kademlia DHT does that in a more significant way.
Not really sure what Urbit does uniquely in that regard really.
I do crave some one-time use generated address that maps to a DHT/Kademlia cluster to provide deterministic privacy against p2p networks that doesn't depend on BGP autonomous centralized entities.
Know of anything like that out of curiosity? Ha.
It's not "one time use", but I believe BrightID[1] might be of interest to you. It allows applications to verify that you're a real person without looking into all your metadata and such. And it's not tied directly to your finances, etc like some other ID solutions are.
DHTs do not have a solution to Sybil attacks. In reality, they depend on super nodes. That’s what Urbit’s spanning tree (galaxies/stars/planets) provides, a system of reliable routing. Nothing stops Urbit nodes from using a DHT to communicate, as the network protocol is addressed by identity.
It's not "Ethereum is just..."
Urbit is sacrificing accessibility by adding complexity which Ethereum is, on top of the reputation of what cryptocurrency is, while also additionally requiring the complexity of wallets and ERC-21 (or w/e it is these days) to prove you have address space.
That's bs in my opinion. It should be completely automated like Ygg does it and allow any peer to participate and connect and discover routing deterministically and dynamically.
I hear Urbit can switch at any time, yeah, easier said than done when you've built a lot of expectations on a significant piece of the stack including the wallet and auth parts which are pretty integral. Then shifting the conceptual model? Not likely.
Potentially it is better to purchase an Urbit ID directly, rather than indirectly purchasing Apple ID through buying their hardware, or a Google/Facebook ID by donating your data.
Nevertheless, despite being presented as a free and open system, it seems like Urbit would centralise power with those selling Urbit IDs to an extent that Google, Apple, Facebook, etc have not yet achieved.