>My take is that they went with all their bizarre design decisions in order to keep normies and entryists out for as long as possible

But it's just complexity for the sake of complexity with no discernible benefit. It's contradictory and self-defeating to encourage developers to adopt Urbit while simultaneously purposely designing it just so developers won't adopt it. Urbit makes many weird and contrarian design choices without explanation. It's fine to explore ideas and try different different methodologies but you should at least be able to explain why you're choosing to do it and how it would be beneficial. Here's a good example from the documentation:

A loobean is a Nock boolean - Nock, for mysterious reasons, uses 0 as true (always say "yes") and 1 as false (always say "no").

So they create an alternative to booleans that's just a backwards boolean? And their explanation for this? 'mysterious reasons' What?!? The only thing mysterious here is why any developer would use this.

The mysterious part would be a joke. The actual reasoning, which Yarvin himself has explained, is to unify the underlying data values between booleans and c-style return codes. In C and unix, the convention is that 0 indicates program success and any other value indicates some kind of program failure. It's strange for the fundamental success code to be false when cast as a boolean, so it makes sense to either change the success codes or change the booleans. Changing the success codes would actually be pretty incoherent - what would you do, 0 and >1 values are failure and 1 is success? - so it makes more sense to change the booleans if something is going to change

Not saying I agree it's worth the trouble. Even Yarvin agrees it wasn't worth the trouble. But he didn't just pull this idea out of nowhere

The original parcels of Urbit address space went for a lot more than $20.

I have some idea what I'm talking about. I was pitched on Urbit by Curtis himself on April 20, 2012, long before it launched, and before it was even called Urbit. He tried to sell me a block of Urbit address space at the time. I don't remember the asking price, but it was substantial, many thousands of dollars. I declined.

Yes, the crowdsales priced individual addresses at less than one cent, but it's a 64-bit address space, so even at one cent that puts the gross valuation of Urbit at many orders magnitude greater than the gross planetary product since the dawn of human history. I'd say that's overvalued. Also, the addresses are not sold individually but in large blocks, with part of the pitch being that people who get in early can turn around and sell parts of their holdings to greater fools. If memory serves, the first crowdsale raised $500k. So even at 1 cent per, someone ended up writing some pretty big checks.

You're either confused or the details have changed since you looked at it 8+ years ago. The address space for sale is 32-bit. There is also a 128-bit space that is free

https://urbit.org/blog/the-urbit-address-space/

Actually, it's just a 128-bit address space (so I was wrong about it being 64-bit, but this just makes the problem that much worse). Parts of this space are divvied up IP-address style into 96-bit-wide blocks (and some other parcel sizes as well), so that carves out a 32-bit sub-space. But no matter how you slice it, the fact remains that they are selling a digital asset at a valuation that exceeds the total economic output of the known universe by several orders of magnitude. If that's not a scam, I don't know what is.

> they are selling a digital asset at a valuation that exceeds the total economic output of the known universe by several orders of magnitude. If that's not a scam, I don't know what is.

But they're not. There are 2^32 planets. A planet is the minimum unit of personal identity and is meant to correspond to a "responsible adult human". Within a planet you can have 96 bits of sub-identity, if you want to have things subordinated to your own identity (e.g. your IOT stuff, your phone, your router, your car, your kids, whatever). No one is buying a 128 bit identity.

You can buy planets right now for $10-$20 on opensea. $20 * 2^32 is about 10% of the annual military budget of the United States, not several orders of magnitude larger than the total economic output of the known universe.

OK, so the market price has gone down since I last looked. Still, even at $10, that's still a valuation of $40 billion. That's in the same league as Dow Chemical and Capital One. So I very much stand by what I said above about fools and their money.