<story><title>Urbit Is Building a &apos;Virtual Galaxy&apos; for Bitcoin Nodes</title><url>http://www.coindesk.com/urbit-developers-bitcoin-node/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Animats</author><text>What did they sell?  Apparently, some (all?) of their potential user ID space.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;s sort of like IRC.)  They recognize that a big problem with social networks is spam.  If you can freely create user IDs, it&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;So their solution is to create a market in user ID space.  It&amp;#x27;s not clear if this will work out, but it&amp;#x27;s something. If you buy an ID, you own it, in the Bitcoin sense. That is, you&amp;#x27;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.)&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;s useless to end users at this stage.  The concepts are interesting; it&amp;#x27;s good to see people trying original ideas.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;s a developer toolkit.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>davidgerard</author><text>Urbit: neoreaction via Diaspora in INTERCAL on the blockchain.&lt;p&gt;(Urbit is explicitly intended to instantiate Yarvin&amp;#x27;s political views, per the 2013 version of the security chapter: &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;archive.is&amp;#x2F;UK8So&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;archive.is&amp;#x2F;UK8So&lt;/a&gt; )</text></comment>
<story><title>Urbit Is Building a &apos;Virtual Galaxy&apos; for Bitcoin Nodes</title><url>http://www.coindesk.com/urbit-developers-bitcoin-node/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Animats</author><text>What did they sell?  Apparently, some (all?) of their potential user ID space.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;s sort of like IRC.)  They recognize that a big problem with social networks is spam.  If you can freely create user IDs, it&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;So their solution is to create a market in user ID space.  It&amp;#x27;s not clear if this will work out, but it&amp;#x27;s something. If you buy an ID, you own it, in the Bitcoin sense. That is, you&amp;#x27;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.)&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;s useless to end users at this stage.  The concepts are interesting; it&amp;#x27;s good to see people trying original ideas.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;s a developer toolkit.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hault</author><text>urbit dev here: we completely agree that we need to have &lt;i&gt;useful&lt;/i&gt; apps on top of it. We have an alpha for super simple wordpress-like hosting (in fact, the urbit.org site uses it!). All you have to do is drop a few md files into a tree and you&amp;#x27;re ready to go. See &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;urbit.org&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;using&amp;#x2F;web&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;urbit.org&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;using&amp;#x2F;web&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Joey Krug, founder of Augur, had a great post on how he could see Urbit as being a great compliment to the blockchain[0]:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;If the blockchain is useful in those areas where [almost] no trust exists, Urbit has the potential to be useful for essentially everything else.&lt;p&gt;To give a concrete example, this would be useful for any Ethereum app that doesn&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;t built very well to run decentralized apps [which is definitely the case if you&amp;#x27;ve ever tried building one without having to rely on central servers for caching, storing accounts, comments, etc.]. It&amp;#x27;s, imo, a nice complement to blockchain tech like Ethereum and Bitcoin. Long term once it&amp;#x27;s out and running I see dapps like Augur [a decentralized prediction market which I work on - &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;augur.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;augur.net&lt;/a&gt;] using it so users can securely store their private keys, report data, market data, trade history, etc. and easily go across&amp;#x2F;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].&lt;p&gt;If we&amp;#x27;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: &amp;quot;They have verve, and that&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;t looked at it more deeply (and probably should).&amp;quot; [&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=11810177&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=11810177&lt;/a&gt;] - very cool!&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;And finally, another idea: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;urbit.org&amp;#x2F;posts&amp;#x2F;objections&amp;#x2F;#killer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;urbit.org&amp;#x2F;posts&amp;#x2F;objections&amp;#x2F;#killer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=11817721&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=11817721&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>