<story><title>Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum</title><url>https://urbit.org/blog/2017.9-eth/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aeontech</author><text>Every time I read something about Urbit I am reminded of the Lewis Padgett short sci-fi story, &amp;quot;Mimsy Were The Borogroves&amp;quot; [0], [1] describing children discovering alien future toys, and subsequently via use of those toys learning to manipulate reality in incomprehensible ways.&lt;p&gt;I still have not been able to figure out if there&amp;#x27;s actually something that amazing about Urbit, or if behind the obfuscated terminology there&amp;#x27;s nothing, and I am reluctant to commit to the time required to find out for myself. It doesn&amp;#x27;t help that people who spend time in that land seem to all forget how to speak about it except in the terms of Urbit, unable to translate it for laypeople. I suppose that&amp;#x27;s true about any highly technical subject though.&lt;p&gt;[0]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Mimsy_Were_the_Borogoves&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Mimsy_Were_the_Borogoves&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;books.google.com&amp;#x2F;books?id=yPVbDv5DqkoC&amp;amp;lpg=PA181&amp;amp;dq=mimsy%20were%20the%20borogoves&amp;amp;pg=PA181#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=mimsy%20were%20the%20borogoves&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;books.google.com&amp;#x2F;books?id=yPVbDv5DqkoC&amp;amp;lpg=PA181&amp;amp;dq=...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chc4</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m one of those people that get it, so I&amp;#x27;ll try to explain it without going off the deep end and waxing poetically about planets or whatever.&lt;p&gt;Urbit is a platform for building decentralized apps. To that end, it&amp;#x27;s a tightly integrated set of different features that play into that: an identity system so that all the apps can refer to the same people by the same handle, a typed RPC network for easy message sending, and an append-only log of all events that platform handles being the most important parts.&lt;p&gt;Right now you can build decentralized apps like Mastodon, except they 1) take hours to setup a node, along with having to know arcane Linuz sysadmining 2) aren&amp;#x27;t actually decentralized, but federated. Urbit wants to make it easy to setup your own server, which runs as a node for all these decentralized apps (instant messaging, Twitter, etc.), along with be useful for server-y things like aggregate APIs (email, Facebook).&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s not actually anything that amazing about Urbit once you figure it out. It just wants everyone to be able to run their own server, and make it easy to build decentralized apps that talk to other Urbit servers. The important part is that somehow, they saw how bad trying to do that currently is, said &amp;quot;let&amp;#x27;s rewrite everything&amp;quot;, &amp;#x2F;and then did&amp;#x2F;. It&amp;#x27;s like reading about Oberon or Plan9&amp;#x2F;Inferno.&lt;p&gt;Edit: This post is probably the worst introduction to Urbit imaginable. It basically is a technical spec for bootstrapping a PKI over Ethereum, and you should expect about as much as if you got linked something from BitTorrent about that. It assumes domain knowledge from both Urbit and Ethereum (both of which are terrible to explain), and &amp;#x2F;doesn&amp;#x27;t actually matter&amp;#x2F; for most people interested in Urbit. Please don&amp;#x27;t use this as the benchmark for &amp;quot;babies first urbit intro&amp;quot;.</text></comment>
<story><title>Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum</title><url>https://urbit.org/blog/2017.9-eth/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aeontech</author><text>Every time I read something about Urbit I am reminded of the Lewis Padgett short sci-fi story, &amp;quot;Mimsy Were The Borogroves&amp;quot; [0], [1] describing children discovering alien future toys, and subsequently via use of those toys learning to manipulate reality in incomprehensible ways.&lt;p&gt;I still have not been able to figure out if there&amp;#x27;s actually something that amazing about Urbit, or if behind the obfuscated terminology there&amp;#x27;s nothing, and I am reluctant to commit to the time required to find out for myself. It doesn&amp;#x27;t help that people who spend time in that land seem to all forget how to speak about it except in the terms of Urbit, unable to translate it for laypeople. I suppose that&amp;#x27;s true about any highly technical subject though.&lt;p&gt;[0]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Mimsy_Were_the_Borogoves&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Mimsy_Were_the_Borogoves&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;books.google.com&amp;#x2F;books?id=yPVbDv5DqkoC&amp;amp;lpg=PA181&amp;amp;dq=mimsy%20were%20the%20borogoves&amp;amp;pg=PA181#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=mimsy%20were%20the%20borogoves&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;books.google.com&amp;#x2F;books?id=yPVbDv5DqkoC&amp;amp;lpg=PA181&amp;amp;dq=...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>olympus</author><text>Urbit has been around for a few years and has done nothing to clear up the confusion around it.  I think at this point it is safe to say that any claims of Urbit being a revolutionary form of computing are hogwash.&lt;p&gt;This is probably similar to how Scientology got started.  Nobody really believes in it, but are too afraid to strongly denounce it because they don&amp;#x27;t want to be the one who &amp;quot;doesn&amp;#x27;t get it.&amp;quot;  So they all just go along and get sucked further along down the rabbit hole.  The difference between Scientology and Urbit is that Scientology managed to rope in a few celebrities and gained some sustaining mass.  If Urbit wants to make it big, they should pay Zuckerberg and Musk to evangelize it, and then everyone will be falling all over themselves to be part of it.</text></comment>