> can you imagine your grandma using it? not right now. but that's goal they're driving at. and they're going to get there. Landscape (their browser UI) abstracts away all the weirdness about the OS and its tech stack
> who the fuck is going to learn hoon to use this thing? who is going to learn to use C / Swift / to use ? hoon is for development. most people aren't development. most people will not learn hoon and will remain ignorant to its existence.
> it's an obvious pyramid scheme the community is very clear that planets are not designed to appreciate in value. therefore, no one (hopefully) is buying them expecting to get rich. if they get too expensive, it's possible to increase their supply. the goal is that they should be just scarce enough to render network spam unprofitable.
> it's vaporware the code is written. people are using it. there are cool communities being formed there. all right now.
> it's pointless digital sovereignty is the future
Look I don't get it. >Urbit is a country >Urbit is a computer >Urbis is your bedroom Ok faggot.
Elijah Bennett
i guess "i don't like their twitter" is a valid criticism?
Noah King
Urbit is pretty awesome, ive been following it for years and just got a planet set up
Samuel Parker
it really is awesome nearly everything we do online today requires interacting with big business's servers this means that they control your data. when you post something to twitter, you might as well be tossing it into a black hole. yes technically you can file a request for a zip file containing your data, but from a functional perspective-- being able to meaningfully interact with this data-- it is useless to you meanwhile they datamine you and your social graph don't even think about some application that could meaningfully integrate your twitter feed with your facebook feed. it's not that such a thing isn't possible to develop. they don't want it to exist. similarly, if you want to interact with your e.g. nest thermostat, or whatever smart shit, you're doing it through nest servers. yet there is no good reason why to get the functionality of a >facebook >twitter >discord >slack that you need to be interacting via some cloud database it's possible to get the same functionality, while maintaining digital sovereignty (actually owning your data and your interactions / experience). the key is you just need what, for lack of a better term, is called a personal server. unfortunately for someone who hasn't digested this paradigm shift, "personal server" is an awful term. but once you have digested it, it's wonderful. the project might fail, but in the long run, imo, it's imperative that _something_ like it succeed eventually
Jackson Long
What I like is the idea that we won't have to deal with user interfaces for each app/social network we use. Everything can be folded up into one minimal feed. Gives me hope for the future... Urbit/21e8/bitcoin have serious potential to change how we use the internet
Julian Wright
yes the ability for the user to own the ui is a nice plus. rather than being forced to use whatever shit gets forced on you this year.
i also like the emphasis on "calm computing". social media is imo really fucking with people and society.
o/t - what's the deal with these references to 21e8 i've been seeing lately? is this a slogan for bitcoin maximalism or does it mean something else?
"21e8 is a special metaprotocol on top of bitcoin thatfacilitates cryptographic pricing of any piece of information, providing an alternative to today’s big tech recommender models and a protection against shilling attacks[1]. Bridging information content and attention with proof of work opens the potential for true information supply chains for software, media and more. We call these new ecosystemscomputational data marketsbecause they combine real-time content creation with distributed data exchange."
21e8 and Urbit aren't directly related but there is a lot of overlap as far as developers and enthusiasts go and in the not so distant future we will probably see Urbit apps that are compatible with the 21e8 protocol.
Levi Jenkins
I'm not too worried about mass adoption btw, it will probably happen but for now Urbit just needs the best and brightest to keep building strong communities and apps. The technical barrier to entry is a good thing in the early stages, keeps the plebs out and helps avoid tragedy of the commons
Benjamin Rivera
(OP) # > it's an obvious pyramid scheme >the community is very clear that planets are not designed to appreciate in value. therefore, no one (hopefully) is buying them expecting to get rich That's exactly how all MLM scams work, no one ever invests in the end user units, they invest in wholesale bulk units.
Matthew Campbell
here is a stereotypical pyramid scheme. if you can map this onto what urbit has proposed, i'll take what you're saying seriously
i'm still not getting what it is. can you spell it out for me please? is the idea that i'm supposed to solve a proof of work to publish to the blockchain that i like the simpsons or something?
in an actual pyramid scheme, there is no base to the pyramid other than mathematical impossibility
Oliver Jenkins
galaxy owners are able to expand the address space through a governance vote, if need be.
Thomas Rodriguez
It's nothing but a glorified ponzi MLM scam: everyone has to buy galaxies to sell suns to people with less money who wait for stars to spawn to sell to the peasants. Stars have a limited use, but no economic model so everyone buying a star is a bagholder who finances his galaxy breeder their crack and hookers.
Easton Morris
For the record I do hold a suicide stack of several stars, because if this actually takes off then theres no fucking way I'm not going to have bags of it. I got a good deal on them too so I can't say if they're a good buy right now
Andrew Allen
and so what additional levels to the pyramid would that create?
Yup, HackerNews midwits love to bring up "Urbit is a cult!!" whenever it gets discussed. But that's literally desired behavior at this stage.
Michael Hall
If urbit were just a ponzi scheme, they wouldn't have stopped selling stars at the onset of one of the biggest speculative bubbles in human history (2017 ICO mania)
>checked >i'm still not getting what it is. can you spell it out for me please? is the idea that i'm supposed to solve a proof of work to publish to the blockchain that i like the simpsons or something?
It's more like using proof of work to signal and discover the value of content/media. If you have valuable information, then you'll attach a proof of work as a gesture of confidence. If you build the internet around this concept then you can aggregate things based on how much PoW has been attached to it rather than cheap/meaningless metrics such as upvotes or Google adsense or whatever. Does that make sense?
ultimately it comes down to whether you believe it makes sense to charge for a planet. i think it does. if you don't, then i can see why you think urbit is a scam. if people do decide that it makes sense to buy an urbit id, a star will be valuable, since a star can sell them. should a star be able to sell planets? should stars exist at all? these questions beg what an appropriate alternative model would be. you can quibble with the existing model but imo having stars widely be numerous and distributed is advantageous compared to tlon e.g. owning all the address space and selling it off piecemeal to users. this way there is actual federation rather than centralization. also note that nothing that i've described is similar to how an MLM operates
Leo Jackson
so what sort of information and who is doing the mining and how are they being compensated for it?
Jose Murphy
>> can you imagine your grandma using it? >not right now. but that's goal they're driving at. and they're going to get there. Landscape (their browser UI) abstracts away all the weirdness about the OS and its tech stack my dear gramma has and never will use a computer. large corps have exactly zero incentive to use, develop or maintain this dumpsterfire of a project
>> who the fuck is going to learn hoon to use this thing? >who is going to learn to use C / Swift / to use ? hoon is for development. most people aren't development. most people will not learn hoon and will remain ignorant to its existence. Nock and Hoon are the most autistic, cultish and useless indecipherable constructs I've ever seen. Absolute garbage
>> it's an obvious pyramid scheme >the community is very clear that planets are not designed to appreciate in value. therefore, no one (hopefully) is buying them expecting to get rich. if they get too expensive, it's possible to increase their supply. the goal is that they should be just scarce enough to render network spam unprofitable. not designed to appreciate in value, yet ultra-scarce
>> it's vaporware >the code is written. people are using it. there are cool communities being formed there. all right now. some fucking schizo nerds are using it to create their own useless toy jellyware
>> it's pointless >digital sovereignty is the future no, it's the past, ubiquitous surveillance, fine-grained hyper-financialization and increasingly accurate behavioral models will blow what is left of free will out of the water
Elijah Davis
Any kind of information, really anything that can be referenced by a hash. Anyone can mine 21e8 hash puzzles, ive made like $10 myself mining some from pow.market, or you can push them out and have other people mine them
Bentley Wright
>some fucking schizo nerds are using it to create their own useless toy jellyware
Underestimate them at your own peril user. There are some really smart people working on urbit right now.
Jackson Adams
There's zero need to charge for a planet. Essentially, it's not much more than an ETH address, and I can create one whenever I feel like till I am blue in the face and their will be enough for my children and grandchildren to do the same.
The ETH on the other hand are limited for clear economic reasons. Urbit now has zero economic activity so they charge for the coordinates in the address space to make the founders rich.
This is basically a 100% pre-mined shitcoin from the perspective of a planet buyer.
Ryan Sanders
you're just betraying your own ignorance. nock is to hoon as jvm bytecode is to java
Caleb Reyes
it's important for protecting the network from spam if the project goals are successful, you won't need to pay more than a small amount for one if you don't want to pay for one, you can still get on the network using comets
Samuel Collins
the smartest people have already left
should it ever gain more traction the early cult followers/investors will have their stacks to dump on the unsuspecting masses, then they'll fuck off as well.
no company, government or normie will ever want to have anything to do with it, it has neither technical merit nor much meme potential.
Austin Nguyen
>the smartest people have already left who has left besides curtis?
Joseph Lewis
The idea behind Nock, that of an immutable runtime which can serve as a hardware-independent substrate for antifragile systems is platonically elegant, yet useless and economically impossible in practice in its current form. WebAssembly will serve this purpose well, its ecosystem will be magnitudes more mature and far-reaching than any other competitor, including the JVM, not just because it will become *the* standard runtime for the web and IoT, but also due to its security architecture, which Nock already irreversibly fucked up in significant ways.
