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Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane

wejn.org

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Re: Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane

#21

Post by bruiseralmighty »

fvdessen wrote: post #11

While the Urbit tech stack is clearly insane (some say it’s on purpose), The urbit identity layer is interesting and useful. You basically buy your username as a NFT, and that username is bound to signing keys, ip address and ethereum wallet. This makes it quite practical as an identity for chat / social network. This identity is on the eth blockchain and thus nobody can steal it / ban you, which is a unique value pr…

This is also the most compelling aspect of it to me as well. Domains being essentially free allows for too much easy spamming of internet users. Raising the cost of an identity online really helps solve a lot of the bad actor problems.

Re: Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane

#22

Post by geofft »

fvdessen wrote: post #11

While the Urbit tech stack is clearly insane (some say it’s on purpose), The urbit identity layer is interesting and useful. You basically buy your username as a NFT, and that username is bound to signing keys, ip address and ethereum wallet. This makes it quite practical as an identity for chat / social network. This identity is on the eth blockchain and thus nobody can steal it / ban you, which is a unique value pr…

Have you never lost a private key? I definitely lost the private key to my original PGP key.

And I wouldn't say "nobody can ban you" - quite the opposite, in fact: with Urbit every major network node gets to make its own choice about banning, and the system encourages that. And the obvious end state is for a setup like Mastodon (or, frankly, Twitter blocks) where nodes collaborate on identifying spammers, griefers, and other bad actors because nobody wants to do full-time moderation work for their own personal experience on the network. That means your permanent identity can easily be banned across large swaths of the network.

(I think that's actually totally fine, I just don't think it's true to say that nobody can ban you.)

Re: Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane

#23

Post by gryn »

last I saw urbit a long time ago, the only thing I could think of is that it was a social experiment to see how much vague nonsense people a willing to take and how long it would take for people to reach that consensus.

a more elaborate version of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTHg-tGvlJ8

Re: Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane

#24

Post by Spivak »

bruiseralmighty wrote: post #21
fvdessen wrote: post #11

While the Urbit tech stack is clearly insane (some say it’s on purpose), The urbit identity layer is interesting and useful. You basically buy your username as a NFT, and that username is bound to signing keys, ip address and ethereum wallet. This makes it quite practical as an identity for chat / social network. This identity is on the eth blockchain and thus nobody can steal it / ban you, which is a unique value pr…

This is also the most compelling aspect of it to me as well. Domains being essentially free allows for too much easy spamming of internet users. Raising the cost of an identity online really helps solve a lot of the bad actor problems.

I mean if that's the only value. Facebook, but only for people who pay $100/yr, would be an easy way to create a high signal-noise social network and unfortunately it isn't.

Re: Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane

#25

Post by Spivak »

wmf wrote: post #12
fvdessen wrote: post #11

While the Urbit tech stack is clearly insane (some say it’s on purpose), The urbit identity layer is interesting and useful. You basically buy your username as a NFT, and that username is bound to signing keys, ip address and ethereum wallet. This makes it quite practical as an identity for chat / social network. This identity is on the eth blockchain and thus nobody can steal it / ban you, which is a unique value pr…

Or you could buy a domain.

I'm sure someone will talk about your registrar potentially banning you but since your identity is tied to your public IP address that could already happen.

Re: Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane

#27

Post by yongjik »

voldacar wrote: post #5

I don't know much at all about Urbit, but this doesn't seem like it was written in good faith tbh. The mention of security holes seems to be the only real serious critique. Hopefully some urbit people could address those, since claiming to be a secure personal VM and just exposing your data on disk to the cloud provider is crazy. Other than that, the author seems to be mostly making fun of urbit for being weird and a…

On the contrary, I think the author spent a lot of effort to understand the underlying tech stack - honestly I can't understand why, but maybe they were exceptionally bored? This is the first time I learned that the underlying VM is single-threaded, for example.

Re: Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane

#28

Post by jlehman »

wejn wrote: post #16
jlehman wrote: post #13

Reminds me of this essay: http://paulgraham.com/newideas.html

Interesting. I thought that I was tearing down the fact they took the brilliant new idea, and bastardized it beyond recognition, and in multiple ways. I loved the promise of Urbit, and was disappointed by the execution.

You mean "after spending just a few hours poking around it"? It's a big, ambitious project that's been worked on now for nearly two decades.

It seems more likely that you're disappointed by your understanding of the execution, which can be nothing but extremely limited.

Re: Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane

#29

Post by jlehman »

yongjik wrote: post #27
voldacar wrote: post #5

I don't know much at all about Urbit, but this doesn't seem like it was written in good faith tbh. The mention of security holes seems to be the only real serious critique. Hopefully some urbit people could address those, since claiming to be a secure personal VM and just exposing your data on disk to the cloud provider is crazy. Other than that, the author seems to be mostly making fun of urbit for being weird and a…

On the contrary, I think the author spent a lot of effort to understand the underlying tech stack - honestly I can't understand why, but maybe they were exceptionally bored? This is the first time I learned that the underlying VM is single-threaded, for example.

Why would you think he spent a lot of effort? The second sentence literally says that he did not.

Re: Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane

#30

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

geofft wrote: post #22
fvdessen wrote: post #11

While the Urbit tech stack is clearly insane (some say it’s on purpose), The urbit identity layer is interesting and useful. You basically buy your username as a NFT, and that username is bound to signing keys, ip address and ethereum wallet. This makes it quite practical as an identity for chat / social network. This identity is on the eth blockchain and thus nobody can steal it / ban you, which is a unique value pr…

Have you never lost a private key? I definitely lost the private key to my original PGP key. And I wouldn't say "nobody can ban you" - quite the opposite, in fact: with Urbit every major network node gets to make its own choice about banning, and the system encourages that. And the obvious end state is for a setup like Mastodon (or, frankly, Twitter blocks) where nodes collaborate on identifying spammers, griefers, a…

> Have you never lost a private key? I definitely lost the private key to my original PGP key.

For nearly twenty years now, PGP tutorials have often explained the importance of printing out a copy of your private key in a special OCR-readable font, and putting that in a safe place. Then you won't risk losing your private key even if all the devices it was stored on perish.

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