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Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane

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

#141

Post by meowface »

wpietri wrote: post #132
meowface wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point I was trying to convey is best expressed in the paragraph and not the isolated sentence: >My understanding is that most cryptocurrencies intend to be extremely democratic. More democratic than all previously existing currencies, even. (Whether those ideas are feasible or those goals are being achieved is another matter.) I also discussed it a bit in my other reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?…

Skimming that long comment, I still don't see any evidence for your claim. My best guess is you mean a different word than "democratic".

It depends what layer you're considering and what properties you want. At the base layer, the core idea is that the community opts into the protocol and ideally has some say into future protocol changes.

In terms of network consensus, democracy indeed isn't universal in terms of network users, since in PoW the huge mining pools have disproportionate votes, and in PoS the huge staking pools and whales have disproportionate votes. However, the "voting" in this case is just "which blockchain is the valid one". Unless a group of powerful entities collude to 51% attack the network, this doesn't actually confer any direct influence over anything. (Though for PoW, miners do have some influence over what transaction fees people will have to pay.)

In terms of systems built on top of the core network - especially if smart contracts are supported - you can create lots of interesting democratic governance systems. You can basically make whatever you want.

So, is network consensus democratic? Not really. Then it's kind of a question of if it's more or less democratic than, say, money in the United States.

One could make an argument it's way more democratic, since two single organizations control money issuance: the central bank and the treasury. (One partial counter-argument is that the Federal Reserve is - as the name implies - federated regionally through 12 sub-organizations. One could potentially say that it still effectively operates as one entity, though.)

Or that it's way less democratic, since at least everyone in the country can vote for the president, and the president appoints the central bank governors and the treasury secretary.

>Skimming that long comment, I still don't see any evidence for your claim.

The claim:

>My understanding is that most cryptocurrencies intend to be extremely democratic. More democratic than all previously existing currencies, even. (Whether those ideas are feasible or those goals are being achieved is another matter.)

My only claim is that they intend to be democratic. At least Bitcoin did. I don't think that's too hard to support; Satoshi initially intended for everyone to be able to mine. I think he had a pretty democratic vision.

The implied emphasis in that paragraph was on "Whether those ideas are feasible or those goals are being achieved is another matter."

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

#142

Post by dwb »

lisper wrote: post #137
dwb wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He strikes me as enough of a self-important dork to say (and mean) something like this, and what I’ve seen of his politics are extremely bad to me, but let’s not lose perspective: we’re talking about an open-source VM here. There’s no lock-in. If I got into it and then found out that it was worse than I’m seeing right now then I would shrug my shoulders and move on.

> There’s no lock-in. There is very rarely any externally visible lock-in. That's not how cults work. Cults work by building a community of people who perceive non-members as the enemy. Urbit builds that community by enticing geeks with the promise of something new and interesting and then keeps them in by leveraging the sunk-cost fallacy (people don't like to admit that all the effort they put into learning Hoon was…

I still think this "cult" characterisation is a bit much. Even if Urbit does inspire something like what you're worried about, we're talking about, what, some people being annoying in the comments section? The "followers" spending their time on doomed technology that isn't ideal for their needs? An alleged racist accumulating a bit more cryptocurrency (itself possibly a doomed technology) than we'd like? Compare this with religious cults that ruin people's lives, separate them from their families, and so on.

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

#143

Post by lisper »

dwb wrote: post #142
lisper wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There’s no lock-in. There is very rarely any externally visible lock-in. That's not how cults work. Cults work by building a community of people who perceive non-members as the enemy. Urbit builds that community by enticing geeks with the promise of something new and interesting and then keeps them in by leveraging the sunk-cost fallacy (people don't like to admit that all the effort they put into learning Hoon was…

I still think this "cult" characterisation is a bit much. Even if Urbit does inspire something like what you're worried about, we're talking about, what, some people being annoying in the comments section? The "followers" spending their time on doomed technology that isn't ideal for their needs? An alleged racist accumulating a bit more cryptocurrency (itself possibly a doomed technology) than we'd like? Compare this…

Scientology started off as a fairly innocuous-looking self-help book and look where it is now. These things take time. By the time it is obvious that a nascent cult is fully fledged it is generally too late to sound the alarm.

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

#144

Post by q3k »

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.

> Domains being essentially free allows for too much easy spamming of internet users.

My experience with spam [1] is that 90% of the non-trivially-filtered-kind comes from either taken over 'mainstream' email provider accounts (eg. gmail, yahoo, ...) or from exploited websites that can send email (eg. a wordpress or prestashop instance). Obviously dedicated 'spam' domains tend to get blocked _very_ fast on a multitutde of RBLs. It's the domains shared between spam and non-spam users that are the real problem.

Making domains more expensive probably won't help fighting spam. It will, however, increase the barrier to having an online identity to people who can't blow a couple months' rent on an urbit identity.

On the other hand, being able to register domain names without _any_ identity checks and oversight from legally responsible registrar entities could possibly increase abuse in some other ways.

[1] - I help run a mail server for a hackerspace.

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

#145

Post by k2enemy »

tyui44 wrote: post #140
k2enemy wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other reply was correct. Transferring a star is simple. I wanted to figure out how to sell it. I suppose that is also my fault of not understanding ethereum/nft terminology, not just Urbit.

The sales process consists of you transferring ownership to an address the buyer provides you after they pay you; it's not programmatic. The fastest/simplest way to sell is probably to list your star on opensea.io, though there's also a marketplace group on urbit.

Thank you, that is helpful. I'm surprised that people are willing to send eth based on the promise to later transfer an address!

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

#146

Post by _d7dt »

fvdessen wrote: post #131
geofft wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still not following how this is different from Mastodon. Some users run their own instance (= planet), which cannot be "banned" by ordinary Mastodon means; you can only refuse to peer with it. Some users have accounts on someone else's instance, which can be banned by the admin of the instance. If you start tooting, I dunno, reactionary pro-slavery nonsense that takes asymmetrically more effort to refute than to clai…

To make a real life analogy, In mastodon, people all live in big collectivist housings centered around a project, If you get kicked out you become homeless, or you need to start your own collective, where you will be initially alone In urbit, people all live in individual houses, where they can invite friends over. People can ban you from their house, but you can't get kicked out of your own house

I don't think that is correct, there are plenty of Mastodon instances with a very low number of users (1-5 users).

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

#147

Post by dwb »

lisper wrote: post #143
dwb wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still think this "cult" characterisation is a bit much. Even if Urbit does inspire something like what you're worried about, we're talking about, what, some people being annoying in the comments section? The "followers" spending their time on doomed technology that isn't ideal for their needs? An alleged racist accumulating a bit more cryptocurrency (itself possibly a doomed technology) than we'd like? Compare this…

Scientology started off as a fairly innocuous-looking self-help book and look where it is now. These things take time. By the time it is obvious that a nascent cult is fully fledged it is generally too late to sound the alarm.

Sure, and I'm not saying it's impossible. But cults based on some deep self-improvement and/or transcendence plus charismatic leadership, I can broadly understand why they developed. Based on an open-source software project, seems much less likely – imho certainly not enough to start openly worrying about it at this stage.

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

#148

Post by wpietri »

meowface wrote: post #141
wpietri wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skimming that long comment, I still don't see any evidence for your claim. My best guess is you mean a different word than "democratic".

It depends what layer you're considering and what properties you want. At the base layer, the core idea is that the community opts into the protocol and ideally has some say into future protocol changes. In terms of network consensus, democracy indeed isn't universal in terms of network users, since in PoW the huge mining pools have disproportionate votes, and in PoS the huge staking pools and whales have disproporti…

Again, I think you must be using "democratic" to mean something entirely different than I am.

I just reread the original Bitcoin paper and there's nothing in there about democracy. From the beginning of the use of computers, computational capacity has been about access to capital and that has not changed. If you're claiming that Satoshi's goal was something democratic, either you're using the word differently or you're suggesting he's the very dimmest of bulbs, unaware of basic facts about access to computation or somehow unable to think through the meaning.

Maybe you want a word more like "individualist"? I can see how one might confuse that for "democratic".

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

#149

Post by vzcx »

lisper wrote: post #84
vzcx wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want the world to become Tlon, don't you need an Orbis Tertius? As someone who has never met Curtis but has been initiated into both the cult of urbit and the cult of lisp, I've sometimes wondered how familiar he was the works of the latter, as you can often see some familiar things when you squint, but it's covered up with strange materials, quite possibly of alien origins.

Curtis definitely was aware of Lisp. I pointed out to him that he seemed to be reinventing Lisp, but very badly. He actually acknowledged this, or at least acknowledged that this was a possibility. He specifically said that this was part of the Grand Plan (my description, not his): making Urbit radically different from anything that had gone before was an explicit design goal. That is one of the reasons I came to the…

There's being aware of Lisp and then there's having learned Lisp's lessons. Urbit is interesting to me but it is also interesting for me to imagine what it would be like if, perhaps, Curtis had attended MIT instead of Berkeley.

Where you see nefarious intentions I see someone pursuing their own aesthetics, something that is very admirable and that I think more systems engineers should do. It's obviously not your aesthetic. It's not even really my aesthetic. It's Curtis's. But isn't "radically different from anything that has gone before" just a roundabout way of saying "cool?"

As far as the "cult" goes, I am reminded of that part in Jodorowsky's Dune where he's all "I am looking for my holy warriors!" For any system, whether technological, religious or philosophical to remain living and breathing, it needs its adherents and believers, and I see neither bad intentions nor bad outcomes here. Maybe that's just what happens when you are deep enough in the cult. But the cult is... calm. Cozy, even.

Is that so bad?

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

#150

Post by samatman »

_d7dt wrote: post #146
fvdessen wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To make a real life analogy, In mastodon, people all live in big collectivist housings centered around a project, If you get kicked out you become homeless, or you need to start your own collective, where you will be initially alone In urbit, people all live in individual houses, where they can invite friends over. People can ban you from their house, but you can't get kicked out of your own house

I don't think that is correct, there are plenty of Mastodon instances with a very low number of users (1-5 users).

I already spelled out the difference, and even highlighted it in the hope that people would notice, but I don't mind doing it one more time: in urbit, there is no difference between an instance and a user.

If everyone in Mastodon ran an instance with exactly one user, then sure, it would be possible to ban a user, but not strip the database of all their posts and take their identity away, because both of those things are under the instances control.

But Mastodon doesn't work that way, and urbit does.

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