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Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

urbit.org

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Re: Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

#61

Post by chc4 »

tptacek wrote: post #48
chc4 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marketting spiel incoming. You use Reddit to share link, Twitter to keep up with people, and IRC for real time chat. In all of those cases you are trusting a third party corporation that they aren't keeping you data forever and they won't arbitrarily ban you. You can switch to alternatives like Mastodon or, like, voat but it's really the same problem: now you're just trusting a different server, and being banned stil…

Right, but you could do that with any P2P overlay network with any embeddable VM. Why use the very unorthodox one that Urbit came up with? I really think that's the question people are asking when they say they don't understand Urbit. Not, "why would we want to do what this system claims to let us do", but rather, "why would we want to do it that way ?"

Do you have something in mind? Using GNU Social as a convient whipping-post, it's built on PHP and MySQL and Salmon and PubSubHubbub and...

The point of Urbit is to be a cobherent, self-contained platform. Every other decentralized app I've seen had to reinvent several wheels and can't interact with each other because of it.

Urbit has a typed versioned filesystem exposed as a global namespace, typed RPC with a diff/patch system, an identitt system, forces apps (and the e tire platform) to be purely functional for easy saving and crash tolerance, and other fun things. It's like shitty OSX - it has a /vision/, even if some parts don't make sense.

Re: Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

#62

Post by sanxiyn »

tptacek wrote: post #48
chc4 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marketting spiel incoming. You use Reddit to share link, Twitter to keep up with people, and IRC for real time chat. In all of those cases you are trusting a third party corporation that they aren't keeping you data forever and they won't arbitrarily ban you. You can switch to alternatives like Mastodon or, like, voat but it's really the same problem: now you're just trusting a different server, and being banned stil…

Right, but you could do that with any P2P overlay network with any embeddable VM. Why use the very unorthodox one that Urbit came up with? I really think that's the question people are asking when they say they don't understand Urbit. Not, "why would we want to do what this system claims to let us do", but rather, "why would we want to do it that way ?"

I am very interested to hear about other competing P2P overlay network with embeddable VM of similar maturity.

Re: Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

#63

Post by tptacek »

sanxiyn wrote: post #62
tptacek wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but you could do that with any P2P overlay network with any embeddable VM. Why use the very unorthodox one that Urbit came up with? I really think that's the question people are asking when they say they don't understand Urbit. Not, "why would we want to do what this system claims to let us do", but rather, "why would we want to do it that way ?"

I am very interested to hear about other competing P2P overlay network with embeddable VM of similar maturity.

"Of similar maturity"? What does that mean? What is one mainstream application --- let's define "mainstream" here as having more than 10,000 active users --- that is built directly on top of the Urbit stack?

Re: Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

#64

Post by han-sel »

occultist_throw wrote: post #52
pcmonk wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is Urbit still heavily dependent on unreleased root node code? In other words, is this distributed computing just a load of hype covering over a overly complicated star topology? Urbit has always been fully open source as far as I know (at least since 2013). It is true that Tlon runs some of the galaxies and stars that most people use, but that's just because other galaxy owners haven't decided it's worth it to do…

So, there are absolutely no "Killer Features" then? That was my primary question, which you refused to answer. That's what I suspected. Edit: Quote from your post-- "However, recently, I finally heard the first solution which felt like the completely right solution to me, and I believe they're pursuing it." Yet no answer.

See my comment above.

Re: Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

#65

Post by tptacek »

chc4 wrote: post #61
tptacek wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but you could do that with any P2P overlay network with any embeddable VM. Why use the very unorthodox one that Urbit came up with? I really think that's the question people are asking when they say they don't understand Urbit. Not, "why would we want to do what this system claims to let us do", but rather, "why would we want to do it that way ?"

Do you have something in mind? Using GNU Social as a convient whipping-post, it's built on PHP and MySQL and Salmon and PubSubHubbub and... The point of Urbit is to be a cobherent, self-contained platform. Every other decentralized app I've seen had to reinvent several wheels and can't interact with each other because of it. Urbit has a typed versioned filesystem exposed as a global namespace, typed RPC with a diff/p…

The problem I think a lot of people have with this system is that they agree with you: the underlying concept of an overlay network with abstracted addressing and an embedded programming language VM is straightforward, and may indeed be useful. Since all the core technological ideas in this system are simple enough to be undergraduate projects, why not just wait until someone builds one out of conventional components?

You get the irony of complaining about how every competing design has had to "reinvent several wheels", right? The system you're advocating reinvented ASCII.

Re: Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

#66

Post by jacknoble »

han-sel wrote: post #56
occultist_throw wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please identify one concrete computing action that I cannot do with Linux/Windows/Mac that Urbit enables. In other words, what is Urbit's "Killer Feature"? Cause I'm not seeing one. And a runner up question: Is Urbit still heavily dependent on unreleased root node code? In other words, is this distributed computing just a load of hype covering over a overly complicated star topology?

This is a great question. The best way i've found to describe Urbit as a product is a decentralized, open source version of WeChat. No, nobody really cares about privacy, but I think the argument is that for the consumer there is the potential for a way better experience. If all of your data is in one place, as a consumer, you only ever need to enter it once. More interestingly, all of your apps can work together in…

>However, recently, I finally heard the first solution which felt like the completely right solution to me, and I believe they're pursuing it.

What's that?

Re: Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

#67

Post by pcmonk »

tptacek wrote: post #55
pcmonk wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "A value in Hoon is called a noun" - or you could just call it a value. A "value" sounds like an abstract concept. A noun is one of two things: a natural number or a pair of nouns. Calling it a "value" makes it sound much more abstract than it is. > "A core has no exact equivalent in conventional languages, but the closest equivalent is an object. An object has methods; a core has functionally computed attributes (…

For example, all gates/functions are cores, but there's no sense in which you'd call those "objects". To me, all you're doing here is describing an object-based language in which functions are first-class. Obviously, Urbit didn't invent this concept. Its predecessors used normal names for these terms. Why does Urbit invent new ones? We could productively stay focused on just this one example, and see if there's a bet…

> To me, all you're doing here is describing an object-based language in which functions are first-class. Obviously, Urbit didn't invent this concept. Its predecessors used normal names for these terms. Why does Urbit invent new ones?

That's a pretty (unintentionally) misleading description of it. What is an object? An Urbit function has basically nothing that an OOP object has. No class, no inheritance, no attributes, and no methods. It's just a way of encapsulating a formula (VM assembly expression) in a way that's convenient to call with formulas. It uses the the "core" pattern because it's convenient.

"Arm" is a pretty specific term that refers to the way an "element" of a core is represented in the core. When you want to map a particular use of cores to its underlying representation in the "core" pattern, you want to be able to talk about specific data structures.

In general, Urbit errs on the sides of giving names to concepts that could only otherwise be described in multiple sentences. Most projects just don't give names to those concepts. Urbit needs better human descriptions of its concepts, but using traditional names for them would be misleading.

Re: Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

#68

Post by pcmonk »

jerkstate wrote: post #50
pcmonk wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "A value in Hoon is called a noun" - or you could just call it a value. A "value" sounds like an abstract concept. A noun is one of two things: a natural number or a pair of nouns. Calling it a "value" makes it sound much more abstract than it is. > "A core has no exact equivalent in conventional languages, but the closest equivalent is an object. An object has methods; a core has functionally computed attributes (…

> A noun is one of two things: a natural number or a pair of nouns To most of us, a "noun" is a person, place, thing, idea, or feeling. I started replying to the other stuff you were saying, but I started getting this feeling like you're in on the joke and I'm not.

To most of us an "object" is something you can touch. We overload these terms all the time.

Re: Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

#69

Post by tptacek »

pcmonk wrote: post #67
tptacek wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example, all gates/functions are cores, but there's no sense in which you'd call those "objects". To me, all you're doing here is describing an object-based language in which functions are first-class. Obviously, Urbit didn't invent this concept. Its predecessors used normal names for these terms. Why does Urbit invent new ones? We could productively stay focused on just this one example, and see if there's a bet…

> To me, all you're doing here is describing an object-based language in which functions are first-class. Obviously, Urbit didn't invent this concept. Its predecessors used normal names for these terms. Why does Urbit invent new ones? That's a pretty (unintentionally) misleading description of it. What is an object? An Urbit function has basically nothing that an OOP object has. No class, no inheritance, no attribute…

How are these not problems that every VM for a high-level programming language also addresses?

Re: Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

#70

Post by sanxiyn »

tptacek wrote: post #63
sanxiyn wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am very interested to hear about other competing P2P overlay network with embeddable VM of similar maturity.

"Of similar maturity"? What does that mean? What is one mainstream application --- let's define "mainstream" here as having more than 10,000 active users --- that is built directly on top of the Urbit stack?

By maturity I meant something like "continuous opeartion for a year with cryptographically signed live update (including cryptography themselves, implemented in VM)", which Urbit did. But okay, I am also interested in competing projects of any maturity.
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