4title: What is Urbit for?
5author: Galen Wolfe-Pauly
6image: http://media.urbit.org/site/blog-1.jpg
7preview: A vision of the Urbit-powered future.
18Open platforms don’t beat closed systems just because they’re open.
19They win because you can do more exciting things with them. We
20believe we’re overdue for new infrastructure not purely on principle:
21but because we think you can build better products on top.
23We look forward to a future where your fleet of Urbits run the devices
24throughout your house, keep your biometric data in sync with the data
25center and hold your secure medical and financial data. Today Urbit
26is just a proof of concept — but we see a road from here to there.
30These are things that work but are under development today. We expect
31them to improve and stabilize in the coming months.
33### Making the web programmable
35The first thing your Urbit can do is act as a transparent layer to
36your existing services. We’d like urbit to be usable as a self-hosted
37IFTTT for geeks. Your urbit can hold your keys, store data, run
38programs and seamlessly connect to your existing services. Plus, with
39a global revision controlled filesystem it’s easy to share API
40connectors and keep them up to date.
42With an Urbit running on your machine you can `ls` your Gmail from
43Unix. Write a short script to poll Twitter on a keyword and deliver
44the results to your email or into a Slack channel. Send an SMS when
45an HTTP request doesn’t resolve. These are just a few examples. Your
46Urbit is designed to make data trapped in your existing services feel
47like an extension of your local programming environment.
49### Self-hosted publishing and communication
51Additionally your Urbit is a flexible platform for publishing data to
52the web and communicating with others. Sort of like a self-hosted
53Slack, WordPress and Wiki in one. It’s more common to use many tools
54for sharing our content and communicating. Urbit is designed to bring
55those tools together; giving the individual control over their
58Simply write markdown in your favorite editor and have an Urbit sync
59them to the cloud. Use React components to control your layout and
60extend our toolset. Host your own discussion channels and comment
61threads. On a computer you own and control, whose source is 100%
64### Cryptographic identity
66Your Urbit is your digital identity, cryptographically secured but not
67controlled by any central authority. The Urbit PKI fills a gap that
68remains unsolved on the web. We can send encrypted messages, securely
69exchange digital currency, but how do I know who anyone is?
71Your Urbit can post public proof to your third party services and its
72validity is easily auditable. Using Urbit as an identity scheme for
73new services would be a great decentralized alternative to ‘Sign in
78Urbit’s crypto isn’t tested, the network still gets rebooted from time
79to time. The next milestone comes when Urbit matures to the point
80that it’s as reliable as its SaaS counterparts.
82### Lifestreams, finally
84The combination of great API tools and great publishing tools means we
85can finally build an integrated interface for today’s social networks.
86The web is full of streams of data. For the user there’s not much
87utility in bouncing from service to service. Instead, it’d be great
88to have general-purpose tools for consuming and publishing data.
89Imagine a Medium-quality interface that makes no distinction between
90Facebook and Twitter; SMS and Skype.
92### Secret storage, web3
94Bitcoin and Ethereum are both part of a new era of decentralized
95infrastructure that’s just beginning. For the blockchain to realize
96its potential individuals need ought to have a way to host their own
97nodes. At the very least, individuals need a reliable place to keep
98their secrets. What’s more, the blockchain isn’t designed for
99computation. It’s great for contracts and currency, but too slow for
102Urbit is a great complement to the blockchain. Your Urbit can safely
103store your keys, providing an always-available keychain on the
104network. Even better, your Urbit can hold your blockchain assets and
105provide an off-chain computation layer. Urbit’s computation doesn’t
106provide any kind of distributed consensus, but our computation model
107is very simple and lends itself well to auditing. This makes it a
108very blockchain-friendly platform.
112If there’s one thing we know from the history of personal computers
113it’s that computers are always expanding into more and more of our
114lives. The more *personal* our computers get the more they need to
115reflect our thinking and our relationships. We don’t know exactly
116what this will look like, but we can certainly speculate on the areas
117that deserve the most attention.
119### Data permanence and software competition
121Right now applications and data are practically the same thing.
122There’s no practical way for the user to separate them. Apps come and
123go, either by falling out of fashion or actually shutting down. In
124both cases our data becomes orphaned. There’s no practical way for us
125to get it back. The raw data from your LiveJournal is as good as a
126floppy disk from the 80s. Computers hold the records of our lives.
127Losing the history of the world to bitrot is a preventable problem.
129Since each person owns their own Urbit there’s no way to separate the
130user from their data. When you run software on your Urbit you
131*actually run it* and your programs manipulate data that *you own*.
132The individual has permanent access to their data by design. Ensuring
133its durability is a technical problem, not a license agreement
136When individuals are running their own software it’s no longer
137possible to lock them in by controlling their data. Instead, software
138has to actually compete on utility. If one could trivially replace
139the interface for Evernote with one from another developer for $10
140wouldn’t it be worth it? Even more so with Urbit, since after
141installing software you’re not dependent on the developer staying
142alive. You’re running a local copy. This model puts pressure on
143applications to interoperate better and become more modular.
147With a working identity system it’s possible to build up contextual
148reputation systems that aren’t held hostage by their applications.
149Just like the marriage of applications and data, reputation is
150permanently tethered to and jealously guarded by the services we use.
152For example, today we have karma systems on a per-site basis, like
153Reddit. Is there any reason that individuals shouldn’t have karma
154scores per-topic? An individual’s authority on a certain topic could
155be verified by other experts while still denied by detractors. It’s
156easy to extend this to services like Yelp. With a strong identity
157system it’s possible for pseudonymous reviews to be counted with real
158value. We’d no longer need a central authority for deciding on the
159reputation of a restaurant, but just a way to pseudonymously aggregate
160individual opinions. There’s a broad swath of territory ripe for
165With a reliably secure place to store your data on the network,
166wouldn’t you want to store even more personal information yourself?
167Why is it that we don’t store our own medical records, biometric data
168or financial data? In a world where we have a safe place to keep them
169we wouldn’t require anyone else to keep them for us.
171Furthermore, we’d be able to share them pseudonymously. One could
172imagine medical research or census-like polling being done without
173compromising the privacy of those involved. This also lowers the
174barrier to entry for fintech and medical software developers. If I
175can run my own personal health and finance software that can reliably
176access my own transactions and medical records, what would developers
181What needs a network *and* computation? Devices. Turning a unix box
182into a usable platform for hardware isn’t something that any
183individual manufacturer is incentivized to do. For the internet of
184things to actually work we need a platform for devices to interoperate
185simply and securely. Urbit is up to the task. Your Urbit isn’t just
186a single instance, it can sign the keys for a whole network of Urbits
187intended to be used for your devices, sensors, appliances, machines,
188robots, VR helmet, etc.
190The future of the individual’s computing experience may very likely be
191among many different devices. Bret Victor’s ‘Seeing Spaces’ is a
192great exploration of what this future may look like. For the
193industrial enterprise there’s a whole other set of parallel problems:
194tracking inventory, controlling a vast array of machines, and managing
195logistics. In both cases we need a decentralized network and
196computing platform. Urbit is up to the task.
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