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1+---
2+date: ~2016.7.20
3+type: post
4+title: Urbit monthly update
5+author: Curtis Yarvin
6+layout: urbit,post
7+comments: true
8+navmode: navbar
9+navdpad: false
10+navselect: blog
11+navpath: /
12+navhome: /
13+navclass: urbit
14+---
15+<br /><br />
16+
17+First, a huge thank you to everyone who helped make our crowdsale a
18+success. It's an amazing feeling to realize that the Internet is
19+fully capable of funding and programming its own replacement. The
20+world both knows enough about it, and cares enough about it.
21+
22+It will still be a lot of work to make Urbit a polished product for
23+ordinary humans, and organizing this work remains a tremendous
24+responsibility. But now we're confident that it can be done.
25+
26+Now that the public has a serious stake in Urbit, we can't really keep
27+up our old habit of working in the dark and occasionally releasing
28+mysterious beautiful things. We'll keep up with these monthly
29+updates, on or about the 20th of each month.
30+
31+As always, you can see the beating pulse of Urbit development at
32+[urbit.org/stream](https://urbit.org/stream).
33+
34+## General status
35+
36+The work required to pull off the sale definitely drained the energy
37+of our two strongest engineers, Philip (`~wictuc-folrex`) and Anton
38+(`~fyr`).
39+
40+Rather than remain on the path to total burnout we decided to push
41+back the issuing of stars. Our goal is to activate invites on August
42+12th, 2016. Apologies for the delay, and the short notice.
43+
44+## Great renaming, rekeying, and new ames
45+
46+If you bought a star, you might notice that while our invitation
47+server (the womb) is up, it's not currently configured to let you
48+create a star.
49+
50+Our first major release, which comes with a continuity breach
51+(complete network reboot where all ships are recreated), needs to (a)
52+fix the ship naming algorithm "`@p`", giving everyone (including us)
53+new names; and (b) replace the somewhat risible cryptosuite A (RSA and
54+other horrors) with the competent cryptosuite B (Curve25519, Ed25519,
55+AES).
56+
57+Not only will this let star buyers collect their stars (they don't
58+need to, but it might be fun), but all planet owners will now claim
59+their new planets via the womb. If you have an old ticket, the womb
60+will convert it into a new invitation.
61+
62+We had planned to run the great renaming today, but about a week or so
63+ago we found ourselves reconsidering. This isn't because the new
64+crypto and `@p` code isn't ready -- it is (largely because it's the work
65+of Ray, `~raplys-lornex`). But...
66+
67+1: Anton needed a break and the womb is his code. For a piece of
68+critical infrastructure, it's also a little under-documented and
69+under-tested. Hoon as a typed language makes you lucky. Urbit is
70+still a testnet, but we're a little tired of relying on luck.
71+
72+2: Slipping the great renaming lets me (Curtis, `~tasfyn-partyv`)
73+resuscitate and integrate my rewrite of the `%ames` network module,
74+which was mostly completed and then put aside six months ago (so that
75+I could do things that didn't involve writing code). New `%ames` is
76+sorely needed, because right now there's a network bug that actually
77+sinks (permanently disables) ships, and we basically can't debug
78+anything in the area because we'd be debugging old code.
79+
80+People have also expressed some concern about the fact that `%ames` is
81+sending mysterious UDP messages which aren't documented in any way
82+(the whitepaper has some protocol description, but it's still not
83+quite comprehensive. Actually, `%ames` is a pretty clean system overall
84+and shouldn't be hard to turn into the kind of literate, stable Hoon
85+code the future should be made of. But again, documenting obsolete
86+code kind of sucks.
87+
88+Finally, we have an idea (half Anton's, half mine) about how to
89+actually end the unfortunate tradition of continuity breaches, by
90+providing a "rough start" model which lets you create a working ship
91+with just the private key. Needless to say, it would be very exciting
92+to actually stop rebooting the world, for good.
93+
94+So it's a pretty good fit to push the renaming and the new network
95+protocol out into a single Great Inception, which currently seems like
96+it should happen in early August. I certainly can't wait to pick my
97+new, permanent Urbit name! But as always, we ship no code before its
98+time. We will keep you up to date on our progress XX
99+
100+## Other near-term goals
101+
102+The short-term focus remains self-hosting and onboarding. Ray is
103+currently working on currently working on building a simple message
104+board on top of `tree`, so that Urbit can be its own phpBB as well as
105+its own IRC. Persistent IRC (ie, `:talk`) is extremely useful, but we
106+need long-form discussion. Reddit is pretty good, but not *quite*
107+right -- and an ounce of self-hosting is worth a pound of SaaS.
108+
109+Basically, we don't intend to work on user-level features that we
110+don't use ourselves for quite some time, if not ever. Self-hosting is
111+the path to maturity, always and everywhere.
112+
113+## Medium-term goals
114+
115+Our medium-term focus is expanding the attack surface of Urbit as an
116+open-source project in every possible way. We want to completely
117+dispel the aura of mystery.
118+
119+There are two general paths toward this: teaching and documentation.
120+On the teaching front, I think you'll like the new, super-easy Urbit
121+learning series I started [here](https://urbit.org/docs/byte). More
122+Urbytes are forthcoming.
123+
124+On the documentation front, Urbit has a large volume of basically
125+undocumented and undescribed code at the Hoon and Arvo levels. This
126+is incredibly shitty from the perspective of an open-source project,
127+especially because neither I nor anyone has the kind of obsessive
128+attachment to random details that you'd expect in an under-documented
129+system.
130+
131+We need the community to own the technical decisions in Hoon and Arvo.
132+Urbit can't be a real open-source project until we truly open this
133+attack surface.
134+
135+The right way to solve this, I think, is to "document into existence" --
136+producing design documents from the existing codebase, reviewing these
137+designs collectively, then converging the actual code with them. The
138+key areas to attack are Arvo itself and the vanes. The first area I
139+want to do this with is the new `%ames`.
140+
141+There is an excuse for not having done this already: premature
142+documentation is a serious evil. When you're figuring out how a
143+system should work at all, documenting it is counterproductive. But
144+Urbit is past this point. It needs to settle down and become a
145+grownup.
146+
147+## Contributors
148+
149+Many thanks to those who have been providing the fantastic stream of
150+PRs we have been getting. We've had great help on all parts of the
151+stack: from JavaScript to the VM.
152+
153+We'd love to help you get involved. Come join us on `:talk`!
154+
155+## Keep in touch / office hours
156+
157+`:talk` is always a great place to come and ask questions. Going
158+forward someone from Tlon will be available in `:talk` from 12PM - 3PM
159+PDT each weekday.
160+
161+[r/urbit](https://www.reddit.com/r/urbit) is also a good place for any
162+kind of discussion.
163+
164+For anything else you can always get in touch with us via
165+[`urbit@urbit.org`](mailto:urbit@urbit.org).