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2+title = "Urbit and Bitcoin"
3+description = "A sound money deserves a sound computer."
4+date = 2019-10-17
5+[extra]
6+author = "Christian Langalis"
7+ship = "~pindet-timmut"
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9+
10+Urbit provides a new model for an OS. We presently have the opportunity to reimagine the affordances an OS provides to its developers and users. We envision our system including money as a primitive. Developers should be able to securely use money in their applications as easily as they can utilize the filesystem or networking. And while we’re quite ambitious – even iconoclastic, creating a new currency is not our goal. Bitcoin should be our native currency.
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12+Bitcoin shares our ethos of digital self-ownership. Running a Bitcoin node is essentially running a personal server hosting the Bitcoin blockchain, which can verify your transactions. We are building Urbit to to be the *best* personal server, so this week we launched several grants to start building tools for interacting with Bitcoin nodes from Urbit. The project is promising, and we hope to make Bitcoin a development theme moving forward.
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14+We view Bitcoin and Urbit as complementary systems. We are thrilled to inherit Bitcoin from its development community and incorporate it into our OS. Our proposition is that sound digital money requires a dependable computer to be used safely and effectively. Consider what’s required to make a robust exchange or payment application. On Unix-based systems, that requires a world-class security team on a $10m annual budget. Urbit’s OS is more secure by design, because it’s strictly-typed and entirely functional. As such, we feel a duty to hand these tools to Bitcoin developers, who can use them to their fullest.
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16+At a high level, Urbit and Bitcoin share a key view: the virtual is subsuming the real. In other words, sovereignty is no longer embodied in the physical, but the digital. Liberty, property, and civic participation are no longer possible if someone else controls the code you run. For example, what worries you more: a pickpocket or a sim-swapper? The bogeymen of today don’t target your person; they target your code, your private key, your password, your searches, your data. While some lament this reversal, we must seize upon it as an opportunity to redesign the cybernetic flow of society. The alternative is certain domination.
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18+Proponents of Urbit and Bitcoin converge along this key realization, but from different foundational insights. Urbit understands the personal computer as the kernel of our lives. Bitcoin takes a corresponding approach to monetary media, which it identifies as the substrate of an economy and society. Both projects recognize that client-server computing is inhospitable to this new class of digital property. Both converge where computers are maximally useful for management of one’s business, consumption, and investment; they must be secure to maintain their new digital wealth.
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20+Right now, we’re starting with the basics: a Bitcoin wallet and a Bitcoin node solution for Urbit. These tools will bring Urbit’s Bitcoin functionality from 0 to 1, and will serve as building blocks for our upcoming push from 1 to `n`. We’ll be talking more about this in the coming weeks and months. If this excites you, please feel free to get involved with some of our current Bitcoin bounties, found [here](https://grants.urbit.org/bounties).