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@@ -1,31 +1,46 @@

1−# arvo and pills

2−/arvo/

3−urbit.pill

4−# autoconf

5−/.MAKEFILE-VERSION

6−/make.conf

7−/.make.conf

8−# intermediate

9−*.swo

10−*.swp

11−*.o

12−/outside/**/*.a

13−/outside/re2/obj

14−# build

15−/bin/urbit

16−/vere.pkg

17−.tags

18−.etags

19−GPATH

20−GTAGS

21−GRTAGS

22−# scratch

23−/zod/

1+# See https://help.github.com/articles/ignoring-files/ for more about ignoring files.

2+

243# dependencies

25−node_modules/

26−.sass-cache

27−# OS

4+/node_modules

5+/.pnp

6+.pnp.js

7+

8+# testing

9+/coverage

10+

11+# next.js

12+/.next/

13+/out/

14+.next

15+

16+# production

17+/build

18+/cache

19+

20+# misc

2821.DS_Store

29−# ??

30−/inst

31−cscope.*

22+*.pem

23+

24+# debug

25+npm-debug.log*

26+yarn-debug.log*

27+yarn-error.log*

28+

29+# local env files

30+.env

31+.env.local

32+.env.development.local

33+.env.test.local

34+.env.production.local

35+

36+# vercel

37+.vercel

38+

39+# editors

40+/.nova/

41+

42+# rss

43+public/rss.xml

44+

45+yarn.lock

46+

.npmrcnew file+1

@@ -0,0 +1 @@

1+unsafe-perm = true

.nvmrcnew file+1

@@ -0,0 +1 @@

1+14

.prettierrcnew file+5

@@ -0,0 +1,5 @@

1+{

2+ "tabWidth": 2,

3+ "useTabs": false,

4+ "printWidth": 80

5+}

LICENSEnew file+21

@@ -0,0 +1,21 @@

1+MIT License

2+

3+Copyright (c) 2019 Tlon Corporation

4+

5+Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy

6+of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal

7+in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights

8+to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell

9+copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is

10+furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

11+

12+The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all

13+copies or substantial portions of the Software.

14+

15+THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR

16+IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,

17+FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE

18+AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER

19+LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,

20+OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE

21+SOFTWARE.

README.mdnew file+58

@@ -0,0 +1,58 @@

1+The website for Urbit is maintained by the Urbit Foundation and the Urbit community. Issues and contributions are welcome.

2+

3+## Getting Started

4+

5+1. Fork the [Urbit site repository](https://github.com/urbit/urbit.org).

6+

7+2. [Create a local clone](https://help.github.com/articles/cloning-a-repository/) of your fork.

8+

9+3. Navigate to the `urbit.org` directory and install Node 14 using [nvm](https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm):

10+

11+ ```shell

12+ cd urbit.org

13+ nvm install 14

14+ ```

15+ You can then run `nvm use` whenever in the repository (or automate it with a script - see [here](https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm#deeper-shell-integration)).

16+

17+4. Install our dependencies:

18+

19+ ```shell

20+ npm install

21+ ```

22+

23+ If running an arm64 Mac (M1 or later), you may need to install some dependencies to compile canvas, one of our dependencies. Assuming you have [Homebrew](https://brew.sh):

24+

25+ ```shell

26+ arch -arm64 brew install pkg-config cairo pango libpng jpeg giflib librsvg

27+ ```

28+

29+5. Run the development server:

30+

31+ ```shell

32+ npm run dev

33+ # or

34+ yarn dev

35+ ```

36+

37+ Open [http://localhost:3000](http://localhost:3000) with your browser to see the result.

38+

39+To learn more about contributing, see GitHub's [documentation](https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/quickstart/contributing-to-projects).

40+

41+## Framework and Library Documentation

42+

43+To learn more about Next.js, take a look at the following resources:

44+

45+- [Next.js Documentation](https://nextjs.org/docs) - learn about Next.js features and API.

46+- [Learn Next.js](https://nextjs.org/learn) - an interactive Next.js tutorial.

47+

48+To learn more about Tailwind CSS, take a look at the docs:

49+

50+- [Tailwind CSS Docs](https://tailwindcss.com/docs) - Docs

51+

52+## Deployment

53+

54+We deploy using Vercel. All pull requests will show a deployment preview via the same.

55+

56+## Upgrades

57+

58+The `/scripts` contains scripts used to programmatically upgrade site content data.

components/BackgroundImage.jsnew file+9

@@ -0,0 +1,9 @@

1+// Easily crops images

2+export default function BackgroundImage(props) {

3+ return (

4+ <div

5+ className={`bg-img bg-cover ${props.className || ""}`}

6+ style={{ backgroundImage: `url(${props.src})`, ...props.style }}

7+ />

8+ );

9+}

components/BasicPage.jsnew file+46

@@ -0,0 +1,46 @@

1+import { useRouter } from "next/router";

2+import Head from "next/head";

3+import Meta from "../components/Meta";

4+import ErrorPage from "../pages/404";

5+import {

6+ Container,

7+ SingleColumn,

8+ Section,

9+ Markdown,

10+ IntraNav,

11+ TableOfContents,

12+} from "@urbit/foundation-design-system";

13+import Header from "./Header";

14+import Footer from "./Footer";

15+import classNames from "classnames";

16+

17+export default function BasicPage({ post, markdown, search, index = false }) {

18+ const router = useRouter();

19+ if (!router.isFallback && !post?.slug) {

20+ return <ErrorPage />;

21+ }

22+ return (

23+ <Container>

24+ <Head>

25+ <title>{post.title}</title>

26+ {Meta(post)}

27+ </Head>

28+ <IntraNav ourSite="https://urbit.org" search={search} />

29+ <SingleColumn>

30+ <Header search={search} />

31+ <Section>

32+ <h1>{post.title}</h1>

33+ </Section>

34+ <Section>

35+ <div className={classNames("flex", { sidebar: index })}>

36+ <div className={classNames("markdown", { "max-w-prose": index })}>

37+ <Markdown.render content={JSON.parse(markdown)} />

38+ </div>

39+ {index && <TableOfContents />}

40+ </div>

41+ </Section>

42+ </SingleColumn>

43+ <Footer />

44+ </Container>

45+ );

46+}

components/Contact.jsnew file+16

@@ -0,0 +1,16 @@

1+import NewsletterSignup from "./NewsletterSignup";

2+

3+export default function Contact({

4+ emphasize,

5+ ecosystem = false,

6+ className = "",

7+}) {

8+ const linkText = emphasize ? "text-green-400" : "text-wall-600";

9+ const border = emphasize ? "border-green-400" : "border-wall-600";

10+

11+ return (

12+ <div className={className}>

13+ <NewsletterSignup color={border} />

14+ </div>

15+ );

16+}

components/ContentArea.jsnew file+86

@@ -0,0 +1,86 @@

1+import { useState, useEffect, useRef } from "react";

2+import { useRouter } from "next/router";

3+import { TableOfContents } from "@urbit/foundation-design-system";

4+

5+export default function ContentArea(props) {

6+ const [shortcut, setShortcut] = useState("");

7+

8+ const detectOS = () => {

9+ const agent = window.navigator.appVersion;

10+ if (agent.includes("Win")) {

11+ return "Ctrl+K";

12+ } else if (agent.includes("Mac")) {

13+ return "⌘K";

14+ } else if (agent.includes("Linux")) {

15+ return "Ctrl+K";

16+ }

17+ };

18+

19+ useEffect(() => {

20+ setShortcut(detectOS());

21+ }, []);

22+

23+ const scrollBox = useRef();

24+

25+ const router = useRouter();

26+

27+ useEffect(() => {

28+ const handleRouteChange = () => {

29+ if (scrollBox.current === null) return;

30+ scrollBox.current.scrollTop = 0;

31+ };

32+

33+ router.events.on("routeChangeComplete", handleRouteChange);

34+

35+ // If the component is unmounted, unsubscribe

36+ // from the event with the `off` method:

37+ return () => {

38+ router.events.off("routeChangeStart", handleRouteChange);

39+ };

40+ }, []);

41+

42+ return (

43+ <div className="w-full min-w-0 flex flex-col items-center bg-white">

44+ <div

45+ ref={scrollBox}

46+ className="px-4 md:px-12 lg:px-24 pt-8 md:pt-10 lg:pt-16 flex flex-col w-full max-w-screen-xl max-h-screen h-screen overflow-y-scroll"

47+ >

48+ <div className="flex justify-between w-full items-center shrink-0">

49+ <div className="font-semibold antialiased text-lg text-black">

50+ {props.breadcrumbs}

51+ </div>

52+ <div className="hidden md:block">

53+ <button

54+ onClick={(e) => {

55+ e.stopPropagation();

56+ props.search.toggleSearch();

57+ }}

58+ className="bg-wall-100 text-wall-500 flex px-4 py-1 rounded-lg type-ui"

59+ >

60+ Search<div className="ml-4 text-wall-400">{shortcut}</div>

61+ </button>

62+ </div>

63+ </div>

64+ <div className="flex justify-between">

65+ <div className="min-w-0 max-w-screen-md">

66+ <div className="mb-16">

67+ <h2 className="mt-24">{props.title}</h2>

68+ {props?.description && (

69+ <p className="text-wall-400 font-regular mt-2 text-xl">

70+ {props.description}

71+ </p>

72+ )}

73+ </div>

74+ {props.children}

75+ <div className="pb-24" />

76+ </div>

77+ {!props?.disableToC && (

78+ <TableOfContents

79+ key={props.params.slug?.join("/") || Math.random()}

80+ />

81+ )}

82+ </div>

83+ </div>

84+ </div>

85+ );

86+}

components/CopyLink.jsnew file+61

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1+import { useCopyToClipboard } from "../lib/hooks";

2+

3+export default function CopyLink({ content, className }) {

4+ const [copyStatus, copy] = useCopyToClipboard(content);

5+

6+ const buttonIcon =

7+ copyStatus === "inactive" ? (

8+ <svg

9+ width="16"

10+ height="16"

11+ viewBox="0 0 16 16"

12+ className="fill-white"

13+ xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"

14+ >

15+ <path

16+ fillRule="evenodd"

17+ clipRule="evenodd"

18+ d="M3.2 1.6C3.2 0.716344 3.91634 0 4.8 0H11.3615L14.9333 2.38124V12.2667C14.9333 13.1503 14.217 13.8667 13.3333 13.8667H12.8V14.4C12.8 15.2837 12.0837 16 11.2 16H2.66667C1.78301 16 1.06667 15.2837 1.06667 14.4V3.73333C1.06667 2.84968 1.78301 2.13333 2.66667 2.13333H3.2V1.6ZM3.2 3.2H2.66667C2.37211 3.2 2.13333 3.43878 2.13333 3.73333V14.4C2.13333 14.6946 2.37211 14.9333 2.66667 14.9333H11.2C11.4946 14.9333 11.7333 14.6946 11.7333 14.4V13.8667H4.8C3.91634 13.8667 3.2 13.1503 3.2 12.2667V3.2Z"

19+ />

20+ </svg>

21+ ) : copyStatus === "copied" ? (

22+ <svg

23+ width="16"

24+ height="16"

25+ viewBox="0 0 16 16"

26+ xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"

27+ >

28+ <path

29+ fillRule="evenodd"

30+ clipRule="evenodd"

31+ d="M0 8C0 3.58172 3.58172 0 8 0C12.4183 0 16 3.58172 16 8C16 12.4183 12.4183 16 8 16C3.58172 16 0 12.4183 0 8ZM7.54325 11.4247L12.1498 5.66647L11.3169 5.00013L7.39013 9.90859L4.60812 7.59025L3.92526 8.40969L7.54325 11.4247Z"

32+ />

33+ </svg>

34+ ) : (

35+ <svg

36+ width="16"

37+ height="16"

38+ viewBox="0 0 16 16"

39+ className="fill-white"

40+ xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"

41+ >

42+ <path

43+ fillRule="evenodd"

44+ clipRule="evenodd"

45+ d="M0 8C0 3.58172 3.58172 0 8 0C12.4183 0 16 3.58172 16 8C16 12.4183 12.4183 16 8 16C3.58172 16 0 12.4183 0 8ZM10.8229 11.5772L8.00004 8.75429L5.17716 11.5772L4.42292 10.8229L7.24579 8.00004L4.42292 5.17716L5.17716 4.42292L8.00004 7.24579L10.8229 4.42292L11.5772 5.17716L8.75429 8.00004L11.5772 10.8229L10.8229 11.5772Z"

46+ />

47+ </svg>

48+ );

49+

50+ return (

51+ <button

52+ className={`bg-wall-600 p-4 rounded-xl button-sm text-white flex items-center justify-center space-x-2 ${className}`}

53+ onClick={() => copy()}

54+ >

55+ <p className="leading-5">

56+ {copyStatus === "copied" ? "Copied" : "Shortcode"}

57+ </p>

58+ {buttonIcon}

59+ </button>

60+ );

61+}

components/DocsSidebar.jsnew file+32

@@ -0,0 +1,32 @@

1+import Link from "next/link";

2+import { useState } from "react";

3+import { MenuTray } from '@urbit/foundation-design-system'

4+

5+export default function Sidebar(props) {

6+ const [isOpen, setTray] = useState(false);

7+ return (

8+ <>

9+ <div className="hidden md:flex flex-col w-96 bg-wall-100 max-h-screen h-screen">

10+ <header className="flex shrink-0 justify-between items-center pl-6 pt-12 mt-5 pb-8">

11+ <Link href="/" passHref>

12+ <a className="font-semibold antialiased text-lg text-wall-500">Urbit</a>

13+ </Link>

14+ </header>

15+ <div className="overflow-y-auto p-6 pt-16">

16+ {props.children}

17+ <div className="pb-32" />

18+ </div>

19+ </div>

20+

21+ <MenuTray isOpen={isOpen} setTray={setTray} search={props.search}>

22+ <header className="flex shrink-0 justify-between items-center pb-8">

23+ <Link href="/" passHref>

24+ <a className="type-ui text-wall-500">Urbit</a>

25+ </Link>

26+ </header>

27+ {props.children}

28+ <div className="pt-64" />

29+ </MenuTray>

30+ </>

31+ );

32+}

components/EventPreview.jsnew file+92

@@ -0,0 +1,92 @@

1+import Link from "next/link";

2+import { DateTime } from "luxon";

3+import { DateRange } from "../components/Snippets";

4+import {

5+ generateDisplayDate,

6+ generateRealtimeDate,

7+} from "@urbit/foundation-design-system";

8+import classNames from "classnames";

9+

10+export default function EventPreview({ event, className, big }) {

11+ // Event tiles have a 'dark mode' used when their background images are dark and white text is needed for legibility.

12+ const grayText = event?.dark ? "text-white dark:text-black" : "text-wall-400";

13+ const blackText = event?.dark

14+ ? "text-white dark:text-black"

15+ : "text-wall-600";

16+

17+ const starts = generateDisplayDate(event.starts, event.timezone);

18+ const ends = generateDisplayDate(event.ends, event.timezone);

19+

20+ const inFuture = generateRealtimeDate(starts) > DateTime.now();

21+

22+ const happeningNow =

23+ generateRealtimeDate(event.starts) > DateTime.now() && !inFuture;

24+

25+ return (

26+ <div className={`cursor-pointer h-full ${className}`}>

27+ <div

28+ key={event.slug}

29+ className={`bg-wall-100 min-h-[320px] h-full flex flex-col rounded-xl bg-cover bg-center bg-no-repeat `}

30+ style={{ backgroundImage: `url(${event.image})` || "" }}

31+ >

32+ <Link href={`/events/${event.slug}`}>

33+ <div

34+ className={classNames(

35+ "flex flex-col p-6 min-h-[320px] justify-between items-between h-full relative",

36+ {

37+ "backdrop-brightness-50 rounded-xl": Boolean(

38+ event?.darken_image

39+ ),

40+ }

41+ )}

42+ >

43+ <div

44+ className={`grow-1 flex ${big ? "justify-center" : ""

45+ } flex-col h-full`}

46+ >

47+ <h3 className={`${blackText} mb-2`} id={event.title}>{event.title}</h3>

48+ <p className={blackText + " truncate text-sm"}>

49+ {event.description}

50+ </p>

51+ </div>

52+

53+ <div className="flex justify-between items-end">

54+ <div className="">

55+ <p className={`${blackText} type-sub mb-1`}>{event.location}</p>

56+ <DateRange

57+ starts={starts}

58+ ends={ends}

59+ className={`${grayText} type-sub`}

60+ />

61+ </div>

62+

63+ {inFuture && event.registration_url ? (

64+ <div>

65+ <a

66+ className="button-sm bg-green-400 text-white"

67+ href={event.registration_url}

68+ onClick={(e) => e.stopPropagation()}

69+ target="_blank"

70+ >

71+ RSVP

72+ </a>

73+ </div>

74+ ) : event.youtube ? (

75+ <div className="shrink-0">

76+ <a

77+ className="button-sm bg-wall-600 text-white shrink-0"

78+ href={`https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=${event.youtube}`}

79+ onClick={(e) => e.stopPropagation()}

80+ target="_blank"

81+ >

82+ ▶ Watch

83+ </a>

84+ </div>

85+ ) : null}

86+ </div>

87+ </div>

88+ </Link>

89+ </div>

90+ </div>

91+ );

92+}

components/Footer.jsnew file+6

@@ -0,0 +1,6 @@

1+import { Footer as FooterComponent } from "@urbit/foundation-design-system";

2+import { footerData } from "../lib/constants";

3+

4+export default function Footer() {

5+ return <FooterComponent data={footerData} />;

6+}

components/GrantPreview.jsnew file+63

@@ -0,0 +1,63 @@

1+import classnames from "classnames";

2+import Link from "next/link";

3+

4+export default function GrantPreview({ grant }) {

5+ const isCompleted = grant.extra.completed;

6+ const isOpen = !isCompleted && grant.extra.assignee?.[0] === "";

7+ const type = grant.taxonomies.grant_type;

8+

9+ const className = classnames({

10+ "bg-lightBlue": type.includes("Proposal") && isOpen,

11+ "bg-purple-200": type.includes("RFP") && isOpen,

12+ "bg-yellow-100": type.includes("Bounty") && isOpen,

13+ });

14+

15+ return (

16+ <div

17+ key={grant.slug}

18+ className={`mb-4 cursor-pointer bg-wall-100 rounded-lg ${className}`}

19+ >

20+ <Link href={`/grants/${grant.slug}`} passHref>

21+ <a>

22+ <div className="p-8">

23+ <div className="flex items-center mb-4">

24+ <h3 className="type-ui" id={grant.slug}>

25+ {grant.title}

26+ </h3>

27+ <div className={`bg-wall-500 text-wall-100 badge-sm ml-2`}>

28+ {!isCompleted ? (isOpen ? "Open" : "In Progress") : "Completed"}

29+ </div>

30+ </div>

31+ <p className="mb-4">{grant.extra.description}</p>

32+ <div className="flex w-full flex-col md:flex-row md:items-center justify-between">

33+ <p className="text-wall-500">

34+ <strong>Reward: </strong>

35+ {grant.extra.reward}

36+ </p>

37+ <div className="flex items-center flex-wrap md:mt-0 mt-4">

38+ {grant.taxonomies.grant_type.map((category) => {

39+ const className = classnames({

40+ "bg-blue-400 text-white": category === "Proposal",

41+ "bg-purple text-white": category === "RFP",

42+ "bg-green-400 text-white": category === "Apprenticeship",

43+ "bg-yellow-300": category === "Bounty",

44+ });

45+ return (

46+ <div className={`${className} badge-sm mr-1 my-1`}>

47+ {category}

48+ </div>

49+ );

50+ })}

51+ {grant.taxonomies.grant_category.map((category) => (

52+ <div className="bg-wall-500 text-wall-100 badge-sm mr-1 my-1">

53+ {category}

54+ </div>

55+ ))}

56+ </div>

57+ </div>

58+ </div>

59+ </a>

60+ </Link>

61+ </div>

62+ );

63+}

components/GrantProgramOverview.jsnew file+59

@@ -0,0 +1,59 @@

1+import { useRouter } from "next/router";

2+import Link from "next/link";

3+import Head from "next/head";

4+import Meta from "../components/Meta";

5+import ErrorPage from "../pages/404";

6+import {

7+ Container,

8+ Section,

9+ SingleColumn,

10+ Markdown,

11+ IntraNav,

12+ formatDate,

13+} from "@urbit/foundation-design-system";

14+import Header from "./Header";

15+import Footer from "./Footer";

16+import { DateTime } from "luxon";

17+

18+export default function GrantProgramOverview({

19+ post,

20+ markdown,

21+ search,

22+ program,

23+ actionLink,

24+ actionText,

25+}) {

26+ const router = useRouter();

27+ if (!router.isFallback && !post?.slug) {

28+ return <ErrorPage />;

29+ }

30+

31+ const title = program.charAt(0).toUpperCase() + program.slice(1);

32+ return (

33+ <Container>

34+ <Head>

35+ <title>{title} • Grants</title>

36+ {Meta(post)}

37+ </Head>

38+ <IntraNav ourSite="https://urbit.org" search={search} />

39+ <SingleColumn>

40+ <Header search={search} />

41+ <Section narrow short>

42+ <h1>{post.title}</h1>

43+ <div className="type-ui text-wall-500 mt-4 md:mt-8 lg:mt-10">

44+ Last Revision: {formatDate(DateTime.fromISO(post.date))}

45+ </div>

46+ <Link href={actionLink} passHref>

47+ <a className="button-sm bg-green-400 text-white mt-8 max-w-fit">

48+ {actionText}

49+ </a>

50+ </Link>

51+ </Section>

52+ <Section narrow short className="markdown">

53+ <Markdown.render content={JSON.parse(markdown)} />

54+ </Section>

55+ </SingleColumn>

56+ <Footer />

57+ </Container>

58+ );

59+}

components/Header.jsnew file+169

@@ -0,0 +1,169 @@

1+import Link from "next/link";

2+import { useRouter } from "next/router";

3+import { useState } from "react";

4+import classnames from "classnames";

5+import { capitalize, MenuTray } from "@urbit/foundation-design-system";

6+

7+function ActiveLink({ children, href, className, currentPath }) {

8+ const firstCrumb = currentPath.split("/")[1];

9+

10+ const activeClassName = classnames({

11+ "text-wall-900": "/" + firstCrumb === href,

12+ "text-wall-500": "/" + firstCrumb !== href,

13+ });

14+

15+ return (

16+ <Link href={href} passHref>

17+ <a className={`${className} ${activeClassName}`}>{children}</a>

18+ </Link>

19+ );

20+}

21+

22+export default function Header(props) {

23+ const [isOpen, setTray] = useState(false);

24+

25+ const currentPath = useRouter().asPath;

26+

27+ const routeDepth = currentPath.split("/").length;

28+

29+ const firstCrumb = currentPath.split("/")[1];

30+

31+ return (

32+ <header className="layout px-4 md:px-8 flex justify-between items-center pt-8 md:pt-10 lg:pt-12 pb-10 md:pb-12 lg:pb-24">

33+ <div>

34+ <Link href="/" passHref>

35+ <a className="font-semibold text-lg">Urbit</a>

36+ </Link>

37+ {routeDepth > 2 ? (

38+ <Link href={`/${firstCrumb}`} passHref>

39+ <a className="inline md:hidden type-ui text-wall-500 ml-2">

40+ {capitalize(firstCrumb)}

41+ </a>

42+ </Link>

43+ ) : null}

44+ </div>

45+ {

46+ // Large screen header

47+ }

48+ <nav className="items-center hidden md:flex">

49+ <ActiveLink

50+ currentPath={currentPath}

51+ className="mr-5 type-ui"

52+ href="/getting-started"

53+ >

54+ Get Started

55+ </ActiveLink>

56+

57+ <ActiveLink

58+ currentPath={currentPath}

59+ className="mr-5 type-ui"

60+ href="/overview"

61+ >

62+ Overview

63+ </ActiveLink>

64+

65+ <ActiveLink

66+ currentPath={currentPath}

67+ className="mr-5 type-ui"

68+ href="/ecosystem"

69+ >

70+ Ecosystem

71+ </ActiveLink>

72+

73+ <ActiveLink

74+ currentPath={currentPath}

75+ className="mr-5 type-ui"

76+ href="/grants"

77+ >

78+ Grants

79+ </ActiveLink>

80+

81+ <ActiveLink

82+ currentPath={currentPath}

83+ className="mr-5 type-ui"

84+ href="/events"

85+ >

86+ Events

87+ </ActiveLink>

88+

89+ <ActiveLink

90+ currentPath={currentPath}

91+ className="mr-5 type-ui"

92+ href="/blog"

93+ >

94+ Blog

95+ </ActiveLink>

96+ </nav>

97+

98+ {

99+ // Small screen header

100+ }

101+ <MenuTray isOpen={isOpen} setTray={setTray} search={props.search}>

102+ <Link href="/" passHref>

103+ <a className="font-semibold mb-4">Urbit</a>

104+ </Link>

105+ <Link href="https://urbit.org" passHref>

106+ <a className="font-semibold mt-2">Urbit.org</a>

107+ </Link>

108+ <Link href="https://operators.urbit.org" passHref>

109+ <a className="mt-2">Operators</a>

110+ </Link>

111+ <Link href="https://developers.urbit.org" passHref>

112+ <a className="mt-2">Developers</a>

113+ </Link>

114+ <Link href="https://roadmap.urbit.org" passHref>

115+ <a className="mt-2 mb-4">Roadmap</a>

116+ </Link>

117+ <hr className="border-wall-200" />

118+

119+ <ActiveLink

120+ currentPath={currentPath}

121+ className="mr-5 mt-4 mb-4 text-green-400"

122+ href="/getting-started"

123+ >

124+ Get Started

125+ </ActiveLink>

126+

127+ <ActiveLink

128+ currentPath={currentPath}

129+ className="mr-5 mb-4"

130+ href="/overview"

131+ >

132+ Overview

133+ </ActiveLink>

134+

135+ <ActiveLink

136+ currentPath={currentPath}

137+ className="mr-5 mb-4"

138+ href="/ecosystem"

139+ >

140+ Ecosystem

141+ </ActiveLink>

142+

143+ <ActiveLink

144+ currentPath={currentPath}

145+ className="mr-5 mb-4"

146+ href="/grants"

147+ >

148+ Grants

149+ </ActiveLink>

150+

151+ <ActiveLink

152+ currentPath={currentPath}

153+ className="mr-5 mb-4"

154+ href="/events"

155+ >

156+ Events

157+ </ActiveLink>

158+

159+ <ActiveLink

160+ currentPath={currentPath}

161+ className="mr-5 mb-4"

162+ href="/blog"

163+ >

164+ Blog

165+ </ActiveLink>

166+ </MenuTray>

167+ </header>

168+ );

169+}

components/HighlightCard.jsnew file+22

@@ -0,0 +1,22 @@

1+import Link from "next/link";

2+export default function HighlightCard({ slug, highlight }) {

3+ return (

4+ <Link href={highlight.url}>

5+ <div className="cursor-pointer bg-wall-100 rounded-xl min-h-0 flex-1">

6+ <div className="flex flex-col p-4 h-full relative">

7+ {highlight.image ? (

8+ <div className="w-64 md:w-full rounded-xl object-cover overflow-hidden basis-3/5">

9+ <img className="h-full w-64 md:w-full object-cover" src={highlight.image} />

10+ </div>

11+ ) : (

12+ <div className="rounded-xl w-full"/>

13+ )}

14+ <div className="pt-4">

15+ <p className="mb-2 font-semibold leading-5">{highlight.title}</p>

16+ <p className="text-sm leading-5">{highlight?.description}</p>

17+ </div>

18+ </div>

19+ </div>

20+ </Link>

21+ );

22+}

components/JoinGroup.jsnew file+79

@@ -0,0 +1,79 @@

1+import { useCopyToClipboard } from "../lib/hooks";

2+

3+export default function Contact({ emphasize, groupName, label, className }) {

4+ const [copyStatus, copy] = useCopyToClipboard(groupName);

5+

6+ const linkText = emphasize ? "text-green-400" : "text-wall-600";

7+ const border = emphasize ? "border-green-400" : "border-wall-600";

8+ const washedBg = emphasize ? "bg-green-100" : "bg-wall-100";

9+ const iconColor = emphasize ? "#00B171" : "#24221E";

10+

11+ const buttonIcon =

12+ copyStatus === "inactive" ? (

13+ <svg

14+ width="16"

15+ height="16"

16+ viewBox="0 0 16 16"

17+ fill="none"

18+ xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"

19+ >

20+ <path

21+ fillRule="evenodd"

22+ clipRule="evenodd"

23+ d="M3.2 1.6C3.2 0.716344 3.91634 0 4.8 0H11.3615L14.9333 2.38124V12.2667C14.9333 13.1503 14.217 13.8667 13.3333 13.8667H12.8V14.4C12.8 15.2837 12.0837 16 11.2 16H2.66667C1.78301 16 1.06667 15.2837 1.06667 14.4V3.73333C1.06667 2.84968 1.78301 2.13333 2.66667 2.13333H3.2V1.6ZM3.2 3.2H2.66667C2.37211 3.2 2.13333 3.43878 2.13333 3.73333V14.4C2.13333 14.6946 2.37211 14.9333 2.66667 14.9333H11.2C11.4946 14.9333 11.7333 14.6946 11.7333 14.4V13.8667H4.8C3.91634 13.8667 3.2 13.1503 3.2 12.2667V3.2Z"

24+ fill={iconColor}

25+ />

26+ </svg>

27+ ) : copyStatus === "copied" ? (

28+ <svg

29+ width="16"

30+ height="16"

31+ viewBox="0 0 16 16"

32+ fill="none"

33+ xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"

34+ >

35+ <path

36+ fillRule="evenodd"

37+ clipRule="evenodd"

38+ d="M0 8C0 3.58172 3.58172 0 8 0C12.4183 0 16 3.58172 16 8C16 12.4183 12.4183 16 8 16C3.58172 16 0 12.4183 0 8ZM7.54325 11.4247L12.1498 5.66647L11.3169 5.00013L7.39013 9.90859L4.60812 7.59025L3.92526 8.40969L7.54325 11.4247Z"

39+ fill={iconColor}

40+ />

41+ </svg>

42+ ) : (

43+ <svg

44+ width="16"

45+ height="16"

46+ viewBox="0 0 16 16"

47+ fill="none"

48+ xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"

49+ >

50+ <path

51+ fillRule="evenodd"

52+ clipRule="evenodd"

53+ d="M0 8C0 3.58172 3.58172 0 8 0C12.4183 0 16 3.58172 16 8C16 12.4183 12.4183 16 8 16C3.58172 16 0 12.4183 0 8ZM10.8229 11.5772L8.00004 8.75429L5.17716 11.5772L4.42292 10.8229L7.24579 8.00004L4.42292 5.17716L5.17716 4.42292L8.00004 7.24579L10.8229 4.42292L11.5772 5.17716L8.75429 8.00004L11.5772 10.8229L10.8229 11.5772Z"

54+ fill={iconColor}

55+ />

56+ </svg>

57+ );

58+

59+ return (

60+ <div className={className}>

61+ <h4 className="text-wall-500 flex items-baseline flex-wrap">

62+ {label ? label + " " : ""}

63+ <div className="rounded-lg flex items-stretch">

64+ <code

65+ className={`rounded-l-lg px-2 md:px-4 py-2 ${washedBg} flex items-center h-full ${linkText}`}

66+ >

67+ {groupName}

68+ </code>

69+ <button

70+ className={`rounded-r-lg px-4 ml-0.5 flex-1 flex justify-center items-center ${washedBg}`}

71+ onClick={() => copy()}

72+ >

73+ {buttonIcon}

74+ </button>

75+ </div>

76+ </h4>

77+ </div>

78+ );

79+}

components/Meta.jsnew file+54

@@ -0,0 +1,54 @@

1+export default function Meta(post, disableImage, large = false) {

2+ const author = post?.extra?.author || "urbit.org";

3+ const title = post?.title ? post.title : "";

4+ const description =

5+ post?.description || "Urbit is a new kind of computer that you can own completely in ways that matter: networking, identity, & data.";

6+ const image =

7+ post?.extra?.image ||

8+ post?.image ||

9+ "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/opengraph/sig-white.png";

10+ return (

11+ <>

12+ <link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="/images/favicon.ico" />

13+ <link

14+ rel="apple-touch-icon"

15+ sizes="180x180"

16+ href="/images/apple-touch-icon.png"

17+ />

18+ <link

19+ rel="icon"

20+ type="image/png"

21+ sizes="32x32"

22+ href="/images/favicon-32x32.png"

23+ />

24+ <link

25+ rel="icon"

26+ type="image/png"

27+ sizes="16x16"

28+ href="/images/favicon-16x16.png"

29+ />

30+ <link rel="manifest" href="/images/site.webmanifest" />

31+

32+ <meta

33+ name="twitter:card"

34+ content={large ? "summary_large_image" : "summary"}

35+ key="twitter-card"

36+ />

37+ <meta name="twitter:site" content="@urbit" key="twitter-site" />

38+ <meta name="twitter:creator" content="@urbit" key="twitter-creator" />

39+ <meta name="og:title" content={title} key="title" />

40+ <meta name="og:description" content={description} key="description" />

41+ <meta name="description" content={description} />

42+ <meta name="author" content={author} key="author" />

43+ {!disableImage && (

44+ <meta name="twitter:image" content={image} key="image" />

45+ )}

46+ <link

47+ rel="alternative"

48+ type="application/rss+xml"

49+ title="RSS"

50+ href="/rss.xml"

51+ />

52+ </>

53+ );

54+}

components/NewsletterSignup.jsnew file+38

@@ -0,0 +1,38 @@

1+export default function NewsletterSignup(props) {

2+ return (

3+ <form

4+ action="https://urbit.us11.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=972a03db9e0c6c25bb58de8c8&amp;amp;id=be143888d2"

5+ method="post"

6+ id="mc-embedded-subscribe-form"

7+ name="mc-embedded-subscribe-form"

8+ className="validate form max-w-screen-sm"

9+ target="_blank"

10+ noValidate

11+ >

12+ <div className="input-group" id="mc_embed_signup_scroll">

13+ <div className="mc-field-group w-full relative">

14+ <input

15+ className={`appearance-none outline-none text-wall-500 type-ui bg-white black ${

16+ props.color || "border-wall-600"

17+ } border-4 px-3 w-full mb-2 h-16 rounded-xl`}

18+ type="email"

19+ name="EMAIL"

20+ id="mce-EMAIL"

21+ placeholder="your@email.com"

22+ />

23+ <div className="flex h-16 items-center justify-center absolute top-0 right-6">

24+ <button

25+ id="mc-embedded-subscribe"

26+ className="type-ui dark:text-green-400 text-wall-500 bg-transparent"

27+ type="submit"

28+ name="subscribe"

29+ >

30+ {/* onClick={() => _paq.push(['trackEvent', 'Mailing List', 'Subscribe'])}> */}

31+ Sign Up

32+ </button>

33+ </div>

34+ </div>

35+ </div>

36+ </form>

37+ );

38+}

components/Pagination.jsnew file+22

@@ -0,0 +1,22 @@

1+import Link from "next/link";

2+export default function Pagination(props) {

3+ return (

4+ <Link

5+ href={`/${props.section}/${props.post.slug}`}

6+ key={`post-${props.post.slug}`}

7+ >

8+ <div

9+ className="bg-wall-100 cursor-pointer font-semibold p-2 px-4 rounded-xl flex"

10+ style={{ maxWidth: "45%" }}

11+ >

12+ <p className="shrink-0 pr-1">{props.previous ? "<- " : ""}</p>

13+ <p className="text-wall-600 truncate">{props.post.title}</p>

14+ <p className="shrink-0 pl-1">{props.next ? " ->" : ""}</p>

15+ </div>

16+ </Link>

17+ );

18+}

19+

20+Pagination.defaultProps = {

21+ className: "",

22+};

components/PostPreview.jsnew file+27

@@ -0,0 +1,27 @@

1+import {

2+ Card,

3+ formatDate,

4+ generateDisplayDate,

5+} from "@urbit/foundation-design-system";

6+

7+export default function PostPreview(props) {

8+ const section = props?.section ? props.section : "blog";

9+

10+ const date = generateDisplayDate(props.post.date);

11+ return (

12+ <Card

13+ slug={`/${section}/${props.post.slug}`}

14+ image={props.post.extra.image}

15+ title={props?.title || props.post?.title || ""}

16+ author={props.post?.extra?.author || ""}

17+ ship={props.post?.extra?.ship || ""}

18+ content={

19+ <div className="text-wall-500 type-sub mt-1">{formatDate(date)}</div>

20+ }

21+ />

22+ );

23+}

24+

25+PostPreview.defaultProps = {

26+ className: "",

27+};

components/Sidebar.jsnew file+21

@@ -0,0 +1,21 @@

1+import { useState } from "react";

2+import { MenuTray } from '@urbit/foundation-design-system';

3+

4+export default function Sidebar(props) {

5+ const [isOpen, setTray] = useState(false);

6+ return (

7+ <>

8+ <div className="hidden md:flex flex-col h-full sticky top-8">

9+ <div className="overflow-y-auto">

10+ {props.children}

11+ <div className="pb-32" />

12+ </div>

13+ </div>

14+

15+ <MenuTray isOpen={isOpen} setTray={setTray} search={props.search}>

16+ {props.children}

17+ <div className="pt-64" />

18+ </MenuTray>

19+ </>

20+ );

21+}

components/Snippets.jsnew file+111

@@ -0,0 +1,111 @@

1+import Link from "next/link";

2+import {

3+ formatDate,

4+ formatTime,

5+ formatTimeZone,

6+} from "@urbit/foundation-design-system";

7+

8+export function Name({ children, className }) {

9+ return <b className={`font-normal ${className || ""}`}>{children}</b>;

10+}

11+

12+export function Patp({ children, className }) {

13+ return (

14+ <Link href={`/ids/${children}`} passHref>

15+ <a>

16+ <code className={`font-mono ${className || ""}`}>{children}</code>

17+ </a>

18+ </Link>

19+ );

20+}

21+

22+// Used to render a human name alongside their @p

23+export function Person({

24+ name,

25+ patp,

26+ nameClassNames,

27+ patpClassNames,

28+ className,

29+}) {

30+ return (

31+ <>

32+ {patp && name ? (

33+ <>

34+ <Name className={nameClassNames}>{name}</Name>{" "}

35+ <Patp className={patpClassNames + " opacity-60"}>{patp}</Patp>

36+ </>

37+ ) : patp ? (

38+ <Patp className={patpClassNames}>{patp}</Patp>

39+ ) : name ? (

40+ <Name className={nameClassNames}>{name}</Name>

41+ ) : null}

42+ </>

43+ );

44+}

45+

46+// This goes inside a <p/> tag

47+export function ReadableList({ children, serial = ",", conjunction = "and" }) {

48+ return (

49+ <>

50+ {children.map((Child, index) => {

51+ if (index < children.length - 2) {

52+ return (

53+ <>

54+ {Child}

55+ {serial}

56+ </>

57+ );

58+ } else if (index < children.length - 1) {

59+ return (

60+ <>

61+ {Child} {conjunction}{" "}

62+ </>

63+ );

64+ }

65+ return <>{Child}</>;

66+ })}

67+ </>

68+ );

69+}

70+

71+export function ShowOrHide({ children, condition }) {

72+ if (condition) {

73+ return children;

74+ }

75+ return null;

76+}

77+

78+export function DateRange({ starts, ends, className, short }) {

79+ // For events which have no end datetime

80+ if (!ends.isValid) {

81+ return (

82+ <div>

83+ <p className={className}>

84+ {`${formatDate(starts)} • ${formatTime(starts)} ${formatTimeZone(

85+ starts

86+ )}`}

87+ </p>

88+ </div>

89+ );

90+ }

91+ // For events which start and end on the same day

92+ if (starts.hasSame(ends, "day")) {

93+ return (

94+ <div>

95+ <p className={className}>

96+ {`${formatDate(starts)} • ${formatTime(starts)} to ${formatTime(

97+ ends

98+ )} ${formatTimeZone(starts)}`}

99+ </p>

100+ </div>

101+ );

102+ }

103+ // For multi-day events

104+ return (

105+ <div>

106+ <p className={className}>{`${starts.toFormat(

107+ "cccc, LLLL d"

108+ )} to ${formatDate(ends)}`}</p>

109+ </div>

110+ );

111+}

components/TabCarousel.jsnew file+9

@@ -0,0 +1,9 @@

1+// Given multiple children, returns only 1 to be rendered based on props.index

2+export default function TabCarousel(props) {

3+ if (props.children) {

4+ if (props.children[props.index]) {

5+ return props.children[props.index]

6+ }

7+ }

8+ return null

9+}

components/ecosystem/Badge.jsnew file+20

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@

1+import classnames from "classnames";

2+export default function EcosystemBadge({ type }) {

3+ return (

4+ <div

5+ className={classnames(

6+ "uppercase font-bold text-white text-xs w-fit rounded-lg mb-2 px-2 py-1",

7+ {

8+ "bg-[#B37ED7]": type === "Organization",

9+ "bg-[#83b2d4]": type === "Application",

10+ "bg-wall-600": type === "Podcast",

11+ "bg-[#8dd5b1]": type === "Marketplace",

12+ "bg-[#B5966D]": type === "Article",

13+ "bg-[#219DFF]": type === "Group",

14+ }

15+ )}

16+ >

17+ {type}

18+ </div>

19+ );

20+}

components/ecosystem/BasicPage.jsnew file+146

@@ -0,0 +1,146 @@

1+import { useRouter } from "next/router";

2+import Head from "next/head";

3+import Link from "next/link";

4+import Meta from "../Meta";

5+import ErrorPage from "../../pages/404";

6+import classnames from "classnames";

7+import {

8+ Container,

9+ SingleColumn,

10+ Section,

11+ Markdown,

12+ IntraNav,

13+} from "@urbit/foundation-design-system";

14+import Header from "../Header";

15+import Footer from "../Footer";

16+import MetadataBlock from "./MetadataBlock";

17+

18+export default function BasicPage({

19+ section,

20+ post,

21+ markdown,

22+ search,

23+ children,

24+}) {

25+ const router = useRouter();

26+ if (!router.isFallback && !post?.slug) {

27+ return <ErrorPage />;

28+ }

29+ const metaPost = Object.assign({}, post);

30+ metaPost.title = `${post.title} - ${section}`;

31+ metaPost.description =

32+ section === "Podcast" ? `${post.podcast} - ${post.date}` : post.description;

33+ section === "Article" ? `${post.publication} - ${post.date}` : post.description;

34+ return (

35+ <Container>

36+ <Head>

37+ <title>

38+ {post.title} • {section}

39+ </title>

40+ {Meta(metaPost)}

41+ </Head>

42+ <IntraNav ourSite="https://urbit.org" search={search} />

43+ <SingleColumn>

44+ <Header search={search} />

45+ <Section narrow className="space-y-12">

46+ <div className="flex items-center space-x-4">

47+ <img src={post.image} className="w-36" />

48+ <div className="flex flex-col pl-2">

49+ <h1 className="text-3xl">

50+ {post.title}

51+ </h1>

52+ <p>{section}</p>

53+ </div>

54+ </div>

55+ {/* General purpose metadata bar -- podcast listen button is special-cased URL, flexed at the end of the row */}

56+ <div className="flex justify-between">

57+ <div className="flex space-x-12">

58+ {post?.podcast && (

59+ <MetadataBlock

60+ title="Podcast"

61+ content={post.podcast}

62+ />

63+ )}

64+ {post?.publication && (

65+ <MetadataBlock

66+ title="Publication"

67+ content={post.publication}

68+ />

69+ )}

70+ {post?.author && (

71+ <MetadataBlock

72+ title="Author"

73+ content={post.author}

74+ />

75+ )}

76+ {post?.date && (

77+ <MetadataBlock

78+ title="Date"

79+ content={post.date}

80+ />

81+ )}

82+

83+ {post?.twitter && (

84+ <div className="flex flex-col">

85+ <p className="font-bold text-wall-400">Twitter</p>

86+ <Link href={"http://twitter.com/" + post.twitter}>

87+ <a className="text-green-400 text-sm font-semibold font-mono">@{post.twitter}</a>

88+ </Link>

89+ </div>

90+ )}

91+

92+

93+ {post?.URL && section !== "Podcast" && section !== "Article" && (

94+ <div className="flex flex-col">

95+ <p className="font-bold text-wall-400">Website</p>

96+ <a

97+ className="text-green-400 text-sm font-semibold font-mono"

98+ href={post.URL}

99+ >

100+ {post.URL.slice(post.URL.indexOf("://") + 3)}

101+ </a>

102+ </div>

103+ )}

104+

105+ {post?.URL && section === "Urbit Marketplace" && (

106+ <div className="flex flex-col">

107+ <p className="font-bold text-wall-400">Accepts</p>

108+ <p className="text-sm font-semibold font-mono">

109+ {post.payment.join(", ")}

110+ </p>

111+ </div>

112+ )}

113+ </div>

114+

115+

116+

117+ {post?.URL && section === "Podcast" && (

118+ <a

119+ href={post.URL}

120+ className="button-lg bg-green-400 text-white cursor-pointer flex space-x-2"

121+ >

122+ <img src="/images/sound.svg" />

123+ &nbsp;Listen

124+ </a>

125+ )}

126+ {post?.URL && section === "Article" && (

127+ <a

128+ href={post.URL}

129+ className="button-lg bg-green-400 text-white cursor-pointer flex space-x-2"

130+ >

131+ Read

132+ </a>

133+ )}

134+ </div>

135+ <div className="flex">

136+ <div className="markdown w-full">

137+ <Markdown.render content={JSON.parse(markdown)} />

138+ {children}

139+ </div>

140+ </div>

141+ </Section>

142+ </SingleColumn>

143+ <Footer />

144+ </Container>

145+ );

146+}

components/ecosystem/EcosystemSidebar.jsnew file+86

@@ -0,0 +1,86 @@

1+import { useRouter } from "next/router";

2+import Link from "next/link";

3+import classnames from "classnames";

4+function ActiveLink({ children, href, className, currentPath }) {

5+ // special casing this behaviour which overloads one nav

6+ const archive = Boolean(

7+ currentPath === "/ecosystem?type=archive" && href === "/ecosystem"

8+ );

9+ const activeClassName = classnames({

10+ "text-wall-800": currentPath === href || archive,

11+ "text-wall-400": currentPath !== href && !archive,

12+ });

13+

14+ return (

15+ <Link href={href} passHref>

16+ <a className={`${className} ${activeClassName}`}>{children}</a>

17+ </Link>

18+ );

19+}

20+

21+export default function EcosystemSidebar() {

22+ const router = useRouter();

23+ let currentPath = router.asPath;

24+ return (

25+ <div className="flex flex-col space-y-4 pr-24">

26+ <ActiveLink

27+ currentPath={currentPath}

28+ className="type-ui"

29+ href="/ecosystem"

30+ >

31+ Spotlight

32+ </ActiveLink>

33+ <ActiveLink

34+ currentPath={currentPath}

35+ className="type-ui"

36+ href="/ecosystem?type=communities"

37+ >

38+ Communities

39+ </ActiveLink>

40+ <ActiveLink

41+ currentPath={currentPath}

42+ className="type-ui"

43+ href="/ecosystem?type=organizations"

44+ >

45+ Organizations

46+ </ActiveLink>

47+

48+ <ActiveLink

49+ currentPath={currentPath}

50+ className="type-ui"

51+ href="/ecosystem?type=applications"

52+ >

53+ Applications

54+ </ActiveLink>

55+ <ActiveLink

56+ currentPath={currentPath}

57+ className="type-ui"

58+ href="/ecosystem?type=groups"

59+ >

60+ Groups

61+ </ActiveLink>

62+ <ActiveLink

63+ currentPath={currentPath}

64+ className="type-ui"

65+ href="/ecosystem?type=marketplaces"

66+ >

67+ Marketplaces

68+ </ActiveLink>

69+ <ActiveLink

70+ currentPath={currentPath}

71+ className="mr-5 type-ui"

72+ href="/ecosystem?type=podcasts"

73+ >

74+ Podcasts

75+ </ActiveLink>

76+

77+ <ActiveLink

78+ currentPath={currentPath}

79+ className="mr-5 type-ui"

80+ href="/ecosystem?type=articles"

81+ >

82+ Articles

83+ </ActiveLink>

84+ </div>

85+ );

86+}

components/ecosystem/IndexCard.jsnew file+34

@@ -0,0 +1,34 @@

1+import Link from "next/link";

2+import EcosystemBadge from "./Badge";

3+export default function IndexCard({ slug, feat }) {

4+ return (

5+ <Link href={slug}>

6+ <div className="cursor-pointer bg-wall-100 rounded-xl min-h-0 flex-1">

7+ <div className="flex flex-col p-4 h-full relative">

8+ {feat.image ? (

9+ <div

10+ className="w-64 md:w-full rounded-xl object-cover overflow-hidden basis-1/2"

11+ style={{

12+ backgroundColor: feat?.matchedPost?.bgColor || "rgba(0,0,0,0)",

13+ }}

14+ >

15+ <img className="h-full w-64 md:w-full object-cover" src={feat.image} />

16+ </div>

17+ ) : (

18+ <div

19+ className="rounded-xl w-full"

20+ style={{

21+ backgroundColor: feat?.matchedPost?.bgColor || "rgba(0,0,0,0)",

22+ }}

23+ />

24+ )}

25+ <div className="pt-4">

26+ <p className="mb-2 font-semibold leading-5">{feat.title}</p>

27+ <EcosystemBadge type={feat.type} />

28+ <p className="text-sm leading-5">{feat?.description}</p>

29+ </div>

30+ </div>

31+ </div>

32+ </Link>

33+ );

34+}

components/ecosystem/MetadataBlock.jsnew file+7

@@ -0,0 +1,7 @@

1+export default function MetadataBlock({ title, content }) {

2+ return <div className="flex flex-col py-2 basis-1/2">

3+ <p className="font-bold text-wall-400">{title}</p>

4+ <p>{content}</p>

5+ </div>

6+

7+}

components/ecosystem/Post.jsnew file+107

@@ -0,0 +1,107 @@

1+import { Markdown } from "@urbit/foundation-design-system";

2+import EcosystemBadge from "./Badge";

3+

4+import Link from "next/link";

5+export default function Post({ post }) {

6+ return ["featured-1", "featured-2", "featured-3"].map((feat) => {

7+ const childPath =

8+ post[feat] && (post[feat]?.matchedPost?.type === "Application" || post[feat]?.matchedPost?.type === "Group")

9+ ? `${post[feat]?.matchedPost.ship}/${post[feat].matchedPost.slug}`

10+ : `${post[feat].matchedPost?.slug}`;

11+ const href = post[feat]?.matchedPost

12+ ? `/${post[feat].matchedPost.type.toLowerCase()}s/${childPath}`

13+ : null;

14+ return post?.[feat] ? (

15+ <div

16+ className="mt-8 mb-24"

17+ id={post?.[feat].title.toLowerCase().replace(/ /, "-")}

18+ >

19+ <div className="flex space-x-4 items-center">

20+ <div

21+ className="h-24 w-24 rounded-xl items-center justify-center shrink-0 overflow-hidden"

22+ style={{

23+ backgroundColor:

24+ post[feat]?.matchedPost?.bgColor || "rgba(0,0,0,0)",

25+ }}

26+ >

27+ {(post[feat]?.matchedPost?.image || post[feat]?.matchedPost?.tile) && (

28+ <img

29+ className="rounded-xl w-24 object-cover"

30+ src={post[feat]?.matchedPost?.image || post[feat]?.matchedPost?.tile}

31+ />

32+ )}

33+ </div>

34+ <div className="flex flex-col">

35+ <h4 className="text-xl pb-2 leading-6 font-bold">

36+ {post?.[feat].title}

37+ </h4>

38+ <EcosystemBadge type={post[feat].type} />

39+ </div>

40+ </div>

41+ <div className="markdown mt-8 mb-8">

42+ <Markdown.render content={JSON.parse(post[feat].content)} />

43+ </div>

44+

45+ {post[feat].type === "Podcast" && (

46+ <Link href={href || "#"} passHref>

47+ <a class="button-sm text-white flex-col bg-green-400 cursor-pointer pr-4 w-fit">

48+ Listen to {post[feat].type}

49+ </a>

50+ </Link>

51+ )}

52+

53+ {post[feat].type === "Article" && (

54+ <Link href={href || "#"} passHref>

55+ <a class="button-sm text-white flex-col bg-green-400 cursor-pointer pr-4 w-fit">

56+ Read {post[feat].type}

57+ </a>

58+ </Link>

59+ )}

60+

61+ {post[feat].type === "Application" && (

62+ <Link href={href || "#"} passHref>

63+ <a class="button-sm text-white flex-col bg-green-400 cursor-pointer pr-4 w-fit">

64+ View {post[feat].type}

65+ </a>

66+ </Link>

67+ )}

68+

69+ {post[feat].type === "Organization" && (

70+ <Link href={href || "#"} passHref>

71+ <a class="button-sm text-white flex-col bg-green-400 cursor-pointer pr-4 w-fit">

72+ More about {post[feat].title}

73+ </a>

74+ </Link>

75+ )}

76+

77+ {post[feat].type === "Community" && (

78+ <Link href={href || "#"} passHref>

79+ <a class="button-sm text-white flex-col bg-green-400 cursor-pointer pr-4 w-fit">

80+ More about {post[feat].title}

81+ </a>

82+ </Link>

83+ )}

84+

85+

86+ {post[feat].type === "Marketplace" && (

87+ <Link href={href || "#"} passHref>

88+ <a class="button-sm text-white flex-col bg-green-400 cursor-pointer pr-4 w-fit">

89+ More about {post[feat].title}

90+ </a>

91+ </Link>

92+ )}

93+

94+ {post[feat].type === "Group" && (

95+ <Link href={href || "#"} passHref>

96+ <a class="button-sm text-white flex-col bg-green-400 cursor-pointer pr-4 w-fit">

97+ More about {post[feat].title}

98+ </a>

99+ </Link>

100+ )}

101+

102+ </div>

103+ ) : null;

104+ });

105+}

106+

107+

components/ecosystem/SpotlightArchive.jsnew file+66

@@ -0,0 +1,66 @@

1+import { Container, IntraNav, SingleColumn, Section } from "@urbit/foundation-design-system";

2+import Header from "../Header";

3+import Footer from "../Footer";

4+import Meta from "../Meta";

5+import Head from "next/head";

6+import Link from "next/link";

7+import EcosystemSidebar from "./EcosystemSidebar";

8+import Sidebar from "../Sidebar";

9+

10+export default function SpotlightArchive({ posts, search }) {

11+ const post = {

12+ title: "Spotlight Archive",

13+ description: "The archive of ecosystem spotlights.",

14+ };

15+ return (

16+ <Container>

17+ <Head>

18+ <title>Archive • Spotlight • Urbit</title>

19+ {Meta(post)}

20+ </Head>

21+ <IntraNav ourSite="https://urbit.org" search={search} />

22+ <SingleColumn>

23+ <Header search={search} />

24+ <Section>

25+ <div className="measure">

26+ <h1>Ecosystem</h1>

27+ </div>

28+ </Section>

29+ <Section className="flex">

30+ <Sidebar>

31+ <EcosystemSidebar />

32+ </Sidebar>

33+ <div>

34+ <h3 className="mb-12">Spotlight Archive</h3>

35+ {posts.map((post) => {

36+ return (

37+ <div key={post.slug} className="mb-24 cursor-pointer">

38+ <Link href={`/ecosystem/spotlight/${post.slug}`}>

39+ <div>

40+ <h3 className="text-green-400">{post.title}</h3>

41+ <div className="type-ui mt-2">

42+ {["featured-1", "featured-2", "featured-3"].map(

43+ (feat, i) => {

44+ if (post?.[feat]) {

45+ return (

46+ <>

47+ {i ? ", " : ""}

48+ <span>{post[feat].title}</span>

49+ </>

50+ );

51+ }

52+ }

53+ )}

54+ </div>

55+ </div>

56+ </Link>

57+ </div>

58+ );

59+ })}

60+ </div>

61+ </Section>

62+ </SingleColumn>

63+ <Footer />

64+ </Container>

65+ );

66+}

components/gateway/Description.jsnew file+19

@@ -0,0 +1,19 @@

1+import { Markdown } from "@urbit/foundation-design-system";

2+

3+const Description = ({ description, fallback, markdown }) => {

4+ return (

5+ (description !== fallback || markdown) && (

6+ <div className="flex flex-col space-y-4">

7+ {markdown ? (

8+ <div className="markdown">

9+ <Markdown.render content={JSON.parse(markdown)} />

10+ </div>

11+ ) : (

12+ <p>{description}</p>

13+ )}

14+ </div>

15+ )

16+ );

17+};

18+

19+export default Description;

components/gateway/Gateway404.jsnew file+29

@@ -0,0 +1,29 @@

1+import GatewayHeader from "./GatewayHeader";

2+import {

3+ Container,

4+ SingleColumn,

5+ Section,

6+} from "@urbit/foundation-design-system";

7+import Link from "next/link";

8+

9+const Gateway404 = ({ type }) => {

10+ return (

11+ <Container>

12+ <SingleColumn>

13+ <Section narrow className="space-y-12">

14+ <GatewayHeader

15+ title="Error 404"

16+ error

17+ item={`No ${type} at this address`}

18+ />

19+ <hr className="text-wall-200" />

20+ <Link href="/" passHref>

21+ <a className="text-xl block font-semibold">Urbit.org</a>

22+ </Link>

23+ </Section>

24+ </SingleColumn>

25+ </Container>

26+ );

27+};

28+

29+export default Gateway404;

components/gateway/GatewayHeader.jsnew file+29

@@ -0,0 +1,29 @@

1+import GatewayImage from "./Image";

2+

3+const GatewayHeader = ({

4+ image,

5+ patp,

6+ color,

7+ subtitle,

8+ subtitleMono,

9+ error,

10+ title,

11+ item,

12+}) => {

13+ return (

14+ <div className="flex items-center space-x-4">

15+ <GatewayImage patp={patp} color={color} image={image} error={error} />

16+ <div className="flex flex-col">

17+ <h2>{title}</h2>

18+ {subtitle && (

19+ <p className={(subtitleMono ? "font-mono" : "font-sans") }>

20+ {subtitle}

21+ </p>

22+ )}

23+ <p className="mt-1">{item}</p>

24+ </div>

25+ </div>

26+ );

27+};

28+

29+export default GatewayHeader;

components/gateway/Image.jsnew file+62

@@ -0,0 +1,62 @@

1+import { Sigil } from "@urbit/foundation-design-system";

2+const GatewayImage = ({

3+ error = false,

4+ patp = false,

5+ color = "transparent",

6+ image = "",

7+ size = 100,

8+}) => {

9+ if (error) {

10+ return (

11+ <div className="overflow-hidden rounded-xl shrink-0">

12+ <svg

13+ width={size}

14+ height={size}

15+ viewBox="0 0 100 100"

16+ fill="none"

17+ xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"

18+ >

19+ <rect width="100" height="100" rx="10" className="fill-wall-600" />

20+ <path

21+ d="M28.8906 27.9844C28.5019 28.0215 28.1699 28.2833 28.043 28.6524C27.914 29.0235 28.0137 29.4336 28.2969 29.7032L70.2969 71.7032C70.4844 71.8965 70.7402 72.0059 71.0098 72.0059C71.2773 72.0079 71.5352 71.9004 71.7246 71.709C71.9141 71.5176 72.0176 71.2598 72.0137 70.9903C72.0098 70.7227 71.8984 70.4668 71.7031 70.2813L66.2501 64.8283C69.8204 60.9181 72.0001 55.7073 72.0001 50.0003C72.0001 37.8618 62.1386 28.0003 50.0001 28.0003C44.2931 28.0003 39.0976 30.1956 35.1876 33.7658L29.7031 28.2813C29.4922 28.0645 29.1934 27.9551 28.8906 27.9844L28.8906 27.9844ZM50.0001 30C61.0566 30 70.0001 38.9435 70.0001 50C70.0001 55.17 68.0411 59.8575 64.8281 63.406L36.5936 35.1715C40.1405 31.9606 44.8336 29.9995 49.9996 29.9995L50.0001 30ZM32.1721 37.8125C31.842 37.8321 31.5452 38.0137 31.3752 38.2969C29.2424 41.6856 28.0002 45.7029 28.0002 49.9999C28.0002 62.1384 37.8617 71.9999 50.0002 71.9999C54.2951 71.9999 58.3147 70.7558 61.7032 68.6249C62.1739 68.3319 62.3165 67.7128 62.0235 67.2421C61.7305 66.7714 61.1114 66.6288 60.6407 66.9218C57.5587 68.8593 53.9122 69.9999 50.0002 69.9999C38.9437 69.9999 30.0002 61.0564 30.0002 49.9999C30.0002 46.0878 31.1233 42.4414 33.0627 39.3594C33.2697 39.043 33.2815 38.6387 33.092 38.3125C32.9045 37.9844 32.5491 37.7929 32.1721 37.8125L32.1721 37.8125Z"

22+ className="fill-white"

23+ />

24+ </svg>

25+ </div>

26+ );

27+ }

28+

29+ if (patp) {

30+ return (

31+ <div className="rounded-xl overflow-hidden shrink-0">

32+ <Sigil patp={patp} size={size} color={color} />

33+ </div>

34+ );

35+ }

36+

37+ if (image?.startsWith("#")) {

38+ return (

39+ <div

40+ style={{ height: size, width: size, backgroundColor: image }}

41+ className="rounded-xl shrink-0"

42+ />

43+ );

44+ }

45+

46+ return image ? (

47+ <div

48+ className="rounded-xl overflow-hidden shrink-0"

49+ style={{ backgroundColor: color }}

50+ >

51+ <img src={image} style={{ height: size, width: size }} />

52+ </div>

53+ ) : (

54+ <img

55+ className="object-contain shadow-sm rounded-xl"

56+ style={{ height: size, width: size }}

57+ src="https://media.urbit.org/public-links/placeholder-image.png"

58+ />

59+ );

60+};

61+

62+export default GatewayImage;

components/gateway/MetadataBlock.jsnew file+8

@@ -0,0 +1,8 @@

1+const MetadataBlock = ({ title, content }) => (

2+ <div className="flex flex-col basis-1/2 pr-2 sm:basis-1/4 mb-4 md:mb-0 flex-1">

3+ <p className="font-bold text-wall-400">{title}</p>

4+ <p className="font-mono">{content}</p>

5+ </div>

6+);

7+

8+export default MetadataBlock;

components/gateway/MetadataLink.jsnew file+14

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@

1+import Link from "next/link";

2+

3+const MetadataLink = ({ title, href, content }) => (

4+ <div className="flex flex-col basis-1/2 sm:basis-1/4 pr-2 mb-4 min-w-0 flex-1">

5+ <p className="font-bold text-wall-400">{title}</p>

6+ <Link href={href}>

7+ <div className="flex truncate">

8+ <a className="truncate font-mono text-green-400">{content}</a>

9+ </div>

10+ </Link>

11+ </div>

12+);

13+

14+export default MetadataLink;

components/gateway/ResourceCard.jsnew file+24

@@ -0,0 +1,24 @@

1+import Link from "next/link";

2+import GatewayImage from "./Image";

3+import classNames from "classnames";

4+import { capitalize } from "@urbit/foundation-design-system";

5+

6+const ResourceCard = ({ type, shortcode, title, description = "", color, image, full }) => (

7+ <Link href={`/${type}s/${shortcode}`}>

8+ <div className={classNames("cursor-pointer rounded-xl bg-wall-100 p-4 flex items-center space-x-4 mr-2 my-1", {

9+ "basis-full": full

10+ })}>

11+ <GatewayImage color={color} image={image || color} size={50} />

12+ {full

13+ ? <><div className="flex flex-col w-full">

14+ <a className="font-semibold">{title}</a>

15+ <p className="hidden lg:block">{description}</p>

16+ </div>

17+ <a className="button-lg bg-green-400 text-white shrink-0">View {capitalize(type)}</a>

18+ </>

19+ : <a className="font-semibold">{title}</a>}

20+ </div>

21+ </Link>

22+);

23+

24+export default ResourceCard;

components/icons/Cross.jsnew file+11

@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@

1+export default function Cross(props) {

2+ return (

3+ <svg {...props} viewBox="0 0 12 12">

4+ <path

5+ fillRule="evenodd"

6+ clipRule="evenodd"

7+ d="M0.292893 10.2942C-0.0976311 10.6847 -0.0976311 11.3179 0.292893 11.7084C0.683417 12.0989 1.31658 12.0989 1.70711 11.7084L6.00063 7.41487L10.2948 11.7091C10.6853 12.0996 11.3185 12.0996 11.709 11.7091C12.0996 11.3185 12.0996 10.6854 11.709 10.2949L7.41484 6.00066L11.7084 1.70711C12.0989 1.31658 12.0989 0.683417 11.7084 0.292894C11.3179 -0.0976312 10.6847 -0.0976312 10.2942 0.292894L6.00063 4.58645L1.70775 0.293571C1.31723 -0.0969534 0.684061 -0.0969534 0.293536 0.293571C-0.0969879 0.684095 -0.0969879 1.31726 0.293536 1.70778L4.58641 6.00066L0.292893 10.2942Z"

8+ />

9+ </svg>

10+ );

11+}

components/index/BubbleLink.jsnew file+25

@@ -0,0 +1,25 @@

1+export default function BubbleLink(props) {

2+ return (

3+ <li className={"list-none " + props.className}>

4+ <a className={"flex"} href={props.href} target={props.target}>

5+ <div>{props.children}</div>

6+ <div className="flex flex-col ml-4">

7+ <p className="font-bold">{props.title}</p>

8+ <p className="text-wall-400 dark:text-antiwall-400 font-bold leading-snug">

9+ {props.caption}

10+ </p>

11+ </div>

12+ </a>

13+ </li>

14+ );

15+}

16+

17+BubbleLink.defaultProps = {

18+ className: "",

19+ title: "",

20+ caption: "",

21+ children: (

22+ <div className="w-12 h-12 bg-wall-500 dark:bg-antiwall-500 rounded-full" />

23+ ),

24+ target: "_blank",

25+};

content/applications/_index.mdnew file+3

@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@

1++++

2+title = "Application Directory"

3++++

content/applications/~bacwyl-samweg/templeochess.mdnew file+22

@@ -0,0 +1,22 @@

1++++

2+title = "Temple O Chess"

3+shortcode = "~bacwyl-samweg/templeochess"

4+license = "MIT"

5+image = "https://0x0.st/oFuT.png"

6+bgColor = "#FFFF55"

7+developer = "~bacwyl-samweg"

8+website = "https://youtu.be/Raej8C2yIEc"

9+description = "chess game from Temple OS"

10++++

11+

12+### Chess from Temple OS

13+

14+

15+Temple O Chess is a pixel-for-pixel reproduction of the chess game from Temple OS.

16+

17+It was created using [this youtube video](https://youtu.be/Raej8C2yIEc) as a reference.

18+

19+It's a fully playable online chess game. Instead of a challenge system, games are formed using a naive public queue.

20+

21+Just queue up, and you will be automatically matched with the next (or previous) player.

22+

content/applications/~datder-sonnet/hodl.mdnew file+16

@@ -0,0 +1,16 @@

1++++

2+title = "hodl"

3+description = "Track your digital hodlings"

4+shortcode = "~hodler-datder-sonnet/hodl"

5+license = "MIT"

6+image = "https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/16504501/194947852-8802fd63-5954-4ce8-b147-2072bd929242.png"

7+bgColor = "#b8a3d1"

8+developer = "~datder-sonnet"

9+website = "https://github.com/tomholford/hodl"

10++++

11+

12+A portfolio app for tracking your digital assets.

13+

14+Add transactions to get a summary of your crypto net worth.

15+

16+Supports over 13K coins via the Coingecko API.

content/applications/~disreb-winner-mittec/urbit-go.mdnew file+12

@@ -0,0 +1,12 @@

1++++

2+title = "Go"

3+shortcode = "~disreb-winner-mittec/urbit-go"

4+license = "GPLv3"

5+image = "https://winnermittec.space/icon.svg"

6+bgColor = "#D37504"

7+developer = "~winner-mittec"

8+website = "https://winnermittec.space/"

9+description = "Go on Urbit"

10++++

11+

12+The classic board-game Go, now on Urbit!

content/applications/~dister-dister-datryn-ribdun/campfire.mdnew file+12

@@ -0,0 +1,12 @@

1++++

2+title = "Campfire"

3+shortcode = "~dister-dister-datryn-ribdun/campfire"

4+description = "Voice and video chat"

5+license = "MIT"

6+image = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/datryn-ribdun/urbit-webrtc/master/campfire/logo.svg"

7+bgColor = "#FFC179"

8+developer = "~datryn-ribdun"

9+website = "https://github.com/datryn-ribdun/urbit-webrtc"

10++++

11+

12+Hang out with your friends. Voice and video chat by Holium.

content/applications/~dister-dister-sidnym-ladrut/quorum.mdnew file+17

@@ -0,0 +1,17 @@

1++++

2+title = "Quorum"

3+shortcode = "~dister-dister-sidnym-ladrut/quorum"

4+developer = "Quorum Team"

5+description = "A choral explanations app for Urbit"

6+license = "MIT"

7+website = ""

8+bgColor = ""

9+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/applications/quorum-logo.png"

10++++

11+

12+Quorum is a Stack Overflow/Quora style application that allows individuals to submit and vote on questions and answers in threads.

13+

14+To join the Urbit Foundation's [battery payload] board, when prompted to add a board, enter `~dister-dozzod-lapdeg` as the provider, and `battery-payload` as the board.

15+

16+

17+

content/applications/~dister-dozzod-bacdun/uqbar-suite.mdnew file+20

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@

1++++

2+title = "Uqbar Development Suite"

3+shortcode = "~dister-dozzod-bacdun/zig"

4+developer = "Uqbar"

5+description = "The contract & app development, wallet, and block explorer suite from Uqbar."

6+license = "MIT"

7+website = "https://uqbar.network"

8+bgColor = ""

9+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/applications/uqbarsuite.png"

10++++

11+

12+The Uqbar Development Suite, also known as Ziggurat, is an all-in-one developer suite designed to give programmers a seamless coding experience as they create and deploy smart contracts and blockchain-integrated Urbit apps to our testnet. The Ziggurat suite consists of:

13+

14+

15+

16+

17+

18+

19+

20+For more information, read our [Developer Docs](https://uqbar-network.gitbook.io/uqbar-developer-documentation/developer-documentation/developer-documentation).

content/applications/~dister-dozzod-dalten/books.mdnew file+20

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@

1++++

2+title = "Books"

3+developer = "Quartus Co."

4+shortcode = "~dister-dozzod-dalten/books"

5+description = "It just makes cents"

6+license = "MIT"

7+website = "https://dalten.org"

8+bgColor = "#E44D11"

9++++

10+

11+Books is an application for managing your crypto wallets, transactions, and counterparties. It allows you to add your wallet and other people’s, track balances and transactions, and add private annotations to all of the above.

12+

13+

14+

15+## Books in a Nutshell

16+If you spend much time interacting with crypto, you probably have a few wallets: a few hot wallets in metamask, a ledger or two, perhaps an Urbit ID on a master ticket, and that’s just Ethereum.

17+

18+To get a good picture of your aggregate activity you can use a variety of chain analytics tools, but there’s always a sizable catch: there’s nowhere to record the identities of the counter parties you transact with, or the purpose of the transactions. To do this now, your options are to either keep your own records (offline), use a local-storage based address book like Metamask’s, or put your data on someone else’s servers.

19+

20+Books provides an ideal solution: annotate on-chain, public information with private data stored on your urbit, your personal server. This lets you account for your spending, keep records of the people you transact with, and organize your wallets without compromising on privacy or mobility.

content/applications/~dister-dozzod-dalten/gora.mdnew file+24

@@ -0,0 +1,24 @@

1++++

2+title = "Gora - ピタゴラ装置"

3+developer = "~dalten"

4+shortcode = "~mister-dozzod-dalten/gora"

5+description = "A Proof of Attendance Protocol for Urbit"

6+license = "MIT"

7+website = "https://dalten.org"

8+bgColor = "#FCD977"

9++++

10+

11+### A Proof of Attendance Protocol for Urbit

12+

13+Gora is a proof of presence protocol (POPP) that is

14+intended to be extensible, flexible and educational

15+(at least for new hooners).

16+

17+

18+

19+

20+Gora has two distros in

21+circulation - these can be found at:

22+~laddys-dozzod-dalten (Vue.js frontend)

23+~mister-dozzod-dalten (sail frontend)

24+The canonical distro for all Quartus and Dalten Collective apps can always be found at ~dister-dozzod-dalten

content/applications/~dister-dozzod-dalten/keep.mdnew file+13

@@ -0,0 +1,13 @@

1++++

2+title = "Keep"

3+developer = "Quartus Co."

4+shortcode = "~dister-dozzod-dalten/keep"

5+description = "State backup for your agents"

6+license = "MIT"

7+website = "https://dalten.org"

8+bgColor = "#E44D11"

9++++

10+

11+Keep is backup utility for preserving the state of your applications across breaches. Unlike [peat](https://urbit.org/ecosystem/applications/~dister-dozzod-dalten/peat), Keep can backup the state of any arbitrary agent, but does not offer granular control of specific graphs or other targeted contexts.

12+

13+For support with any of Quartus' applications, please visit the [Quartus public group](https://urbit.org/ecosystem/groups/~mister-hilper-dozzod-dalten/quartus)

content/applications/~dister-dozzod-dalten/orca.mdnew file+17

@@ -0,0 +1,17 @@

1++++

2+title = "Orca"

3+developer = "Quartus Co."

4+shortcode = "~dister-dozzod-dalten/orca"

5+description = "Now THIS is podchatting"

6+license = "MIT"

7+website = "https://dalten.org"

8+bgColor = "#13181C"

9++++

10+

11+** ocra has been deprecated and will soon be replaced with updated tooling supporting chat federation for the new Groups backend **

12+

13+Now THIS is podchatting

14+

15+

16+

17+

content/applications/~dister-dozzod-dalten/peat.mdnew file+36

@@ -0,0 +1,36 @@

1++++

2+title = "peat"

3+developer = "Quartus Co."

4+shortcode = "~dister-dozzod-dalten/peat"

5+description = "Graph Backup and Restoration Utility"

6+license = "REKT"

7+website = "https://dalten.org"

8+bgColor = "#574D5A"

9++++

10+

11+Peat is Urbit's first backup utility and works with the %graph-store backend. Quartus is also working to support backup and recovery for arbitrary agent state via %keep, as well as updated utility tooling that supports the new Groups backend.

12+

13+

14+

15+## Peat in a Nutshell

16+- Import

17+ - Recover a Social `graph` from a saved file - transferrable between ships

18+- Export

19+ - Export a Social `graph` to a file on underlying file system (e.g. Unix)

20+- Backup/Restore

21+ - Local recreation of a `graph` that exists, 're-basing' the `graph` to be hosted by the local ship

22+## Import from Disk - Details

23+- User has a `/path/to/pier/<project-desk>/hav` directory for importing (though they could import from anywhere, really).

24+- User also has a form interface, through Peat's webapp allowing them to import without tracking the files in their loom.

25+### From Clay

26+- User gets instructions from the frontend as to how to add files to this directory and commit the desk so the files are available in the OS

27+ - NOTE: This should be converted to using `drum`'s `get` functionality at some point, but this hasn't been wired up yet in `drum`.

28+- User can see all files available for restoration in the default `hav` directory, delineated by whether they represent Agent `state` or `graph`s

29+- User can select a file for restoration

30+- User can apply the file for restoration

31+ - Potentially needing to specify additional details, for a `graph` (e.g. what `group` to associate it with, and what to call the new `resource`)

32+User is informed that the restoration is underway/has completed

33+### From Web

34+- User gets instructions from the frontend as to how to upload files through the frontend, resulting in their unpacking and importing to graph store

35+- User can select from local files on the computer through which they're accessing the frontend.

36+- Note: This method avoids polluting loom with transient files - it is to be the preferred method

content/applications/~dister-dozzod-dalten/wrdu.mdnew file+15

@@ -0,0 +1,15 @@

1++++

2+title = "wrdu"

3+developer = "Quartus Co."

4+shortcode = "~dister-dozzod-dalten/wrdu"

5+description = "Word game by ~dalten for our mothers"

6+license = "MIT"

7+website = "https://dalten.org"

8+bgColor = "#79A86B"

9++++

10+

11+word game by ~dalten for our mothers

12+

13+

14+

15+

content/applications/~donpub-datdux/forms.mdnew file+14

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@

1++++

2+title = "Forms"

3+shortcode = "~donpub-datdux/forms"

4+developer = "~nallux-dozryl"

5+description = "Publish and Respond to Forms."

6+license = "MIT"

7+website = "https://github.com/nallux-dozryl/urbit-forms"

8+bgColor = "#AFC4E0"

9+image = ""

10++++

11+

12+Create and fill out forms and surveys on Urbit.

13+

14+

content/applications/~fabnev-hinmur/escape.mdnew file+16

@@ -0,0 +1,16 @@

1++++

2+title = "EScape"

3+shortcode = "~dister-fabnev-hinmur/escape"

4+developer = "Uqbar"

5+description = "EScape from Eternal September. The UI from Uqbar."

6+license = "MIT"

7+website = "https://uqbar.network"

8+bgColor = "#f2f3ef"

9+image = "https://escape-app-dist.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/escape-logo.png"

10++++

11+

12+EScape is a fully-integrated social management and DAO Tooling system. EScape provides a simple, intuitive, and unified interface for managing groups, messaging ships, receiving notifications, and interacting with other Urbit apps.

13+

14+

15+

16+Get EScape on [iOS](https://apps.apple.com/my/app/escape-by-uqbar/id1610194217) and [Android](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=network.uqbar.escape).

content/applications/~fabnev-hinmur/handshake.mdnew file+14

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@

1++++

2+title = "Handshake"

3+developer = "Uqbar"

4+shortcode = "~dister-fabnev-hinmur/handshake"

5+description = "Confirm Urbit IDs via QR code."

6+license = "MIT"

7+website = "https://uqbar.network"

8+bgColor = "#df828b"

9+image = "https://static.thenounproject.com/png/2002633-200.png"

10++++

11+

12+Handshake generates and verifies QR codes for admission into IRL events.

13+

14+

content/applications/~finmep-lanteb/chess.mdnew file+14

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@

1++++

2+title = "Chess"

3+shortcode = "~finmep-lanteb/chess"

4+developer = "~bonbud-macryg, ~finmep-lanteb, ~nordus-mocwyl, ~rovmug-ticfyn, ~sigryn-habrex"

5+description = "Fully peer-to-peer chess over Urbit"

6+license = "GPL3"

7+website = "https://github.com/thecommons-urbit/chess"

8+bgColor = "#ffffff"

9+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/applications/finmep-chess.svg"

10++++

11+

12+Fully decentralized, peer-to-peer Chess app for Urbit

13+

14+

content/applications/~haddef-sigwen/transit.mdnew file+14

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@

1++++

2+title = "Transit"

3+shortcode = "~haddef-sigwen/transit"

4+license = "MIT"

5+image = "https://haddefsigwen1.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/haddef-sigwen/2022.5.07..20.27.02-image.png"

6+bgColor = "#38285c"

7+developer = "~haddef-sigwen"

8+description = "Planetary transit occurs once per day."

9+website = ""

10++++

11+

12+Planetary transit occurs once per day.

13+

14+

content/applications/~hanfel-dovned/board.mdnew file+14

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@

1++++

2+title = "Board"

3+shortcode = "~dister-hanfel-dovned/board"

4+license = "MIT"

5+image = ""

6+bgColor = "#9E34EB"

7+developer = "~hanfel-dovned"

8+website = "https://github.com/hanfel-dovned/Board"

9+description = "A digital bulletin-board"

10++++

11+

12+An implementation of [Robin Sloan’s Spring ‘83](https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/specifying-spring-83/) concept as an Urbit app called %board. Imagine a digital bulletin-board where each item is a person’s miniature homepage, and the pages you see are based on who you know.

13+

14+

content/applications/~hanfel-dovned/pony.mdnew file+12

@@ -0,0 +1,12 @@

1++++

2+title = "Pony"

3+shortcode = "~dister-hanfel-dovned/pony"

4+license = "MIT"

5+image = ""

6+bgColor = "#232323"

7+developer = "~hanfel-dovned"

8+website = "https://github.com/hanfel-dovned/Pony"

9+description = "Pony is an app for longform threaded conversations"

10++++

11+

12+Pony is an app for longform threaded conversations, like a blend of email and message boards. Create private threads with arbitrary sets of ships, fork threads to new sets of participants, schedule messages to be sent later, and much more.

content/applications/~hanfel-dovned/slam.mdnew file+14

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@

1++++

2+title = "Slam"

3+shortcode = "~dister-hanfel-dovned/slam"

4+license = "MIT"

5+image = "https://hanfel-dovned.sfo3.digitaloceanspaces.com/slam-tile.png"

6+bgColor = "#100032"

7+developer = "~hanfel-dovned"

8+website = "https://github.com/hanfel-dovned/Slam"

9+description = "A social arcade game"

10++++

11+

12+Slam is a social arcade game where you battle waves of enemies that are generated from your pals' gorae.

13+

14+Requires [gora](https://urbit.org/applications/~dalten/gora) and [pals](https://urbit.org/applications/~paldev/pals).

content/applications/~hanrut-sillet-dachus-tiprel/blog.mdnew file+16

@@ -0,0 +1,16 @@

1++++

2+title = "%blog"

3+shortcode = "~hanrut-sillet-dachus-tiprel/blog"

4+license = "MIT"

5+image = ""

6+bgColor = "#533E78"

7+developer = "~dachus-tiprel"

8+website = "https://dachus-tiprel.tlon.network/blog/introducing-blog"

9+description = "The easiest and most versatile publishing app on Urbit"

10++++

11+

12+A publishing tool for creating a basic blog with markdown and css.

13+

14+Blog is just what it sounds like. A new tool from Uqbar, the app lets anyone on Urbit spin up and customize a blog that displays to the net at an auto-generated URL. Nothing could be breezier. Plus it’s got payments through Uqbar and group-blogging settings on the roadmap. Find out more about it on it's [creator's blog](https://dachus-tiprel.tlon.network/blog/introducing-blog).

15+

16+

content/applications/~larryx-woldyr/osmosis.mdnew file+12

@@ -0,0 +1,12 @@

1++++

2+title = "Osmosis"

3+shortcode = "~larryx-woldyr/osmosis"

4+license = "MIT"

5+image = "https://holium-app-globs.nyc3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/osmosis/osmosis-logo-wc.png"

6+bgColor = "#180D39"

7+developer = "~larryx-woldyr"

8+website = "https://https://osmosis.zone/"

9+description = "Interchain liquidity lab."

10++++

11+

12+A fully self-hosted Osmosis frontend, deployed via Urbit.

content/applications/~larryx-woldyr/safe.mdnew file+12

@@ -0,0 +1,12 @@

1++++

2+title = "Safe"

3+shortcode = "~larryx-woldyr/safe"

4+license = "MIT"

5+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/applications/safe.jpeg"

6+bgColor = "#180D39"

7+developer = "~larryx-woldyr"

8+website = "https://safe.global/"

9+description = "Safe front-end"

10++++

11+

12+A fully self-hosted Safe frontend, deployed via Urbit.

content/applications/~larryx-woldyr/uniswap.mdnew file+12

@@ -0,0 +1,12 @@

1++++

2+title = "Uniswap"

3+shortcode = "~larryx-woldyr/uniswap-v3"

4+license = "MIT"

5+image = "https://cryptologos.cc/logos/uniswap-uni-logo.png"

6+bgColor = "0xffffff"

7+developer = "~larryx-woldyr"

8+website = "http://uniswap.org"

9+description = "Self-hosted Uniswap interface"

10++++

11+

12+A self-hosted Uniswap interface for swapping assets on Ethereum.

content/applications/~larryx-woldyr/urbhue.mdnew file+18

@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@

1++++

2+title = "Hue"

3+shortcode = "~larryx-woldyr/urbhue"

4+license = "MIT"

5+image = "https://i.imgur.com/czmkmoK.png"

6+bgColor = "#F0B43D"

7+developer = "~larryx-woldyr"

8+website = "https://ajlamarc.com"

9+description = "Controlling Philips Hue"

10++++

11+

12+In this prototype, Philips Hue Lightbulbs and groups can be controlled from a standard Urbit application by using the Hue Remote API.

13+

14+History and logging of the bulb are collected to provoke consideration of what should be controlled and tracked by the people living in a smart home.

15+

16+This app will hopefully inspire people to think of the potential utility of Urbit in the smart home, inspire non-Urbit users to think of Urbit in non-community driven scenarios, and be a small step forward in understanding the affordances for Urbit in the home.

17+

18+For more information on `%urbhue`, check out our Urbit group: `~pilwyc-fastec/communal-computing-for-urbit`

content/applications/~lomder-librun/ballot.mdnew file+14

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@

1++++

2+title = "Ballot"

3+shortcode = "~livdel-binmun-lomder-librun/ballot"

4+license = "MIT"

5+image = "https://lomder-librun.sfo3.digitaloceanspaces.com/tiles/ballot-app-tile.svg"

6+bgColor = "#cebef0"

7+developer = "~lomder-librun"

8+website = "https://www.holium.com"

9+description = "An app that allows you to vote with other ships."

10++++

11+

12+Ballot allows you to create and vote on proposals, delegate votes to other urbit ships, and trigger actions based on results.

13+

14+

content/applications/~lomder-librun/realm.mdnew file+18

@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@

1++++

2+title = "Realm"

3+shortcode = "~lomdyr-librun/realm"

4+license = ""

5+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/applications/realm-icon.png"

6+bgColor = ""

7+developer = "Holium"

8+website = "https://www.holium.com/"

9+description = "A desktop interface for Urbit"

10++++

11+

12+Realm is a desktop app for Urbit communities (currently in private alpha).

13+

14+[Sign up for the alpha.](https://www.holium.com/)

15+

16+<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gdu4QtFR-Bs" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>

17+

18+Note that the shortcode will not install this application.

content/applications/~midlev-mindyr/astrolabe.mdnew file+30

@@ -0,0 +1,30 @@

1++++

2+title = "Astrolabe"

3+shortcode = "~dister-midlev-mindyr/astrolabe"

4+license = ""

5+image = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/johnhyde/astrolabe/main/ui/src/assets/astrolabe-tile.svg"

6+bgColor = ""

7+developer = "~midlev-mindyr"

8+website = "https://github.com/johnhyde/astrolabe"

9+description = "Astrolabe is a one-stop shop app for exploring Urbit address space."

10++++

11+

12+### Astrolabe is a one-stop shop app for exploring Urbit address space.

13+

14+Features:

15+

16+- **ID Search**:

17+When you search a partial @p (or use wildcards), it will show you the spawned/owned ships which match your search.

18+

19+- **Sigil Search**:

20+You can use a visual interface to enter sigils, either just general shapes, or specific shape/pattern combos

21+

22+- **Sky Chart**:

23+ Astrolabe integrates with %pals to highlight your pals on the sky chart. Clicking/tapping on a point opens a small modal with basic info and a button to take you to a Ship View of the point.

24+

25+- **Ship View**:

26+Summary view for any ship. As on urbit.live or urbit.me, it shows the @p, owner, parent, etc. Allows PNG or SVG download of sigils. Displays tags from %pals, and potentially allows you to add pals and/or edit tags from that screen.

27+

28+

29+

30+Astrolabe integrates with pals wherever possible, and contains documentation to explain the many quirks of Urbit address space to a new user.

content/applications/~midsum-salrux/faux.mdnew file+11

@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@

1++++

2+title = "Faux"

3+developer = "~midsum-salrux"

4+shortcode = "~tindys-botter-dozzod-tomdys/faux"

5+description = "An Urbit-native Discord bridge"

6+license = "MIT"

7+website = "https://github.com/midsum-salrux/faux"

8+bgColor = "#000000"

9++++

10+

11+Faux, a bridge between discord and urbit groups. When a member posts a new message in your discord group, a bot reposts it in your urbit group, and vice versa. This is implemented as a native gall agent and includes a frontend app to configure the connections between your discord and urbit servers.

content/applications/~migmeg-fidlen-sillus-mallus/kenning.mdnew file+17

@@ -0,0 +1,17 @@

1++++

2+title = "kenning"

3+shortcode = "~migmeg-fidlen-sillus-mallus/kenning"

4+license = "MIT"

5+image = "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a0/Voiced_dental_fricative_%28vector%29.svg/1920px-Voiced_dental_fricative_%28vector%29.svg.png"

6+bgColor = "#a59a2d"

7+developer = "~sillus-mallus"

8+website = "https://lovecrypt.net"

9+description = "Memorization tool for text passages."

10++++

11+

12+Memorize passages of text. Every passage is called a “kenning”.

13+

14+1. Every kenning is assigned a kelvin version based on word count.

15+1. You may test your knowledge by filling in the blanks.

16+1. As kelvin decreases, the number of blanks increases.

17+1. For large passages, split the text into several kens for best results.

content/applications/~mister-dister-dozzod-dozzod/terminal.mdnew file+14

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@

1++++

2+title = "Terminal"

3+developer = "Tlon"

4+shortcode = "~mister-dister-dozzod-dozzod/webterm"

5+description = "A web interface to your Urbit's command line."

6+license = "MIT"

7+website = "https://tlon.io"

8+bgColor = "#324246"

9++++

10+

11+

12+Terminal is a command line interface for your urbit. You can run commands, script, and program your Urbit directly, even if your urbit is located on a remote server. Discover the gratification of programming a computer that is truly yours.

13+

14+

content/applications/~niblyx-malnus/gol-cli.mdnew file+15

@@ -0,0 +1,15 @@

1++++

2+title = "Goals"

3+shortcode = "~dister-dozzod-niblyx-malnus/gol-cli"

4+license = "MIT"

5+image = ""

6+bgColor = "#362711"

7+developer = "~niblyx-malnus"

8+website = ""

9+description = "Hierarchically nested goals and projects"

10++++

11+

12+### Goals helps you track and share interrelated tasks

13+

14+

15+Goals is primarily dealing with four kinds of relationships: containment/ownership, virtual nesting, precedence, and priority. These fundamental relationships between goals and that any other important information about a goal does not require any complex sort of topological representation, but can simply be a piece of data associated with the goal.

content/applications/~nocsyx-lassul/silo.mdnew file+20

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@

1++++

2+title = "silo"

3+shortcode = "~dister-nocsyx-lassul/silo"

4+license = "MIT"

5+image = ""

6+bgColor = "#4f46e5"

7+developer = "~nocsyx-lassul"

8+description = "An S3 storage manager"

9+website = "https://github.com/arthyn/silo"

10++++

11+

12+### An S3 storage manager

13+

14+Silo is an application for viewing and managing your urbit's file storage. Currently that means the files in an S3-compatible storage system, but hopefully soon we'll also be able to provide an interface for your local urbit's filesystem too.

15+

16+

17+

18+Currently silo allows you to upload, delete, add folders, and otherwise manage your files like you expect. It also offers easy access to downloading files and copying their URLs.

19+

20+In the future we hope to add the ability to easily share files with others, offer storage to friends or groups, a fully urbit-side S3 and virtual filesystem API, and a drop-in file-picker component that devs can use to easily add image uploads to their apps.

content/applications/~nocsyx-lassul/sphinx.mdnew file+20

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@

1++++

2+title = "sphinx"

3+shortcode = "~dister-nocsyx-lassul/sphinx"

4+license = "MIT"

5+image = "https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/hmillerdev/nocsyx-lassul/2022.7.16..04.35.22-sphinx-web-shifted.svg"

6+bgColor = "#b25068"

7+developer = "~nocsyx-lassul"

8+website = "https://github.com/arthyn/sphinx"

9+description = "Community powered search"

10++++

11+

12+### Community powered search

13+

14+Sphinx is a search engine powered by you and your pals. Using the gossip mechanism developed by ~paldev for [%rumors](https://urbit.org/applications/~paldev/rumors), anytime you post a listing it gets indexed on your urbit and then shared with your friends and friends of friends.

15+

16+

17+

18+Currently sphinx is probably best as a tool for finding groups and apps, but will likely index content soon too. It uses exact, phonetic, and unordered trigram matching to index the keywords in your listings. This allows you to type a query inconsistently and still get similar results as if it was spelled right.

19+

20+Future features include tag aggregation for more "classifieds"-type browsing, browsing by who shared something, ability to specify who a listing gets shared with (private/pals/pals+sponsor), and the ability to add search providers who might host non-gossiped indexes.

content/applications/~nodmyn-dosrux/basket.mdnew file+34

@@ -0,0 +1,34 @@

1++++

2+title = "basket"

3+shortcode = "~nodmyn-dosrux/basket"

4+license = "MIT"

5+image = "https://0x0.st/oFHB.png"

6+bgColor = "#F2F2F2"

7+developer = "Assembly Capital"

8+website = "https://github.com/bacwyls/basket"

9+description = "show off your meme collection"

10++++

11+

12+

13+### Basket is a simple db of tagged images

14+

15+The frontend displays the most recent image in the full window,

16+so it can be used to add some personal style to an urbit desktop environment.

17+

18+In addition to being a personal db, basket is an experimental app on top of the 'rooms' primitive in [Realm](https://twitter.com/HoliumCorp).

19+

20+Members of a room have temporary write-access to each others basket db.

21+The frontend makes it ergonomic and fun to share / collaboritively create this data.

22+

23+In theory (at scale), this creates a kind of decentralized giphy.

24+

25+The images you know about are the images your friends have shared with you.

26+It gamifies the creation of rich, human curated image metadata.

27+One obvious use case for this is keeping track of memes.

28+

29+To export the full dataset you can GET `http://yoururbitship.com/~/scry/basket/images.json`

30+Then you might want to use a python script to actually download the images to local storage.

31+

32+Eventually, it would be nice to have a simple way to export and share the dataset.

33+

34+Read full documentation on the [Github repository](https://github.com/bacwyls/basket).

content/applications/~nodmyn-dosrux/houston.mdnew file+17

@@ -0,0 +1,17 @@

1++++

2+title = "houston"

3+shortcode = "~nodmyn-dosrux/houston"

4+license = "MIT"

5+image = "https://0x0.st/ojrj.png"

6+bgColor = "#FFFFFF"

7+developer = "Assembly Capital"

8+website = "https://github.com/assemblycapital/houston"

9+description = "Moon Management Dashboard"

10++++

11+

12+### Moon Management Dashboard

13+

14+

15+

16+Keeps track of the moons you've spawned and exposes a poke API for the standard moon utilities: `|moon`, `|moon-breach` and `|moon-cycle`

17+

content/applications/~nodmyn-dosrux/radio.mdnew file+15

@@ -0,0 +1,15 @@

1++++

2+title = "radio"

3+shortcode = "~nodmyn-dosrux/radio"

4+license = "MIT"

5+image = "https://0x0.st/o4--.png"

6+bgColor = "#f2f2f2"

7+developer = "Assembly Capital"

8+website = "https://github.com/bacwyls/radio"

9+description = "an app for urbit disc jockeys"

10++++

11+

12+Create and tune into virtual radio stations where you can chat and play Youtube videos with your friends.

13+

14+

15+

content/applications/~nodmyn-dosrux/vita.mdnew file+20

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@

1++++

2+title = "vita"

3+shortcode = "~nodmyn-dosrux/vita"

4+license = "MIT"

5+image = "https://bwyl.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/vita%2Fvita.png"

6+bgColor = "#F2F2F2"

7+developer = "Assembly Capital"

8+website = "https://github.com/assemblycapital/vita"

9+description = "monitor your app distributions"

10++++

11+

12+### Keep track of your app distributions

13+

14+To get downloads, `:vita` periodically scrys %cs /subs for each desk and caches the results.

15+

16+`:vita` accepts foreign pokes attesting to activity on a desk.

17+`/lib/vita-client.hoon` helps any agent send vita activity pokes.

18+It sends a maximum of one poke per day, and allows users to opt-in / opt-out depending on developer preference.

19+

20+Read full documentation on the [Github repository](https://github.com/assemblycapital/vita).

content/applications/~norsyr-torryn/canvas.mdnew file+29

@@ -0,0 +1,29 @@

1++++

2+title = "canvas"

3+shortcode = "~dister-norsyr-torryn/canvas"

4+license = "MIT"

5+image = "https://yosoyubik.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/canvas/tile.svg"

6+bgColor = "#3787B9"

7+developer = "~norsyr-torryn"

8+website = "https://github.com/yosoyubik/canvas"

9+description = "Collaborative Pixel Art"

10++++

11+

12+### Collaborative Pixel Art

13+

14+

15+

16+#### Features

17+- Each stroke is stored automatically on your Urbit.

18+- Export Canvas Images as SVG.

19+- Image files are stored on S3 Storage, if configured.

20+- Allows creation of public or private canvases.

21+- Others can join a public canvas and work collaboratively in a cool art project.

22+

23+#### Access

24+Search for ~dister-norsyr-torryn in Grid to find the Canvas app, and install it from there

25+

26+A public canvas is hosted at: ~picsel-norsyr-torryn/public

27+

28+

29+Come and join the group to share your creations and see what others are doing: ~norsyr-torryn/canvas

content/applications/~paldev/face.mdnew file+13

@@ -0,0 +1,13 @@

1++++

2+title = "face"

3+developer = "~paldev"

4+shortcode = "~paldev/face"

5+description = "see your friends"

6+license = "MIT"

7+website = "https://pal.dev/suite/face"

8+bgColor = "#3b5998"

9++++

10+

11+Face is an image rolodex of your urbit friends. Compatible with [pals](/applications/~paldev/pals), face lets you share a photo of yourself with mutuals and also see a gallery of their faces. To share, enter an image link in the url field.

12+

13+

content/applications/~paldev/fafa.mdnew file+14

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@

1++++

2+title = "fafa"

3+developer = "~paldev"

4+shortcode = "~paldev/fafa"

5+description = "2fa otp authenticator app"

6+license = "MIT"

7+website = "https://pal.dev/suite/fafa"

8+bgColor = "#1a1a2a"

9++++

10+

11+

12+Fafa is a two-factor authentication app. Log in to your saved accounts with a one-time passcode generated on your urbit. (Only access this app over a secure connection and remember to also save your backup codes somewhere secure.)

13+

14+

content/applications/~paldev/pals.mdnew file+15

@@ -0,0 +1,15 @@

1++++

2+title = "pals"

3+shortcode = "~paldev/pals"

4+developer = "~paldev"

5+description = "friendlist for peer discovery"

6+license = "MIT"

7+website = "https://pal.dev/suite/pals"

8+bgColor = "#99D3BD"

9++++

10+

11+Pals is a contact list for your urbit friends. Send and receive friend requests with intuitive ease. Once you're pals, a smiley face icon indicates mutual status.

12+

13+

14+

15+Keep track of who your pals are or how you know them with tags, which exist mostly for your own book-keeping, but could be used in the future by other applications to group content. Similarly, some apps work better with pals, like [rumors](/applications/~paldev/rumors), an anonymous gossip app, and [sphinx](/applications/~nocsyx-lassul/sphinx), an Urbit search engine.

content/applications/~paldev/picture.mdnew file+13

@@ -0,0 +1,13 @@

1++++

2+title = "picture"

3+developer = "~paldev"

4+shortcode = "~paldev/picture"

5+description = "a picture frame for the garden"

6+license = "MIT"

7+website = "https://pal.dev/suite/picture"

8+bgColor = "#DDDDDD"

9++++

10+

11+Picture is a digital frame for your urbit. Simply upload an image to see it every time you open up Landscape. (Refrain from uploading huge images to avoid memory pressure.)

12+

13+

content/applications/~paldev/rumors.mdnew file+15

@@ -0,0 +1,15 @@

1++++

2+title = "rumors"

3+shortcode = "~paldev/rumors"

4+developer = "~paldev"

5+description = "anonymous gossip from friends of friends"

6+license = "MIT"

7+website = "https://pal.dev/suite/rumors"

8+bgColor = "#bb77dd"

9++++

10+

11+Rumors is an anonymous gossip feed powered by [pals](/applications/~paldev/pals). The more mutuals you have, the more rumors you'll see: messages posted by your pals, and their pals, populate the feed.

12+

13+

14+

15+Built using a p2p gossip protocol, rumors anonymizes posts and orders them chronologically. Drop links, ask questions, lurk, or whisper secrets into the void …

content/applications/~paldev/scooore.mdnew file+14

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@

1++++

2+title = "sc'o're"

3+developer = "~paldev"

4+shortcode = "~paldev/scooore"

5+description = "leaderboard for groups' ['o']s, as seen on tv!"

6+license = "MIT"

7+image ="https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/applications/scooore.svg"

8+website = "https://pal.dev/suite/scooore"

9+bgColor = "#FDFF54"

10++++

11+

12+A leaderboard of your peers' emoji reactions in Groups.

13+

14+

content/applications/~paldev/verse.mdnew file+13

@@ -0,0 +1,13 @@

1++++

2+title = "verse"

3+developer = "~paldev"

4+shortcode = "~paldev/verse"

5+description = "a random Bible verse, every day"

6+license = "MIT"

7+website = "https://pal.dev/suite/verse"

8+bgColor = "#EEEEDD"

9++++

10+

11+Verse displays a random Bible verse. Whenever you open Landscape, a new daily passage awaits.

12+

13+

content/applications/~pocwet/docs.mdnew file+17

@@ -0,0 +1,17 @@

1++++

2+title = "Docs"

3+developer = "~pocwet"

4+shortcode = "~pocwet/docs"

5+description = "User and developer documentation for Urbit apps"

6+license = "MIT"

7+website = "https://github.com/tinnus-napbus/docs-app"

8+bgColor = "#FBCF44"

9+image = "https://m.tinnus-napbus.xyz/pub/books.svg"

10++++

11+

12+

13+Docs is an Urbit app for documenting other Urbit apps - it finds docs in other desks and displays them for users and deveopers to browse.

14+

15+

16+

17+The docs folder contains the source of the app, and the docs-dev folder contains the files necessary for including docs in your app. Note that the files in docs-dev are symlinked, so the'll need to be copied with cp -rL or equivalent.

content/applications/~pocwet/straw.mdnew file+13

@@ -0,0 +1,13 @@

1++++

2+title = "Straw"

3+developer = "~pocwet"

4+shortcode = "~pocwet/straw"

5+description = "Vote on what to publish."

6+license = "MIT"

7+website = "https://urbit.org"

8+bgColor = "#6C6973"

9+image = ""

10++++

11+

12+

13+This app lets group members vote on whether a post is published to a notebook. It is intended for use with Studio, which you can install from ~tirrel/studio.

content/applications/~ribben-donnyl/funes-notes.mdnew file+15

@@ -0,0 +1,15 @@

1++++

2+title = "Funes Notes"

3+shortcode = "~ribben-donnyl/funes-notes"

4+license = "MIT"

5+image = "https://is4-ssl.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/Purple112/v4/64/64/8b/64648bfc-02b2-b955-6230-b86af334b6b1/AppIcon-0-1x_U007emarketing-0-10-0-85-220.png/230x0w.webp"

6+bgColor = ""

7+developer = "~ribben-donnyl"

8+website = "https://funes.app"

9+description = "Mobile notetaking application using urbit as a back-end."

10++++

11+

12+Funes Notes is a mobile notetaking application [available for iOS](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/funes-notes/id1627315560), using urbit's `%graph-store` as a backend.

13+

14+

15+Initial development funded by the Urbit Foundation via [Urbit Notes](https://urbit.org/grants/urbit-notes) proposal grant.

content/applications/~sitden-sonnet/channel.mdnew file+20

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@

1++++

2+title = "Channel"

3+shortcode = "~sitden-sonnet/channel"

4+license = "REKT"

5+image = "https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/haddefsigwen1/reciprocal/2022.7.09..22.54.53-channel.png"

6+bgColor = "#000000"

7+developer = "Quartus Co., Reciprocal Ltd."

8+website = "https://reciprocal.ltd"

9+description = "A distributed imageboard platform, with love"

10++++

11+

12+### An imageboard platform, with love

13+

14+Developed as a collaboration between the Quartus Corporation and [Reciprocal Ltd.](https://reciprocal.ltd), Channel is an imageboard platform that leverages graph-store to allow any ship on the Urbit network to create and manage their own imageboard.

15+

16+

17+

18+Incoming posts have their authors scrambled with a per-ship, per-installation SHA-256 salt and thus get rotated into a "tripcode comet" visible when viewing the graph outside the interface. The interface by default hides all authors.

19+

20+Board owners can ban ships (using their rotated names), delete threads, and ban words and URLs, as well as assign janitors. You can even connect two boards using Quartus' Orca tool to syndicate posts across boards.

content/applications/~sogryp-dister-dozzod-dozzod/groups.mdnew file+40

@@ -0,0 +1,40 @@

1++++

2+title = "Groups"

3+shortcode = "~sogryp-dister-dozzod-dozzod/groups"

4+license = "MIT"

5+image = "https://bootstrap.urbit.org/icon-groups.svg"

6+bgColor = "#EFF0F4"

7+developer = "Tlon"

8+website = "https://github.com/tloncorp/landscape-apps"

9+description = "Groups is a decentralized platform that integrates with Talk, Notebook, and Gallery for a full, communal suite of tools."

10++++

11+

12+Start, host, and cultivate communities. Own your communications, organize your resources, and share documents. Groups is a decentralized platform that integrates with Talk, Notebook, and Gallery for a full, communal suite of tools.

13+

14+ <video autoPlay muted loop playsInline>

15+ <source

16+ src="https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/applications/groups-create-a-group.webm"

17+ type="video/webm"

18+ />

19+ </video>

20+

21+Teams, clubs, DAOs, and secret societies use Groups to digitally congregate, using channel integrations to extend their capabilities.

22+

23+ <video autoPlay muted loop playsInline>

24+ <source

25+ src="https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/applications/groups-create-a-channel.webm"

26+ type="video/webm"

27+ />

28+ </video>

29+

30+Write, edit, and publish longform or shorter documents with Notebook, a basic text editor for announcements, internal meeting minutes, blogs, and everything in between.

31+

32+ <video autoPlay muted loop playsInline>

33+ <source

34+ src="https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/applications/notebooks.webm"

35+ type="video/webm"

36+ />

37+ </video>

38+

39+

40+Gather links to images, articles, and web pages to maintain a collection of references with Gallery, a versatile and interoperable repository for day-to-day digital trawling.

content/applications/~sogryp-dister-dozzod-dozzod/talk.mdnew file+21

@@ -0,0 +1,21 @@

1++++

2+title = "Talk"

3+shortcode = "~sogryp-dister-dozzod-dozzod/talk"

4+license = "MIT"

5+image = "https://bootstrap.urbit.org/icon-talk.svg"

6+bgColor = "#2B5DC0"

7+developer = "Tlon"

8+website = "https://github.com/tloncorp/landscape-apps"

9+description = "Talk is a decentralized chat app that integrates with Groups, Notebook, and Gallery for a full, communal suite of tools."

10++++

11+

12+Send peer-to-peer direct messages to one or many friends. Talk is a simple chat tool for catching up, getting work done, and everything in between.

13+

14+ <video autoPlay muted loop playsInline>

15+ <source

16+ src="https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/applications/talk.webm"

17+ type="video/webm"

18+ />

19+ </video>

20+

21+Start threads. React with emojis. Respond to your Groups chat channels from Talk. When integrated with Groups, both direct messages and team chats appear in Talk. Two apps in one place.

content/applications/~sortug/gate.mdnew file+27

@@ -0,0 +1,27 @@

1++++

2+title = "Gate"

3+shortcode = "~dister-dozzod-sortug/gate"

4+license = "MIT"

5+image = "https://s3.sortug.com/img/fav.png"

6+bgColor = "#000000"

7+developer = "Sortug Development"

8+website = "https://sortug.com"

9+description = "Seamless QR login"

10++++

11+

12+# Secure, seamless login for Urbit

13+

14+Let's make joining Urbit easier!

15+

16+Why do this?

17+

18+When you can do this?

19+

20+

21+Logging in to any Urbit app requires you to input your ship's URL and the `+code` generated on dojo. This requires people to login to their ship's terminal, output the code on dojo, then copy and paste it in their browser or app. This is bad enough if you have a ship running locally, but if you have it running remotely (as is common) the process becomes seriously annoying.

22+

23+Mainstream mobile apps such as Signal handle first login much more seamlessly; after registration is done, further logins are done via QR code. The app produces a QR code, you scan it, and that's it. That's the state-of-the-art, battle-tested user experience for modern applications. Now available on Urbit.

24+

25+Gate makes it easier for newcomers to use Urbit, and greatly enhances the user experience of native applications, desktop and mobile, that Urbit deserves.

26+

27+Users can login to Urbit just by scanning a QR code, receive a URL link and login to an Urbit ship instantly by clicking on it. That simple. Most importantly, hosting providers can use Gate to send a QR code or a URL link to a user, and have the user access his Urbit apps with a simple camera scan or click of a link, making the onboarding process much easier for non-technical users.

content/applications/~sortug/trill.mdnew file+27

@@ -0,0 +1,27 @@

1++++

2+title = "Trill"

3+shortcode = "~dister-dozzod-sortug/trill"

4+license = "MIT"

5+image = "https://s3.urbit.cloud/img/trill-logo.png"

6+bgColor = "#000000"

7+developer = "Sortug Development"

8+website = "https://sortug.com"

9+description = "Urbit Native Microblog"

10++++

11+

12+### Your own social feed, forever.

13+

14+Urbit is a networked personal server. It is the ideal stack to host a microblog service.

15+

16+For years Urbit users have been busy chatting to each other, coordinating to build the network. But it is time that we lay back a little and just post at our leisure.

17+

18+Trill is an Urbit native microblog. You can post text or media links into your feed, make threads, and share it with your friends and followers. You can also build a timeline of your favorite Urbit users, and keep lists of users, categorized as you want.

19+

20+Unlike other microblogs, however, users of Trill truly own their feed. Users host their own content. They can even program it; tinker with the source as much as you want.

21+

22+There are no ads in Trill, no "trends", no analytics. We don't even know how many people are using Trill. And we don't care. We just want to trill. Please join the party.

23+

24+### More information

25+You can install the app by searching for ~dister-dozzod-sortug on your Grid interface, or by running `|install ~dister-dozzod-sortug %trill` in Dojo.

26+

27+The official group of the app is at ~hoster-dozzod-sortug/trill on the Groups app.

content/applications/~sortug/ufa.mdnew file+27

@@ -0,0 +1,27 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit Feed Aggregator"

3+shortcode = "~dister-dozzod-sortug/ufa"

4+license = "MIT"

5+image = "https://s3.urbit.cloud/img/lan.png"

6+bgColor = "#000000"

7+developer = "Sortug Development"

8+website = "https://sortug.com"

9+description = "Bring all the web into Urbit"

10++++

11+

12+### Own your content, share it with your friends

13+

14+Urbit is your personal server. Why do you want a personal server? Many things. But one of them, part of the initial vision of Urbit's development, was to use to interact programatically with the Web. To interact with Web services, but in your own terms. Using your chosen frontend, blocking all tracking, telemetry, analytics and other malicious code. Urbit as an API aggregator.

15+

16+The Urbit Feed Aggregator (aka UFA) makes that vision true. Now you will be able to browse the best content on the internet, but really own it, like people used to own books, magazines and newspapers. Control, curate, save and share your the content you like, with complete freedom.

17+

18+UFA is not just an app, it's a platform to which a myriad apps will be added in the future. As of present (August 2022) UFA includes support for Trill (our sister app, the Urbit native microblog) and Twitter. You can read and keep lists of Twitter content without having to login to Twitter.com, and you can save and share that content inside Urbit, via the Trill or Groups apps.

19+

20+### More information

21+You can install the app by searching for ~dister-dozzod-sortug on your Grid interface, or by running `|install ~dister-dozzod-sortug %ufa` in Dojo.

22+

23+The official group of the app is at ~hoster-dozzod-sortug/ufa on the Groups app.

24+

25+You can also follow ~sortug on Trill for announcements.

26+

27+Within 2022 RSS, Instagram and Email support will be added. For the future, the sky is the limit. If you want to help create a new plugin for UFA, please contact us at the official group.

content/applications/~tiller-tolbus/membrane.mdnew file+14

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@

1++++

2+title = "Membrane"

3+shortcode = "~mister-master-tiller-tolbus/membrane"

4+license = "MIT"

5+image = "https://tiller-tolbus.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/membrane.png"

6+bgColor = ""

7+developer = "~tiller-tolbus"

8+website = ""

9+description = "Spreadsheets and databases"

10++++

11+

12+### Membrane is a spreadsheet tool for Urbit

13+

14+Spreadsheets were the original tool for the productivity power user, so it is only fitting that we bring them to Urbit. Keep a budget, run a formula, and share your sheets with friends using Membrane.

content/applications/~tirrel/scene.mdnew file+14

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@

1++++

2+title = "Scene"

3+shortcode = ""

4+license = ""

5+image = "https://tirrel.io/assets/scene-logo-stroke.svg"

6+bgColor = "rgb(0, 0, 0)"

7+developer = "Tirrel Corp."

8+website = "https://tirrel.io"

9+description = "The new Urbit desktop, by ~tirrel corp."

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+[Download scene here](https://tirrel.io/scene/index.html).

content/applications/~tirrel/studio.mdnew file+21

@@ -0,0 +1,21 @@

1++++

2+title = "Studio"

3+shortcode = "~tirrel/studio"

4+license = ""

5+image = "https://tirrel.io/assets/stool.svg"

6+bgColor = "rgb(160, 226, 167)"

7+developer = "Tirrel Corp."

8+website = "https://tirrel.io"

9+description = "Tools for making money."

10++++

11+

12+### Studio is a publishing tool for Urbit

13+

14+

15+

16+Need a personal website, fast? Studio can set one up in under a minute. For writers, Studio connects you with your legacy-web audience, even if they’re not on Urbit yet. With a click, you can share your newsletter or blog via auto-generated blog or email distribution list

17+

18+Studio pulls content from your Groups notebooks. Notebooks from any group you own will appear.

19+

20+If you need any help, we’re always available in our group: ~tirrel/tirrel-support

21+

content/applications/~worpet-bildet/portal.mdnew file+16

@@ -0,0 +1,16 @@

1++++

2+title = "Portal"

3+shortcode = "~worpet-bildet/portal"

4+license = ""

5+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/applications/portal.svg"

6+bgColor = "rgb(0,0,0)"

7+developer = ""

8+website = ""

9+description = "Portal is the front page"

10++++

11+

12+### Portal is the front page for urbit

13+

14+Portal made its debut as the solution to decentralized discovery on Urbit. Portal enables anyone on Urbit to curate content, apps, and groups for other ships to discover

15+

16+

content/apprenticeships.mdnew file+38

@@ -0,0 +1,38 @@

1++++

2+title = "Become an Apprentice"

3+date = "2023-01-04"

4+weight = 1

5+description = "Everything you need to know about applying for an apprenticeship"

6++++

7+

8+Apprenticeships are practical learning opportunities for new Urbit developers provided by experienced members of the Urbit development community. As an apprentice, you'll have the opportunity to:

9+

10+- Learn from an experienced Urbit contributor

11+- Make helpful contributions to an active project, and

12+- Earn address space for learning

13+

14+Becoming an apprentice is easily one of the best ways to level up your skills, and perhaps even land a job.

15+

16+## Get started

17+

18+Apprenticeships are for those that are new to Urbit development (or an area of it), and would like to find their grounding by working on a pre-existing codebase and problem set. Nearly all apprenticeships involve some degree of Hoon work, so you should make sure that you've completed [Hoon School](https://developers.urbit.org/guides/core/hoon-school) and [App School](https://developers.urbit.org/guides/core/app-school/intro) in either their asychronous or [cohort formats](https://developers.urbit.org/courses) prior to signing up.

19+

20+To become an apprentice, [apply for an open apprenticeship](/grants?program=apprenticeship&open=true&wip=false&completed=false#view-grants)

21+

22+Although some apprenticeships are posted on this site to be claimed, more often than not they emerge out of a conversation between a mentor and an enthusiastic potential apprentice. This is because mentors are generally busy engineering, and while they know many things that need to be done, getting those ideas into writing is difficult.

23+

24+## How it works

25+

26+Once a mentor has written up an apprenticeship, and approved an apprentice, The Urbit Foundation will perform a quick KYC step and send contracts to all parties for signing. Once those contracts are executed, work can proceed.

27+

28+Mentors and apprentices work together by having weekly pairing sessions and maintaining an open line of communication over Urbit. It's expected that mentors put at least two hours per week into supporting their apprentice.

29+

30+## Funding

31+

32+Apprenticeships pay 1 star upon the sucessful completion of the apprenticeship, for an apprenticeship of a duration of up to three months.

33+

34+## Getting Paid

35+

36+When you have completed the scope of your grant, you will create a detailed writeup of the work completed and your learnings, share the writeup with your mentor, and get your approval of completion. After recieving this approval from your mentor, please [submit an invoice here](https://airtable.com/shrXXCs1uaxtNSBcg). Your mentor must also contact `~marfun-pacpet` to confirm completion of the apprenticeship and approve the payment. Once the Urbit Foundation receives approval from your champion and an invoice for the amount agreed upon in your grant or milestone, the Foundation will pay your star allocation to the Ethereum address you have provided.

37+

38+We approve and issue payments within 30 days of invoice receipt and approval, although often payment is made more quickly. If you have any questions regarding getting paid or submitting an invoice, please contact `~marfun-pacpet` for assistance.

content/articles/2022-09-24_urbit-courts-daos-crypto.mdnew file+10

@@ -0,0 +1,10 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit Courts DAOs, Crypto Teams in Quest to Make Internet P2P Again"

3+publication = "Coindesk"

4+author = "March Hochstein and Daniel Kuhn"

5+date = "2022-09-24"

6+URL = "https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/09/24/urbit-courts-daos-crypto-teams-in-push-to-make-internet-p2p-again/"

7+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/articles/coindesk.jpg"

8++++

9+

10+A wildly ambitious project to reinvent the entire internet computing stack is finally shipping usable apps after a decade-plus of laying groundwork. Can it overcome a “janky” UX?

content/articles/2022-09-24_urbit-is-web3-weird-and-wonderful.mdnew file+10

@@ -0,0 +1,10 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit Is Web3, Weird and Wonderful and I Don’t Care Who Made It"

3+publication = "Coindesk"

4+author = "March Hochstein"

5+date = "2022-09-24"

6+URL = "https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/09/24/urbit-is-web3-weird-and-wonderful-and-i-dont-care-who-made-it/"

7+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/articles/coindesk.jpg"

8++++

9+

10+Software can have bugs, but it doesn’t have cooties.

content/articles/2022-09-28_college-course-on-urbit.mdnew file+10

@@ -0,0 +1,10 @@

1++++

2+title = "Why Would Anyone Take a College Course on Urbit?"

3+publication = "Coindesk"

4+author = "Daniel Kuhn"

5+date = "2022-09-28"

6+URL = "https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/09/28/why-would-anyone-take-a-college-course-on-urbit/"

7+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/articles/coindesk.jpg"

8++++

9+

10+Neal Davis taught the first graduate-level seminar on the controversial computing platform Urbit. Here’s why.

content/articles/2022-09-29_assembly-miami-dispatch.mdnew file+11

@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit Assembly: If We’re All Here, Who’s Watching The Internet?"

3+publication = "Zora Zine"

4+author = "Madeline Cash"

5+date = "2022-09-29"

6+URL = "https://zine.zora.co/urbit-assembly-miami-dispatch"

7+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/articles/zorazine.png"

8++++

9+

10+Forever Magazine founder and Zora Zine contributor Madeline Cash reports on secret societies, subjective idealism, and digital intimacy in her dispatch from Urbit Assembly in Miami

11+

content/articles/2022-09-29_the-dream-of-digital-homesteading.mdnew file+10

@@ -0,0 +1,10 @@

1++++

2+title = "The Dream of Digital Homesteading"

3+publication = "Compact"

4+author = "Geoff Schullenberger"

5+date = "2022-09-29"

6+URL = "https://compactmag.com/article/the-dream-of-digital-homesteading"

7+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/articles/compactmag.png"

8++++

9+

10+Geoff Schullenberger attends Assembly 2022 and chronicles his impressions and thoughts.

content/articles/2022-10-04_a-more-beautiful-computer.mdnew file+11

@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@

1++++

2+title = "User Error: A More Beautiful Computer"

3+publication = "Spike Art Magazine"

4+author = "Adina Glickstein"

5+date = "2022-10-04"

6+URL = "https://www.spikeartmagazine.com/?q=articles/user-error-more-beautiful-computer"

7+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/articles/spike-logo-text.jpg"

8++++

9+

10+From Dimes Square to the Network State, new frontiers are in the making. Adina Glickstein attends Urbit Assembly and considers the politics of tech-augmented exit.

11+

content/articles/2022-10-13_my-weekend-with-the-martians.mdnew file+10

@@ -0,0 +1,10 @@

1++++

2+title = "My Weekend With the Martians"

3+publication = "Astra"

4+author = "Ruby Sutton"

5+date = "2022-10-13"

6+URL = "https://astra-mag.com/articles/my-weekend-with-the-martians/"

7+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/articles/astra.png"

8++++

9+

10+At the Assembly, a conference of Urbit denizens, Ruby Sutton discovers a community of eccentrics who dare to dream of a different internet.

content/articles/2022-10-23_three-things.mdnew file+10

@@ -0,0 +1,10 @@

1++++

2+title = "Three Things #40: October 23, 2022"

3+publication = "Three Things"

4+author = "Lane Rettig"

5+date = "2022-10-23"

6+URL = "https://rettig.substack.com/p/three-things-40-october-23-2022"

7+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/articles/3things40.jpg"

8++++

9+

10+Lane Rettig outlines three unique aspects of Urbit in an attempt to answer the eternal question "What is Urbit?"

content/articles/2023-02-20_trailblazing-urbit-startup-makes-earth-shaking-acquisition.mdnew file+10

@@ -0,0 +1,10 @@

1++++

2+title = "Trailblazing Urbit Startup Makes Earth Shaking Acquisition"

3+publication = "Globe Newswire"

4+author = "Globe Newswire"

5+date = "2023-02-20"

6+URL = "https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2023/02/20/2611391/0/en/Trailblazing-Urbit-Startup-Makes-Earth-Shaking-Acquisition.html"

7+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/articles/globe-newswire.jpeg"

8++++

9+

10+Holium Corp closes $2.9 million in seed funding and acquires Third Earth in record pace.

content/articles/2023-05-10_urbit-a-network-older-and-weirder-than-bitcoin.mdnew file+10

@@ -0,0 +1,10 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit, a Network Older and Weirder Than Bitcoin, Finally Turns Toward Growth"

3+publication = "Coindesk"

4+author = "Bradley Keoun"

5+date = "2023-05-10"

6+URL = "https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2023/05/10/urbit-a-network-older-and-weirder-than-bitcoin-finally-turns-toward-growth/"

7+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/articles/coindesk.jpg"

8++++

9+

10+The peer-to-peer network started in 2002 says it's taking on "MEGACORP," much in the same vein as many blockchain networks. A bit more fun are the "secret code names" that users are assigned.

content/audits.mdnew file+22

@@ -0,0 +1,22 @@

1++++

2+title = "Audits"

3+date = "2021-10-10"

4+weight = 1

5+description = "Urbit Security Audits"

6++++

7+

8+Confidence and trust are fundamental to Urbit's ethos. The strength of our smart contract protocols are regularly scrutinized for potential vulnerabilities and enhanced when weaknesses are identified.

9+

10+To that end, we continue to maintain a robust security protocol. Our smart contracts are generally healthy and secure, but the process of auditing is never fully complete. As our ecosystem evolves, our security protocols evolve with it.

11+

12+Since transparency is an integral feature of trust, we've made our security audits publicly available. Please refer to the below documents for a more thorough analysis.

13+

14+### Security Audits

15+

16+- [Ames Networking Protocol Review](<https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/audits/Tlon.io%20-%20Urbit%20AMES%20Networking%20Protocol%20Review%20Final%20Report%20(1).pdf>), Leviathan, November 2020

17+- [Urbit Constitution Audit](https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/audits/Urbit%20Constitution%20Audit%20-%20OpenZeppelin.pdf), OpenZepplin, September 2021

18+- [Urbit Constitution JS Library Audit](https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/audits/Urbit%20Constitution%20JS%20Audit.pdf), bloctrax, July 2018

19+- [Urbit Constitution JS Library Code Review](https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/audits/Urbit%20Constitution%20JS%20Library%20Report%20-%20December%202018%20Review.pdf), bloctrax, December 2018

20+- [Urbit Keygen JS Library Report](https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/audits/Urbit%20Keygen%20JS%20Library%20Report.pdf), bloctrax, September 2018

21+- [Urbit Keygen JS Library Report, 2nd Review](https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/audits/Urbit%20Keygen%20JS%20Library%20Report%20-%20Second%20Review%20with%20Resolutions.pdf), bloctrax, November 2018

22+- [Urbit Security Audit](https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/audits/Urbit%20Security%20Audit.pdf), bloctrax, June 2018

content/bitcoin-wallet.mdnew file+60

@@ -0,0 +1,60 @@

1++++

2+title = "Bitcoin Wallet"

3++++

4+

5+The latest Urbit release includes a native Bitcoin wallet. Please read the following security recommendations and disclaimers carefully. Urbit.org cannot recover any lost keys.

6+

7+### Instructions

8+

9+Run `|start %btc-wallet` in the dojo. After refreshing Landscape you should see an orange bitcoin tile in the first row. Clicking on it will prompt a two-step process:

10+

11+1. Enter a provider who is connected to a full-node (such as `~zod`). The provider will maintain a synced Bitcoin ledger, index your public addresses to determine your balance, and process your transactions.

12+

13+2. The next step is to provide an extended public key (or xpub). Providing your xpub allows the Bitcoin Wallet to automatically generate new public addresses (called _child public keys_—you can learn more about this [here](https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032.mediawiki)) when bitcoin is sent to your ship. To provide an xpub you can either enter your master ticket (which can be downloaded from [Bridge](https://bridge.urbit.org)), or directly import your xpub (such as from a hardware wallet like [Ledger](https://support.ledger.com/hc/en-us/articles/360011069619-Extended-public-key) or [Trezor](<https://wiki.trezor.io/User_manual:Displaying_account_public_key_(XPUB)>)).

14+

15+Clicking on the Landscape tile will take you to the Bitcoin Wallet application, where you can view your balance and send bitcoin. All that you'll need to do is enter the recipient's Urbit ID (if they have configured the wallet using the above steps) or a Bitcoin address.

16+

17+If you are interested in [being a provider](https://subject.network/posts/btc-wallet-config/#connecting-a-provider-to-a-full-node) or [running a bitcoin full node](https://subject.network/posts/pi-fullnode-urbit/#bitcoind) on the Urbit network please check out `~sitful-hatred`’s excellent tutorials.

18+

19+### Verify

20+

21+You should verify your version of this Bitcoin wallet. To do so, follow the instructions in the README in our [Github](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/master/pkg/btc-wallet/README) repo.

22+

23+Instructions reproduced here:

24+

25+To verify your version of the bitcoin wallet, run the following command in the dojo:

26+`> +btc-wallet-check`

27+It should return with the following hash:

28+`0v9t022.n8kv1.5emkt.s2p9i.hvsa9`

29+

30+### Disclaimer Statement

31+

32+The Urbit Bitcoin Wallet and its related components are experimental pieces of software. You are free to review the open-source code before using:

33+

34+- [Wallet](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/tree/master/pkg/btc-wallet)

35+- [Full Node Provider Agents](https://github.com/timlucmiptev/btc-agents)

36+

37+No guarantees are made about the security of this software. It may contain vulnerabilities that could lead to loss of funds. This wallet software has not had a formal security audit.

38+

39+You can read about the security audit for Urbit's networking protocol in this [post](https://urbit.org/blog/security-audit/). This audit does not encompass the wallet, except to the extent that the wallet operates on Urbit's networking architecture.

40+

41+If you decide to use this wallet, please store responsible amounts of Bitcoin, and use best security practices. The developers of this software cannot help you recover your keys / funds, if lost.

42+

43+### License

44+

45+With the exception of its external dependencies, this software is a component of Urbit, and is released under Urbit's MIT License, reproduced below.  [View Original](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/urbit/urbit/master/LICENSE.txt)

46+

47+The MIT License (MIT)

48+

49+Copyright (c) 2015 Urbit

50+

51+Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy

52+of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal

53+in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights

54+to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell

55+copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is

56+furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

57+

58+The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

59+

60+THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

content/bitcoin.mdnew file+125

@@ -0,0 +1,125 @@

1++++

2+title = "Bitcoin Development on Urbit"

3++++

4+

5+### Overview

6+

7+Urbit OS currently ships with our Bitcoin wallet, %btc-wallet, released in 2021,

8+and our Lightning implementation, %volt, is almost ready for live use on the network. Several integrations with the app ecosystem are planned immediately following its release, including subscription publishing, social payments, and more.

9+

10+**The Urbit Advantage**

11+

12+- Composability: Modular userspace applications expose a consistent API format to each other locally and over the network, making seamless integration of Lightning payments, Taro assets, and other protocols easy

13+- Networking and identity: Exactly-once message delivery, NAT traversal, and E2E encryption come built into Urbit's P2P protocol, and Urbit identities are sybil-resistant, human-readable network addresses bound to BIP32 extended public keys

14+- Efficient, secure development: Urbit OS is strictly typed and purely functional, and apps have reproducible builds on all client machines, removing much of the complexity, risk, and pain points from development

15+

16+**Getting Involved**

17+

18+Interested in contributing to or supporting Bitcoin development on Urbit? GitHub repos for individual projects and information on the Urbit Foundation grant program are linked below, and dedicated Urbit groups and Bitcoin node operators on Urbit are listed in the Community section. You can also reach out to current contributors ~tondes-sitrym and ~pindet-timmut on Urbit or at urbitcoin@protonmail.com.

19+

20+### Wallet

21+

22+Urbit's Bitcoin wallet consists of two agents: %btc-provider, which communicates with an external full node; and %btc-wallet, which handles transaction generation and signing, and uses a %btc-provider instance (on the same ship or elsewhere on the Urbit network) to broadcast transactions and receive data from the Bitcoin network.

23+

24+Wallet users can receive payments using the xpub associated with their Urbit ID, allowing Bitcoin payments to be sent between ships with a persistent, human-readable network address without compromising on-chain privacy.

25+

26+**Resources**

27+

28+GitHub

29+

30+- Agents: [https://github.com/urbit/urbit/tree/master/pkg/bitcoin](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/tree/master/pkg/bitcoin)

31+- UI: [https://github.com/urbit/urbit/tree/master/pkg/btc-wallet](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/tree/master/pkg/btc-wallet)

32+- Provider utilities: [https://github.com/urbit/urbit-bitcoin-rpc](https://github.com/urbit/urbit-bitcoin-rpc)

33+

34+Writeups

35+

36+- Grant proposal: [https://urbit.org/grants/bitcoin-full-node-provider-and-wallet](https://urbit.org/grants/bitcoin-full-node-provider-and-wallet)

37+- Architecture document: [https://gist.github.com/jalehman/e0c91071427ca4c349c0673f376945cb](https://gist.github.com/jalehman/e0c91071427ca4c349c0673f376945cb)

38+- Provider setup guide: [https://subject.network/posts/pi-fullnode-urbit/#bitcoind](https://subject.network/posts/pi-fullnode-urbit/#bitcoind)

39+

40+

41+**Continuing Work**

42+

43+The current %btc-wallet implementation is not a modern BIP-157/158 light client. While users who depend on another ship's %btc-provider/full node for communication with the Bitcoin network do not risk loss of on-chain funds, their lack of visibility on the network will be more problematic for those also using it with Lightning. Funding is available for developers interested in contributing: reach out to the Urbit Foundation, ~tondes-sitrym on Urbit, or urbitcoin@protonmail.com.

44+

45+### Lightning

46+

47+Volt, Urbit's Lightning implementation, like our Bitcoin wallet consists of two agents: %volt, the primary agent that manages channels, payments, invoices, and chain monitoring; and %volt-provider, which connects to an external LND node for handling payments with endpoints outside the Urbit network.

48+

49+All Volt nodes will run %volt, and be able to operate channels with Urbit peers without maintaining an LND instance or depending on another ship that does. To transact with non-Urbit Lightning peers, and in the short term (see below) to perform multi-hop payments inside Urbit, they will need to open a channel with a node that uses %volt-provider to connect with LND. Chain monitoring likewise requires connecting to a local or remote %btc-provider agent (see Wallet above). For more details on the network architecture, see the grant proposal linked below.

50+

51+Volt implements BOLTs 2, 3, 5, and 11, and in the near future will add onion routing (variants on BOLTs 4 and 7). Because %ames, Urbit's networking module, already handles transport, guarantees required message delivery properties, and furnishes persistent, unique 'domain names', implementation of BOLTs 1, 8, and 9 is unnecessary for Volt nodes.

52+

53+Beta release of Volt is planned for the end of 2022, and additional features including multi-hop/onion routing implementation are proposed for completion by mid-2023.

54+

55+**Resources**

56+

57+GitHub: [https://github.com/dasrun-fadben/volt/tree/on-chain](https://github.com/dasrun-fadben/volt/tree/on-chain)

58+

59+Initial grant proposal and spec: [https://urbit.org/grants/volt-lightning-on-urbit](https://urbit.org/grants/volt-lightning-on-urbit)

60+

61+Proposal for further work: [https://urbit.org/grants/lightning-development](https://urbit.org/grants/lightning-development)

62+

63+**Continuing Work**

64+

65+The primary element currently missing from Volt is onion routing of multi-hop payments for full privacy and efficiency of payments to and from nodes that don't also operate LND. This has been partially specified in the second proposal linked above: funding and collaborators are available for this as well as work described there on application integrations, submarine swaps, and more, so interested developers should take a look and get in touch.

66+

67+### Roadmap

68+

69+**2022**

70+

71+- *Volt Beta Release*

72+Final work on channel sweeps, remaining safety checks, and UI development is currently ongoing and expected to be complete by EOY 2022.

73+

74+**2023**

75+

76+- *Initial Ecosystem Integrations*

77+ - Submarine swaps: Implementation of the PeerSwap protocol, fallback use of the Loop API, and UI targeted at merchant use-cases. Funded, expected completion in spring 2023.

78+ - Apps: Integration of Lightning subscription and one-time paygates into Groups, social payments and %volt-provider discovery with %pals, and app tipjar module. Specified and proposed for grant funding.

79+- *Lightning Routing*

80+Payments with multiple intra-Urbit hops and via multiple %volt-provider channels are the last remaining component for full-featured and private payments with Volt. Specified and proposed for grant funding.

81+- *Wallet Improvements*

82+Work on feature, security, and UI upgrades for the Bitcoin wallet and node provider, aimed at making the application a full-featured and BIP157/158-compliant light client, should begin before EOY 2023.

83+

84+**Future**

85+

86+- *Taro Implementation*

87+Implementation of Taproot Asset Representation Overlay, with an initial focus on using nonfungible Taro assets to represent credentials, permissions, and reputation of Urbit identities.

88+- *Atomic Streaming Payments*

89+ - Integration of Volt payments with streaming apps like %radio and the Holium WebRTC client via HTLC-DASH or similar implementation.

90+ - Generic protocol for non-media pay-to-stream data

91+

92+### Grants

93+

94+The Urbit Foundation operates a grant program aimed at new Urbit developers, network public goods, and community development. Work on the Bitcoin wallet, Lightning implementation, and submarine swaps for Volt (Urbit Lightning) users all has received funding from UF, and interesting non-technical proposals with social value to the network are also considered.

95+

96+Grants homepage: [https://urbit.org/grants](https://urbit.org/grants)

97+

98+Past Bitcoin-related grants

99+

100+- [https://urbit.org/grants/bitcoin-full-node-provider-and-wallet](https://urbit.org/grants/bitcoin-full-node-provider-and-wallet)

101+- [https://urbit.org/grants/volt-lightning-on-urbit](https://urbit.org/grants/volt-lightning-on-urbit)

102+- [https://urbit.org/grants/lightning-development](https://urbit.org/grants/lightning-development)

103+

104+## Bitcoiners on Urbit

105+

106+### Groups

107+

108+Urbitcoiners: ~pindet-timmut/urbitcoiners

109+

110+### Providers

111+

112+**Bitcoin Full Nodes**

113+

114+~tirrel

115+~zod

116+

117+**Lightning Nodes**

118+

119+~tondes-sitrym

120+~bosdys

121+

122+### Guides

123+

124+Running %btc-provider with a full node on Raspberry Pi: [https://subject.network/posts/pi-fullnode-urbit/](https://subject.network/posts/pi-fullnode-urbit/)

125+

content/blog/2019-10-3-roadmap.mdnew file+112

@@ -0,0 +1,112 @@

1++++

2+title = "~2019.10 Roadmap"

3+date = "2019-10-02"

4+description = "Galen Wolfe-Pauly on the road ahead for the identity/OS/interface/community stack."

5+aliases = [

6+ "/posts/essays/2019-10-3-roadmap",

7+ "/posts/2019-10-3-roadmap"

8+]

9+

10+[extra]

11+author = "Galen Wolfe-Pauly"

12+ship = "~ravmel-ropdyl"

13+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/2019-10-3-roadmap.jpg"

14++++

15+

16+

17+

18+The daily work of building a new OS from scratch is so engaging and exciting that we habitually forget to even take stock of what we’ve accomplished. We’re fixated on the prospect of moving the world on to Urbit, starting with ourselves.

19+

20+It’s a good thing I have a recurring reminder to write these updates. While our focus is on the future, it’s good to get a sense of the rate that we’re moving forward, and to let everyone know what’s been going on. We’ve made great progress over the past few months.

21+

22+We’ve got a new interface, Urbit 0.8.0, Hoon School, and a grants program among lots of other updates. We’ll go into detail about all of these, and talk a bit about where we’re headed next. The system is improving at a really good pace. We intend to keep it up.

23+

24+## Identity (Azimuth)

25+

26+The other day I got an email, clicked a link, and got a planet. A real, live, piece of cryptographic property with paper wallets and everything. It took about two minutes. And at the end, I could have easily sent invites to my friends.

27+

28+This experience is part of a completely new Bridge, the interface for interacting with your Urbit identity. The beta experience we’re testing today is quite stripped down, but it’s a huge improvement over the last Bridge release. Clicking a link is a lot easier than downloading source code, running it from the command-line, and probably running into a python-related error.

29+

30+Getting to this point involved rewriting Bridge from scratch, figuring out how to host it securely, building infrastructure to fund the requisite transactions involved in registering a new identity, and setting up a service to send emails (and dispose of them afterward). We've also redesigned our paper wallets to make them simpler and clearer.

31+

32+We still want to get this new version of Bridge a bit further along before releasing it to everyone — but we’re excited about it. We didn’t quite get to the point of building an affordance for payments, which we had hoped to do, but that’s coming later.

33+

34+We want everyone to have an Urbit identity. And we want it to be incredibly easy to get one, so we’ll get Bridge out this month with a new urbit.org (more on that below).

35+

36+The other area of identity-related work was Sigils — the algorithmically generated images that go with every Urbit identity. (We’ve got a blog post in the works that covers how we created these, which is a good story that needs to be told.) The original version of Sigils didn’t look very good at small sizes and a few collisions were found (thanks to [urbit.live](https://urbit.live) for helping to discover the collisions). The [new, improved sigils](https://github.com/urbit/sigil-js) have no collisions and look great at small sizes.

37+

38+**Q4 2019**

39+

40+- Release Bridge to the public

41+- Get Bridge working well on mobile

42+- Add payments support, hopefully including BTC

43+- Add a network explorer

44+

45+**Q1 2020**

46+

47+- Integrate Bridge with a native app for Arvo

48+

49+## OS (Arvo)

50+

51+As a team, we want Urbit to be our primary computer, our last computer, our permanent computer. And we want this now — or at least as soon as we possibly can. We’re both ambitious and impatient.

52+

53+The frustration that we can’t move onto Urbit today propels us forward. The system saw major updates over the past few months all the way through the stack. On the Arvo side, we divide our work into Infrastructure (everything in the kernel and interpreter) and Interface (everything in userspace and the front-end). We’ll start with Infrastructure progress first.

54+

55+We’re very nearly to the point that all the kernel-level code in the system has been written by our current team. The one remaining vane that deserves a rewrite (Gall) has had a major cleanup by Jared just recently. The [Ship of Theseus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus) approach does appear to be working. The infrastructure team is doing fantastic work and has really deepened their ownership of the system. The Urbit of today is on the road to becoming a great piece of system software.

56+

57+The biggest infrastructure-level milestone was the release of [Urbit 0.8.0](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/releases/tag/v0.8.0). We introduced a new process-separation architecture, implemented the correct bootstrap sequence, moved to LMDB for persistence, replaced our http vane (%eyre) and moved to Nix for our build system.

58+

59+To put it simply, Arvo is now much more stable and durable. During the beginning of the year we were seeing bugs and instability that were frustrating and unacceptable. While there are still issues on the live network, none of them terrify us much. We also implemented the ability for users to ‘individually breach’, which means that you can now reset your Urbit without waiting for us to reset the network.

60+

61+### Landscape (Arvo UI)

62+

63+We don’t just build infrastructure for others to develop on top of. We build interfaces too. At the top of the stack, we released a completely new Landscape, the interface for Arvo. This new interface makes it possible to build other ‘modules’ for Arvo that go beyond chat and publishing.

64+

65+This new Landscape is a complete departure from the last direction. Your Urbit now has a simple home screen that launches individual modules and it’s [relatively easy](https://github.com/urbit/create-landscape-app) to create new ones. We’re all enjoying using Landscape around the office. It’s still a bit of a prototype — but it’s quite a good one, I think.

66+

67+In moving to this new model we decided to narrow our focus to desktop only for now. We’ll return to mobile again next year — but first we want to get the desktop experience right. We’ve pulled the iOS app from the app store for the time being. I’m personally sad to see it go, since I enjoyed using it. But our prior iteration of Landscape just wasn’t quite right.

68+

69+This version of Landscape is, I think, the last one that we’ll call a prototype. Over the past few weeks, since shipping this, some amazing work has been happening on the interface front. We have a systematic approach to building interfaces on top of Urbit that’s very promising, albeit just getting started. We’ve already put out [one post](https://urbit.org/posts/landscape-a-portrait/) about Landscape's future, with more posts to come.

70+

71+**Q4 2019**

72+

73+- Improved Arvo-level error handling

74+- Implementation plan for ‘telescoping kelvins’ — or [how we plan to future proof Arvo](https://groups.google.com/a/urbit.org/forum/#!topic/dev/6Mwn6TQFVwc)

75+- Versioning scheme between Arvo and Vere

76+- A new Haskell implementation of the daemon

77+- A native client (instead of just a browser tab)

78+- A [new user-space architecture](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hS_UuResG1S4j49_H-aSshoTOROKBnGoJAaRgOipf54/edit)

79+- Hoon.hoon that’s OTA upgradeable

80+- Working Jacque prototype, a graal-truffle-based implementation of vere

81+

82+**Q1 2020**

83+

84+- Integrated client with Bridge and Arvo

85+- New interface framework, codenamed ‘Widescreen’

86+

87+## Docs + Community

88+

89+We had quite a bit of interest in our second session of Hoon School. We ended up with 150 people enrolled in Hoon 101, and 42 in 201. The 101 session just ended, with a lot of positive responses and feedback from the participants. We learned a lot doing it and got quite a bit of interesting new example code.

90+

91+Hoon 101 started with students with little to no programming experience. Hoon 201, which is just getting underway, covers more advanced topics. We’re quite curious to see what comes out of it.

92+

93+We’re also adding features to Landscape to make it more amenable to use by Hoon Schoolers. Good examples include code evaluation within Chat (for office hours), and the ability to pin posts in Publish. The next crop of Hoon learners will be able to use Urbit to learn about Urbit.

94+

95+Aside from Hoon School we’re always updating our documentation. Most notably, we added search to the docs (finally). This was a much needed feature that makes the docs much more usable.

96+

97+We also launched our [grants program](https://grants.urbit.org/) quietly, but all of our available bounties were quickly claimed nonetheless. We’re ready to give away more address space to contributors and are excited by how quickly people got involved.

98+

99+We also did some experimentation with holding events on Arvo. We held weekly AMAs for while, and hosted a few meetings with the community. With the new UI out, our public channels have been a lot more active. We’ll surely be holding more on-urbit events in the future — but for the time being the conversation in urbit-help is a lot of fun.

100+

101+**Q4 2019**

102+

103+- Vane level documentation

104+- An active grant program

105+

106+## urbit.org

107+

108+Urbit.org is about ready for a refresh — so we’re in the process of rebuilding it. We have, for a long time, told the story of Urbit by describing the system technically. We think Urbit can be explained much more simply and much more concisely. We’re working to put together a new set of materials in this direction.

109+

110+We’d also like to populate urbit.org with a lot more content about what we’re working on and thinking about. We do a reasonable job of writing updates, but many of our projects get released without any background info. Tlon and the Urbit community are full of smart, thoughtful people — and we’d like to do a lot more to surface their work. We plan to close out the year with both a new website and a lot of writing about what we’ve been building. Not everyone wants to read the source code!

111+

112+That covers it for now. If you have questions or want to chat — find us in `~dopzod/urbit-help`. See you online!

content/blog/2019-5-roadmap.mdnew file+103

@@ -0,0 +1,103 @@

1++++

2+title = "~2019.5 Roadmap"

3+date = "2019-05-15"

4+description = "Where we are and where we're going as of mid-2019."

5+aliases = [ "/posts/essays/2019-5-roadmap", "/posts/2019-5-roadmap" ]

6+

7+[extra]

8+author = "Galen Wolfe-Pauly"

9+ship = "~ravmel-ropdyl"

10+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/2019-5-roadmap-1.png"

11++++

12+

13+

14+

15+We often get so busy that we forget to tell you what we’ve been up to. Here’s an update on what we’re doing and where we’re headed with each layer of the stack.

16+

17+At a very high level we have two goals for 2019: make Azimuth easier to use, and get Arvo to a 1.0.

18+

19+Next year we’ll begin to move away from some of the MEGACORP software we use in the office, and replace it with our own tooling. There’s some exciting work happening in that department, but we’ll cover that in a future post.

20+

21+For some related recent thinking on all of this, see [The 100 Year Computer](/posts/essays/the-100-year-computer/), [The State of Landscape](/posts/essays/the-state-of-landscape/) and [Azimuth as MultiPass](/posts/essays/azimuth-as-multipass/).

22+

23+For now, let’s just look at what’s on the immediate horizon:

24+

25+## Azimuth

26+

27+At lunch the other day someone on our team said something like, ‘We built a complete and working public key infrastructure, but we haven’t told anyone.’

28+

29+It’s true. Azimuth is operational, secure, and well tested. It’s a pretty cool piece of technology and it’s out there in the world for anyone to use. It also doesn’t require that you use Arvo — Arvo happens to make use of Azimuth, but Azimuth itself is a completely separate system.

30+

31+So the question is why haven’t we told the world about it?

32+

33+I tend to think that in order for a technology to succeed it has to not only be an important technical innovation, it also has to be easy to understand as a product. And that’s our answer: we’ve undersold Azimuth because we want it to be easier to understand by _using_, not just by reading the code. Azimuth is quite an elegant piece of technology — but that doesn’t matter until it has a great user experience to match.

34+

35+That’s why, in the near term, we’re focused on building on top of Azimuth ourselves. We can’t ask others to go down roads if we haven’t already been down them.

36+

37+Here’s what we’re building first:

38+

39+### Q2 2019

40+

41+- A simplified onboarding flow for getting an Azimuth point that’s simple to share with friends over email, text or as a URL.

42+- A redesigned and improved Bridge for managing your points.

43+- An interface that allows you to easily send money between Azimuth points without running Arvo.

44+

45+### Q3 2019

46+

47+- Expanded Azimuth-centric example modules, documentation and developer tooling.

48+

49+Still under consideration:

50+

51+- An OAuth server or JWT flow for logging into any service with an Azimuth point.

52+- A mobile app for point to point payments using Azimuth.

53+

54+### 2020

55+

56+Azimuth is beginning to feel like [multipass](/posts/essays/azimuth-as-multipass/), with a variety of ways to use Azimuth points without ever booting Arvo

57+

58+## Arvo

59+

60+The Arvo interface has always been held back by Arvo’s technical immaturity. This is still true to some degree. The system has not stabilized completely.

61+

62+But! We’ve been using Landscape quite a lot lately. I use it daily, in fact — even [on my phone](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/landscape-urbit/id1393148862). An encrypted (although not audited — so let’s not call it ‘secure’), authenticated chat where I own the keys and can read the source code feels really nice to use. The interface isn’t as good as we’d like, but it’s not bad. Landscape is a great preview of where we’re going: a simple, permanent, self-sovereign computer.

63+

64+There are still rough edges, and Landscape is not nearly general purpose enough, but we have plans:

65+

66+### Q2 2019

67+

68+- A new update to the Arvo interface that we’re calling Modulo. Modulo expands beyond chat and longform discussion to make your Arvo interface feel much more like the computer it actually is.

69+- Upgrades to our event persistence, networking, and DNS integration aimed at much better stability. Arvo instances don’t crash that often, but with these changes it should be very rare.

70+- Significant improvements to testing with a new simulation testing framework and integration testing pipelines.

71+

72+### Q3 2019

73+

74+- A significant overhaul to Gall, our application model, making it much simpler for users to write apps or ‘agents’ in Arvo.

75+- A new version of the compiler that makes us less reliant on jets. This will eliminate a major obstacle to achieving network continuity, or the ability for ships to upgrade themselves totally over-the-air, forever.

76+- A significant overhaul and stability update to Clay, our filesystem, making it possible for us to trust it for self-hosting, search it easily, and depend on it for long-term data storage.

77+- Tooling for hosting and hopefully a beta program for hosted Arvo instances run by Tlon.

78+

79+### 2020

80+

81+- A completely overhauled Arvo interface, Daigo, with a complete but simple set of messaging and collaboration tools. Modulo is meant to be fun to experiment with, but we aim to make Daigo part of our daily workflow.

82+- We come to work every day, use Arvo, go home.

83+

84+## Community

85+

86+We’ve often felt like it was far too early to invite others in to the system.

87+

88+As long as we’re up front about the state of this 100 year computer -- that it’s live, but incomplete — I think it’s a good thing to welcome people on board. There’s plenty to play with, experiment with and explore.

89+

90+Hoon school was the first effort in this direction. We intend to do a lot more:

91+

92+### Q2 2019

93+

94+- Scaling Hoon school up to include both a track for experts and for beginners, and allowing many more participants.

95+- Holding more meetings and events on Landscape, experimenting with Arvo-native discussion.

96+- A clear program for address space grants for developers + contributors.

97+- New documentation site with searchable library docs.

98+

99+### Q3 2019

100+

101+- Hoon School participants understand clearly how to build a Modulo agent, and invite others into it.

102+- The road toward building an Azimuth module is well understood, paved, and clear.

103+- We have clear instructions and tutorials for building Azimuth modules and using Azimuth as a login or reputation primitive.

content/blog/2020-to-2021.mdnew file+45

@@ -0,0 +1,45 @@

1++++

2+title = "2020 -> 2021"

3+description = "Reflecting and looking forward."

4+date = "2021-01-20"

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Josh Lehman"

8+ship = "~wolref-podlex"

9+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/arch-sunrise-2.jpeg"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+In this post, which has been adapted from our most recent [newsletter](https://urbit.us11.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=972a03db9e0c6c25bb58de8c8&id=be143888d2), we'll take a moment to reflect on the events of the last year, and then turn our attention to the next one.

15+

16+## 2020

17+

18+In spite of the many challenges presented over the last year, it was a resoundingly good one for Urbit.

19+

20+It seems like a long time ago now that the folks at Tlon rolled out OS1 (now called Landscape), just as the pandemic forced everyone into their homes throughout the world. At the time, [Urbit is for Communities"](https://urbit.org/blog/urbit-is-for-communities/) was just a vision, but now it’s been transformed into reality—there are more thriving communities in Landscape than any of us can keep track of, with new faces popping onto the network on a daily basis.

21+

22+Landscape brought many new ships onto the network which helped identify those areas in which Urbit’s infrastructure could be most improved. [Ford Fusion](https://urbit.org/blog/ford-fusion/) eliminated the possibility of a partially-applied over-the-air (OTA) update through a drastic reduction in the size and complexity of the codebase. The efficiency of the OTA process was improved by several orders of magnitude, and many long-standing memory issues were resolved. Now we deploy code on our infrastructure nodes and see users receive an update, over a decentralized network, often in less than a minute.

23+

24+After improving the stability of the system Tlon turned its attention to bringing more ships onto the network. A long-standing barrier to Urbit’s adoption has been the technical knowledge required to host one’s own ship—this prompted Tlon to build and launch an Urbit [hosting service](https://tlon.io), the waitlist for which is now thousands deep.

25+

26+With Tlon becoming more singularly focused on building products on Urbit, concrete steps have been taken towards making urbit.org a separate organization that’s focused on long-term development of Urbit’s platform. I joined to [lead that effort](https://urbit.org/blog/first-steps-towards-urbit-org/) back in August and have since spent the majority of my time working with dozens of contributors on projects spanning documentation, education, external integrations, and much more.

27+

28+We rounded out the year with a full network reset (called a “continuity breach”), which has in the past has been synonymous with loss of all data on the network. This time things went differently: tooling was made available to the community that allowed ships to preserve their data, which enabled most to seamlessly rejoin post-reset. This is a significant milestone for the project as it signifies not only a commitment to technical excellence, but to supporting our budding community.

29+

30+## 2021

31+

32+In the last three weeks we’ve seen a huge amount of inbound interest as people are waking up to the inherent problems with using centralized services run by MEGACORPs—we’re just happy we started working on Urbit all those years ago. While we tend to not plan more than about six months in advance, I can still talk at a high level about what urbit.org will be focusing on in the immediate future.

33+

34+Growth in Urbit’s developer community has been growing organically in lockstep with the overall network growth. This means, happily, that there’s a pretty large pool of people eager to contribute to Urbit. The priority for urbit.org, therefore, is to improve its capacity to effectively assist contributors. In broad strokes, this means:

35+

36+- Rework urbit.org to better help developers learn how to contribute to Urbit

37+- Since Urbit is ready to build on top of, provide practical guides that demonstrate how to do so

38+- Guide developers to make high-value contributions to Urbit and its ecosystem

39+- Build community amongst contributors

40+

41+My strategy to date has been heavily focused on working directly with contributors to provide technical guidance and direction, and it’s been working really well. To that end I’ll also be scaling our ability to provide such support by bringing more individuals into urbit.org that can mentor, review work, and provide guidance on where to best direct contributors' energy.

42+

43+2021 is shaping up to be a big year for Urbit, and we'd [love your help](https://grants.urbit.org) in building it. If you want to see what we're working on in real time, join us in Landscape at ~wolref-podlex/foundation.

44+

45+See you on the network!

content/blog/20200929-state-of-urbit.mdnew file+72

@@ -0,0 +1,72 @@

1++++

2+title = "Late 2020 Progress Update: OS 1 -> OS 1.N"

3+date = "2020-09-28"

4+description = "When we announced OS 1, in April, we started to disappear into Urbit. Since then, we’ve been living on Urbit like we never have before."

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Galen Wolfe-Pauly"

8+ship = "~ravmel-ropdyl"

9+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/state-of-urbit-1.jpg"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+When we announced OS 1, in April, we started to disappear into Urbit. Since then, we’ve been living on Urbit like we never have before. This has been our goal for years: to mature the system we’re building by becoming its first committed users. We knew that critical step toward Urbit’s maturity was being able to depend on it ourselves, but the system itself had to mature to the point that we could do that practically.

15+

16+We’ve done this in fits and starts. We’ve _tried_ and failed a few times over the years. We’ve always _used_ Urbit to some extent, but we’ve never _relied_ on it. These past six months have been different. I can’t tell whether it was out of sheer determination and commitment, or that the system was just genuinely ‘there’. Either way, both Tlon and the Urbit Community genuinely live on Urbit now.

17+

18+In a way, our ability to use Urbit day to day doesn’t make sense. When we shipped OS 1, it was full of holes. There were serious performance, stability, and reliability issues. Plenty of people showed up and thought, ‘I don’t understand why you think this is useful.’ But, it was good enough that we wanted to use it. And since we wanted to use it, we put our energy into making it better like we hadn’t ever before. Being able to use a system that you can really trust is a wonderful feeling. It’s Computing Without Compromises.

19+

20+All of the sudden, it’s Fall. We never found the time to name any of our releases or write announcements. We’ve just been making the system better in every way we can find. We’ve got a lot of exciting things planned for the last few months of the year — but I wanted to recap the progress we’ve made for those following along from the outside. If you haven’t been on the network, it’d be impossible to see.

21+

22+The tl;dr is that Urbit is much faster, more reliable, and nicer to use than it was six months ago. Things have gotten much better, across the board. We threw ourselves into OS 1 admittedly underprepared, but we’ve learned a lot and matured the system a lot along the way.

23+

24+Anyway, let’s walk through the details. We’ll talk about our infrastructure and interface work independently, since that’s how we organize things internally. Then we’ll talk a bit about what’s going on on the network.

25+

26+### Infrastructure

27+

28+

29+

30+In April, Urbit was slow, fragile, and didn’t always update itself properly. We made enormous progress on all of these.

31+

32+First off, Urbit is about 10x faster for most users. With some careful debugging, we were able to locate a few really [high](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/pull/3029) [impact](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/pull/3054) [improvements](https://twitter.com/pcmonk/status/1276327036722704385). There’s still performance work to do, but the effects of this work are widespread. Boot times are faster, local compute is faster, the network is faster. It’s a huge improvement.

33+

34+Second, we got our memory usage under control. Urbit still uses a 2GB memory arena. If the state of your Urbit grows to over 2GB things, uh, fall apart. This used to happen regularly, and now it’s pretty much unheard of. We implemented [tooling](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/pull/3235) to compact and deduplicate the memory image when it’s growing too large. We brought the memory usage of the compiler [down ~90%](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/pull/3041). There are areas where we can be more disciplined about how we use memory, but this is more or less a solved problem for the near term.

35+

36+Third, we implemented a completely new build system. Well, we actually [got rid of the build system](https://urbit.org/blog/ford-fusion/) altogether and [made it a part of the filesystem](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/pull/3060). This made it possible for us to fix our over the air (OTA) updates and make them both fast and reliable. In April, an OTA could bring down your node and would take hours or even days to apply. Today, we regularly deploy OTAs with no fear of them breaking any nodes — they often go from galaxy → planet in a minute or less.

37+

38+We also rewrote a large part of our runtime in Haskell and made overall progress on [network scaling](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/pull/3174). And: we implemented a [principled approach](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/pull/2366) to [error handling](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/pull/3064), making nodes much less likely to become unrecoverable.

39+

40+The network is stable, fast, and safe from day to day. We’re pretty confident it can grow quite a bit without serious issues. When we shipped OS 1 we really weren’t sure what we could handle. Now we’re standing on much more solid ground.

41+

42+### Interface

43+

44+

45+

46+When we shipped OS 1 it was a bunch of separate pages (that were slow to load), all with separate ways of storing and processing data. Our interface work over the past six months is all about unification and simplification.

47+

48+First, we pulled OS 1 together as a [single page app](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/pull/3025). Using OS 1 involves a good amount of moving around and refreshing the page each time was pretty painful. Now it’s snappy to move between pages and keep up with what’s going on. In tandem, we started using our own component library, [Indigo](https://github.com/urbit/indigo-react). This makes frontend development much cleaner and more efficient.

49+

50+Next, we unified the way we store data and compute. It used to be that each individual module (chat, publish, and links) used their own ‘agents’ to store and process data on the Urbit side. (An agent is the Urbit equivalent of a datastore + business logic.) With a lot of moving parts, this approach caused all kinds of synchronization challenges. Rather than a module-per-agent model we’ve started to move toward a type-of-data-per-agent model. The first of these is [graph store](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/pull/3110). We’re presently in the process of migrating all our modules to graph store.

51+

52+Those two are by far the most significant, but there’s so much more. We [rewrote](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/pull/2937) the `group-store`, allowing for different roles (admin, moderators, and so on) in a group. We shipped better debugging tools, automatic reconnection, a settings panel, and overall visual polish and refinement.

53+

54+

55+

56+And I almost forgot [Leap](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/pull/3231): an omnibox for navigating around OS 1 with the keyboard. We have plans to make Leap much more powerful — but it’s a great first start toward making OS 1 keyboard accessible. I almost exclusively use [Leap](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/Canon_Cat_keyboard.jpg) to get around OS 1 these days.

57+

58+### Community + network

59+

60+

61+

62+Our primary goal with OS 1 was to get both Tlon and the Urbit Community living entirely on Urbit. We did that, and in doing so we’ve seen how nice it is to grow a community in a calm, non-invasive environment. We started doing regular [Urbit](https://twitter.com/urbit/status/1308875082312364048) [Dialogues](https://twitter.com/urbit/status/1304139629948329985) with friends and peers in the absence of physical meetups, which have been fun.

63+

64+Getting onto Urbit is still relatively challenging. By the standards of software you run yourself, it’s not so bad at all. But by comparison to ordinary consumer software, it’s way too hard. Tlon is [working on that](https://tlon.io) — but these last six months have been only for the brave. That is, those that want to host their own nodes.

65+

66+Turns out, there are plenty of people who are up for running Urbit themselves and quite a few small communities have sprouted around the network. Overall the network has a fun, cozy feeling. It’s nice.

67+

68+### What’s next

69+

70+We’re still more or less flat-out, full speed ahead into an even better Urbit-world. The seeds of change were planted when we made Josh the [interim technical director of urbit.org](https://urbit.org/blog/first-steps-towards-urbit-org/). Urbit itself is getting close to the point where the separation between Urbit and Tlon has to become more real. Urbit is aimed at being an ubiquitous platform, Tlon is aimed at making it as usable and useful as possible.

71+

72+We’ll talk about some of this on [October 9th](https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/273439025/), and you can see a bit of what’s coming on [tlon.io](https://tlon.io) today. If you tried booting Urbit in April and it was tough, try again. We’re easy to find on the network, and we’d love to get reacquainted.

content/blog/20201119-models-of-society.mdnew file+65

@@ -0,0 +1,65 @@

1++++

2+title = "Models of Society"

3+description = "Conversations compose society. What composes conversation — how do we digitize it in a way that enhances society without imposing upon it? How do we form this new medium, both to facilitate natural human behavior and to inspire the best of it?"

4+date = "2020-11-18"

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Tyler Shuster"

8+ship = "~radbur-sivmus"

9+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/cochno-stone.png"

10++++

11+

12+_I had used Facebook and Google for my entire adult life. I knew they were toxic but I didn't know why. For a few weeks I tried to create a website that would scrape data from Facebook’s API and push data back, puppetting it from my own server. But as I stared headlong into the ever-shifting darkness of the modern web, I despaired and abandoned my attempt. Less than a year later I heard about Urbit. Technically, it went way over my head&mdash;but socially I knew exactly what it was, what it always had to be, why it was a discovery and not an invention, a place and not a product. I've watched the settlers there for four years, only just now using the opportunity of the pandemic to swim to this new landscape and gaze upon this young nation, this digital city, this urbis ec bit. I do not work for Tlon. I just live here._

13+

14+<hr>

15+

16+All people like to talk. Society is built by talking. In this&mdash;the year of our Lord two thousand and twenty&mdash;for many (maybe most) talking means typing on computers: handheld, laptop, or desktop. Computers can do all sorts of interesting things, like aid in designing buildings or simulate protein folding&mdash;fundamentally, a computer is a machine for doing math really fast. But computers can be networked, which turns them into tools for communication. Because society runs on talking and because computers enable us to do that, the most common thing that computers end up doing is to transmit human thoughts in text. Normal people call this writing, which is a kind of talking. Let’s call it messaging. When we think about building a good computer&mdash;and computer network&mdash;one that serves society in the best ways needs to do messaging well. Only a small percentage of people will regularly do anything else. (Urbit does serve those needs but I will leave that explanation to more capable minds.)

17+

18+## Modes of Messaging

19+

20+

21+

22+In general, technology serves humanity as a kind of appendage&mdash;instead of thinking new thoughts or acting on its own, it does what we command. Technology never creates new social structures&mdash;it merely makes existing ones easier, or it facilitates the creation of new ones. We use our tools to expand our capacities, and once we are capable of doing more, we can imagine new things to do. Inventing the wheel did not invent motorized transportation&mdash;but it did facilitate it and it was a necessary step, even an inspirational one. Similarly, the invention of writing made new forms of human interaction and new tools for organization possible.

23+

24+Consider the following conversational conventions, or modes of messaging: a letter; a dialogue; a book; a meeting; minutes of that meeting. These are each pieces of technology: finely constrained solutions to human problems. Now, we have digital forms of each of these which diverge variously from the original. A letter becomes an email. A dialogue becomes a chat room, or a series of blog posts, or a twitter spat. A book becomes a website or an ebook. Meetings in 2020 have virtually been replaced by their virtual counterparts. Minutes become recordings or transcripts.

25+

26+Although we do not have a clear picture of how humanity developed the technology of writing out of the basic capacity for speech, we can imagine that the computerization of writing has many parallels. It does not make the old tools obsolete, nor does it immediately introduce new social structures. It does create the potential, however. On the timeline of human existence, we have only had digitized text for a relatively short time. Because we want to understand how to best use these new forms, we should look at their underlying structure.

27+

28+In order to digitize messages well, computers need to reconcile two facts about all modes of messaging. They have:

29+

30+1. One basic shape, and

31+2. An infinite variety of forms.

32+

33+1 &mdash; The basic shape: all these modes have one common substance: human language. Any conversation is made of words. At first we only had spoken language. Then we discovered writing. Writing allows us to encode our words as glyphs to transmit them over time or distance. The internet extends this capacity. We called this "hypertext"&mdash;like good old fashioned text, but one level up. A staggering amount of messaging now takes place over this hypertext transfer protocol (http). In the process of digitizing language, we have learned the basic shape of a message. We can see this in how every social network shares messages in basically the same shape: an author, some content, references, an audience. We can confirm this basic shape by comparing it against our experience of the real world, and the previous comparison between speech and writing. Speech and writing both use the same substance, and take the same basic shape. They all have an author, content, references, and an audience.

34+

35+2 &mdash; Our experience of this one basic shape takes an infinite number of forms. The examples above (letter, meeting, &c) are just a few. These forms depend on the content of the message, the people involved, and the place they occur. All three aspects contribute significantly to its form, but the one that computerized messaging has not adequately compensated for is the place. Content depends only on the author and their intent. Getting certain people to view that content might be more difficult but most know how to use a computer. The place however, has not yet been adequately compensated for, and I think that has contributed seriously to our lack of civil and serious discourse over the internet. A president would not give an address in a bar, and a prospective lover would not utter his advances on stage. In writing, we can use the different physical forms to distinguish place. You shouldn’t read a book by the pool. You might not read a letter in public. You wouldn’t put a billboard in your bedroom.

36+

37+Furthermore, it seems possible that in our eagerness to "connect the world," we focused injudiciously on creating communities around "interests." Evidence suggests that unless the interest has a highly refined focus, these communities devolve into pandering, self-reference, and exploitation. In this way, the internet is something like a convention of conventions, where you wander in a sea of foreigners loosely affiliated by interest and surrounded by advertising booths. In physical space, people do gather by interest but they also gather by physical proximity&mdash;they are grounded and bound in place.

38+

39+Having an indistinct sense of place makes the form of conversation ambiguous and the participants of the conversation disconnected. Consequently, people are unsure how to interact. One need only know the term "comments section" to understand that.

40+

41+## People in Places

42+

43+

44+

45+As the internet grew to accommodate new conversation forms using the basic substrate of hypertext, web developers began to conceive of "digital spaces" through analogy&mdash;chat "rooms" and "forums,” or the "silo" and the "walled garden." Today, most of our conversation takes place in these walled gardens&mdash;privately-owned places which may be beautiful on the inside, but inaccessible from elsewhere. While some of these walled gardens are very large, our conversation is essentially confined to them. There is no roaming from one space to another while keeping one’s identity. We create new identities for new spaces both because we must and because we are afraid of repercussions on one platform for what we say on another. This is because we do not own our identity; we merely have a key&mdash;our password. The owners of the walled garden still own the artifacts of our tenure there, and can revoke our access to them at any time.

46+

47+The concept of identity and the concept of place are fundamentally linked. We imagine the prince who travels overseas where no one knows his name, or we imagine the old prospect of traveling to a new world to make a fortune. While those both exemplify a dramatic change in identity and place, we usually want to keep our identity consistent. We want to be recognized by friends whichever place we go, and we all strive toward having a good reputation, which is a consistent identity across places. This consistent identity also allows control of that reputation per place. A man is not judged in public by the words he says among friends. And there is no way to search what someone has said except by asking him. With our current system of identity providers (an absurd term, but a real one), we surrender our rights to selectively expose our thoughts, regardless of the place they have been uttered. A data breach or a weak password might lay bare our most private thoughts. We run the real risk of being confronted by an old conversation presented out of context or after we have learned better.

48+

49+People need distinct spaces to form conversations in distinct modes, and they need to have a consistent identity that controls how public their words are.

50+

51+In theory, we would have a digital city with unique regions, public fora, and sovereign parcels, into which one person might travel at will. In practice, we see this pattern: an app emerges to facilitate a mode of conversation. It gains popularity. Facebook (or Google, or Microsoft) buys and absorbs it. As monolithic empires, they can use the same format for all their messages. This gives them a great amount of power. They use this power to create things like "Sign in with Facebook" (or Google, or Microsoft) that benefit the user by consolidating their identity, but fail to solve the underlying problem. Their problem is that in order to allow people to communicate using the current technology stack, they need to be in control of everything.

52+

53+## Urbis ec Bit

54+

55+

56+

57+Urbit does solve this underlying problem. At this point the explanation goes so far down the stack that you could spend years tracing it all, but the relevant part is this: Urbit is not an empire; it’s a territory. An empire is an entangling of land and rule: within the bounds of said empire, you agree to be bound by its laws and the penalties for transgression. The laws exist at the whim of a despot or cabal. Your standing as a Roman citizen buys you no favors in Persia. In contrast, a territory imposes only physical laws. For example, in the desert, you will die faster. The only way to change that is to alter the desert. Urbit imposes nothing but the digital equivalent of physical laws. You have an identity which can be said to be truly yours, and you have a piece of software that runs on whatever computer you choose and can do anything you want with the messages sent to your identity. There are no social protocols enforced, because no one can control what software you run on your computer. As long as you agree to communicate using the same basic substrate, you can communicate with anyone using Urbit. This is the digital equivalent of speaking the same language. Whether or not others will accept you into their coalitions is not the technology's concern.

58+

59+In the same way that the land provides clay and timber, Urbit also provides the tools and material for building places both public and private. These include the aforementioned consistent message substrate (content), as well as tools for organizing people/audiences, structure for referencing other content, and an identity system that is owned only by you while being verified by all. The places are being built&mdash;private rooms with just a few people, meeting halls, club houses, huge public spaces, and countless personal encounters, the contents of which are known to none but the participants.

60+

61+The default tools work with messages in a few of the ways with which we've grown familiar: chat, direct messaging, publishing, link-sharing. They map onto existing forms of messaging because as I said earlier, the technology does not create new social structures; it just facilitates them. We have only seen the beginning of what the internet is capable of doing. Within a few decades it replaced the majority of letters, phone calls, and text dissemination&mdash;that was just the first phase of getting up to parity with what written text and speech could already do. In order to get to the next phase of creating new social processes, we need our technology to be organic and democratic, in the sense that everyone can participate and shape it. It needs to have a consensual foundation&mdash;a common substrate&mdash;and infinite possibility for expression. Urbit provides both of those.

62+

63+Similar to working undeveloped land, it takes a lot of hard work, which is why Urbit is not ready for mainstream adoption yet, and why I alluded to the idea of settlers in my opening paragraph. Traveling to the new world is not for everyone, but everyone is welcome.

64+

65+_How could one do other than submit to Tlön, to the minute and vast evidence of an orderly plant? It is useless to answer that reality is also orderly. Perhaps it is, but in accordance with divine laws&mdash;I translate: inhuman laws&mdash;which we never quite grasp. Tlön is surely a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men._

content/blog/2021-11-18-report-from-the-field.mdnew file+94

@@ -0,0 +1,94 @@

1++++

2+title = "Report from the field: Assembly 2021"

3+date = "2021-11-18"

4+description = "The system builds the community and the community builds the system."

5+[extra]

6+author = "Galen Wolfe-Pauly"

7+ship = "~ravmel-ropdyl"

8+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/galen-at-assembly.JPG"

9++++

10+

11+

12+

13+Before Assembly I committed to write a ‘recap’ post for everyone who couldn’t make it. Originally I figured this post would be an opportunity to walk through the list of things that we shipped and showed off in Austin. But it turns out that the most important thing about Assembly was simply the way it felt to be there.

14+

15+I’m not sure it’s possible to really do the feeling in the room justice, but I’m going to try. Then I’ll get into the announcements and happenings for those of you who couldn’t make it.

16+

17+But first, a quick note:

18+

19+We ran Assembly under the [Chatham House rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatham_House_Rule). Basically, you can talk about what happens at Assembly—but you can’t name anyone.

20+

21+I’ve run many of our Urbit events this way because I think it puts people at ease. Everyone in the room can just relax, connect with one another, and hang out without worrying about being named on the internet.

22+

23+I’ll try to abide by the Chatham rule in this post which is why no one is named specifically.

24+

25+

26+

27+New world energy -

28+

29+In the months leading up to Assembly we were totally focussed on using the event as a release date for a bunch of different lines of work. Coming out of that sprint, we didn’t really know what to expect. We wanted to make sure Urbit was ready for people to build on and that everything we were going to ship worked well. What we didn’t realize was just how emphatically people are *ready to build*.

30+

31+When I got up on stage on Friday night to welcome everyone I was really impressed by the room itself. It was packed with people who looked excited and motivated. The room just looked amazing. There were so many different kinds of people staring back at me. Some who I recognized from the earliest days of the project, and lots I had never seen before. I’ve been at my share of Urbit events, but this was something totally different.

32+

33+We didn’t have much scheduled during Assembly. Most of the time was unstructured to allow for freeform discussion, sunbathing on the lawn, and gathering at picnic tables. The panels that we did schedule will go down in history. Panelists discussed questions about creators, escaping reward systems, and the role of DAOs from governance to governments. There was hard money with a computer on it, Moloch shoes, community members grabbing the mic, and a talk written two hours before it was delivered about the relationship between centralization and decentralization when it comes to UX that blew our minds.

34+

35+I spent the weekend of Assembly in almost constant conversation with people building Urbit hardware, experimenting with different kinds of Urbit software, and thinking about incredible things like a Nock chip. I talked to the lead architect of a CPU from the 90s, a former senior US government official, an editor of a well-known literary magazine, the inventor of a new display technology, musicians whose work I already admired, a fragrance designer, writers, and, of course, lots of engineers and designers from many different backgrounds. Data scientists, systems hackers, language nerds, someone running a successful currency. I watched these people get projects off the ground, start raising money, plan the future of Urbit hosting companies, and plan new features for Landscape. I saw a last-minute warehouse party come together that kept people talking well into the early hours of the morning.

36+

37+Where did these people come from? All over the place. They have this incredible *new world energy*. They understand immediately, intuitively that Urbit has the potential to be a foundation for the society they want to live in. I’ve never seen anything like it.

38+

39+This energy seems to have come from the very practical work we do day-to-day: building Urbit, refining it, making it easier to use. The crowd at Assembly was somehow brought together by Urbit itself. It’s insanely exciting. It makes working on Urbit feel even more like a form of definite optimism. The system builds the community and the community builds the system.

40+

41+

42+

43+Urbit is ready to be built upon -

44+

45+Sometime in early 2021 we realized that there were many lines of work converging on a single theme: ‘Urbit is ready to be built upon’. This is the spirit we wanted to bring to Assembly, and it was very much in the room in Austin. Some of that feeling is still lingering on the network. I think it comes from some very concrete improvements that have been made to the system.

46+

47+We’ve always wanted Urbit to be maintained by a self-sustaining ecosystem and, early this year, we could see what needed to be done to really let others begin doing so. There were four parallel projects that came together to hit this milestone: Software distribution, star.market, developer and operator guides, and the Foundation roadmap. We talked about all of these things in the Assembly keynote (which you can watch [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywj36TUtbS4)), but let’s touch on them one by one.

48+

49+Software distribution

50+

51+The most important thing that we shipped just before Assembly is the ability to actually package and distribute software over Urbit itself. It’s now possible for someone to build an app, package it up, and share it with a friend directly over the network.

52+

53+For their friend, the experience is incredibly nice. You can simply send someone a link and they can install the app and run it themselves, on their own urbit, right away. The whole thing is peer-to-peer, of course. There’s no app store, no vetting process. It’s networked software like it’s supposed to be: people computing together freely.

54+

55+We’ve been saying for years that we want people to build on top of Urbit and we always meant it. Now it’s possible in a way it never has been before. To check it out, watch [this segment](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MA8sqFi8Bd8) from Assembly.

56+

57+Software distribution can get better in _a lot_ of ways, and we’re continuing to work on it. But it’s live, and people are experimenting with it already. There’s Chess, there’s Pokur, there are video calls (although they’re still a little buggy). Everyone seems to love ‘pals’ and ‘zone’—but you’ll have to get on the network to check those out.

58+

59+star.market

60+

61+We’ve always used the address space to fund our work as one of the primary Urbit developers. As Urbit has become more useful, and address space has become more expensive, it’s more and more difficult for others to do this. The community saw the need for developers to easily use their granted address space to fund their work and a higher resolution for the Foundation to fund contributions to Urbit.

62+

63+This is what [star.market](https://star.market/) and the WSTR project are for. WSTR is an ERC-20 token that is backed 1:1 by ERC-721 Urbit stars. Unlike a star, a WSTR token can be fractionally divided, allowing for a broader distribution of ownership of Urbit. WSTR was built by the community over the past couple of months with no involvement from Tlon. Tlon did, eventually, help to put together star.market—the interface for interacting with the WSTR contracts safely and securely.

64+

65+I’ve come to think that WSTR can be a powerful tool for funding new Urbit projects. I’m excited to see what both our early community of developers and operators can do with it, as well as the nascent Urbit Foundation.

66+

67+Guides

68+

69+As we make it easier for developers to build software, operators to participate in the economy, and communities to make Urbit their home, we need to improve our documentation. We always like to do things bottom-up: the product work comes first. Well, the product is now live.

70+To this end we recently launched:

71+

72+[operators.urbit.org](https://operators.urbit.org/) collects all of the information about participating in the Urbit economy, running infrastructure nodes, and participating in governance in one place.

73+

74+[developers.urbit.org](https://developers.urbit.org/) has an overhauled program for learning about Urbit as a system and beginning to develop on top of it.

75+

76+[network.urbit.org](https://network.urbit.org/) allows anyone to explore the network. View galaxy transfers or how many planets a star has spawned.

77+

78+We’ve got a lot more planned in this area of work in the coming months, and these three sites are a great start.

79+

80+Urbit Foundation

81+

82+Over these past few years we’ve operated the Urbit Foundation as a ‘protocol’ inside of Tlon. Our goal has been to develop that protocol to the point that it’s refined, working, and can run on its own outside of Tlon.

83+

84+Josh has done an exceptional job running the foundation protocol at Tlon over the last year or so. He and I have been working closely together on everything that Tlon builds, while also coordinating our community of contributors. I’m very excited that the Foundation, with Josh as its Director, is now separating from Tlon as a fully independent entity focussed on supporting the ecosystem.

85+

86+Assembly was the perfect moment to begin formally separating out the Foundation and, as of a week ago, it is an independent entity. We’ve thought long and hard about how to make the Foundation an enduring, stable organization. Josh will be the first Executive Director but, ultimately, the Senate of Galaxies will elect the Board. This will keep the Foundation accountable to the network as a whole and I’m optimistic it can work well.

87+

88+If you’re on the network, you can read more about the Foundation in ~wolref-podlex/foundation.

89+

90+Assembly 2022 -

91+

92+I had more than a few enthusiastic people come up to me at Assembly and ask what we were planning for Assembly 2022. I have absolutely no idea, of course. We poured all our energy into making Assembly 2021 a success.

93+

94+Given what I saw in Austin, I’m pretty confident that next year we’ll be in completely new territory. The goal of this project has always been to build a completely new digital world. And now, it seems to be building itself.

content/blog/2021-11-18-the-promise-and-paradox-of-decentralization.mdnew file+55

@@ -0,0 +1,55 @@

1++++

2+title = "The Promise and Paradox of Decentralization"

3+date = "2021-11-17"

4+description = "Is centralization just a natural tendency of all networks? Are we destined to have a 'decentralization sandwich?'"

5+[extra]

6+author = ""

7+ship = "~lableg-tadrex"

8+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/ux-centralization.JPG"

9++++

10+

11+

12+

13+Every so often, a platform will do something outrageous—changing its terms of use, kicking off API partners, restricting [the content category it was built on](https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/3/18123752/tumblr-adult-content-porn-ban-date-explicit-changes-why-safe-mode), banning Donald Trump, failing to ban Donald Trump, etc.—and we'll all realize we're utterly dependent on centralized entities that can make arbitrary and unaccountable decisions. Sure, you can build your own minimal Facebook or Twitter clone, if you really want, but can you build your own Cloudflare? How about your own payment network? If your company does something legal in your country but banned in America, and the US decides to sanction you, which leads to local banks cutting you off because they can't survive without access to the dollar, are you going to build your own reserve currency? Your own Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. or ASML?

14+

15+There are, to varying extents, efforts to do all of the above. But what's worth considering is that *all of these bans happen through centralized actors running on decentralized systems*. The Internet was supposed to be a totally open set of protocols that anyone could interact with, and for a long time it was, and yet getting kicked off Facebook and Twitter means being exiled from public discourse. Banks are regulated, but every country can set up their own banking regulations, and different countries see the social role of banks very differently; for some countries they're a tool of economic planning, for others a way to help connect local companies to global markets, for others a source of money that can be channeled to politically favored groups. The chip industry was historically very open to new entrants; the transistor was developed at Bell Labs, and for political reasons AT&T licensed it to all comers at a low price.

16+

17+And yet all of these originally decentralized systems end up facing some degree of centralization.

18+

19+The promise of a decentralized system is that anyone can build anything they want, because no one owns it. There are three important features of this; two downsides and a caveat:

20+

21+- The first downside to "Anyone can build anything" is that "anyone" means *anyone*, and the people to whom decentralized systems are the most attractive are the ones who are banned from other systems, often for good reasons. Free speech absolutists want to be defending Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Eugene V. Debs or even Lenny Bruce, but if you want to get a sense for the typical piece of content enabled by a totally uncensored communications system, check your spam folder.

22+

23+- The second downside is that a lack of ownership means that no one is responsible when things go wrong. Bitcoin doesn't have a way to censor your decision to move money from one address to another or even a protocol-level sense of whether you're buying Alpaca socks or a rocket launcher. (nb: You are almost certainly not buying a rocket launcher with Bitcoin; you are at best getting scammed, and at worst [getting in trouble](https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/los-angeles-county-man-pleads-guilty-federal-charge-attempting-obtain-biological-toxin)). But this also means that the protocol can't tell when you meant to send your life savings to your cold wallet and sent it to the wrong address instead.

24+

25+- The caveat is that, to quote a [*Diff* piece from last year](https://www.thediff.co/p/amazon-a-new-kind-of-antitrust-risk#:~:text=does%20it%2C%20too.-,Technology-Governance%20Fit,-Pondering%20Durian%20has) ($), "[A]ny decentralized order requires a centralized substrate, and the more decentralized the approach is the more important it is that you can count on the underlying system." This applies to cryptocurrencies (you can trust the protocols) and to the Internet (ditto). It also applies, in an interesting way, to the increasingly decentralized world of free trade and free-flowing capital: money can only flow and deals can only be made if everyone has a consistent sense of property rights and contracts, and the definition of those concepts will typically be determined by whichever participant in a transaction has the more sophisticated financial and legal system. Globalization ends up being a bit like Henry Ford's pitch: you can use any economic paradigm you want, as long as it's the American one.1

26+

27+An open, decentralized system is *sparse*: there's room for anything, which means that most of the possibility space consists of nothing at all. This creates a natural demand for onramps—Coinbase for figuring out Bitcoin, portals for figuring out the Internet, TSM for turning chip designs into functioning products, and the like. These create a complicated dynamic: these onramps are built on an open system, but part of their function is to close off some of it. And the better they do that, the more value they can capture. Meanwhile, because they have a monopoly on what they've fenced off, their economics support providing a better user experience. Make a really helpful update to the Bitcoin wiki, and you can feel good about yourself and perhaps contribute to the price of Bitcoin in a highly indirect way; design and launch an improved onboarding process at Coinbase and your contribution is quantifiable, and affects your next cycle's equity grants.

28+

29+This privatization proceeds in three different ways:

30+

31+- Some companies start building on an open protocol and then slowly make it their own. Chrome's decision to make the search bar synonymous with the address bar was a slight improvement in the interface, but also a very strong statement that Google had replaced manually typing in URLs as the default way to navigate. (The strongest evidence for this is the frequency of navigational searches; [the most commonly-searched term on Google](https://www.mondovo.com/keywords/) is "Facebook" and [the most frequently searched term on Bing is "Google"](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-28/google-tells-judges-it-s-so-popular-it-s-bing-s-top-search-term).) Typing in URLs is a sometimes-decent way to find what you're looking for, though [the half-life of links is about two years](https://blog.zomdir.com/2017/10/the-half-life-of-link-is-two-year.html). But guessing at URLs can be [perilous](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitehouse.com). No one is responsible for fixing this, but Google is the closest approximation, because what they are responsible for is solving the "look for something on the Internet and get the wrong result" problem, a different but related one from the broader task of allowing arbitrary site owners to host arbitrary content. Privatizing is effective, and solves problems for users rather than protocol designers. But it does go against the spirit of the original network.

32+

33+- Twitter is another example, except that they basically created their own open mostly-open protocol and then slowly took control of it. Tweets were originally a simple format, with 140 characters of text and a bit more metadata (this made it compatible with SMS, which had a 160-character limit). For a while, Twitter looked like it would operate a novel protocol and let third parties decide what to put on it and what to read off it. And then the company started to realize that an open system was also one where it was trivial to filter out ads and recommendations. So the outside partners gradually got cut off.

34+

35+- Facebook—the product, not the company—is a third example. It essentially implemented a missing element to the protocol: *identity matters*. When the original protocols were being hammered out, identity was a problem taken care of by the fact that getting online required steep hurdles; if everyone involved is affiliated with a university that trusts them to use a PDP-10 responsibly, spam or abuse were not big concerns. (Not that early usage was [strictly professional](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/apr/19/online-high-net-drugs-deal).) With billions of people online, accessing relevant information can mean traversing a graph of people rather than links, so the identities of those people becomes important. To the user, if not to the network itself, a name and relationship is a far more important unique identifier than an IP address.

36+

37+This pattern raises a question: is centralization just a natural tendency of all networks? Are we destined to have a "decentralization sandwich," where there's a hard-to-change set of protocols, something open built on top of *that*, and a series of closed systems built on top of that, which are the only ones the average person interacts with?

38+

39+One of the interesting alternatives to this is [Urbit](https://urbit.org), which is trying to build a network in which identity exists from the start, and is neither free nor monopolized. One of Urbit's principles is that users own their data, and while they can use third-party services, they're sharing their data with services, not using a login to access information that lives on someone else's servers.

40+

41+This is a nice theoretical solution to the "build your own" problem above: if someone tries to start Twitter-but-without-banning-X, they begin with "Twitter-but-it's-100%-X," which seems bad until they reach the next stage where trolls arrive and they start to learn that Online Censorship is mostly about spam and gore and only occasionally about politics. But if they're moving their data around, and their friends graph with it, then spinning up a separate instance of the same service, pulling in the same content from their friends, and whitelisting someone who's blacklisted elsewhere is a lot more feasible.

42+

43+At least at first. One of the problems with owning your own data is that it ignores the question of what format that data is in. Data formats are sometimes considered carefully, but they can also be hammered out fast to get a minimum viable product out the door. Then they evolve over time, accumulating cruft and complexity, until they might as well be encrypted.

44+

45+And indeed, what's to stop someone from having a proprietary format that's literally encrypted? Or one that gets changed to an encrypted version later on? This is not a trivial point; if you're ever in a position where you absolutely have to share some information that you want to keep secret, the smartest thing to do is share a huge amount of confusing and poorly-explained information, or use an [annoying but technically accurate format](https://www.vice.com/en/article/gv5vxb/crypto-keys-printout-of-edward-snowdens-email-service-lavabit-ladar-levison). Strict and unalterable rules are no match for determined adversaries, whether they're trying to play a prank, make a point, or maximize shareholder value.

46+

47+But the data format questions are not rhetorical: there is actually an answer of sorts, though it's a frustrating one. Software systems are not just lines of code, but the entire extended system of people who maintain, host, and build on platforms. And the norms of those communities can push back against market pressures. I've been spending an increasing amount of time around Urbit users and devs, and they really do view the current centralized model of the Internet as anathema. They are aware that the fun apps we use are all either designed to be addictive from the start or subject to relentless evolutionary pressure to get more addictive. There's a history of [norms evolving in response to new addictive behavior](https://gist.github.com/jm3/6724931). And Urbit's architecture is a lot closer to norms than to the clumsy mechanism of laws; instead of centralized services that own data, there's a set of 256 Urbit identities that can route messages between users. Instead of single points of failure, there are a few hundred fallback options; instead of the binary of on-Facebook-or-anathematized, there's a 2^8 bit gradient.

48+

49+One possibility for the successor to the current Internet is that it will end up being a system designed to support communities that achieve cohesion based on which forms of addictive or socially corrosive technology they reject. Sort of a digital version of the Amish, [not rejecting technology wholesale but carefully considering every new technology before adopting it](https://kk.org/thetechnium/amish-hackers-a/). If you assume that the pace of change in consumer-facing Internet stays high, and that it gets more compelling over time, then in the long run the only options are a) be careful what you use, or b) accept that you're outsourcing a growing share of your decisions to product managers and growth hackers who do not necessarily have your interests at heart.

50+

51+Norms are not a perfect solution to these problems (if they were, we'd only know about issues like novel addictive behaviors, monopolies, and the homogenization of entertainment from history books). And technology can't fully solve social problems. But it can certainly have an effect on them—"you can't solve a social problem with technology" is a good guideline, but technologies mitigate them all the time. What's a streetlight if not a technological solution to the social problem that there are places where it's dangerous to be out when it's dark? What's asymmetric-key cryptography if not a technological solution to the social problem that it's hard to keep secrets? There's still a fundamental tension with open systems, where they get mature enough to be useful at which point the median user's priority is getting things done rather than adhering to the network's original design principles. But a design that recognizes this from the beginning, and a community that wants to make it happen, can stave off decline for a long time. And that's the positive story of technology: we're all fighting against entropy, which is a hard fight to win, but there are long and fascinating stalemates ahead.

52+

53+(Disclosure: I'm long decentralization by way of Bitcoin and Urbit. If you're on Urbit and would like to discuss *The Diff*, go to ~lableg-tadrex/the-diff.)

54+

55+1. There is naturally some resistance to this, both because of conflicts with different countries' norms and with other countries' natural desire to determine their own destiny. So it's a leaky abstraction, but it gets less leaky over time as economies get more integrated and thus more of the world has to standardize. The most direct example of this is the fact that [the dollar's share of global invoices is 4.7x the US's share of global imports](https://www.economist.com/schools-brief/2020/08/27/global-trades-dependence-on-dollars-lessens-its-benefits) ($, *Economist*). In the same way that English is most likely to be the shared second language of any two randomly-selected people who don't speak it as a first language, the dollar is most likely to be the second most useful currency to anyone in a country that doesn't use dollars.

content/blog/a-founders-farewell.mdnew file+619

@@ -0,0 +1,619 @@

1++++

2+title = "A Founder's Farewell"

3+date = "2019-01-13"

4+description = "My goal was always to fire myself at the first possible opportunity. I'm super happy to reach it."

5+aliases = [

6+ "/posts/essays/a-founders-farewell",

7+ "/posts/a-founders-farewell"

8+]

9+

10+[extra]

11+author = "Curtis Yarvin"

12+ship = "~sorreg-namtyv"

13+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/farewell.png"

14++++

15+

16+

17+

18+After 17 years, I've left the Urbit project.

19+

20+I've resigned as CTO, board member, and voting shareholder of

21+Tlon (Urbit's corporate sponsor). I've also reassigned my

22+personal galaxies to urbit.org (Urbit's embryonic foundation,

23+still in Tlon's custody).

24+

25+My family still has a few thousand Urbit stars (in long timelock

26+contracts), plus a nonvoting minority in Tlon. This isn't

27+authority, just compensation: I have zero central power over

28+either Urbit or Tlon. Nor will I contribute code to Urbit, nor

29+write nor speak publicly about it. I am actually done here.

30+

31+From the very start, I knew Urbit could not succeed until it

32+ceased to be mine and became the world's. Urbit works; its PKI

33+is on the Ethereum mainnet; it's open source; in every way,

34+technical, legal, and mathematical, it is the world's.

35+

36+(What _is_ Urbit? Please read the [primer](/primer).)

37+

38+Let's talk about: why I've left; the state of Tlon; and the state

39+of Urbit. If there's any time left, we'll read some poetry.

40+

41+## Why I left

42+

43+No one had the power to fire me. (If anyone wanted to, they kept

44+it to themselves.) I wanted to quit; I could; I should have; I did.

45+

46+I'm a thinker, not a doer; an explorer, not a leader; an author,

47+not a maintainer. My goal was always to fire myself at the

48+first possible opportunity. I'm super happy to reach it.

49+

50+Any creator is a sort of parent – where control is dependence,

51+powerlessness is independence, and independence is victory.

52+There are a lot of ways to light a fire. The last step is just

53+getting out of the way – which must be done not too late, not

54+too soon, and just right. No one can beat Satoshi in this act;

55+anyone should be delighted to follow him.

56+

57+I worked full-time on Urbit, alone and self-funded, for eleven

58+years. From 2002 to 2013, I wrote an end-to-end clean-slate

59+system-software stack: an axiomatic interpreter that fits on a

60+T-shirt, a typed functional language that doesn't use abstract

61+math, and a purely functional operating system. I didn't patent

62+any of this; I put it all in the public domain. (Not a valid

63+open-source license; Urbit is now MIT licensed.)

64+

65+By 2013 I had a stack that worked well enough to make [a

66+video](https://vimeo.com/75312418), then raise a 1.5M seed round. Urbit in 2013 was a

67+working product – in fact, Urbit has had a live global network

68+since November 2013. But in a new platform, the distance between

69+_working_ and _compelling_ is nontrivial. Especially for a seed

70+company with just a few young engineers, building something like

71+nothing ever built before.

72+

73+Urbit in 2013 had roughly the same feature set as Slack in 2013,

74+but less polished, and decentralized. It was pretty buggy and

75+slow. But had we put all our resources into debugging and

76+optimization, it would not have taken five years.

77+

78+My instinct was always that Urbit's delivery schedule should be

79+as long as possible. For me, there are always two Urbits: the

80+Urbit that exists, and the Urbit that should exist. To invent

81+the latter I have to inhabit it. When I look at the present,

82+I try as hard as possible to look at it from the perspective of

83+the future – that's where my head should be.

84+

85+This always makes me think Urbit sucks. And the last thing you

86+want to do is evangelize anything that sucks. This is a bias,

87+but that doesn't make it wrong. For instance: the 2013 Urbit had

88+a shell and a persistent distributed chat – but the shell was

89+mixed in with the kernel, and the chat with the network protocol.

90+As seen from the 2019 Urbit, this is very lame indeed.

91+

92+The conventional wisdom is to ship your embarrassing "MVP." For

93+several reasons, Urbit occupies a unique strategic position.

94+Urbit just isn't relevant until Urbit is, if not perfect,

95+uniformly excellent. It can't just work. It has to work right.

96+Urbit has to be amazing – which is hardly a useless discipline.

97+

98+I still did not think it would take five years to make Urbit

99+work right – or to get the resources to make it work right

100+(which only happened in 2018). But founders always delude

101+themselves, or no one would do it.

102+

103+Urbit is not uniformly excellent quite yet. There are a few

104+medium-sized cleanups in the near-term pipeline. But this is a

105+matter of months, not years. I don't see any unknown unknowns.

106+The adventure isn't over – but the exploration is over.

107+

108+A clean-slate system software stack, from fundamental interpreter

109+to social network, through typed functional language and

110+deterministic OS, is an enormous architectural journey – so

111+long and winding that it's easy for anyone to get lost in any

112+detail. Isn't that any explorer's first job: not getting lost?

113+

114+But once the route is marked, there is a second duty: getting out

115+of the way. It's time for surveyors, not explorers, to map,

116+measure and smooth every wrinkle on the map. That's how system

117+software matures. Lines first ripped in one long slash are

118+polished, straightened and refined across years and decades.

119+

120+And Urbit is too deep and interesting for one technical leader.

121+Every part of it needs its own owner. But others can't build a

122+real sense of ownership while the founder is still around. I'm

123+not even the best engineer on the project; I just got here first.

124+

125+This codebase is very young and very general; there is a lot of

126+fun left to be had with it; others deserve to have that fun.

127+

128+I have no successor as "BDFL." Technical leadership passes to

129+Tlon as a company. Urbit is open source and anyone may play, but

130+anyone who wants to catch up to Tlon still has a lot to learn.

131+Not that that should stop them!

132+

133+I can't make Urbit technically transparent in one speech. But

134+maybe I can shed a little light on the strategy, organization,

135+history and future of the company and the project. It's easier

136+to be frank on the way out.

137+

138+## Tlon, boiling oceans since 2013

139+

140+First of all: why did we do what we did?

141+

142+An ambitious system software project can inhabit one of four

143+institutional forms: bigco, startup, academia, or community.

144+

145+None of these is a fit for a clean-slate system software stack.

146+The startup is the least worst. I'd do it again.

147+

148+A normal startup lifecycle (Tlon actually got into YC, but

149+declined – this was either cool or lame) looks nothing like a

150+normal system-software lifecycle. Nor is Urbit normal. But

151+while Silicon Valley is absurd, it still fits Marianne Moore's

152+line: "with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there

153+is in it after all a place for the genuine."

154+

155+The less said about big companies and big science, the better.

156+But the choice between startup and community is interesting.

157+Let's talk a little about why Tlon, this corporation, exists,

158+then a little more about what it actually is.

159+

160+### Tlon, from cathedral to bazaar

161+

162+I used to think I could give Urbit directly to the world – that

163+I could just post the code and an open-source community could

164+take it from there. That'd probably work now, but it's not yet

165+the right thing – and not because nobody wants a revolution.

166+

167+I've never been an open-source person myself. But the model has

168+fascinated me since I encountered Nethack in the '80s. Now that

169+open-source software is a mature field, we can see what kinds

170+of problems the open-source "bazaar" mode is and isn't good at,

171+versus the corporate "cathedral" mode.

172+

173+One problem open source isn't good at is creative collaboration

174+on large and novel systems. For example, if we consider the set

175+of people creating Google's new Fuchsia OS, and the set of people

176+contributing npm modules, we see that it's almost impossible to

177+imagine something like Fuchsia as a community effort – but this

178+is not for lack of talent-hours. Imagine a bazaar creating a

179+feature film, and you'll get the picture. (And Fuchsia seems

180+like a fairly traditional OS.)

181+

182+Why is creative work so hard for bazaars? We could take this as

183+an axiom – but it's worth understanding.

184+

185+The path from concept to product is an annealing process. Your

186+code starts as a gas and ends as a metal. It must cool gradually

187+under precise control. When parts cool too fast, flaws appear.

188+Where flaws appear, the code must be reheated: ie, rewritten.

189+

190+Except for ASCII and a few algorithms, Nock, Hoon and Arvo didn't

191+really rely on anything from 20th-century CS. We didn't drop any

192+off-the-shelf parts into the oven; the whole stack is made from

193+gas. So the code in Urbit has been rewritten at least once; the

194+best code has been rewritten four or five times; perhaps some has

195+been rewritten ten, fifteen, even twenty times.

196+

197+In 2002, I started out with no idea what I was doing. Urbit was

198+interstellar vapor. I did have a decent grounding in 20th

199+century CS, academic and practical. In the '90s I was a grad

200+student in OS at Berkeley, then spent eight years on system

201+software projects (a language, an OS and a browser) in industry.

202+What I wanted, I did not know; what I knew, I did not want.

203+

204+In a long annealing process, it's important to triage the order

205+in which you solve problems. There are three kinds of problems:

206+problems you can't solve now, problems you don't have to solve

207+now, and hard problems. Unless you postpone anything that isn't

208+a hard but solvable problem, your gas will never turn into steel.

209+There are lots and lots and lots of ways to go nowhere fast.

210+

211+Somehow it's 2019. Urbit is hot iron under the hammer. It is

212+solid, but not yet hard. It has shape, but can yet be shaped.

213+It is done, but ought to be finished. It is a sword; you don't

214+want to get stabbed with it; it is not Excalibur, the blade to

215+end all blades.

216+

217+The bazaar is great. But cathedrals still exist for a reason.

218+The challenge for an ambitious system-software project is not

219+whether to choose the cathedral or bazaar model, but when and

220+how to transition from cathedral to bazaar.

221+

222+A cathedral – the same classic pyramid org-chart no doubt used

223+by the builders of the actual pyramids, or the actual cathedrals

224+– is economically less efficient than a bazaar. Why?

225+

226+Even on the world's most fun project, working for some dumb boss

227+is no fun. The bazaar succeeds because the project extracts free

228+labor from contributors – not by cheating them, but in exchange

229+for fun, status, experience, etc. But mainly fun, honestly.

230+

231+Whereas a cathedral costs a giant ton of money. But in exchange,

232+the cathedral gets _cohesion_ – the capacity for intelligent

233+coordinated action. Bazaars can coordinate, but not easily.

234+

235+Because a cathedral can coordinate, a cathedral can _create_ –

236+acting at a scale above individual action. A bazaar is very

237+useful, but a bazaar does not create. It can grow; it can heal,

238+harden, extend, and expand; but creation requires an individual

239+or a coordinated group.

240+

241+But a bazaar can get a lot more done, a lot faster and a lot

242+cheaper. So the right starting point for a bazaar is an existing

243+system which is very clear, very final, and very simple. So any

244+new system should be created by a cathedral and perfected by a

245+bazaar. Since these institutions share little or no structure,

246+the transition is by no means straightforward.

247+

248+### Tlon, just a little startup

249+

250+Tlon is Urbit's little corporate cathedral. It's about 20

251+people, about 15 of them engineers. Everyone is working on

252+Urbit, but not everyone is writing Hoon; there is client-side

253+work, Ethereum work, etc.

254+

255+The team is comfortably funded and more than competent. One Tlon

256+engineer is a 10-year, level 6 Google veteran; another is a YC

257+alum; these people are great, but not really outliers. And not

258+to be credentialist – there are plenty of dropouts, too.)

259+

260+Today, there's almost no part of the Urbit codebase that I still

261+know better than anyone else. There are even design areas that

262+others know better. When we transitioned from Nock 5 to Nock 4,

263+all I contributed was a suggestion. The same for our Ethereum

264+address collection, which our customers absolutely loved.

265+

266+Who's responsible for growing and maintaining this team? Who's

267+the stone at at the top of the pyramid? Not me: if you gave me a

268+goat to feed, the goat would die. The stone that holds the arch

269+together is Tlon's CEO and my cofounder, Galen Wolfe-Pauly.

270+

271+Tlon was founded in 2013; Galen led it through its long seed

272+stage, with only a few engineers, to 2018, when he finally

273+secured the resources to do the project justice. (Although way

274+too much of Tlon's energy in 2018 had to go into Ethereum.)

275+

276+Galen's previous project was the social meta-network Ost. He has

277+an architecture degree from Cooper Union; he is a great designer,

278+a good front-end engineer, and a pretty good surfer. (He also

279+runs the @urbit Twitter.)

280+

281+Galen sets Tlon's product vision and is responsible for both

282+visual appearance and human experience. Basically, Galen is the

283+Steve Jobs of Urbit, with only two differences: Galen's not an

284+asshole, and Steve wasn't short.

285+

286+Galen is joined in the new leadership team by Erik Newton

287+(operations, legal) and Anthony Arroyo (product, engineering).

288+Erik used to run a divorce-law firm and still is a relationship

289+coach. Anthony was a grad student in comparative literature and

290+managed engineering prototypes at Applied Minds.

291+

292+With my departure, Galen is in exclusive control of Tlon and

293+holds the only board seat. Tlon did take seed funding from VCs.

294+But outside investors have never held any management role.

295+

296+## Urbit, in the rear-view mirror

297+

298+Since I'm not going to talk about Urbit again, let me say a few

299+words that might otherwise go unsaid.

300+

301+### Urbit, a level and neutral platform

302+

303+Urbit's distribution and sponsorship hierarchy of galaxies,

304+stars and planets is _not_ designed as a political structure,

305+or even a social structure. The actual social layer is in

306+userspace -- one layer up.

307+

308+Socially and politically, Urbit is a flat network of planets.

309+Galaxies and stars are plumbing. No one cares which star is your

310+sponsor, any more than your Facebook friends care who your ISP

311+is, or you care what data center Facebook is in.

312+

313+The sponsorship hierarchy and the senate of galaxies (which can

314+amend Urbit's Ethereum constitution) are _technical_ governance

315+mechanisms. They exist to react to unanticipated technical

316+issues or conflicts (like denial-of-service attacks). Because

317+sponsorship has an escape mechanism, it is not a _feudal_ bond

318+(like your relationship to Facebook).

319+

320+Urbit is a decentralized network of social networks. No one can

321+regulate it. Urbit is made to blossom into an endless garden

322+of human cultures, each of which must regulate itself, none of

323+which can bother the others. The soil in which these flowers

324+grow must be level and neutral.

325+

326+### Urbit, anything but a fair distribution

327+

328+Who got those galaxies, anyway?

329+

330+Urbit has no mining mechanism and needs none. My model was: I

331+own the whole space, since I made it; on the other hand, it's

332+worthless until I find a way to give it away.

333+

334+In the end, I am probably the only individual with a fair amount

335+of Urbit address space (no galaxies, a few percent of all stars).

336+Tlon plus urbit.org also have about the right amount (slightly

337+less than half). The rest are held by third parties – all of

338+whom have either much more, or much less, than they deserve.

339+

340+But although the distribution of Urbit space was thoroughly

341+unfair, it was always _honest_ and never _corrupt_. Everyone

342+who has galaxies or stars did _something_ for Urbit. Some gave a

343+lot of money, some gave a little; some contributed a lot of code,

344+some just showed up. We paid a lawyer by bartering a pair. A

345+bunch went to contest winners who solved a trivial Nock problem

346+in 2010.

347+

348+What's unfair: the standards changed wildly across time. What's

349+honest: they were always the same across _people_. Granted, you

350+often had to be in the right place at the right time. This is

351+another problem with life that we can't fix.

352+

353+Every real system of property is unfair. Who deserves to own

354+Manhattan? Who does own it? If property be not unfair – if it

355+is not the result of respecting past accidents – it is not

356+property at all, but something else. I certainly would not do it

357+this haphazardly again, but the outcome is no tragedy.

358+

359+When you live in Manhattan, you simply don't worry about who

360+owns it or why; and nor does it matter. Are they Jews? Muslims?

361+Christians? Communists? Italians? You don't care and you don't

362+have to. You know it's basically random and probably unfair.

363+Randomness, even blatant unfairness, creates a kind of neutral,

364+peaceful, even promising urban anonymity.

365+

366+Property is always and everywhere a kind of amnesty. It says:

367+whatever happened in the past, this is now what is. When we all

368+agree that everyone has what they now have, however they got it,

369+we have a formula for peace. When we say that everyone should

370+have what they deserve, we can never expect everyone to agree –

371+which means we have planted permanent seeds of discord.

372+

373+And randomness is a virtue – it disrupts hidden patterns. The

374+galaxy owners include famous VCs and total nobodies; a Zen monk

375+and a former Orthodox nun; a blockchain industry leader and a

376+permaculture farmer. If they do have to all agree on something,

377+they should have little to agree on but the truth.

378+

379+## Urbit, a technical report card (January 2019)

380+

381+As a system-software stack, the fundamental thesis of Urbit is

382+that technical simplicity can flow all the way up to the top of

383+the stack, where it becomes human usability. If we can build a

384+purely functional OS, we can build a zero-maintenance server,

385+which is easy to understand because how it works is simple.

386+With this problem solved – nothing else matters.

387+

388+Unfortunately, I still have to give Urbit an "incomplete" here.

389+No grade is available, because usability depends on a lot of

390+fit-and-finish issues that are naturally back-loaded. I would

391+still much rather run an Urbit ship than a Mastodon instance.

392+But still, Urbit today can't quite promise zero maintenance.

393+

394+So we have to look at smaller indicators. One way to get anyone

395+to grade their own work is to ask them for three ways they've

396+succeeded, and three ways they've failed.

397+

398+### Urbit, three battles won

399+

400+I did once want to be a real computer scientist. Before my

401+expulsion for sordid & disturbing behavior, I was once a

402+19-year-old PhD student in CS at Berkeley. I even made an

403+embarrassing bet with Raph Levien as to which of us would win the

404+Turing Award – my money is definitely on Raph at this point.

405+You can even go and read my Usenix '93 paper on ASLR-secured

406+RPC, which won Best Student Paper and has like 50 citations.

407+

408+Well. That whole scene is a bad trip, kids. Avoid it. Also, if

409+you start out as Rimbaud, you might end up as Lebowski. On the

410+other hand, to have any excuse for boiling the ocean, you do have

411+to make some serious CS problems just go away. Here are three.

412+

413+#### Validation

414+

415+20th-century languages underrate the centrality of communication

416+to computing. Their type systems expect all data to live in a

417+single memory forever. They don't consider data serialization

418+and validation to be core competencies of a programming language.

419+

420+So serialization/validation is handled either ad hoc, or by

421+intermediate data description systems which have inherent

422+impedance mismatches with the language proper. Not only is work

423+done over and over – but most network security breaches exploit

424+seams in custom or complex deserialization and validation code.

425+

426+In Urbit there is one kind of data, a noun, which is an atom

427+(unsigned integer) or a cell (ordered pair of nouns). There is

428+one serialization model, which maps noun to atom to noun, in a

429+page of code. And a type defines a set of nouns by defining a

430+function of an arbitrary noun, whose range is that set – which

431+means any data type is also its own data validation function.

432+

433+#### Idempotence

434+

435+20th-century computers have two brains: one fast and temporary,

436+the other slow and permanent. When one of these two-brained

437+computers hears a packet, and sends an acknowledgment, that only

438+means the temporary brain heard it. Acks are not end-to-end

439+transactions.

440+

441+This means you can't write a command protocol where your commands

442+get executed exactly once. You can only choose "at least once"

443+or "at most once." This problem is as ridiculous and frustrating

444+as it sounds.

445+

446+You can address it in three ways: (a) make all your commands

447+formally idempotent, so that repeating them has no additional

448+effect; (b) insert a layer of stateful middleware — a message

449+queue; (c) be fine with "almost always once." Guess which

450+approach is most popular?

451+

452+Your Urbit ship has one permanent brain. Its acks are end-to-end

453+transactions — no packet is acknowledged until all its direct

454+effects are finalized. Every message channel is its own message

455+queue. And every message is executed once.

456+

457+#### Dependencies

458+

459+20th-century languages are all at least vaguely based on a

460+formalism from the '30s called the "lambda calculus." The

461+fundamental operation in lambda calculus is variable reduction

462+from name to value. So lambda languages all have a symbol table

463+or environment which binds names to values.

464+

465+Modern build systems assemble large programs out of small files

466+by reusing this symbol table for global function names, a process

467+called "linking." Unfortunately, linking causes a problem known

468+as "dependency hell," involving baffling, unpredictable upgrade

469+failures. The fundamental problem is the "diamond dependency" —

470+when a build requires two different versions of one symbol.

471+

472+Urbit does not use the lambda calculus, an environment or symbol

473+table, or linking. Because it pushes name resolution out of the

474+fundamental interpreter and up into the language, it can play

475+many more namespace juggling tricks. And its build system has no

476+trouble including multiple versions of the same library.

477+

478+### Urbit, three battles unwon

479+

480+As I mentioned earlier, triage is essential on any long journey.

481+You have to keep moving forward, even when you have no idea where

482+you're going – which means attacking the hardest problems you

483+can solve right now.

484+

485+Unfortunately, this is a different standard than the usual rule

486+for shipping a product: solve the most important problems first.

487+This principle of triage is a general case of Knuth's apothegm

488+against premature optimization. Urbit, in fact, was absurdly

489+slow for a long time, but after a couple of engineer-months of

490+focused optimization it seems fine now.

491+

492+But there are other areas where Urbit today is surprisingly weak.

493+All look careless, but all are the result of careful triage.

494+When you find a weakness due to triage, you may think you are

495+judging Urbit's quality. You are just judging its maturity –

496+which doesn't make your judgment wrong, of course.

497+

498+#### Opacity

499+

500+Urbit's notorious opacity is the problem that makes people

501+complain the most. It's not an unwarranted complaint.

502+

503+At least, it's not all an unwarranted complaint. Part of the

504+complaint is just about novelty. Novelty is of course inherent

505+in any clean-slate stack. I do regret making 0 true and 1 false.

506+On every other count, however, I offer all critics of Urbit's

507+novelty none but the most vulgar gesture.

508+

509+But novelty is not the only problem. Urbit's external

510+documentation has gotten much better in 2018 – in particular,

511+it's now much easier to learn the language. Its _internal_

512+documentation, and general code quality, remains at best poor to

513+average. Worse: the worst code is the oldest, deepest code,

514+which is also the most fundamental. Not only is it not

515+commented, it is full of cryptic, meaningless names.

516+

517+There is now a new style guide, which should enable all reference

518+documentation to migrate into the codebase. But this style guide

519+is so new that none of the codebase complies with it. The guide

520+demands "space-rated" code that documents every variable and

521+every line – and almost none of the codebase is space-rated.

522+

523+Urbit's internal opacity persists for two reasons, one good and

524+one bad. The bad reason is just laziness. The good reason is

525+justified fear of _premature explanation_, which like premature

526+optimization ruins the annealing process.

527+

528+When you don't know exactly what you're doing, preserve as much

529+ambiguity as possible. For example, a name that means something

530+is a commitment to one specific explanation; a name that means

531+nothing is no commitment at all. A cryptic name is productive

532+procrastination; it lets the hard problem of naming get solved

533+later, and hence better.

534+

535+#### Impermanence

536+

537+Your Urbit ship needs to be _permanent_. That means it doesn't

538+lose data, sink, or get wedged, or rot. It's not complicated.

539+I wish Urbit today could make this promise, but it can't.

540+

541+There are are two problems here: short-term permanence and

542+long-term permanence. Short-term permanence means your ship

543+can't fail or lose data except via OS or hardware failure.

544+Long-term permanence means you can put your ship on a USB stick

545+in a box for 50 years, or 100, or 500, and when you turn it on

546+in a modern interpreter it will upgrade itself and work fine.

547+

548+There aren't any significant structural obstacles to each of

549+these milestones. But we can't claim them yet. We haven't

550+really even worried about them. This is another triage case:

551+in this case, the issue is _premature reliability_.

552+

553+Permanence also includes security. Except for the on-chain PKI,

554+in which case you're trusting Ethereum, you shouldn't yet trust

555+Urbit's security at all. Sorry!

556+

557+#### Duplication

558+

559+Triage can procrastinate in the other direction. It can skip

560+problems that are too hard to solve. When you procrastinate,

561+always come back – in this case, when the problem is easier.

562+Here's one way Urbit has skipped a problem that was too hard.

563+

564+Urbit, as you may recall, is a single-level store. It has only

565+one brain. And yet, we resisted the natural unification of

566+_documents_ and _applications_ and _secrets_ that a one-brained

567+computer obviously suggests.

568+

569+Instead, Urbit today is built more the Unix way (if not the

570+Windows way). It has separate subsystems for tracking and

571+updating these three kinds of data. This was my design. Like

572+Urbit's opacity or impermanence, this was always obviously lame.

573+

574+Why do it the lame way? Because, before understanding the union

575+of these problems, we had to understand each problem by itself.

576+We didn't – not even close.

577+

578+No one else ever built a purely functional operating system. No

579+one is going to go straight from zero to the right thing. You

580+have to solve a hard problem, learn from it, and do it again.

581+

582+Now that the team has built and used the specialized subsystems,

583+it's probably time to go ahead and generalize. The problem now

584+strikes me as almost straightforward. The constraints are clear

585+and so are the tools. None of this was true a year ago.

586+

587+On the low end, triage keeps you moving forward by stopping you

588+from wasting time on easy problems. On the high end, triage

589+keeps you moving forward by keeping you from leaping too far

590+ahead, and falling down an impossible rathole.

591+

592+## Further reading

593+

594+What will I do personally? I'll spend more time with my kids.

595+I'll finish reading my 1911 Britannica – I am only on the B's.

596+I have no other long-term plans.

597+

598+But I won't be back to Urbit. I am leaving not just the project

599+but the field – no less than Satoshi, or Everett, or Rimbaud.

600+Will Satoshi weigh in on the next Bitcoin Cash fork? Did Rimbaud

601+fly back from Ethiopia for his book-release tour? (Did anyone

602+want him back?) It's not so bad to be a middle-aged Rimbaud.

603+

604+Is there more to say? Of course, but not in prose. Read

605+Bunting's _Chomei at Toyama_ and _Notes on a Fly-Leaf_; Cavafy's

606+_Il Gran Rifiuto_, Keeley & Sherrard translation; Canto XV of the

607+Inferno, Pinsky translation. You might learn something.

608+

609+## Apologies and acknowledgments

610+

611+I apologize to anyone who has too little Urbit space. I refuse

612+to guilt-trip anyone who has too much.

613+

614+I appreciate my friends by not naming them. I disarm my enemies

615+by inviting them to lunch – but only if they come unarmed.

616+

617+I thank everyone who has ever worked on Urbit and everyone who

618+will work on it in the future; our backers, great and small; my

619+cofounder, Galen, and his family; my parents, wife and kids.

content/blog/a-topiary.mdnew file+38

@@ -0,0 +1,38 @@

1++++

2+title = "A Topiary: Hypertext and Urbit"

3+date = "2021-06-13"

4+description = "A brief history of hypertext and Urbit networking"

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Reid Scoggin"

8+ship = "~sitful-hatred"

9+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/treebranches.jpeg"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+> Under the trees of England I meditated on this lost and perhaps mythical labyrinth. I imagined it untouched and perfect on the secret summit of some mountain; I imagined it drowned under rice paddies or beneath the sea; I imagined it infinite, made not only of eight-sided pavilions and of twisting paths but also of rivers, provinces and kingdoms... I thought of a maze of mazes, of a sinuous, ever growing maze which would take in both past and future and would somehow involve the stars.

15+

16+-- _The Garden of Forking Paths_, Jorge Luis Borges

17+

18+The pre-technological world was already [networked](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indra%27s_net). No material object and no idea has ever stood alone—"no man is an island". Language itself is a network of associations shared between a group of people. The question of technology is: how do we bring our web of associations into the realm of computers? The legacy internet has focused on social networks almost exclusively—our mammalian brains readily took to this, we all love to [signal](https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/robin-hanson/). But before “social media” there was something called hypertext: a seemingly modest way to connect documents shared between computers.

19+

20+A footnote in a book used to require a library, locating the referenced book, and finding the cited page (which might have footnotes itself)! Hypertext allows one to traverse a network quickly and easily with just mouse clicks, making information accessible to those without the time and resources to hunt down physical artifacts. Urbit’s “%graph-store” is not the same as hypertext but it does bear some familial resemblances. Fundamentally, %graph-store is a data structure that can accommodate disparate data types within a single edifice. It is based on [graph databases](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_database) and recent implementations such as [GraphQL](https://graphql.org/). To understand this data structure it is worth diving into the origins of hypertext—the original linked network.

21+

22+The story of hypertext begins at the end of WWII with an article in _The Atlantic_ that proposed to extend the human mind via machine. Vannevar Bush had seen first-hand the explosion of electronics manufacturing and scientific knowledge, recognizing the great peril and opportunity of such a revolution. His [description](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/) of the Memex presaged the technological world of today, envisioning a personal device that would allow the user to draw upon a vast library of information, and link documents together arbitrarily—what he called "associative indexing"—a deliberate recreation of how the mind connects thoughts.

23+

24+The 1960s saw the first implementations of these ideas. Ted Nelson's [writing](https://archive.org/details/SelectedPapers1977/page/n15/mode/2up) around _Project Xanadu_ elaborated this linking between documents into what Nelson called _hypertext_. Nelson imagined "a text arranged in a graph structure", centered around a corpus arranged in nonlinear sequence, manipulable by author or audience. The concept was first demonstrated in 1968, at Douglas Engelbart's 'Mother of all Demos', where a vision of computers as a collaborative social environment was revealed to the world. "[The Journal](https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/137/#7)", presented alongside other revolutionary demos, exhibited collaboratively edited documents with hyperlinked connections. Any time-travellers in the audience would have immediately recognized the first webpage. From here, the idea of a linked network of documents would be developed through successive phases of computing, from the mainframe to the PC.

25+

26+Experimentation with these ideas continued through the 1970s and 80s. A team directed by Andy Lippman at MIT extended the concept to threaded visual hypermedia with the _Aspen Movie Map_, a user-directed virtual tour of Aspen, Colorado. Hypertext and hypermedia gained a mass audience for the first time with HyperCard, a program that shipped with Mac computers. Users were able to collect or create '[stacks](https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks)' of interlinked cards; a personal body of text, art, and knowledge could be accrued and modified, or shared with others—though not yet with native networking capabilities.

27+

28+With the World Wide Web, hypertext achieved escape velocity. Initially a one-man [project](http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html), the world wide web was similar to Bush’s vision of the Memex—a way to share, index, and connect information between individuals and groups. The web succeeded by utilizing the physical infrastructure already available: PCs with graphical interfaces, DNS, and the internet. Critically, its method of transmitting and traversing texts was a standardized protocol, allowing a free body of information to assemble atop the new infrastructure by anyone willing to learn the tools. A new frontier was cleared and cultivated with open standards, but it would gradually face enclosure.

29+

30+In the following decade, after the first wave of social networking sites had crested but before phones became the primary web clients, Twitter was launched. Originally an awkward bridge between SMS and the web, its design eventually coalesced around static identity, posts with chronological sorting, and interlinked post threads. These simple primitives spawned a vast corpus of information, a graph-of-graphs intertwined and overlapped, mapping an entire platonic world. Twitter is fundamentally constrained by its very nature: it is the walled garden of an advertising company. The financial incentives of the server operators demanded seizure of the commons and the replacement of standardized protocols with proprietary databases.

31+

32+As the first networked services withered, a new critique was implicitly articulated in the construction of a [new kind of abstract machine](https://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-programming-from.html). Urbit learned from the past: tightly defined protocols, baked-in cryptography, and decentralization were key. If power over the network was determined by those who ran the servers, then we would run the servers ourselves.

33+

34+Urbit is not fundamentally a hypertext system; it is a new kind of computer, designed to participate in a peer-to-peer network that rejects the client-server model. All Urbit software takes its networking model for granted, it is not an ad-hoc layering of mismatched abstractions. Fundamental design decisions determine the trajectory of the future.

35+

36+Early [implementations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo4j) of graph databases and projects like [RDF](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework) hit on the same core idea: linked data needs its own data structure. In 2020 Urbit OS adopted an application called %graph-store that made use of a new, native [data structure](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-Gwfg442kV3cdfG7NnWPEf2TMa3uLUTAKkZD70ALZkE/edit) which would act as a database service for social applications. Chats, long-form text, and other types of data produced in the course of social computing now share the same tent, a single structure extensible to new types of content. Each item added to it is a node in a personal graph—a tree that grows branches as your computer communicates. These nodes can be linked arbitrarily to other graphs—Urbit's global immutable namespace grants both permanence and ownership and allows the graph’s branches to intertwine with others. Graphs can accommodate a variety of content, from simple text, to code and media yet to be conceived. You own your graph, and it is a record of your digital journey with others.

37+

38+Personal hypertext graphs are leaving behind proprietary platforms and gaining independence. Graphs until now have been used as tools of surveillance and marketing, but they are being reclaimed and sewn back into the network, each bound to the cryptographic identity of an individual, permanent computer. Where the map of your life was once splintered across a thousand systems and held in the custody of strangers, it is now possessed only by you and shared only as you see fit. On Urbit, an infinite forest of digital lives can take root, nesting their boughs and stalks.

content/blog/aesthetic-culture-1.mdnew file+103

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1++++

2+title = "Aesthetic Culture #1"

3+description = "One of the most exciting things about Urbit is the aesthetic and design around it, developed partly by Tlon (through the design of Urbit itself) and partly by the community (by producing great Urbit art)."

4+date = "2020-11-11"

5+

6+[extra]

7+description = "One of the most exciting things about Urbit is the aesthetic and design around it, developed partly by Tlon (through the design of Urbit itself) and partly by the community (by producing great Urbit art)."

8+author = "~nartes-fasrum"

9+ship = "~nartes-fasrum"

10+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/help-the-environment.jpg"

11++++

12+

13+

14+

15+_This post is the first in a series of digests centered on art produced within and about Urbit by a member of the community, ~nartes-fasrum. Monthly digests will be available within the Urbit Community group in Landscape, and will occasionally be compiled here on the blog to give you a sneak peek at some of what’s happening on the network. Enjoy! ~wolref-podlex_

16+

17+One of the most exciting things about Urbit is the aesthetic and design around it, developed partly by Tlon (through the design of Urbit itself) and partly by the community (by producing great Urbit art). As the community grows, it creates more art, and we have the opportunity to showcase some of the pieces we love. These works can draw curious new users in, and they give existing users ways to communicate their excitement to friends.

18+

19+To that end, I wrote [the Art by Urbit proposal](https://grants.urbit.org/proposals/636838408-art-by-urbit), a regular digest for the dissemination of Urbit art and propaganda. We'll bring you the works of both familiar faces and new users, in a variety of media types from image manipulation to 3D models and physical pieces. This first digest will cover some of the art produced in the past year, but will have a focus on the last two months. Future digests will be incremental updates summarizing the artworks of the prior month.

20+

21+## ~datnut-pollen

22+

23+~datnut- made a physical representation of their sigil from maple wood & epoxy resin, and mentioned the potential to use an Arduino to cause different lighting effects for different statuses of an urbit.

24+

25+

26+

27+## ~lagrev-nocfep

28+

29+~lagrev- [made a thread of Dinosaur Comics](https://twitter.com/sigilante/status/1299101593997127680), using the Urbit Whitepaper as the seed text.

30+

31+

32+

33+A sweet poem about the potential for Martian felines is theirs as well:

34+

35+

36+

37+## ~litmus-ritten

38+

39+~litmus- produces art full of glowing gases and colourful curves:

40+

41+

42+

43+~litmus- also drew Urbitan for the release of OS1:

44+

45+

46+

47+More of their work is available in the notebooks of the Internet Weirdness Research Unit.

48+

49+## ~minder-folden

50+

51+~minder- stylistically ranges from retrofuturistic memes to flat-out classic 50s retro:

52+

53+

54+

55+

56+

57+More of ~minder-’s work is available in his The New Era notebook.

58+

59+## ~naltyc-wornes

60+

61+~naltyc-, & by extension ~dasfeb industries, produces content related to the exploration of Urbit on small & unique computers:

62+

63+

64+

65+

66+

67+More of their work is available in the smol computers group.

68+

69+## ~nartes-fasrum

70+

71+I use GIMP to edit images I pull off various social media platforms, and usually post the results on Twitter at [@nartesfasrum](https://twitter.com/nartesfasrum).

72+

73+

74+

75+## ~norsyr-torryn

76+

77+No discussion of Urbit art would be complete without mentioning [~norsyr-'s Canvas app](https://github.com/yosoyubik/canvas), which won first place in the [Hackathon 2020](https://urbit.org/blog/hackathon-results/) event.

78+

79+

80+

81+## ~radbur-sivmus

82+

83+~radbur- writes poetry on a range of subjects, one of which could be Urbit. Interpretation of ["A Weaver's Regard"](https://t.fust.us/writing/poetry/weavers-regard) and ["Internet Absurdities"](https://t.fust.us/writing/poetry/internet-absurdities) is left as an exercise to the reader.

84+

85+## ~sitful-hatred

86+

87+~sitful- has a Martian Meme Depository chat in the Networked Subject group, which catalogs a number of the Urbit memes that have been created so far.

88+

89+

90+

91+## ~tocrex-holpen

92+

93+~tocrex- has been drawing the galaxies of Urbit, and uploading results to Twitter at [@tocrexholpen](https://twitter.com/tocrexholpen). Each galaxy has a unique design and outfit, with the galactic sigil proudly displayed as its face.

94+

95+

96+

97+## Landscape

98+

99+Something that's become quickly evident with the addition of background images to Landscape is that people love to customize their ship's appearance and make it feel more like home. To close things out, we're providing a pair of backgrounds — one darker, one lighter — for use on your ship (or your desktop, should you so desire).

100+

101+

102+

103+

content/blog/after-machine-war.mdnew file+40

@@ -0,0 +1,40 @@

1++++

2+title = "After the Machine War"

3+description = "The date is January 1, 2050. The place, New York City. The vibe...subdued."

4+date = "2021-03-14"

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Simon Kovacs"

8+ship = "~bacbec-lormur"

9+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/berlin-wall.jpeg"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+> The following fictional passage, from a book being written in an Urbit Group called “the Aleph,” sketches out a dismal future for the human race. As an item of speculative fiction, the piece is not what one might call original. Anyone could have come up with these ideas. In fact, several already have. The Matrix is an obvious antecedent. Vonnegut isn’t far behind either. And the treacly humanism lodged beneath the bitter humor resembles nothing so much as the work of that beau monde satirist, George Saunders.

15+>

16+> Really the only notable thing about it is that it was written on Urbit. And that, perhaps, has made all the difference.

17+>

18+> It’s easy to be pessimistic about the future. Intellectuals, especially, are drawn to pessimism, because pessimism (falsely) implies a greater wealth of knowledge about the ways of the world. But one thing the pessimist never sees coming is a turn for the better. To wit, the future described in the below excerpt doesn’t have to take place. And Urbit is one piece of evidence for the claim that it will not.

19+>

20+> The philosopher-cum-internet comedian Slavoj Zizek likes to point out that no one was really expecting the Soviet Union to collapse in 1989. In fact, the average Soviet dissident wasn’t even gunning for it. He was haggling over small reforms, pushing to get the less corrupt politicians to the top, just going about his day eating or opening a window or walking dully along. Then, kaboom. Collapse. No more USSR.

21+>

22+> Then as now, the unexpected is more likely to occur than most would believe. One thing is not only possible, but an established fact: A brand new digital infrastructure is slowly, quietly being built. While U.S. political parties haggle over $1,400 disbursements for citizens, the rules of global finance are being re-written in code. While pundits debate the merits of Dr. Seuss’s lesser known titles, a global shift away from traditional publishing is gaining steam. And while users and social apps themselves pop up and down like whack-a-mole, folks are putting down roots with permanent peer-to-peer digital identities. If you’re anything like an optimist, you’ll probably want to get on Urbit ASAP and put down your own.

23+

24+The date is January 1, 2050. The place, New York City. The vibe...subdued. Back in 2020, you made a note to yourself to take stock of the world around you here at the half-century mark. And now the time has come. What do you find? The air quality is a bit worse, the bad parts of town are a bit more dilapidated, the Knicks are still terrible—all in all, from the outside at least, not much has changed from 30 years ago. Today you wake up groggy on your self-adjusting Smart Bed (Smart Bed Never Sleeps), you make yourself a steaming pot of coffee (locally sourced, delivered within the half-hour by a drone, now that you’ve got Titicaca Prime), you shower and get ready for work.

25+

26+But what was that dream you had last night? Only the faintest traces of it remain. A luminous rainbow, a mountain landscape, a sense of profound inner peace, mixed with euphoria, mixed with...an intense desire to go out and buy some Health Morsels cereal?

27+

28+That’s odd. You’ve never even had Health Morsels. You open up your laptop, where you can view the activity of the iThink microchip that you got implanted in your cortex a few years ago. “Ads help Elysium provide you with free, quality sleep-monitoring. To disable ads, please upgrade to Elysium Premium.” That explains it. After all—and you pause for a moment over whether the forthcoming thought is yours or the iThink’s, before deciding that it’s much the same anyway—Health Morsels probably are delicious. And healthy, too.

29+

30+As usual, they’re setting something on fire outside your home. Normally you’d scroll back through your Squawker feed to see what it was all about, but today you’re late for work, and anyway you’re in a pleasant haze after the Health Morsels dream—no point ruining it by poring over the latest Squawker pile-on. You glance at the awning. Ah, the bodega. Toilet paper and Juul Pods are cheaper in bulk from Titicaca anyway.

31+

32+Another day at the office. You were never exactly passionate about content moderation, but hey, it keeps the lights on. (And since ConEd got absorbed by Titicaca, it’s been pretty important to have a Verified Income Stream.) It’s a normal day at work. Algorithms haven’t yet been able to filter out all Unverified Content—so it’s up to you the flag Unacceptable Violence, Disputed Claims, and Unfederated Currency transactions.

33+

34+Except after your pleasant dream, it all suddenly seems so drab. You start to wonder whether there was an error last night—maybe they turned the dream levels up too high. Something from your night-time vision just won’t leave your mind, like a film strip looping over and over. It’s that river beside a sloping field, like you used to swim in when you were a kid. You can almost feel the icy cold against your skin, the sticks and mud against the soles of your feet, and then there’s the ripe, marshy scent of the riverbed. Uh oh. You realize you’re close to danger levels. This isn’t where your head’s supposed to be at. Frantically you scroll through content, seeking to moderate it. A user threatening violence against Titicaca. A stream that violates DMCA. A highly dubious Squawker claim, with no support from experts. Flagged. Flagged. Flagged.

35+

36+Yet the river remains. You see it, you feel it, just as you feel the kiss of the sun on your shoulders, the breeze rustling through your damp hair.

37+

38+Now you know what’s coming. You brace for it and wait. Three. Two. One. ZAP. Your iThink produces an electric shock: plenty painful but not permanently damaging—at least that’s what the Verified studies show. The river recedes from your mind. Following the shock, your iThink, as versatile a little machine as ever was invented, delivers a few milligrams of both amphetamine and oxycodone, bringing on a wonderful feeling of simultaneous alertness and relaxation. You look up at your monitor. Content moderation doesn’t seem so bad, with the stimulant and the barbiturate swirling paradoxically through your system. It’s true what they say in the ads: iThink doesn’t just make you think better, it makes you feel better. You dive back into your content moderation with renewed verve, even flagging a couple completely innocent posts just out of surplus exuberance. So what if you hardly get outside at all these days, so what if you’ll never swim in that stupid river. The fastest electronics, the Your Health and Wellbeing tracked and adjusted by an intelligence far greater than that which you could ever hope to possess, a gizmo that gives a whole new meaning to the term neural net.

39+

40+2050 turned out to be a pretty good year after all.

content/blog/agency-daos.mdnew file+110

@@ -0,0 +1,110 @@

1++++

2+title = "The Dream of the Agency DAO"

3+date = "2022-11-04"

4+description = "As creative studios and agencies struggle for more creative freedom, DAOs and tokenization will surely take a more central role in the marketing and branding industries. Decentralization offers such entities benefits that could fundamentally reshape creatives’ relationships with clients—reducing layers of inefficiency and anti-creative incentives."

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Isaac Simpson"

8+ship = "~mogmet-tadnem"

9+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/blog/skybanner.jpg"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+

15+Chris Callahan runs an independent brand strategy agency called [Visitor](https://visitor.agency/). Visitor wrote the line that [emblazoned](https://astra-mag.com/articles/my-weekend-with-the-martians/) the sky over the parking lot that housed Urbit Assembly. Its work focuses on Web3 blue chips and up-and-comers: dev marketing, notoriously one of the toughest niches in the branding world.

16+

17+“Devs are very sensitive to puffery and cringe,” says Callahan. “Traditional tactics like headlines and manifestos fall flat. Clarity and vision are much more important because they showcase the benefit as well as a long term potential for use.”

18+

19+Why? Because developers eschew sales. If something is good, it will rise to the top without the help of annoying salespeople. The thing is, marketing-world creatives usually agree—we’re just bogged down by salespeople of our own. So we, like devs, yearn for the day when decentralization will save us from the social climbers and “connectors” that suck up all the oxygen.

20+

21+Enter the Agency DAO. The idea—a creative agency that solicits work, receives clients, hires creatives, and makes decisions all on the blockchain—is oft-discussed because it appeals to the crunchy, anti-establishment vibe at the core of every major ad agency. A trustless, leaderless creative community where everyone has equal voice and the best creative rises naturally to the top? The dream of the ‘90s come true!

22+

23+Unfortunately, decentralization in the ad world currently occupies much more podcast time than reality.

24+

25+## Creative by Committee

26+

27+But there are some actual attempts at making the Agency DAO a reality. Koto, a top creative agency known for creating the AirBNB brand, tried it with Web3 brand Polkadot. [It pit two pitches against each other to determine the future direction of the Polkadot brand by vote](https://vote.polkadot.network/). It used a quadratic voting via Snapshot to deliver the will of the Polkadot network to four “multisig curators” who executed the vote on chain.

28+

29+While the experiment worked, it also revealed the shortcomings of the blockchain’s ability to guide creative decisionmaking.

30+

31+“To organize Polkadot token holders who wanted to participate and create the voting parameters took very long,” says Callahan. “To have the wisdom of crowds decide on two design elements was an exemplary concept for Polkadot to own. The question is, did it push the work? Or was its value in consensus alone?”

32+

33+Quadratic voting is cool, but the creative process is long and complicated. Stakeholders chose between option A and option B. At the end of the day, that doesn’t feel like a significant innovation, especially if the vote isn’t even actually happening on chain. Rebranding sprints typically take around 3 months. This process took 11. Sure, it was a good way for Koto to play ball, but it wasn’t much more than that.

34+

35+Agency DAOs face the same central problem as ordinary DAOs, which can be summed up thusly: every decentralizing force is too costly, and every cost compromise moves the system back towards traditional hierarchies. The nature of creative work even further stymies the theoretical Agency DAO. Creative products almost always suffer when anti-hierarchical principles are put in place. As David Ogivly famously said,

36+

37+_“Some agencies pander to the craze for doing everything in committee. They boast about ‘team-work’ and decry the role of the individual. But no team can write an advertisement, and I doubt whether there is a single agency of any consequence which is not the lengthened shadow of one man.”_

38+

39+So this leaves us with the question of how exactly the DAO model can help creative agencies, and what such an organization might look like, and how Urbit can help. There are roughly three paths: 1) Project Bountification 2) Talent Retention 3) Idea Valuation.

40+

41+## Project Bountification

42+

43+In the Mad Men era, a few Agencies of Record (AORs) dominated the advertising world. These massive whales took every cent of a given big brand’s yearly advertising budget and charged a simple 15% premium on all media (e.g. radio time, TV time) purchased. A very simple and very profitable system, [now long gone](https://www.genedelibero.com/the-agency-of-record-the-shift-is-on-to-specialized-agencies/).

44+

45+Today, big brands typically have many agencies—sometimes hundreds—each with a different specialty, and each fighting for their own share of the budget. I’ve been in rooms with representatives from no less than 10 agencies—digital, DEI, experiential, CSR, influencer, etc—all pitching ideas for the same holiday campaign, and all surely billing upwards of $100/hour per person to do so.

46+

47+This sounds nice for agencies, but actually it isn’t—instead of focusing on the creative work, they must dedicate their energy towards constantly re-pitching themselves to the client and fighting with procurement people on rates. The managerial class types who control the budgets care a lot less about the quality of the creative than whether you remembered their dog’s birthday.

48+

49+Crypto could provide a solution to modern agencies’ woes by creating a flatter system for project acquisition; adopting the sort of decentralized bounty system some devs already use for Web3 projects.

50+

51+“Bounties are great,” says Callahan. “Big agency players should popularize them. I feel like if there's a way to do an on-chain bounty with select members who either hold a special token that allows participation on key briefs, that would help a lot.”

52+

53+How would such a system work? First, a brand issues a bounty for a project for work it needs done. Luckily, this basically already happens in advertising, it’s called a request for proposal, or RFP. The only difference here is instead of RFP acquisition and response being 90% schmooze-fest and 10% creativity/pitching prowess, it’s a lot more like what you’ve seen on Mad Men: the client’s RFP passes trustlessly to the bold creatives who spend many drunk, sleepless nights coming up with genius ways to knock their socks off.

54+

55+“A brand issues a bounty for a stunt activation that, for example, educates the world on the psychological benefits of calm computing,” Callahan explains. “The members of Agency DAO approve it, and create their own bounty for creatives inside the DAO. Bounties burn after 10 days. Ideas submitted and sent to client in the manner set by DAO.”

56+

57+Once the job is awarded, the chosen agency will continue this pattern, effectively removing the “account guy” layer—the sales-y middle people abhorred by both creatives and devs alike—and returning more focus to creativity.

58+

59+## Talent Retention

60+

61+“Professional creative” industries, e.g. marketing, branding, etc, suffer from turnover rates orders of magnitude higher than the industries they serve. Being a creative is both kind of awesome, because a new gig is never too far away, and also scary, your current gig reliant on the slightest whims of the client.

62+

63+This means that the market for creative talent in the form of copywriters, designers, art directors, animators, producers, editors, etc, is always choppy and competitive. Staffing sucks—it’s difficult to evaluate the quality of someone’s work until you’re actually working with them, because creatives stuff their portfolios with successful projects they’ve barely touched. Beyond that, now bloated Web2 lowballers like Fiverr and Upwork bottom out the market with garbage time labor that even the biggest brands still somehow fall for. Another great opportunity for Web3 disruption.

64+

65+The Agency DAO model provides permanence. Currently, some independent agencies offer equity packages that take a long time to vest, and are only ever worth anything if the agency sells. Owning fungible tokens from day one is a much better way to incentivize both work quality and retention.

66+

67+DAOs also offer flatter and more collaborative atmospheres, which creatives at least ostensibly want.

68+

69+“There’s total transparency of who works on what. Better collaboration between members, meaning happier, more fulfilled workers. Awards will be more meaningful and accurate,” says Callahan. “Plus, the value of your tokens naturally increases or decreases based on your performance. Just by getting hired at a successful DAO you can already be doing well.”

70+

71+Finally, a system that allows democratized voting on creative products, as opposed to traditional [Hype Dad aristocracies](https://thecarousel.substack.com/p/vibe-shift-to-destroy-marketing-world), could actually foster more Darwinistic environments where the best creative has a higher chance of rising to the top.

72+

73+“Eventually group preference will select one creative over others; causing repeat elections of the same member,” says Callahan. This could occur on both the agency level—removing the Hype Dad problem, e.g. lazy incumbents making lame decisions. “There's a sort of Darwinism that is created that can determine benefits or even redundancies for those not pulling their weight or who simply aren't as talented as others.”

74+

75+## Idea Valuation

76+

77+The creative industries are perhaps the only example of a field in which the artists retain no intellectual property right for their ideas. This is why advertising creatives make so much money—an advertiser can milk a good idea for decades and we’ll never see a dime.

78+

79+The tokenization inherent to the DAO model opens up several possibilities for valuing ideas in new ways that behave more like copyright.

80+

81+“The basic thought now is starting something I’m calling General Idea; pre-created, white label ideas based on research of real creative problems that need fixing,” says Callahan. “We NFT the ideas, sell them to clients. They make them or they resell that idea to other clients or agencies. That monetary markup value on the idea trickles down the original creator. More democratic way to share ideas and defend their ownership when they’ve been recorded on the blockchain.”

82+

83+This sort of blockchain-based soft copyright is one way to value an agency’s DAOs. Another, simpler way, is to sell NFTs or NFT-related independent creations of the agency itself. Art collective/creative agency [MSCHF](https://mschf.xyz/), for example, makes its money both via brand deals and also a la carte meme-to-merch drops. Agencies with a certain amount of clout could easily tokenize the clever side projects of its creatives—making it far less reliant on client deals and more able to capitalize on its creative prowess.

84+

85+“Pool Suite [another creative studio] does a great job of being a creative company that happens to make NFTs of music and general drops and stuff,” says Callahan. “They're a studio first and then a blockchain player after. I'd still consider them a ‘diet-DAO.’”

86+

87+[Édouard Urcades](https://fabled-faster.tlon.network/writing/stars) has designed interfaces for Tumblr and IBM, and currently serves as a design lead at Tlon. His project Structure is a “cork board” for creative projects on Urbit—sort of a “mercenary guild,” for UX/UI designers looking for work. Structure is run by a gnosis safe wallet operated by its 12 members. Beyond serving as a “soft on-ramp for Urbit-related design labor,” Ed plans to monetize Structure by selling Urbit merch designed in-house, both NFT and IRL.

88+

89+## How Urbit Can Help

90+

91+The three categories discussed above—project bountification, talent retention, idea valuation—present theoretical frameworks for the Agency DAO. However, the shortcomings of current DAO infrastructure and governance make them largely impossible. Enter Urbit.

92+

93+The creative industries rely almost entirely on reputation—so any Agency DAO without permanent pseudonymous ID is dead in the water.

94+

95+“Goodby Silverstein and Partners, for example, is widely regarded as one of the best ad agencies out there,” says Callahan. “When a big name in the creative industry goes to work there, the reputation of Goodby Silverstein increases.”

96+

97+Urbit IDs let you maintain your creative and working reputations while operating within a self-owned ecosystem that can’t be deleted. Beyond that, Urbit’s design-forward OS selects for self-expression in a way that no corporate-owned platform could.

98+

99+

100+“The sigil itself is its own design feature,” says Callahan.

101+

102+Simply put, running an Agency DAO on Discord and Google Docs would be fundamentally unserious. It’s one thing for a traditional agency to use Web2 products as _tools_ for its creatives. It’s quite another for Web2 products to be the only connection the agency has with its creatives outside of the blockchain.

103+

104+Recruitment, ideation, project sharing, and even simple chat aren’t possible on Web3 without something like Urbit to tie it all together. Sure, you could get a bunch of anonymous creatives together on a shared Figma, but there will be zero accountability and likely low participation. Whereas Urbit—particularly Holium’s forthcoming Realm—brings Urbit ID into a decentralized, permanent environment that connects members P2P, and allows on-chain transactions without leaving Urbit. All while maintaining permanent IDs.

105+

106+As creative studios and agencies struggle for more creative freedom, DAOs and tokenization will surely take a more central role in the marketing and branding industries. Decentralization offers such entities benefits that could fundamentally reshape creatives’ relationships with clients—reducing layers of inefficiency and anti-creative incentives. However, a decentralized ID layer like Urbit is needed before the Agency DAO can be practically attempted.

107+

108+–

109+

110+*Isaac Simpson is a Los Angeles based writer and the founder of the marketing agency [WILL](https://willtheagency.com/). You can read his work on his substack [The Carousel](https://thecarousel.substack.com/).*

content/blog/an-email.mdnew file+84

@@ -0,0 +1,84 @@

1++++

2+title = "An Email from the Archive"

3+description = "I found this email in my archives recently and thought it might be fun to share publicly."

4+date = "2020-11-29"

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Galen Wolfe-Pauly"

8+ship = "~ravmel-ropdyl"

9+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/moon.jpg"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+I found this email in my archives recently and thought it might be fun to share publicly.

15+

16+```

17+From: Galen Wolfe-Pauly <galen@tlon.io>

18+Date: Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 9:50 AM

19+Subject: Continuing

20+To: XXXXXXXXXXXXX

21+```

22+

23+Here are a few things I was thinking about after we chatted. It may be that I'm just reiterating things I already said — but perhaps it's useful:

24+

25+1 -

26+

27+Our collective desire to depend on digital communication tools vastly exceeds what I would have ever guessed. Even if you somehow factor out what’s addictive about the platforms we use today: they serve a real need. The crux of the problem with our current platforms is that they don’t actually serve the need that we want them to serve. They’re not tools in the way we expect tools to be. For the most part, the platforms we depend on serve the needs of their shareholders or some graph or another that needs to go ‘up’, which makes them compromised in a very deep way.

28+

29+In the pre-digital world we enjoyed a few things about the way we communicated, collaborated and did business that are dwindling: simplicity, durability and ownership. I’ll try to give some straightforward examples of what I mean:

30+

31+A - When I talk to someone directly, I’m not worried that someone else is listening in. If they go tell someone else what I said to them, that’s something for us to work out between us — they’re not _always_ reporting our conversations back to a third party. The constraints of the interaction and the privacy implications are _simple_ — I don’t think about them at all. Good privacy guarantees flow from a strict focus on simplicity. When two people want to talk to each other: give them a secure channel to talk. Putting a centrally-controlled service between them is just an interim solution because no one could figure out a better way to do it.

32+

33+B - When I write something down on paper, or type into a typewriter, I have an intuitive sense of the durability of what I’ve made. I have notes on my shelf I took ten years ago. I don’t worry about them disappearing. This means I can have a very direct, high-resolution relationship with the medium. I can pour myself into my physically-written notes in a way I would never pour myself into a Google Doc. Our digital tools are deeply untrustworthy because we know they can disappear, that they won’t actually last forever.

34+

35+C - Around 2008 I started limiting myself to a few specific drawing and writing tools. I use them all the time and can actually refine my relationship to them since I know they’re not going to change out from under me. Perhaps at some point these pens wont be made anymore, but the ones I have are actually _mine_. Similarly, the things I make with them actually belong to me in a way that doesn’t require some ridiculous terms of service. A sense of ownership, when it comes to the medium of communication, determines our level of trust and commitment.

36+

37+Our digital tools have to achieve the same level of simplicity, durability and ownership that our pre-digital tools did. Until they do, we’re always going to be in conflict with them, full stop.

38+

39+The main thing is that exactly none of our present platform-centric world can survive when you see things this way. The digital world we live in is composed of an insanely complicated, ephemeral set of tools that distinctly _do not_ belong to the people that use them.

40+

41+We’re going to be in a constant struggle with technology until it conforms to these three very basic expectations. These are the expectations we try to get Urbit to fall in-line with, of course. Something else could also succeed by satisfying them. But I also don’t really see anything else, aside from Bitcoin and maybe Ethereum, falling in line with these core principles.

42+

43+So: while I wish that Urbit was more mature and ready to capture those that are being purged from mainstream social media, are bored with it or are frustrated with the constraints of ‘productivity software’ — I think this conflict is going to drag on until people realize that what we’re in conflict with is the structure of the software we use. Using software that’s managed by other people is always going to cause serious problems all the way up at the user level. For more speculation on how this might play out, watch Black Mirror.

44+

45+2 -

46+

47+(1) is, in a way, a long-winded way of saying that the state of the world hasn’t changed our direction all that much. In order for Urbit to be approachable to use, it has to be very nicely made and that takes time and iteration. As the system stabilizes, Urbit can evolve in a more traditional way: we, along with others in the ecosystem, release stuff, observe how people use it, and try to make it better. We’re at the point where we’re nearly ready to get into that feedback loop, and we very much need to get there. We’re close.

48+

49+Urbit is a distinctly different _kind_ of software than anything we have now. Your Urbit is something you actually own and can do whatever you want with: not unlike your furniture or your kitchen tools. An Urbit is a tool for individual, human-scale computing and our whole approach to designing and making things is completely different. Most computing is about industrial-scale computing: where the software system stores everyone’s data and is managed by the people who build it.

50+

51+Urbit is the opposite of industrial-scale. Urbit is much more like something that’s carefully crafted and delivered to you directly. This craftsman-like approach to building software really isn’t a part of most modern software engineering.

52+

53+When I think about this from the standpoint of the person using what we make, it’s especially important. Urbit should feel like something that’s purposefully made by hand — not something you picked off the shelf at Wal-Mart. Some of this ethos was present in the early PC movement, but it’s mostly lost today. The care and attention that goes into building the system is also exactly what we make money on. People pay us to own a piece of it, to use it. We’re incentivized to make nice things, in the Urbit model, and we take that responsibility seriously.

54+

55+3 -

56+

57+Networks are a really important social form that’s only just beginning to come into existence. A network is neither a state nor a company, but something in-between. Bitcoin is a network, Ethereum is network (but it’s still far too centralized). Urbit is a young network.

58+

59+(In my view, a real network is always decentralized. Centralized networks are basically just companies.)

60+

61+Urbit is controlled by the collective of people who use it — in varying degrees, of course. The main thing is that this collective is bound together only by private keys and a blockchain, not a set of legal documents. The agreements between everyone on the network are in some cases more formalized (in terms of ownership) and looser (in terms of content moderation) than what we’re used to in either a state controlled or company controlled model. This is a very unusual kind of institution.

62+

63+On a successful Urbit network, Facebook, Airtable, and Signal are just successful applications. You could probably build companies around them that ship software to Urbit — but they’re more like 5 - 10 people instead of thousands.

64+

65+Urbit doesn’t aim to eat away at the government per se. Instead, it’s an important communication tool for institutions of any scale to actually take control of their means of collaboration. The efficiency of inter-government communication and government to populace communication can clearly be improved by _a whole lot_.

66+

67+4 -

68+

69+The most important thing is that people can generate a vision of the future. This can only emerge from a small collective of motivated people. Our public life is overwhelmed by people shooting from the hip, aiming for likes.

70+

71+There are difficult, infrastructural problems _all over the place_ that desperately need the considerate attention of small groups of people. Urbit, as communication tooling, is aimed at improving the quality of the fabric that binds these groups together. Or, to put it another way, before you can solve any specific problem you have to improve the problem solving process overall. Everything is gated on solving the process.

72+

73+5 -

74+

75+Christopher Alexander is, indeed, probably the biggest influence on my thinking when it comes to paying close attention to making things that both generate a deep sense of connection and are shaped by the people who inhabit them.

76+

77+[http://en.bp.ntu.edu.tw/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/06-Alexander-A-city-is-not-a-tree.pdf](http://en.bp.ntu.edu.tw/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/06-Alexander-A-city-is-not-a-tree.pdf) is one of his early, well known essays that’s easy to find online. I think ‘The Nature of Order’ is the thing that had the biggest impact on me, but it’s harder to find. There’s probably a PDF floating around on the internet somewhere. It's also a beautiful (four volume) book. The first volume kind of nails it. This talk is also great: [https://twitter.com/urbit/status/1148030042846326784](https://twitter.com/urbit/status/1148030042846326784)

78+

79+The thing that comes to mind lately is Hejduk. He had passed away by the time I was at Cooper, but I feel like I was educated in the ghost of his work. This documentary gives a good impression of his thinking: [https://www.amazon.com/John-Hejduk-Builder-Worlds/dp/B07NKQ72C8](https://www.amazon.com/John-Hejduk-Builder-Worlds/dp/B07NKQ72C8)

80+

81+Hejduk was able to see that architecture isn’t about building buildings per se, but something else. That was always quite obvious to me.

82+

83+Talk soon!

84+G

content/blog/an-urbit-overview.mdnew file+215

@@ -0,0 +1,215 @@

1++++

2+title = "An Urbit Overview"

3+date = "2016-05-10"

4+description = "A high-level overview of Urbit."

5+aliases = [

6+ "/posts/essays/an-urbit-overview",

7+ "/posts/an-urbit-overview"

8+]

9+

10+[extra]

11+author = "Galen Wolfe-Pauly"

12+ship = "~ravmel-ropdyl"

13+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/an-urbit-overview.jpg"

14++++

15+

16+

17+

18+## What Urbit is

19+

20+Urbit is a virtual city of general-purpose personal servers.

21+

22+## Your old personal server

23+

24+What's a personal server? In a sense, you already have one. Your

25+personal server is the combination of all the cloud services you use

26+now.

27+

28+This "server" is a mess. It's broken into 17 different fragments

29+which are scattered all over the planet. You have no control at all

30+over any of the pieces. The more we depend on Web services, the more

31+we realize how unsustainable this situation is.

32+

33+Can you remember all the services you have accounts for? How about

34+the username and password for each? Some of them will let you pull

35+your data out somehow, some won't. Sometimes you can move your data

36+between them, sometimes you can't. But they're all good at

37+showing you ads.

38+

39+## Your new personal server

40+

41+Your urbit is your own general-purpose server. It holds your

42+data; runs your apps; wrangles your connected devices; and

43+defines your secure identity. If you still need your old

44+services, it drives them with APIs.

45+

46+Your urbit presents your whole digital life as a single web

47+service. And since it's yours, open source and patent-free, it

48+never shows you ads. Or loses your data. Or updates without

49+your consent.

50+

51+Technically, Urbit is a new kind of OS that has a precise formal

52+definition. (Urbit is actually a [single mathematical function](https://media.urbit.org/whitepaper.pdf).) One advantage of a math-based OS is that Urbit is perfectly

53+portable. It can't tell whether it's in a cloud data center or on

54+your home PC.

55+

56+Concerned about mass surveillance? Download your urbit and restart it

57+on your laptop, or move to a new host in Iceland. Urbit's formal

58+simplicity makes managing it as easy as managing an iPhone: all you

59+have to decide is what apps to add.

60+

61+Each urbit is a node on a global, encrypted P2P network. Your Urbit

62+name, a generated pseudonym like `~talsur-todres`, is also your

63+network address. Like Bitcoin, Urbit address space is a cryptographic

64+asset with a limited supply.

65+

66+By keeping addresses scarce, we make spam and abuse expensive. Urbit

67+is a "friendly network," like the Internet in 1986, where a stranger

68+is nice until proven nasty. As it matures, Urbit will grow into a

69+decentralized, self-governing virtual city both safe and free.

70+

71+## The Urbit future

72+

73+In an Urbit world, your data is no longer trapped in a jumble of

74+proprietary servers. Your urbit is a permanent, versioned, typed

75+archive the size of your digital life. Even before you move your data

76+from a Web service to a local Urbit app, your urbit can drive your

77+account with an API or scraper.

78+

79+And within Urbit, data is never locked inside apps. Imagine if you

80+could painlessly switch between Facebook and Google+, Asana and

81+Trello, Tumblr and WordPress. Not only does your urbit upgrade itself

82+and its apps automatically, you can "sidegrade" a running app to

83+another vendor without losing data.

84+

85+Your urbit is also your digital identity. Along with your data

86+lifestream of media, messages and documents, it has the keys and

87+tokens to manage all your legacy Web services. It holds the keys

88+for your cryptocurrency wallets, so it can buy and sell for you.

89+(With one personal server to secure, not 17 different accounts,

90+you actually have the bandwidth to take security seriously.)

91+

92+You still use network services. But instead of interacting with

93+the service provider's HTML UI, which phones home using

94+proprietary HTTP APIs, you interact with a third-party app on

95+your urbit, which talks to multiple service providers using

96+public, typed Urbit protocols. For example, your urbit runs a

97+single shopping app, which downloads catalogs and uploads orders.

98+This app is one store which sells everything in the world, with a

99+salesman who's 100% on your side and always has the best price.

100+Every computing experience is different when the UI is working

101+exclusively for the user.

102+

103+Finally, your urbit is the hub for your network of connected

104+devices. Your smart thermostat, your wristband, your phone and

105+tablet, all run satellite urbits which talk securely to your main

106+urbit in the cloud.

107+

108+## A chance for digital freedom

109+

110+The promise of the personal server isn't just convenience.

111+General-purpose computing is magic. This magic must be in the

112+hands of all, not just those who can master Unix. The computer

113+is a bicycle for the mind. It's an open vehicle for exploration

114+and discovery. It's not a way to optimize ad delivery.

115+

116+Urbit, as virtual city, is a platform that brings together all our

117+datastreams -- from emails to heartbeats -- in a way that we ourselves

118+control. Can we work together to match faces in photos, without

119+submitting to some panopticon in Mountain View? While the first step

120+in freedom is the right to be left alone, the second is the power to

121+form new intentional communities, to create and evolve a voluntary

122+definition of public space. We have no idea at all what people will

123+do with this power.

124+

125+General-purpose computing is digital freedom. And today, a cloud data

126+center is the technically optimal locus of computation. The cloud is

127+always on, always available, never loses data. Hosts are sometimes

128+attacked; but they never intentionally tamper with their virtual

129+computers. The cloud can never be secure against a global adversary;

130+but most people don't have a global adversary. A single portable

131+platform provides "herd immunity" for the few who do need direct

132+physical control over their main computers.

133+

134+Though even laptops are atrophying into mere browsers, mass-market,

135+general-purpose computing on the client side remains an endangered

136+species that must be protected. But on the server side, this species

137+has never even _existed_. There has never been anything like a

138+mass-market personal server. Why not?

139+

140+## Freedom is an engineering problem

141+

142+Urbit is not a difficult idea. Urbit is like a flying car: the idea

143+is not the hard part. Almost everyone we talk to about Urbit turns

144+out to have had pretty much the same idea themselves. The problem is

145+building it.

146+

147+A server is a computer. It's running some operating system. This OS

148+is a flavor of Unix. There are no alternatives. It's connected to

149+some network. This network is the Internet. It has no competitors.

150+You can have a personal server, if it's a Unix server on the Internet.

151+

152+Almost no one thinks being a Unix system administrator is fun. Not

153+even Unix system administrators think running an Internet server is

154+fun. So the personal Unix/Internet server is like the personal

155+bulldozer. This is not a consumer product. Any number of engineers

156+can't turn a bulldozer into a bicycle.

157+

158+How did we build the personal bulldozer? We didn't. We started

159+from scratch. (The people who built the first PCs didn't start

160+with a mainframe OS, either.) We created a new platform: Urbit.

161+

162+Urbit doesn't compete with Unix and the Internet. It's a new,

163+opaque layer on top of them. Your browser runs on a native OS,

164+but it doesn't give Web apps any way to talk to the native OS.

165+Urbit is like a browser for the server side: code within Urbit is

166+formally isolated from the platform it runs on top of.

167+

168+Your urbit is a Unix process, in a data center or your PC. It sends

169+UDP packets over the Internet. It can both load and serve web pages

170+over HTTP. Except for character sets and crypto, nothing in Urbit

171+reuses or depends on any 20th-century code.

172+

173+Urbit is a complete, clean-slate system software stack: a

174+non-lambda interpreter (Nock), a functional language (Hoon), and

175+an event-driven OS (Arvo), with its own encrypted protocol

176+(Ames), typed revision control (Clay), reactive web server (Eyre)

177+and functional build system (Ford). The full system, including

178+basic apps, is only 30,000 lines of Hoon.

179+

180+The first end-to-end prototype of Urbit took one engineer eleven

181+years. The current beta took three more years, with about three

182+engineers on average.

183+

184+How does it take 14 years to write 30,000 lines of code? The code

185+wasn't the hard part. The hard part was rewriting it until it was

186+right. We think we've solved all the real CS problems, and we're

187+certainly done changing major interfaces. But it will take more than

188+our small team to deliver a polished Urbit user experience that can

189+actually challenge modern web apps.

190+

191+## Where we are, what we're doing

192+

193+Urbit is in feature freeze. It's a minimum viable product in

194+early beta. It still needs quite a bit of fit-and-finish work.

195+We certainly don't recommend it for end users or consider it in

196+any way secure. But it's fun to play with, if you're a hacker.

197+

198+This summer, we're making the switch to an open and transparent

199+development and specification process. A system as unusual as

200+Urbit can't be invented in public. But it has to be finished and

201+maintained in public.

202+

203+Additionally, we're creating an open political and economic process,

204+with a small, fixed-price public presale of Urbit address space. Join

205+us and help make this future actually happen.

206+

207+To keep reading, learn more about [Urbit's address

208+space](/blog/the-urbit-address-space); share our vision of the Urbit user

209+experience, from the [top down](/blog/what-is-urbit-for) or the [bottom

210+up](/blog/magic); check out the [development roadmap](/blog/roadmap);

211+evaluate Urbit's [beliefs and principles](/blog/beliefs-and-principles) or its

212+[interim constitution](/blog/interim-constitution).

213+

214+(For technical readers, check out our [documentation](https://urbit.org/docs/) or

215+the [whitepaper](https://media.urbit.org/whitepaper.pdf)).

content/blog/announcing-urbit-grants.mdnew file+49

@@ -0,0 +1,49 @@

1++++

2+title = "Announcing: Urbit Grants Program"

3+date = "2019-08-05"

4+description = "Announcing Urbit Grants, a way to earn stars through contributing."

5+aliases = [

6+ "/posts/essays/announcing-urbit-grants",

7+ "/posts/announcing-urbit-grants"

8+]

9+

10+[extra]

11+author = "Robert Mariani"

12+ship = "~lodleb-ritrul"

13++++

14+

15+We’ve long been grateful for the hard work of our open-source community, so we’re pleased to announce Grants, a program that gives contributors the opportunity to be compensated for their efforts. It’s in beta right now at [grants.urbit.org](https://grants.urbit.org/).

16+

17+The Grants program will reward valuable contributions with Azimuth stars in one of three ways: Gifts, Bounties, and Proposals.

18+

19+### Gifts

20+

21+We’ve periodically announced gifts for important contributions to the project – like in [2018](https://urbit.org/posts/2018-2-17-update/) and [2019](https://urbit.org/posts/urbit-grants-and-mid-2019-gifts/) – but we wanted to make this more formal.

22+

23+Not everyone always works on structured projects, so the lack of formal criteria for receiving a gift is meant to reward contributors who work outside of the bounty and grant system.

24+

25+Going forward, gifts will be awarded semi-annually (every six months). They’ll retain the informal and arbitrary nature of the awards that came before: Tlon will determine who gets what. We’ll work hard to make sure these payouts are fair.

26+

27+To see the gifts that have been awarded so far, check out the [History section](https://grants.urbit.org/history) of the Grants website.

28+

29+### Bounties

30+

31+Bounties are discrete projects in search of a champion. Tlon will define a clear deliverable, and some number of stars as their reward. Larger bounties will often have their star reward spread across multiple milestones.

32+

33+Contributors can apply to claim a bounty by clicking the “Request to work on this” button. Once a contributor is selected to work on a bounty, nobody else will be able to apply.

34+

35+Bounties are listed in the [Bounties explorer](https://grants.urbit.org/rfws). Play around with the explorer by filtering bounties using the Tag and Category features.

36+

37+### Proposals

38+

39+Proposals are a way for contributors to pitch their own ideas, with a targeted number of stars. Proposals can be accepted, rejected, or accepted with changes. Unlike bounties, a proposal can only be completed by the individual or group who submitted it.

40+

41+Proposals don’t need to be fleshed out like a bounty does, at least not initially. Submit an idea and Tlon will work with you to refine it.

42+

43+You can see the list of accepted proposals in the [Proposals explorer](https://grants.urbit.org/proposals).

44+

45+### What can you do?

46+

47+[Sign up](https://grants.urbit.org/auth/sign-up) on our Grants website page, then set up your profile so we know who you are, linking your GitHub, Twitter, and your Azimuth point: reputation is a factor in determining eligibility for a grant.

48+

49+Also, check out the [Grants section](https://urbit.org/faq/#grants-1) of the new Urbit FAQ for more information.

content/blog/ares.mdnew file+51

@@ -0,0 +1,51 @@

1++++

2+title = "Ares"

3+date = "2023-06-26"

4+description = "A light technical description of Ares, the new Urbit runtime"

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Noah Kumin"

8+ship = "~librex-dozryc"

9+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/blog/ares-header.png"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+## What is Ares?

15+

16+Ares is a new Urbit runtime that will be much faster and manage a much larger amount of data than previous versions of the runtime. Those new to Urbit commonly ask if they will be able to host photos and videos on their Urbit ships. Ares—a joint project from the Urbit Foundation, Tlon, and Zorp—sets the stage for us to be able to answer, simply, “Yes.” Ares is still a work in progress, but we expect to see the new binaries rolled out later this year. There are three components to the project. Let’s talk about them one by one.

17+

18+## 1. Code Generation

19+

20+Modern CPUs are extraordinarily fast. But until now your Urbit hasn’t been able to take full advantage of this fact. One way to conceptualize the problem is to imagine a train that is only able to go as fast as a track-worker can lay down track for it. In this analogy, your CPU is the train, and the track-worker is the Urbit runtime. The aim is to have large sections of track laid down ahead of time. Ares includes a codegen system that compiles Nock, Urbit’s assembly language, to machine code that the CPU can predict well.

21+

22+This system addresses what has until now been a problem: Nock is meant to invoke other code in a given Urbit computer’s “subject.” Or, in more common parlance, in the computer’s “state.” Your state changes with every new message your Urbit computer sends and receives, or with any new event in any app. That makes it hard to make the resulting machine code run fast, since the CPU needs to read from the subject while it’s running in order to figure out what machine code will be run next.

23+

24+The new code generation process in Ares solves this problem by using a system which the developers have called “subject knowledge analysis.” What does this mean? By analyzing how an Urbit subject might change over the course of a Nock computation, Ares will learn about the subject's tree shape and about its data dependencies (*i.e.*, the way that later parts of the computation depend on earlier parts of the computation). This allows those parts of the subject which are known at the time of compiling Nock to machine code to remain known at later points in the computation.

25+

26+To go back to our metaphor of train tracks, this is what allows the “track” to be laid down ahead of time. This set of known parts of the subject typically includes Nock formulas stored in [cores](https://developers.urbit.org/guides/core/hoon-school/F-cores#cores). This allows the resulting machine code to use direct jumps to perform Nock function calls. Without this “subject knowledge analysis,” the CPU would have had to perform an “indirect jump” by calculating the location to which a later instruction would jump. Now your computer’s CPU can jump directly to where it’s supposed to go.

27+

28+## 2. 2stackz Noun Allocator

29+

30+Ares will make use of what we’re calling the *2stackz noun allocator*. With the advent of Ares, your Urbit will be a virtual machine with two stacks and no heap. What does this mean? Traditionally, a program has a *stack* and a *heap*. The stack is a linear data structure within a program used for the program’s execution. The heap is a less structured region of memory that is used for storing large pieces of data or data that you want to keep around for a while without taking up space in the stack. However, the heap is slower, because its system for allocating memory is less orderly. (Imagine, say, trying to find a specific pair of socks in a heap of clothing.)

31+

32+Ares recognizes that because Nock is much more constrained than most languages, the Urbit runtime doesn’t actually need a heap. Instead you can take the function call stack and split it in two. The top of either stack can then be used as a little temporary heap. Whenever a function executes, you copy the data that gets returned from one stack to the other. And all the intermediate products that get created when running that function (*i.e.*, other functions that got called by the initial function) sit there as *garbage* (unwanted or unused data) in between the two stacks. But you don’t have to do the same sort of bookkeeping—tracking and updating these values—that you would have to do with a heap.

33+

34+Every piece of data in your Urbit computer is a noun. A noun is an atom (a positive integer or zero) or a cell (a pair of nouns). Before Ares, both allocating and freeing a noun in the Urbit runtime were processes that took a lot of time. (To *allocate* a noun is to put that noun in memory and to *free* it is to tell your urbit that you don’t need it any more.) Ares should make both of these processes much faster. This is good news because the Urbit runtime allocates nouns (particularly pairs of nouns, known as cells) like nobody’s business.

35+

36+## 3. Persistent Memory Arena

37+

38+Ares’s Persistent Memory Arena is for managing large amounts of data within your urbit in such a way that your urbit does not get slow. If you have terabytes of data within your Urbit, you can only have a very small subset of that within your hardware’s RAM at a given time. The rest of that data is going to have to live on disk—the section of your hardware that is more capacious but takes more time to access.

39+

40+To deal with this fact, your motherboard moves data back and forth between RAM and disk depending on what data needs to be accessed at a given time. This is known as *paging*, because it does so one *page* (usually four kilobytes) at a time. Traditionally operating systems will handle paging for you, but they do it in a generic way. The Persistent Memory Arena is designed specifically for managing Urbit's single-level store.

41+

42+A *single-level store* means that there’s no distinction in the operating system between data that lives in RAM and data that lives on disk. Instead of having two levels from which you can access data, you only have one, and the system itself manages which parts of the data are in RAM and which are in disk. The Persistent Memory Arena is an optimization for handling a large amount of data in a single level store. It is for nouns that persist between computations. Using the PMA, your urbit’s state can grow large without being hemmed in by the limitations of your hardware’s RAM.

43+

44+

45+## Updates and Links

46+

47+You can find the Ares GitHub repository [here](https://github.com/urbit/ares). The technical proposal is [here](https://github.com/urbit/ares/blob/status/docs/proposal/proposal-nock-performance.md). Check back at the Urbit Google Groups [listserv](https://groups.google.com/a/urbit.org/g/dev/), the [@zodisok](https://twitter.com/zodisok) Twitter account, and the Urbit Foundation [group](https://tlon.network/lure/~halbex-palheb/uf-public) for updates about the upcoming release.

48+

49+–

50+

51+*Noah Kumin is the founder and editor in chief of the [Mars Review of Books](https://marsreview.org/).*

content/blog/august-2022-grants-program.mdnew file+73

@@ -0,0 +1,73 @@

1++++

2+title = "August Grants Program Review"

3+date = "2022-08-30"

4+description = "The completion of the first cohort of Hoon School Live and the following App School Live program minted dozens of capable new Hoon developers. These developers are completing applications, closing out bounties, and putting together proposals at a rapid pace, with more to come as Assembly 2022 draws near."

5+[extra]

6+author = ""

7+ship = "~sarlev-sarsen"

8+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/blog/b52.jpg"

9++++

10+

11+

12+

13+# Completed Grants

14+

15+Recently completed grant projects include Urbit micro-blogging, Hoon-native Discord bridging, Urbit’s first arcade-style game, Port application improvements, Ethereum bookkeeping and eth-provider infrastructure.

16+

17+* [Trill](https://urbit.org/applications/~sortug/trill) and sister application [Urbit Feed Aggregator](https://urbit.org/applications/~sortug/ufa) give you a way to escape from Twitter’s algorithms while still being able to share your shower thoughts with your followers.

18+* [Faux](https://urbit.org/applications/~midsum-salrux/faux) is a transformation of the python-based Urbit to Discord bridge, turning it into a Hoon native app and offering a front-end that takes you through the setup experience, letting you to bring your Discord friends a little taste of Urbit.

19+* [Slam](https://urbit.org/applications/~hanfel-dovned/slam), everyone’s favorite new arcade game, integrates with [Gora](https://urbit.org/applications/~dalten/gora) and [pals](https://urbit.org/applications/~paldev/pals), utilizing a mechanism whereby the number of gorae held by your pals will influence the way your game is played.

20+* The [Ethereum Provider](https://urbit.org/grants/eth-provider) grant gets the network a step closer to decentralized Ethereum access, particularly for those who don’t wish to rely on an infura node.

21+* A bounty for [Port Maintenance](https://urbit.org/grants/port-maintenance) delivered iterative improvements to the Port application for those who run their ships on a local machine.

22+* And Quartus delivered [Books](https://urbit.org/applications/~doller-doller-rabsef-bicrym/books), an Ethereum address and transaction manager for you to easily append notes and memos to your on chain transactions without having to rely on a third party (as a friendly reminder, [Urbit is not yet a secure environment so please be careful](https://twitter.com/pcmonk/status/1563634078779592709?s=20&t=FN7VVjMdjyIdukSvtg5_7g) what information you store on your ship).

23+

24+

25+# Proposals

26+

27+As the above grants wrap up, more grants are coming to life. Proposals are community generated and selected projects which offer contributors the space to build whatever tooling or applications they believe Urbit needs. Each of the following projects was funded in August:

28+

29+

30+

31+* [Herd](https://urbit.org/grants/herd) - Dependency management for Citadel

32+* [Full Stop](https://urbit.org/grants/full-stop) - A menstruation tracker for Urbit

33+* [Peat](https://urbit.org/grants/peat) - Urbit’s first backup utility

34+* [Quorum](https://urbit.org/grants/quorum) - A clone of stack exchange on Urbit

35+* [Gather](https://urbit.org/grants/gather) - an Urbit native meetup tool

36+* [Olif](https://urbit.org/grants/olif) - Olfactive rendering of Urbit address space

37+* [Urbit Interface Framework](https://urbit.org/grants/urbit-interface-framework) - Framework for alternative web browser interface

38+* [Whom](https://urbit.org/grants/whom) - A profile and contacts manager

39+

40+

41+# Apprenticeships

42+

43+Apprenticeships are also bringing opportunities for hands-on developer education and enabling seasoned contributors to share knowledge through real world projects. And contributors get to earn address space as they learn the stack and grow their network.

44+

45+Three new apprenticeships began in August:

46+

47+

48+

49+* [Loom Pointer Compression](https://urbit.org/grants/loom-pointer-compression) - Work to double the size of the loom

50+* [Build a UI for Volt](https://urbit.org/grants/volt-ui) - An interface for %volt, Urbit’s lightning wallet agent

51+* [Vere Profiling](https://urbit.org/grants/profiling) - Uncovering and visualized performance bottlenecks in the runtime

52+

53+

54+# Bounties

55+

56+August also brings with it the assignment of previously open bounties to developers looking to grow their portfolio of Urbit projects. Many of bounties that found contributors are a part of [Holium’s App Dev Summer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHyzH09QaZQ), and are slated to be completed by Assembly in Miami:

57+

58+* [Minesweeper](https://urbit.org/grants/minesweeper) - A classic desktop game, now natively in hoon

59+* [Abacus](https://urbit.org/grants/abacus) - A basic calculator app with the ability to convert units

60+* [Chronicle](https://urbit.org/grants/chronicle) - A news app that links articles from group channels

61+* [Lexicon](https://urbit.org/grants/lexicon) - A simple dictionary app with custom definitions for a group

62+* [Chess Improvements](https://urbit.org/grants/chess-bounty) - An enhanced chess experience with timing and ELO servers

63+

64+Even with all the claimed bounties, there remain a variety of projects which currently seek developers. Check out the following grants and apply to those that fit your skills and interests:

65+

66+

67+* [Trove](https://urbit.org/grants/trove) - A group file sharing tool

68+* [Urbit Native Ethereum wallet](https://urbit.org/grants/eth-wallet) - An ETH wallet for Urbit maxis

69+* [UrbitSwap](https://urbit.org/grants/urbitswap) - An Urbit-hosted Uniswap instance

70+* [Tune slaw/scot jets](https://urbit.org/grants/slaw-scot-jets) - Tuning jets for better performance

71+* [New Mars Persistent Memory](https://urbit.org/grants/persistent-memory) - Development of a persistent memory arena

72+

73+Have a project that you want to help fund and think would make a good bounty? Want to propose a project about which you are passionate? Looking for a mentor to better learn a part of the Urbit ecosystem? For more information on current projects and opportunities from the Urbit Foundation’s grant program, visit [urbit.org/grants](/grants) or reach out to ~sarlev-sarsen to get involved.

content/blog/azimuth-as-multipass.mdnew file+34

@@ -0,0 +1,34 @@

1++++

2+title = "Azimuth as Multipass"

3+date = "2019-05-15"

4+description = "What if everyone had a single 'civilizational key'?"

5+aliases = [

6+ "/posts/essays/azimuth-as-multipass/",

7+ "/posts/azimuth-as-multipass"

8+]

9+

10+[extra]

11+author = "Galen Wolfe-Pauly"

12+ship = "~ravmel-ropdyl"

13+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/azimuth-as-multipass-1.png"

14++++

15+

16+

17+

18+Why can’t I just walk up to a door and have it open for me? Why can’t I simply arrive at a restaurant and have them know I’m there? Shouldn’t I be able to buy a ticket to a show with my Multipass then scan it at the entrance and use it to buy drinks?

19+

20+Why should I have to log in with MEGACORP? Today, in most cases, it’s a different MEGACORP for every single context. It’s a MEGAMESS.

21+

22+Why not just use one? Forget about how we get there for a moment: just imagine how simple it could be.

23+

24+An Azimuth point is an identity and a wallet. Both a driver’s license and a credit card. Identity and money. Think about it as a ‘civilizational key’ for a new society. Concretely, it’s nice to imagine it as a physical object. A slick, card sized object with an e-ink screen. You can tap it to pay, tap it to enter, and plug it into a computer to boot your Arvo OS.

25+

26+Worried about losing it? Just remember your ticket. If you use our wallet system, all you need to remember is something like `~ravmel-ropdyl` and `~habpem-sondem-pidbyt-solbyn`. A point and a ticket. That’s it.

27+

28+Woke up in the desert, no idea how you got there, but can still remember your point and ticket? Great! Just get to an internet connection and re-ticket – you’ll be fine. Although probably dehydrated.

29+

30+If you’re someone who’s worried about getting kidnapped, just use a child identity. Your Azimuth planet has ~4B of them, so you can always invalidate one if you lose it.

31+

32+Perhaps part of how we ended up in the world we’re in is that we didn’t have something like Azimuth to begin with. Today, it’s backwards: everyone has an address on the network, but no one has an identity.

33+

34+We think everyone needs an identity that can hold money and have packets routed to it. Start there, and it’s quite fun to imagine where you end up. A civilized digital society might even be possible after all.

content/blog/azimuth-is-on-chain.mdnew file+107

@@ -0,0 +1,107 @@

1++++

2+title = "Azimuth is On-Chain"

3+date = "2019-01-13"

4+description = "The Urbit address space, now called Azimuth, is on the blockchain. And too many other things to fit into a single post."

5+aliases = [

6+ "/posts/essays/azimuth-is-on-chain",

7+ "/posts/azimuth-is-on-chain"

8+]

9+

10+[extra]

11+author = "Galen Wolfe-Pauly"

12+ship = "~ravmel-ropdyl"

13++++

14+

15+

16+

17+The Urbit address space is now live on the Ethereum blockchain. We’re calling the PKI ‘Azimuth’ and you can find it at [`0x223c067f8cf28ae173ee5cafea60ca44c335fecb`](https://etherscan.io/address/0x223c067f8cf28ae173ee5cafea60ca44c335fecb) or [`azimuth.eth`](https://etherscan.io/address/azimuth.eth). Owners of Azimuth ‘points’ (galaxies, stars or planets) can use [Bridge](https://github.com/urbit/bridge/releases) to manage them and view their balance now.

18+

19+Sometime in the next few days, owners of Azimuth points will be able to boot Arvo, the Urbit OS, from their Azimuth point and request access to one of our 'cities': private communities for chat and discussion. These new cities use Landscape, a brand new UI for using Urbit in the browser.

20+

21+This means you can boot a deterministic OS from an identity you own, join a totally independent, decentralized and self-governing network and run a clean, simple UI. Pretty exciting. Is it ready for ordinary users? Definitely not.

22+

23+Since 2013, you've been able to boot an Urbit and join our test network. And, since 2013, we've always had our sights set on building a personal server that can both last 100 years and be delightful to use. Urbit isn't meant just to be as good as the MEGACORP software we use today. It's meant to be much, much better.

24+

25+But Urbit is not a 'product' in the conventional sense. Urbit is a public thing. It's meant to belong to everyone. For the past six years, much of our work was research and design work. Which means lots of weird ideas thrown away, and others rewritten or redesigned many times over. Our work has always been open source, but we tend to be pretty quiet about it.

26+

27+With Azimuth on the blockchain, it's time for us to start engaging with the world more directly.

28+

29+We aren't calling this a launch. There's no keynote. There's no dancing on stage. I mean, it's 2019. You must be pretty sick of being marketed to. We'll try to stick to the specifics here. What's new, what we've been up to and what works. There's too much to fit into a single post, so we'll keep it pretty light for now. Each of these sections will probably get its own post in the near future.

30+

31+> Note: As of `~2019.1.14` we're in the process of rebooting the Arvo network. We expect it to be back online before the end of the week. We'll update this post and [tweet](https://twitter.com/urbit) when the network is online and stable.

32+

33+## Rethinking the stack

34+

35+We've started to talk about Urbit as a stack of three parts: Azimuth, the address space and identity layer on Ethereum; Arvo, the OS and overlay network; and Aegean, a pattern for building decentralized communities on the Arvo network.

36+

37+We tried to capture this separation in [the primer](/primer), a new overview of Urbit. Explaining Urbit has always been challenging. A monolithic project that is OS, network, language, VM and UI barely makes sense. Separating the layers helps, we think.

38+

39+Let's step through them to see what's new.

40+

41+## Azimuth

42+

43+

44+

45+As a quick refresher: Urbit addresses, now called Azimuth 'points', are short names like `~diblun-tidduc`. You own your Azimuth point with a private key and can use it as a routable network address on the Arvo network. You can read more about Azimuth in [the primer](/primer#what-azimuth-is). If you're curious who owns all this address space, you can find that [in there too](/primer#azimuth-distribution).

46+

47+In late 2017 we decided to migrate the yet-to-be-named Azimuth to a system of Ethereum contracts. After a year of coding, testing, auditing and migrating — they're now fully deployed to the Ethereum mainnet.

48+

49+Azimuth is basically two parts, a database of who owns which points, and a set of rules about what points and their owners can do. That set of rules is called Ecliptic, and can be found at [`0x6ac07b7c4601b5ce11de8dfe6335b871c7c4dd4d`](https://etherscan.io/address/0x6ac07b7c4601b5ce11de8dfe6335b871c7c4dd4d) or [`ecliptic.eth`](https://etherscan.io/address/ecliptic.eth). The top-level Azimuth points, the galaxies, can vote on upgrades to the Ecliptic contract, but they can't edit the database of who owns what.

50+

51+The ownership database contract is called Azimuth, which you can find at [`0x223c067f8cf28ae173ee5cafea60ca44c335fecb`](https://etherscan.io/address/0x223c067f8cf28ae173ee5cafea60ca44c335fecb) or [`azimuth.eth`](https://etherscan.io/address/azimuth.eth). For those of you who own address space, you can use the `getOwnedPoints` function in the 'Read Contract' tab to check your balance. The function returns the number (not the phonemic string like `~ravmel-ropdyl`) of your points. Each Azimuth point is an ERC-721, non-fungible piece of digital property.

52+

53+To manage your points, we built [Bridge](https://github.com/urbit/bridge/releases), a completely custom interface for interacting with our Solidity contracts. Interface quality is really important to us, and we couldn't find anything in the 'crypto' world that met our standards. Bridge is good, but crypto UX is a hard problem. We've already got some ideas for improvements.

54+

55+If you're curious, you can find the source for the contracts in the [`urbit/azimuth`](https://github.com/urbit/azimuth) repo. The Bridge source is in the [`urbit/bridge`](https://github.com/urbit/bridge) repo.

56+

57+We had the source for our contracts audited by Open Zeppelin, Blockchain at Berkeley and Bloctrax. Did we miss something? We sure hope not — but we'd happily compensate anyone who can find bugs. Please reach out to security@urbit.org if you find something of concern. We'd be happy to hear from you.

58+

59+

60+

61+Azimuth names have always had a pronunciation system. `~ronryd-nidseg` is 13,695,781, for example. Now, they also have a visual system. We call these strange crests from another planet 'sigils', and you'll notice them used throughout all our new interfaces. You can find the source in the [`urbit/sigil-js`](https://github.com/urbit/sigil-js) repository. Building these was a lot of fun — we'll save the details for a future post.

62+

63+So, how do you get an Azimuth point? We've left that question unanswered intentionally. Azimuth points are meant to be like digital land, not currency. They should change hands slowly. In order to get an Azimuth point, you'll need to find someone who already has one and is willing to part with it.

64+

65+## Arvo

66+

67+

68+

69+Arvo boots from Ethereum, is no longer embarrassingly slow, and has a brand new build system. [Our documentation](https://urbit.org/docs/learn/arvo/hoon) has also improved quite a lot. Hoon, Arvo's programming language, has had a lot of work done to its type system and compiler. We built new tooling for generating static sites (you're probably reading this on one right now) that are much, much faster and easier to use.

70+

71+It's tough to talk about the progress we've made on Arvo without writing a long technical post. We'll save that for later. In a way, what's remarkable about Arvo is that it has become _less_ remarkable. It's more stable, faster, and the code quality has improved.

72+

73+There's plenty of work to do, though. Should you be building on top of Arvo? Probably not yet. The kernel and kernel modules are really where the work still lies. We build things on top of Arvo, and in doing so it's pretty clear that the system can be better. Clay (the filesystem) and Gall (the application model) are due for a rewrite. A complete rewrite of the web server, Eyre is almost finished.

74+

75+## Aegean

76+

77+

78+

79+Aegean is a pattern for building 'cities': groups of people running the same 'agent' on their Arvo servers. Agents aren't just 'apps' or programs. An agent rolls together the tools that a community needs. Today, our companies, communities, cults, cliques all have to duct tape together separate MEGACORP apps and services to compute together.

80+

81+Aegean reverses this pattern. A community on Arvo is a city: just a bunch of people running the same agent. Each city is in control of its own codebase: the interface, application code _and_ data storage. This means a community can have complete agency over how to compute together.

82+

83+Aegean cities can be completely different without impacting one another at all. Cities share the neutral infrastructure of Arvo and Azimuth — but they may never even know others exist. An archipelago of hypercultures.

84+

85+It's important to note: the pattern of these cities is _not_ the pattern of Azimuth. The network hierarchy should impact the society of Urbit as much as the electrical grid impacts the life of the street in Manhattan. It matters when the power goes out — but most of the time groups form and dissipate continuously.

86+

87+Before we can let the ocean of cities grow we have to homestead a few of our own.

88+

89+Our first agent is called [Landscape](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/tree/master/pkg/interface), an agent for chat and longform discussion. We are using Landscape to run a few experimental cities over the next month or so. If you have an Azimuth point, you'll need to [request access](mailto:support@urbit.org) to join.

90+

91+Anyone can create their own city, of course. The source is open. But we're not going to encourage you to just yet. Feel free to explore, but also be patient. We've got a lot planned around this. If Azimuth is done and Arvo is young, Aegean is just being born.

92+

93+## Tlon

94+

95+

96+

97+So who is behind all of this? A team of collaborators and contributors. Many of us work at [Tlon](https://tlon.io) — the company we started in 2013 to advance Urbit platform development. Tlon has attracted an incredible group of smart, talented people who want the world to be able to own and control their computers. I'm proud to work alongside them.

98+

99+One important omission on `tlon.io` is Curtis. As of today, he's no longer working on Urbit. [His own words](/posts/essays/a-founders-farewell) are the best way to understand his thinking. It's an achievement for the team, I think, that he can depart with confidence.

100+

101+One major reason for that confidence is that Erik and Anthony have now become COO and CPO respectively. Having thoughtful, organized people leading the project is a huge benefit to the whole team. I'm very glad to have them on board.

102+

103+## Looking ahead

104+

105+I certainly forgot at least a thing or two. We'll dive in to more detail in the coming weeks.

106+

107+There's a lot for you to explore. Have fun!

content/blog/azimuth-security-bounty-program.mdnew file+40

@@ -0,0 +1,40 @@

1++++

2+title = "Azimuth Security Bounty Program"

3+date = "2019-07-21"

4+description = "Inviting you (and your friends) to help us make Azimuth as secure as possible."

5+aliases = [

6+ "/posts/essays/azimuth-security-bounty-program",

7+ "/posts/azimuth-security-bounty-program"

8+]

9+

10+[extra]

11+author = "Anthony Arroyo"

12+ship = "~poldec-tonteg"

13+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/azimuth-security-bounty-program-1.jpg"

14++++

15+

16+

17+

18+Since launching [Azimuth](https://urbit.org/posts/azimuth-is-on-chain/), we’ve been running a private bounty program with [HackerOne](https://hackerone.com/). We’re now taking the program public and inviting you (and your friends) to help us make Azimuth as secure as possible.

19+

20+[Go here](https://hackerone.com/tlon) to see the live program on HackerOne.

21+

22+## What is Azimuth again?

23+

24+Azimuth is [the Urbit public key infrastructure](https://urbit.org/posts/azimuth-is-on-chain/). It’s a set of Ethereum smart contracts that allow for cryptographic ownership and management of Urbit identities. It also provides a governance mechanism whereby galaxy owners are able to propose and vote on improvements.

25+

26+People already [use Azimuth](https://github.com/urbit/bridge) to boot Arvo ships, spawn stars and planets for others and transfer points. But Azimuth is a general identity system, with great potential to be used beyond Arvo: there are primitives for reputation, payments and securing communication channels.

27+

28+## Security program details

29+

30+We had the Azimuth contracts audited by [Open Zeppelin](https://openzeppelin.org/), [Blockchain at Berkeley](https://blockchain.berkeley.edu/) and [Bloctrax](https://www.bloctrax.com/), but we don’t want to take any chances. We’re hoping that the HackerOne program will help us get more eyes on the contracts, identify vulnerabilities and get out in front of any problems. You can find more information about the program at [our page](https://hackerone.com/tlon) on HackerOne.

31+

32+We’re interested in any vulnerability in the Azimuth contracts that would allow an attacker to either seize other user’s points, impersonate points or that would result in the platform becoming unusable.

33+

34+The program page has links and instructions on how to set up a development version of Bridge and point it at either the Ropsten deployment of the contracts or at a local network to play with the contracts and look for vulnerabilities.

35+

36+## Arvo is out of scope for now

37+

38+We’re intentionally focusing our security efforts on Azimuth for now. Since Azimuth serves as our PKI layer, it’s the most crucial for the time being: it’s the source of truth for who owns what. We don’t want to have even a shred of a doubt that these cryptographic properties are secure.

39+

40+Of course, we’re working toward a future where you have a computer connected to this Azimuth point, and the computer has to be as secure as its identity. To achieve this, we have some more hard work to do on Arvo and our interpreter, Vere. When the time comes, we’ll also reach out for help testing vulnerabilities throughout the entire stack.

main/posts/principles.md → content/blog/beliefs-and-principles.mdrenamed+38−43

@@ -1,19 +1,20 @@

1−---

2−sort: 2

3−type: post

4−title: Beliefs and principles

5−author: Galen Wolfe-Pauly + Curtis Yarvin

6−image: http://media.urbit.org/site/blog-2.jpg

7−preview:

8−layout: urbit,post

9−footer: true

10−navmode: navbar

11−navdpad: false

12−navselect: posts

13−navpath: /

14−navhome: /

15−navclass: urbit

16−---

1++++

2+title = "Beliefs and Principles Guiding the Urbit Project"

3+date = "2016-05-10"

4+description = "We believe."

5+aliases = [

6+ "/posts/essays/beliefs-and-principles",

7+ "/posts/beliefs-and-principles",

8+ "/posts/principles"

9+]

10+

11+[extra]

12+author = "Curtis Yarvin + Galen Wolfe-Pauly"

13+ship = "~sorreg-namtyv + ~ravmel-ropdyl"

14+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/beliefs-and-principles.jpg"

15++++

16+

17+

1718

1819## Beliefs

1920

@@ -28,19 +29,19 @@ software, through the IETF principles of sincerity and rough consensus.

2829The ability of the engineering community to govern itself through

2930republican forms is not an abstract theory; it's a proven fact.

3031

31−We believe in both free speech and individual accountability. We

32+We believe in both free speech and individual accountability. We

3233believe that a healthy network is one with diverse and well-defined

3334communities, and clear, user-controlled, boundaries between public and

3435private space.

3536

3637We believe that no software system can replace human trust and

37−communication. Dialogue, judgment and governance are essential to

38−communities of all scales. Code and law can reduce conflict in the

38+communication. Dialogue, judgment and governance are essential to

39+communities of all scales. Code and law can reduce conflict in the

3940common case; they can never handle all exceptions.

4041

4142## Principles

4243

43−Here are some principles of Urbit. Where principles conflict,

44+Here are some principles of Urbit. Where principles conflict,

4445the first stated takes precedence.

4546

4647### Digital independence

@@ -53,56 +54,56 @@ independence a useful and widely available product.

5354### Code is law

5455

5556Wherever possible, the rules of Urbit must be executable as code.

56−Wherever possible, code must be self-enforcing. If not, it must

57−be perfectly defined. If not, it must not be stated.

57+Wherever possible, code must be self-enforcing. If not, it must

58+be perfectly defined. If not, it must not be stated.

5859

5960### Sovereignty is conserved

6061

6162Even where code is law, exceptional situations demanding

62−effective collective action will always arise. There must

63+effective collective action will always arise. There must

6364always be a collective authority to solve these problems.

6465

6566Two known problems in Urbit that require central authority are

66−approval of software updates and activation of the network. But

67+approval of software updates and activation of the network. But

6768there will certainly be others.

6869

6970### Purpose of collective authority

7071

71−Urbit, as opposed to the Tlon corporation, is a republic. Its

72+Urbit, as opposed to the Tlon corporation, is a republic. Its

7273government has one task: promoting, preserving and protecting Urbit.

73−It may take any legal action which advances this goal. Any other

74−actions are *ultra vires*, out of scope. Urbit is not a

74+It may take any legal action which advances this goal. Any other

75+actions are _ultra vires_, out of scope. Urbit is not a

7576general-purpose charity.

7677

7778### Decentralized control

7879

79−Urbit should never fall under any kind of central control. All

80+Urbit should never fall under any kind of central control. All

8081transitions in galaxy ownership should divide positions, not

8182unite them.

8283

83−Galaxy and star ownership should also be separated. It is

84+Galaxy and star ownership should also be separated. It is

8485harmful for a single entity to hold both galaxies and stars.

8586

8687### Property is contingent

8788

8889Property rights are contingent and accidental, not moral or

89−meritorious. A property register does not record why an owner

90−deserves some property. Ownership is neither a reward nor a

90+meritorious. A property register does not record why an owner

91+deserves some property. Ownership is neither a reward nor a

9192right; it is a fact.

9293

9394### Governance is by stake

9495

95−Ultimately, Urbit must be governed by those who own it. In each

96+Ultimately, Urbit must be governed by those who own it. In each

9697tier, equal stakes must hold equal authority.

9798

9899### Content-neutral

99100

100101Urbit does not admit a tradeoff between anarchy and tyranny,

101−order and liberty. Urbit has zero tolerance for abuse, nor does

102+order and liberty. Urbit has zero tolerance for abuse, nor does

102103it facilitate censorship.

103104

104105Urbit will do everything possible to help you block content you

105−don't want to see. It does nothing to help you block content you

106+don't want to see. It does nothing to help you block content you

106107don't want others to see.

107108

108109### Trolling considered harmful

@@ -114,12 +115,12 @@ properly for automatic blocking.

114115### Sockpuppets considered harmful

115116

116117The only legitimate reason for one individual to use multiple

117−identities is to maintain multiple active pseudonyms. But

118+identities is to maintain multiple active pseudonyms. But

118119multiple identities must never interact in the same context.

119120

120121### Not a darknet

121122

122−Urbit is not a darknet. It does not break real-world laws. It

123+Urbit is not a darknet. It does not break real-world laws. It

123124is not designed to facilitate the breaking of real-world laws.

124125For any problem that lawbreakers have, there must always be a

125126better solution that is not Urbit.

@@ -128,12 +129,6 @@ better solution that is not Urbit.

128129

129130As long as they are not facilitating violations of any of these

130131principles, or laws in their own jurisdictions, stars and

131−galaxies are responsible for routing their children. They are

132+galaxies are responsible for routing their children. They are

132133also collectively responsible for escape-routing the children of

133134stars and galaxies which fail in their responsibility.

134−

135−<br /><br />

136−

137−<div>

138− Subscribe to our newsletter: <email dataPath="/submit" submit="Get updates" />

139−</div>

content/blog/bootstrapping-urbit-from-ethereum.mdnew file+394

@@ -0,0 +1,394 @@

1++++

2+title = "Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum"

3+date = "2017-09-19"

4+description = "We've decided to launch Urbit's constitution as a system of Ethereum contracts."

5+aliases = [

6+ "/posts/essays/bootstrapping-urbit-from-ethereum",

7+ "/posts/bootstrapping-urbit-from-ethereum",

8+ "/blog/2017.9.20-bootstrapping-urbit-from-ethereum/",

9+ "/blog/2017.9-eth/"

10+]

11+

12+[extra]

13+author = "Curtis Yarvin + Galen Wolfe-Pauly"

14+ship = "~sorreg-namtyv + ~ravmel-ropdyl"

15++++

16+

17+_TL;DR:_

18+

19+We've decided to launch Urbit's constitution as a system of Ethereum contracts.

20+

21+We'll instantiate a land registry for Urbit address space; an ERC20 "spark"

22+token which is burned to create a generic star; and a voting system for

23+self-governance. We'll also create template contracts which galaxies can use to

24+auction stars, and stars to distribute planets.

25+

26+## A bit of background

27+

28+One thing we realized after the last sale was, 'oh hey, the network has been up

29+for about a year.' Not bad! It wasn't that long ago that we were rebooting the

30+universe every few weeks. We still have plenty of work to do — but Urbit has

31+matured to the point where public ownership of the network really should be

32+cryptographically real.

33+

34+But even when the servers stay up, Urbit is still a testnet and remains

35+centralized in practice. We (Tlon) retain the ability to reset the network keys

36+at any time. This just isn't very 2017.

37+

38+In theory, Urbit doesn't need a blockchain, because real estate moves slowly.

39+In digital real estate, as opposed to digital currency, a low-friction,

40+zero-trust solution to the double-spend problem isn't an economic necessity.

41+

42+In practice, though, we have a hard chicken-egg problem. In the current design,

43+the key you use to secure your urbit is the same key that you use to sign your

44+network packets. Abstractly, this is the right design -- you want one

45+definition of who owns an identity.

46+

47+But concretely, since Urbit keys are valuable, you don't want to put them in an

48+operating system that isn't generally recognized as systematically secure. It's

49+hard to achieve this status while you're a testnet. So the virtuous cycle never

50+gets started.

51+

52+Moving the Urbit land registry to Ethereum is an easy and obvious solution to

53+this problem. If your urbit is owned by an offline Ethereum key, there's now a

54+mature ecosystem for protecting this property. And its security doesn't depend

55+on the security of Urbit. So, we realized, maybe Urbit actually does need a

56+blockchain for its land registry. While the system matures, we can bootstrap

57+off of Ethereum, without changing the design of the Urbit cryptosystem.

58+

59+And best of all, you can get your Urbit star or planet entirely through the

60+blockchain, without interacting with any centralized database or payment

61+mechanism. So we're really living in 2017.

62+

63+Sounds good, right?

64+

65+It does sound good. Although, as usual, we care about making things that _work_

66+above all else. So, rather than a 'announcing the Urbit token sale' post, this

67+is going to get fairly technical. We want to start the discussion about how

68+this change is going to work, and how it's going to get implemented. We'll save

69+the hype for later.

70+

71+First, we'll walk through the costs and benefits of using Ethereum. Then,

72+we'll refresh our memories on how the Urbit address space works, and finally

73+we'll walk through some of the details of how we plan on implementing this.

74+We've thought quite thoroughly about these things, but public criticism is

75+really important.

76+

77+## Weighing the choice of Ethereum

78+

79+Our engineering style is to build the whole stack, from axioms to UI, from

80+custom, super-minimal parts. When these parts don't fit perfectly, we rewrite

81+them until they do. With a few exceptions, such as crypto algorithms, Urbit

82+doesn't reuse existing code or designs, depend on existing tools, or expect

83+outside contributors to solve problems essential to a complete experience.

84+

85+Instinctive minimalism is essential in a custom full stack. The best solution is

86+always to not solve the problem. The natural engineering response to the

87+pre-blockchain difficulty of solving Byzantine consensus agreement was: do we

88+really need it?

89+

90+### The case against Ethereum

91+

92+Since Urbit network address space is a land registry, not a currency,

93+transactions are low-frequency. A low-frequency transaction system can succeed

94+economically even if it has high friction. The double-spend problem, which

95+consensus computing solves, becomes easy or at least tractable given high

96+friction.

97+

98+We reinvent the wheel if we have to, throw it away if we can. So depending on

99+Ethereum goes against all Urbit's instincts.

100+

101+Let's enumerate the problems, as critically as we can:

102+

103+And Ethereum's user experience is notorious; its governance is suspect and

104+unstable; its dilution rate is unconscionable; its dev environment is full of

105+bugs and misfeatures; in short, it's a classic MVP. It has only one real goal:

106+success. It seems to be doing pretty well with that.

107+

108+We prefer [SLC](https://blog.asmartbear.com/slc.html) to MVP. Urbit under

109+construction is fun to play around in. But we certainly won't ask real users or

110+real developers to set foot in Urbit until their experience is truly simple,

111+lovable and complete. The original iPhone set the bar for this, and we'll get

112+as close as we can.

113+

114+### The case for Ethereum

115+

116+It's obvious that Urbit has a practical problem in deploying a self-hosted PKI.

117+When does the testnet become a realnet? You wouldn't put real, valuable keys in

118+your urbit, until you know the system is mature and secure.

119+

120+But how does anyone know that Urbit is mature until more daring users have used

121+it with real, valuable keys? But who wants to be the first person to hop into

122+the box?

123+

124+There is no clear way to bootstrap past the testnet phase. Except, well, reboot

125+Urbit onto an existing blockchain, with a tested and reasonably-secure

126+key-handling infrastructure, that can also validate the Urbit PKI rules. Then

127+each user can decide on their own whether sensitive data is safe in their own

128+urbit.

129+

130+## An Urbit refresher

131+

132+Maybe some people are here because they know what Ethereum is, but not so much

133+Urbit.

134+

135+For those of you not familiar, let's try to refresh your memories.

136+

137+### What Urbit is

138+

139+One simple way to think about Urbit is as a "personal blockchain." Like a

140+blockchain, Urbit is a deterministic virtual computer. Its semantics are defined

141+by a frozen lifecycle function, which maps its event history to its current

142+state. But, unlike a blockchain, an Urbit instance is a private computer for one

143+user, not a public record for everyone.

144+

145+Urbit's lifecycle function is a nano-interpreter called Nock. A typed functional

146+language, Hoon, compiles itself to Nock. An event-driven OS, Arvo, is written in

147+Hoon. Everything above Nock can upgrade itself over Urbit's own overlay packet

148+network, Ames. Ames is live and stable with test keys.

149+

150+Our Urbit interpreter runs on any Unix machine. The Urbit server is a

151+single-level store -- both database and application engine. Every Urbit event is

152+a transaction. Urbit is semantically frozen and cannot call out to Unix.

153+

154+Your Urbit instance is your personal server. Your urbit should eventually

155+contain and manage your whole digital life. You may compute at home or in the

156+cloud, based on your security/privacy tradeoff, but Urbit's formal semantics

157+makes ships trivial to migrate. You'll never be locked in to one computing

158+provider.

159+

160+### The Urbit address space

161+

162+An Urbit address is called a "ship." A ship is a network address, a

163+cryptographic identity, a pronounceable name, and a permanent memory. A ship's

164+name is just its numeric address, written in a syllabic base-256.

165+

166+Smaller addresses mean shorter, more memorable ships. Ships are classified in a

167+hierarchy: 8-bit "galaxies" (like `~dyl`), 16-bit "stars," (`~ropdyl`), and

168+32-bit "planets" (`~ravmel-ropdyl`). Galaxies and stars are network

169+infrastructure. Regular users have planets. The tight 32-bit address space makes

170+names short enough to remember, and costly enough to deter Sybil attacks.

171+

172+Planets are created by their prefix star; stars are created by their prefix

173+galaxy; galaxies were created by the founders. Parents assist their children,

174+providing essential services like peer-to-peer packet routing, but don't own or

175+control them. The prefix is just an initial default -- a ship can switch to any

176+parent that's willing to adopt it.

177+

178+## Summary of the integration model

179+

180+In the new integrated model, every planet, galaxy or star is owned by an

181+Ethereum address. The secret that controls this address is the ship's "master

182+key."

183+

184+The master key is not needed to operate the ship and should not be stored on it,

185+at least not until Urbit is more mature. Master keys should be kept as "cold" as

186+possible. They are only used to perform lifecycle operations on your ship, by

187+signing Ethereum transactions which are sent to the Urbit constitution.

188+

189+We'll fork an open-source Ethereum browser and add a custom UI for Urbit

190+transactions. New users will acquire their urbits entirely on the blockchain.

191+

192+The most basic Urbit transaction is starting a ship you own. To start your ship,

193+you use Urbit to generate an Urbit keypair, and use Ethereum to register the

194+Urbit public key (a 512-bit pair of Curve25519 for encryption and Ed25519 for

195+signature) on the Ethereum blockchain.

196+

197+For users who want to hold generic stars without starting or even selecting

198+specific ships, we'll create a divisible "spark" (USP) ERC20 token. A spark is

199+the right to create one star. Sparks are a convenience tool: they leverage the

200+mature ERC20 infrastructure for holding and trading token utility rights.

201+

202+Instead of launching stars directly, galaxies can cede their unlaunched stars to

203+the Urbit constitution. The issuing galaxy receives one spark in exchange for

204+this star. Any Ethereum address can redeem one spark in exchange for the right

205+to start one star from the constitution's pool.

206+

207+Once all the galaxies are created, Urbit is fully decentralized. We retain no

208+ownership powers over the Urbit constitution.

209+

210+The Urbit galaxies will mirror the state of the constitution, distribute its

211+state and events within Urbit, and post any transactions created within Urbit.

212+Generally an Urbit ship trusts its parent -- if not, it should find a new one

213+fast. But a deeply paranoid ship can still listen to Ethereum directly.

214+

215+## Contract designs

216+

217+The Urbit constitution is four contracts: certificate storage, spark storage,

218+election storage, and logic controller.

219+

220+Following Ethereum best practice, we'll use separate storage and logic

221+contracts. The logic contract is stateless, and can upgrade itself without

222+replacing the storage contracts.

223+

224+We'll walk through how we have designed these contracts in detail here. You can

225+also view our in-progress source at the

226+[`urbit/azimuth` GitHub repo](https://github.com/urbit/azimuth).

227+

228+### Certificate storage contract

229+

230+For every galaxy, star or planet, the certificate contract holds a current

231+state: `%latent`, `%locked`, `%liquid` or `%living`.

232+

233+The default/empty state is `%latent` (nothing has happened to this ship). The

234+contract stores no data for a latent ship.

235+

236+A `%locked` ship has an owner and an activation date. It cannot be activated

237+until the given date. Until activated, the locked ship can't be transferred,

238+vote, liquidate or launch children.

239+

240+A `%liquid` ship is held by the Urbit constitution to be redeemed for a spark.

241+It has no other state.

242+

243+A `%living` ship is active. Its state: an Ethereum address which owns it; an

244+Urbit public key; a revision number, which increments on any lifecycle

245+operation; and (for planets and stars) both current and requested (for escaping)

246+parent ships.

247+

248+The certificate contract throws an event on every state change.

249+

250+### Spark storage contract

251+

252+The spark contract is a divisible ERC20 token (you can't hold half a star, but

253+you can hold half a spark). Only the logic contract can create and destroy

254+tokens.

255+

256+### Governance storage contract

257+

258+The governance contract records galaxies' votes on governance proposals.

259+

260+There are two kinds of proposals: concrete and abstract. A concrete proposal is

261+the address of a new logic contract for the constitution. An abstract proposal

262+is the hash of a document.

263+

264+Voting is one-bit -- the default vote is "no" -- and irreversible. A 256-bit

265+bitfield records the set of galaxies that have voted for each proposal.

266+

267+Only active galaxies may vote. A counter records the number of active galaxies.

268+A proposal passes if more than 50% of active galaxies support it. If the

269+proposal is concrete, the old logic contract is terminated and the new one

270+receives storage control. Abstract proposals have no further effects on the

271+blockchain.

272+

273+### Logic contract

274+

275+The logic contract is stateless and supports the following ops:

276+

277+#### Create a galaxy

278+

279+What: move a galaxy from `%latent` to `%locked` state.

280+

281+Who: the founders only.

282+

283+Comments: this is the only founder-privileged operation.

284+

285+#### Liquidate a star

286+

287+What: move a specific star from `%latent` to `%liquid` state, granting one spark

288+to the galaxy owner.

289+

290+Who: owner of the active galaxy which is the star's prefix.

291+

292+#### Claim a star

293+

294+What: move a specific star from `%liquid` to `%locked` state, with the

295+activation date set to the present, and the owner as claimer; remove one spark

296+from the owner.

297+

298+Who: any Ethereum address which owns a spark.

299+

300+#### Launch a star or planet

301+

302+What: move a specific star or planet from `%latent` to `%locked` state, with the

303+activation date set to the present, and set the Ethereum address which owns the

304+ship.

305+

306+Who: owner of the parent of the launched ship.

307+

308+#### Start a ship

309+

310+What: move a specific ship from `%locked` to `%living` state, setting its Urbit

311+public key.

312+

313+Who: owner of the locked ship.

314+

315+#### Transfer a ship

316+

317+What: change the owner of a `%living` ship, also resetting the Urbit public key.

318+

319+Who: current owner of the ship.

320+

321+#### Rekey a ship

322+

323+What: in a living ship, change the Urbit public key, without changing the

324+Ethereum address that owns the ship.

325+

326+Who: owner of the ship.

327+

328+#### Request adoption

329+

330+What: in a living ship, set the requested-parent field.

331+

332+Who: owner of the ship.

333+

334+#### Accept adoption

335+

336+What: in a living ship, set the current parent to the requested parent, and

337+clear the requested parent.

338+

339+Who: owner of the requested parent.

340+

341+#### Create a proposal

342+

343+What: create a proposal, which is either the hash of a document (abstract) or

344+the address of a new logic contract (concrete).

345+

346+Who: owner of any living galaxy.

347+

348+#### Endorse a proposal

349+

350+What: register support for a proposal. If the proposal is concrete and this

351+vote takes it over 50%, upgrade the contract.

352+

353+Who: any galaxy who has not yet voted on this proposal.

354+

355+### Planet sales and spark auctions

356+

357+We'll also write contracts that help galaxies and stars distribute their stars

358+and planets.

359+

360+#### An auction contract for spark sales

361+

362+The ERC20 spark token creates a liquid market in stars, or rather star

363+precursors. But a galaxy liquidating sparks may not want to just sell a large

364+block into this market, which may have weak depth, especially when the token is

365+initially launched.

366+

367+So we'll validate and deploy the Nick Johnson design for an

368+[off-chain second-price auction](https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/6igsdq/a_proofofconcept_of_a_better_crowdsale_contract/)

369+

370+To run an auction, the seller liquidates a block of stars, then transfers the

371+spark tokens to a seller-owned copy of the auction contract. The Urbit

372+constitution is not involved with the auction.

373+

374+#### A distribution contract for planet sales

375+

376+There is no generic token for planets. To start a planet, you need a star to

377+launch it with your Ethereum address as the owner.

378+

379+To distribute planets on the blockchain, a star instantiates a private copy of

380+the planet sale contract. Since the star is the contract's owner, the contract

381+can send launch operations to the Urbit constitution.

382+

383+The star owner configures the planet sale contract with two parameters: the

384+price in ether of a planet, and the number of planets available.

385+

386+## Okay, so

387+

388+That was quite a lot of information! There's also a blog post about the constitution

389+[here](https://urbit.org/blog/interim-constitution/), and GitHub issues on the

390+[urbit/azimuth repo](https://github.com/urbit/azimuth) are more

391+than welcome.

392+

393+There's a lot more to come on this front as our contracts get closer to getting

394+live, and we begin migrating toward an on-chain Urbit PKI.

main/posts/objections.md → content/blog/common-objections-to-urbit.mdrenamed+251−263

@@ -1,129 +1,128 @@

1−---

2−sort: 9

3−type: post

4−title: Common objections to Urbit

5−author: Curtis Yarvin

6−preview: Some common objections to Urbit, discussed.

7−image: http://media.urbit.org/site/blog-9.jpg

8−layout: urbit,post

9−footer: true

10−comments: true

11−navmode: navbar

12−navdpad: false

13−navselect: posts

14−navpath: /

15−navhome: /

16−navclass: urbit

17−---

18−

19−We love crowdsourced criticism. We've heard a lot of great

20−objections to Urbit. Surely there's more out there! If so,

21−comments are open at the bottom of the page. We'll revise this

22−document to include anything new and interesting.

1++++

2+title = "Common Objections to Urbit"

3+date = "2016-06-27"

4+description = "Some common objections to Urbit, discussed."

5+aliases = [

6+ "/posts/essays/common-objections-to-urbit",

7+ "/posts/common-objections-to-urbit",

8+ "/posts/objections/"

9+]

10+

11+[extra]

12+author = "Curtis Yarvin"

13+ship = "~sorreg-namtyv"

14+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/common-objections-to-urbit-1.jpg"

15++++

16+

17+

18+

19+We love crowdsourced criticism. We've heard a lot of great

20+objections to Urbit. Surely there's more out there! We'll

21+revise this document to include anything new and interesting.

2322

2423Here's our list right now:

2524

2625- [Urbit is not ready for prime time.](#prime)

2726- [Nock jets are a total hoax.](#jets)

2827- [Urbit needs an infinitely extending packet/event log.](#log)

29−- [Urbit is a total scamcoin. It's 100% premined.](#scam)

30−- [Urbit isn't even really decentralized! It has a government!](#gov)

31−- [{Sandstorm, IPFS, Ethereum, ...} is way ahead of Urbit.](#sand)

28+- [Urbit is a total scamcoin. It's 100% premined.](#scam)

29+- [Urbit isn't even really decentralized! It has a government!](#gov)

30+- [Sandstorm/IPFS/Ethereum is way ahead of Urbit.](#sand)

3231- [Urbit doesn't have enough planets for every human being.](#planet)

3332- [Cloud computing is inherently non-private.](#pwned)

3433- [Urbit will never be able to call any existing code.](#code)

35−- [Hoon is too weird. No one will be able to program in it.](#program)

34+- [Hoon is too weird. No one will be able to program in it.](#program)

3635- [Urbit programmers are stuck with Hoon.](#stuck)

3736- [Ordinary users will never be able to manage an Urbit server.](#user)

3837- [Urbit has no killer app.](#killer)

3938- [Urbit is sniffed at by Houyhnhyms.](#horse)

4039

41−*"We choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy, but because it is hard."*

40+_"We choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy, but because it is hard."_

4241— [John F. Kennedy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g25G1M4EXrQ)

4342

44−<h2 id="prime">Urbit is not ready for prime time.</h2>

43+## Urbit is not ready for prime time. {% #prime %}

4544

46−**TLDR**: we agree.

45+_TLDR_: we agree.

4746

48−Urbit right now is a fun toy. It is fun to learn Hoon. It is

47+Urbit right now is a fun toy. It is fun to learn Hoon. It is

4948even fun and quite practical to make actual contributions.

5049(Hoon's IEEE floating-point was written by someone we've never

51−met: `~nym`, formerly `~nodpet-rinned`.) In fact, we have never

52−seen anyone *not* have fun with Urbit.

50+met: `~nym`, formerly `~nodpet-rinned`.) In fact, we have never

51+seen anyone _not_ have fun with Urbit.

5352

54−But there is all kinds of stuff wrong with the codebase. Urbit's

53+But there is all kinds of stuff wrong with the codebase. Urbit's

5554documentation is much improved, but remains incredibly weak --

56−Arvo is almost totally undocumented. Scaling is poor at best.

57−Urbit's reliability is dubious. Its security is nil.

55+Arvo is almost totally undocumented. Scaling is poor at best.

56+Urbit's reliability is dubious. Its security is nil.

5857

59−Urbit is feature-frozen. The only thing we're working on now,

58+Urbit is feature-frozen. The only thing we're working on now,

6059and for the rest of 2016, is doc, debugging and and self-hosting.

6160In that order of importance -- teaching Urbit is more important

6261than fixing it, which is more important than making it useful.

6362But we're quite confident that these are all solvable problems.

6463

6564The most important milestone about Urbit today is that it's ready

66−for technical decisions to be made collectively. A system like

67−Urbit can only be invented by a mad auteur. It can't be

68−maintained or stabilized by a mad auteur. Our primary goal today

65+for technical decisions to be made collectively. A system like

66+Urbit can only be invented by a mad auteur. It can't be

67+maintained or stabilized by a mad auteur. Our primary goal today

6968is expanding the number of people who understand Urbit, and we

7069expect these pioneers to participate in technical governance.

7170

72−<h2 id="jets">Nock jets are a total hoax.</h2>

71+## Nock jets are a total hoax. {% #jets %}

7372

74−**TLDR**: all of computing is a hoax. You can't compare a hoax

75−to nothing. You can only compare it to all the other hoaxes.

73+_TLDR_: all of computing is a hoax. You can't compare a hoax

74+to nothing. You can only compare it to all the other hoaxes.

7675

77−A "jet" is a sort of software device driver in Urbit. Urbit is

76+A "jet" is a sort of software device driver in Urbit. Urbit is

7877precisely defined in terms of an interpreter that fits on a

79−T-shirt, Nock. But a naive implementation of Nock is nowhere

78+T-shirt, Nock. But a naive implementation of Nock is nowhere

8079near practical, because Nock has only one integer operation:

81−increment. For example, to decrement a number in Nock, you

80+increment. For example, to decrement a number in Nock, you

8281increment a counter up to the number under it.

8382

8483The only way an efficient Nock interpreter can work is to

8584recognize algorithms like decrement, and implement them

86−non-naively. By far the easiest way to do this is not to analyze

85+non-naively. By far the easiest way to do this is not to analyze

8786arbitrary code as it's being executed, but to register and match

88−well-known implementations in the standard library. No one

87+well-known implementations in the standard library. No one

8988should be writing their own decrement.

9089

91−But the semantics of the interpreter, *so long as the jet and the

92−jet harness are defined correctly*, are exactly those of Nock.

93−We are not extending or changing Nock in any way. We are just

90+But the semantics of the interpreter, _so long as the jet and the

91+jet harness are defined correctly_, are exactly those of Nock.

92+We are not extending or changing Nock in any way. We are just

9493taking a shortcut in certain cases we understand perfectly.

9594

9695It's not at all unprecedented to have implementations much more

97−complex than the corresponding specification. The x86

96+complex than the corresponding specification. The x86

9897instruction set is relatively simple; the complexity of its

99−decoding and execution path in a modern CPU is enormous. This

98+decoding and execution path in a modern CPU is enormous. This

10099path may well have "peephole optimizations" that replace matched

101−algorithms, and if it doesn't the modern compiler does. People,

102−*bad* people, use "jets" to cheat on benchmarks all the time.

100+algorithms, and if it doesn't the modern compiler does. People,

101+_bad_ people, use "jets" to cheat on benchmarks all the time.

103102

104−Nock is designed as a standard. It's built like a standard.

103+Nock is designed as a standard. It's built like a standard.

105104Typically what causes real problems in standards is ambiguity.

106105Two implementations are incompatible, but each swears it has the

107−right interpretation of the natural-language spec. This simply

108−cannot happen in the Nock world. If two implementations

109−disagree, at least one of them is incorrect. This puts us firmly

106+right interpretation of the natural-language spec. This simply

107+cannot happen in the Nock world. If two implementations

108+disagree, at least one of them is incorrect. This puts us firmly

110109in "with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" territory.

111110

112111The fact remains, however, that a Nock interpreter without jets

113−is completely useless. And there is not even an informal

112+is completely useless. And there is not even an informal

114113document that tells you what jets you need for a reasonably

115−efficient Urbit. (There should be such a document.)

114+efficient Urbit. (There should be such a document.)

116115

117116The correct way to think about jets is not to compare them to a

118−perfect interpreter created by unicorns. Jets are a combined

117+perfect interpreter created by unicorns. Jets are a combined

119118replacement for two other techniques in language implementation:

120119intrinsics and a foreign-function interface.

121120

122121Compared to both intrinsics and an FFI, your jets have one key

123−disadvantage: they need to be specified in pure code. You may

122+disadvantage: they need to be specified in pure code. You may

124123not have this executable specification, which means you need to

125−write it. Is this really so bad for your development process?

126−An executable specification? Which can be trivially tested

124+write it. Is this really so bad for your development process?

125+An executable specification? Which can be trivially tested

127126against the efficient implementation?

128127

129128Compared to intrinsics, jets give you true separation between

@@ -131,7 +130,7 @@ mechanism and policy; only the interpreter, not the programmer

131130and not the compiler, needs to know what's accelerated.

132131

133132Compared to an FFI, jets preclude I/O, so can be trivially

134−sandboxed. Except that the programmer needs to mark routines

133+sandboxed. Except that the programmer needs to mark routines

135134which may benefit from optimization with a hint, here too we

136135separate mechanism (efficient implementation) from policy.

137136

@@ -139,43 +138,41 @@ Yes, formal verification of jet equivalence is desirable.

139138However, in the real world, many specifications, including quite

140139complex ones, are tested into equivalence by brute force.

141140

142−Urbit has some jet abuses. The equivalence between our markdown

143−parser in Hoon and the CommonMark C library is super dubious. It

141+Urbit has some jet abuses. The equivalence between our markdown

142+parser in Hoon and the CommonMark C library is super dubious. It

144143should be revisited.

145144

146145But the miscomputation resulting from a minor jet discrepancy is

147−not a security hole or even fatal. It effectively means the

146+not a security hole or even fatal. It effectively means the

148147event history, computed correctly, does not match the current

149−state. The way to resolve this conflict is for the current state

148+state. The way to resolve this conflict is for the current state

150149to win, and the event history to be discarded -- not abnormal

151−anyway. See the next question.

150+anyway. See the next question.

152151

153−<h2 id="log">Urbit needs an infinitely extending packet/event

154−log.</h2>

152+## Urbit needs an infinitely extending packet/event. {% #log %}

155153

156−**TLDR**: no, it doesn't. Urbit can prune the log.

154+_TLDR_: no, it doesn't. Urbit can prune the log.

157155

158156We can prune the event log because the Urbit transition function

159157doesn't have any access to the event history -- just the current

160158state and the current event.

161159

162−Urbit defines the semantics of a complete event log. It doesn't

160+Urbit defines the semantics of a complete event log. It doesn't

163161and can't require an implementation to maintain the whole log.

164162It can maintain a checkpoint and the log since that checkpoint.

165−The current implementation of Urbit maintains

166163

167164However, any practical urbit maintains a periodically updated

168−checkpoint. Our present implementation doesn't provide a way to

169−prune the event log. But that's just a missing feature. We have

165+checkpoint. Our present implementation doesn't provide a way to

166+prune the event log. But that's just a missing feature. We have

170167one or two of those!

171168

172−<h2 id="scam">Urbit is a total scamcoin. It's 100% premined</h2>

169+## Urbit is a total scamcoin. It's 100% premined. {% #scam %}

173170

174−**TLDR**: yeah. But at least it's not the DAO.

171+_TLDR_: yeah. But at least it's not the DAO.

175172

176−Like a cryptocurrency, Urbit is a digital title. But Urbit is

177−digital land, not digital money. If you assess it as a currency,

178−it's a lousy currency. If you assess a cat as a dog, it's a

173+Like a cryptocurrency, Urbit is a digital title. But Urbit is

174+digital land, not digital money. If you assess it as a currency,

175+it's a lousy currency. If you assess a cat as a dog, it's a

179176lousy dog.

180177

181178In real-world economics, the crucial distinction between land and

@@ -183,25 +180,25 @@ money is that land (a) has intrinsic utility and (b) is

183180non-fungible.

184181

185182Because of (b) alone, frictionless transactions in land are

186−impossible. A blockchain is only needed to ensure zero-cost

187−high-frequency transactions. So digital land doesn't need a

188−blockchain. Which means it doesn't need mining.

183+impossible. A blockchain is only needed to ensure zero-cost

184+high-frequency transactions. So digital land doesn't need a

185+blockchain. Which means it doesn't need mining.

189186

190187Of course, just because a digital title system doesn't need

191188mining, doesn't mean it can't distribute an initial allocation by

192189proof-of-work -- or by any other arbitrary method which is

193−careful not to benefit the system's own developers. Could we

194−give away the Urbit address space randomly? Sure. But why?

190+careful not to benefit the system's own developers. Could we

191+give away the Urbit address space randomly? Sure. But why?

195192

196193Probably the purest design is the "proof-of-burn" initial

197−allocation used by some coins. By any standard, proof-of-burn is

194+allocation used by some coins. By any standard, proof-of-burn is

198195technically beautiful and results in an extraordinary level of

199−ethical independence. We can't help but admire it.

196+ethical independence. We can't help but admire it.

200197

201−But any altcoin or metacoin is just way less work than Urbit. An

198+But any altcoin or metacoin is just way less work than Urbit. An

202199altcoin can afford to burn even its creation energy, capturing no

203−value at all from its seigniorage. Your altcoin doesn't have a

204−clean-slate system software stack to drive. If your rocket has

200+value at all from its seigniorage. Your altcoin doesn't have a

201+clean-slate system software stack to drive. If your rocket has

205202to go to the moon, it's going to leave a little bit of smoke in

206203the air.

207204

@@ -210,80 +207,78 @@ of the currency are rewarded disproportionately for their effort.

210207The scamcoin is a get-rich-quick scheme, vaguely pyramid-shaped.

211208Nothing about Urbit matches this pattern at all.

212209

213−Curtis invented Urbit. So by the [homestead

210+Curtis invented Urbit. So by the [homestead

214211principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_principle), he

215−started out owning all of it. But by now, Urbit's 8-bit galaxies

216−have already been distributed among [57 separate individuals]().

217−Curtis owns 4 -- or 24, counting his whole family. (Some of whom

218−he still owes money.)

212+started out owning all of it. But by now, Urbit's 8-bit galaxies

213+have already been distributed among [57 separate individuals](https://github.com/urbit/arvo/blob/master/sys/vane/ames.hoon#L118-L373).

214+Curtis owns 20, or about 8%.

219215

220216Tlon, the corporation which still runs Urbit development, has 95.

221−(Without Tlon, there is basically no Arvo.) 50 are reserved for

222−a hypothetical Urbit Foundation. Tlon employees have another 16.

217+(Without Tlon, there is basically no Arvo.) 50 are reserved for

218+a hypothetical Urbit Foundation. Tlon employees have another 16.

223219

224220The rest of the galaxies belong to donors, investors,

225221contributors, contest winners, and just random people who were in

226−the right place at the right time. One is a Silicon Valley

227−tycoon. Another is an Orthodox nun in a monastery in Greece. A

228−couple are ex-Tlon employees who might totally hate us. There is

222+the right place at the right time. One is a Silicon Valley

223+tycoon. Another is an Orthodox nun in a monastery in Greece. A

224+couple are ex-Tlon employees who might totally hate us. There is

229225nothing they all have in common, which is sort of the point.

230226

231227This property distribution looks a lot like land ownership in the

232−real world -- complex and asymmetrical. That's no accident. If

228+real world -- complex and asymmetrical. That's no accident. If

233229you have a problem living in New York because New York's real

234230estate is not distributed equally among its residents, you may

235−have a similar problem with Urbit. The reality is that Urbit,

231+have a similar problem with Urbit. The reality is that Urbit,

236232like New York, wasn't born yesterday and comes with a complex

237233ownership history which we couldn't possibly change, even if we

238234wanted to.

239235

240−Decentralization is hard. The only real goal of a property

236+Decentralization is hard. The only real goal of a property

241237system in address space is to create and maintain

242−decentralization. The whole network has to exhibit centrifugal

243−force, not centripetal force. Proof-of-work systems certainly

238+decentralization. The whole network has to exhibit centrifugal

239+force, not centripetal force. Proof-of-work systems certainly

244240seem to have unexpected centripetal qualities, producing

245−unanticipated concentrations of centralized hashpower. See the

241+unanticipated concentrations of centralized hashpower. See the

246242next objection.

247243

248−<h2 id="gov">Urbit isn't even really decentralized! It has a

249−government!</h2>

244+## Urbit isn't even really decentralized! It has a government! {% #gov %}

250245

251−**TLDR**: it's technically impossible for Urbit to be

252−decentralized at this stage of its life. Urbit is designed to

246+_TLDR_: it's technically impossible for Urbit to be

247+decentralized at this stage of its life. Urbit is designed to

253248achieve decentralization, not be born with it.

254249

255−A young network can't afford to be decentralized. It has to act

256−as a unit. Because it has no network effect, it needs every

257−scrap of efficiency it can get.

250+A young network can't afford to be decentralized. It has to act

251+as a unit. Because it has no network effect, it needs every

252+scrap of efficiency it can get.

258253

259254A decentralized general-purpose computing network like Urbit can

260−*only* be bootstrapped by a central government. For example, by

255+_only_ be bootstrapped by a central government. For example, by

261256default your urbit upgrades its OS automatically (like an

262−"evergreen" browser) with signed network updates. Whoever signs

257+"evergreen" browser) with signed network updates. Whoever signs

263258these updates is a government by definition.

264259

265260When it's impossible to eliminate centralized power, it becomes

266−necessary to tame, stabilize, and limit it. This should not be

261+necessary to tame, stabilize, and limit it. This should not be

267262surprising to anyone living under a constitutional government.

268263

269264As we found out with the DAO, if a network isn't ready to be

270−decentralized, its developers shouldn't even try. If Ethereum is

265+decentralized, its developers shouldn't even try. If Ethereum is

271266hard-forked to roll back the DAO (which looks like the most

272267probable result), it acknowledges that it both has a central

273−government, and needs a central government. Decentralization is

274−good. Pretend decentralization -- "decentralization theater" --

268+government, and needs a central government. Decentralization is

269+good. Pretend decentralization -- "decentralization theater" --

275270is harmful, and not a effective path to actual decentralization.

276271

277272A key test of a free software project's health is whether it can

278−fork. So long as the unity of the public-key hierarchy and the

273+fork. So long as the unity of the public-key hierarchy and the

279274network protocol is maintained, the Arvo kernel and Urbit system

280275can fork in all kinds of ways without disrupting the network.

281276Any stress will fragment the "government" that develops the

282−kernel, and as it fragments it grows more limited and stable.

277+kernel, and as it fragments it grows more limited and stable.

283278

284279Urbit is designed to govern itself collectively by address space

285−ownership -- effectively, "proof of stake." Any arbitrary power,

286−will tend to fracture along these property lines. For instance,

280+ownership -- effectively, "proof of stake." Any arbitrary power,

281+will tend to fracture along these property lines. For instance,

287282our hot updates are sent through the galaxy hierarchy; in a

288283development fork, active galaxies would pick upstream sources.

289284Two implementations of a standard are better than one.

@@ -293,71 +288,70 @@ we've created a global property map which is much more likely to

293288splinter further, than reunite.

294289

295290In the long run, every galaxy should have a separate owner, who

296−is a human being rather than a corporation. Combining galaxy

297−holdings will damage the reputation of both galaxies. The only

291+is a human being rather than a corporation. Combining galaxy

292+holdings will damage the reputation of both galaxies. The only

298293reason to merge ownership is to move toward incipient monopoly.

299294Whether a galaxy admits this openly or denies it dishonestly, its

300295reputation will suffer.

301296

302−The technical goal of Urbit is to create a network which, *if it

303−actually takes over the world*, inevitably becomes decentralized.

297+The technical goal of Urbit is to create a network which, _if it

298+actually takes over the world_, inevitably becomes decentralized.

304299Even if Urbit takes over the world, no individual or coherent

305−organization takes over the world. There is nothing even close

300+organization takes over the world. There is nothing even close

306301to a single point of failure in a mature, successful Urbit.

307302

308−This is the goal of all the new "web3" decentralized systems. If

303+This is the goal of all the new "web3" decentralized systems. If

309304IPFS, Sandstorm or Ethereum takes over the world, nobody takes

310−over the world. (The same is almost true of the Internet --

305+over the world. (The same is almost true of the Internet --

311306though it wouldn't be that surprising if a time traveler from

3123072116 revealed that ICANN had become a planetary government.)

313308

314309Urbit, by starting out as a centralized network, just reduces the

315−technical problem to match the actual goal. Only long-term

310+technical problem to match the actual goal. Only long-term

316311decentralization matters.

317312

318313It's very important that Urbit in 2116 be fully decentralized.

319314For Urbit in 2016, pretending to be decentralized would be a joke

320−at best, and a hoax at worst. And of course, no one can DAO us

315+at best, and a hoax at worst. And of course, no one can DAO us

321316-- since the property system is still just a central registry.

322−Among other things, we check it into Github. Github is not a

317+Among other things, we check it into GitHub. GitHub is not a

323318blockchain -- but still, good luck with that.

324319

325−<h2 id="sand">{Sandstorm, IPFS, Ethereum, ...} is way ahead of

326−Urbit.</h2>

320+## Sandstorm/IPFS/Ethereum is way ahead of Urbit. {% #sand %}

327321

328322In general, web3 (next distributed web) solutions don't compete

329−with each other. They support each other. Concretely, they are

323+with each other. They support each other. Concretely, they are

330324all part of each others' network effect.

331325

332326IPFS, Sandstorm, Ethereum, and Urbit can all take over the world

333−at the same time. None of them competes with the others. They

327+at the same time. None of them competes with the others. They

334328enable each other.

335329

336330For instance, IPFS and Urbit are both global immutable

337−namespaces. IPFS is a chord-routed, content-addressed namespace.

338−Urbit is a direct-routed, identity-addressed namespace. Urbit is

339−a typed revision-control system; IPFS is a blob store. IPFS

331+namespaces. IPFS is a chord-routed, content-addressed namespace.

332+Urbit is a direct-routed, identity-addressed namespace. Urbit is

333+a typed revision-control system; IPFS is a blob store. IPFS

340334isn't a computer; the work hasn't been done, but Urbit can easily

341335mount the IPFS namespace and compute functionally against it.

342336

343337So the better IPFS does, the less Urbit needs to struggle against

344−its lack of network effect. The better Urbit does, the easier it

338+its lack of network effect. The better Urbit does, the easier it

345339is for IPFS to point to a functional language that can actually

346−use its referential transparency directly. So their relationship

340+use its referential transparency directly. So their relationship

347341is symbiotic, not competitive at all.

348342

349343The closest thing to a general-purpose competitor that Urbit has

350−is Sandstorm. Sandstorm, which by the way rocks, is also a

344+is Sandstorm. Sandstorm, which by the way rocks, is also a

351345personal server built around a network protocol.

352346

353347But Sandstorm and Urbit compete in the way that, on the PC, the

354−OS and the browser compete. In theory, the OS could solve the

348+OS and the browser compete. In theory, the OS could solve the

355349problems that the browser solves; or the browser could be the OS.

356350In practice, Windows is a great OS to run a browser on.

357351

358352Similarly, a world in which Sandstorm takes off is an awesome

359353world for Urbit, because everyone who has a Sandstorm instance

360−has a great platform for running Urbit on. Urbit on Sandstorm

354+has a great platform for running Urbit on. Urbit on Sandstorm

361355will be a sort of "double-hulled" personal server, safer and more

362356friendly than either system alone.

363357

@@ -365,25 +359,24 @@ Sandstorm and Urbit have very different approaches to network

365359identification; Sandstorm uses capabilities, Urbit identity.

366360Broadly speaking, we believe, capabilities are optimal for

367361expressive power; but identity is optimal for the UI of the

368−common case. We'd need to see the Powerbox, Sandstorm's UI, more

362+common case. We'd need to see the Powerbox, Sandstorm's UI, more

369363fully fleshed out to understand its UI approach better.

370364

371−<h2 id="planet">Urbit doesn't have enough planets for every human

372−being.</h2>

365+## Urbit doesn't have enough planets for every human {% #planet %}

373366

374−A 32-bit planet is a tool, not a toy. Like a car, it's a device

375−for a responsible and independent adult. There aren't 4 billion

376−cars in the world, nor 4 billion independent adults.

367+A 32-bit planet is a tool, not a toy. Like a car, it's a device

368+for a responsible and independent adult. There aren't 4 billion

369+cars in the world, nor 4 billion independent adults.

377370

378371If you aren't an independent adult, and you don't need or even

379372shouldn't have unconditional digital freedom (no one's 8-year-old

380373daughter needs unconditional digital freedom), a moon from

381−someone else's planet is fine. (Even most of today's independent

374+someone else's planet is fine. (Even most of today's independent

382375adults don't complain enough about being Facebook's moons.)

383376

384377And limiting the supply of anything doesn't create a shortage.

385−It sets a price. Ideally, in the long run, we think a planet

386−should cost about $10. This could be off by an order of

378+It sets a price. Ideally, in the long run, we think a planet

379+should cost about $10. This could be off by an order of

387380magnitude either way, and it wouldn't be the end of the world.

388381

389382If a planet costs $10, that means you paid $10 to get a planet.

@@ -395,52 +388,51 @@ social network social.

395388There is always a tradeoff between free speech and free beer.

396389Urbit will always choose free speech.

397390

398−<h2 id="pwned">Cloud computing is inherently non-private.</h2>

391+## Cloud computing is inherently non-private. {% #pwned %}

399392

400−**TLDR**: a general-purpose cloud computer is much, much more

401−private than a special-purpose cloud computer. In general, a

393+_TLDR_: a general-purpose cloud computer is much, much more

394+private than a special-purpose cloud computer. In general, a

402395cloud VM is secure against corporations but not governments.

403396With a global adversary, compute in your closet -- or even on

404397your body.

405398

406399One reason we want the decentralized Internet is that we're tired

407−of giant corporations spying on us. Think about it this way:

408−Amazon is Netflix's main competitor. And yet, Netflix runs its

409−whole operation on AWS. Why is Netflix sure that Amazon won't

400+of giant corporations spying on us. Think about it this way:

401+Amazon is Netflix's main competitor. And yet, Netflix runs its

402+whole operation on AWS. Why is Netflix sure that Amazon won't

410403spy on it?

411404

412405A general-purpose virtual machine is special from a privacy

413406standpoint, just because it's commercially realistic to design

414407terms of service that prevent the host from peeking and poking at

415−the customer's machine. Crossing this moat is technically

408+the customer's machine. Crossing this moat is technically

416409nontrivial and can't possibly happen by any reasonable accident.

417410No hosting contract could contemplate it.

418411

419412Whereas when your cloud computer is a special-purpose machine --

420413just a database row on some corporation's mainframe -- there is

421414no way these services can promise not to handle your data.

422−Handling your data is *what they do*. On a special-purpose

415+Handling your data is _what they do_. On a special-purpose

423416server, the concept of privacy is not even defined.

424417

425418Where even a general-purpose server falls down is where the user

426419has a sovereign adversary, which can secretly violate explicit or

427−implicit hosting contracts. Users with a sovereign adversary

428−must rely only on their own physical security.

420+implicit hosting contracts. Users with a sovereign adversary

421+must rely only on their own physical security.

429422

430−However, most users don't have a sovereign adversary. And those

423+However, most users don't have a sovereign adversary. And those

431424who do maximize their "herd immunity" if they can use the same

432−protocols as those who don't. Otherwise, the adversary could

425+protocols as those who don't. Otherwise, the adversary could

433426simply focus on everyone who uses the secure protocols.

434427

435−Also, the portability of a cloud server image is critical. Of

428+Also, the portability of a cloud server image is critical. Of

436429course, since Urbit is formally specified, it's trivially

437−portable. In fact, one strategy against sovereign adversaries

430+portable. In fact, one strategy against sovereign adversaries

438431may be continuous rotation between hosts, like an MX missile.

439432

440−<h2 id="code">Urbit will never be able to call any existing

441−code.</h2>

433+## Urbit will never be able to call any existing code. {% #code %}

442434

443−**TLDR**: neither will Javascript. And dear Unix, the browser

435+_TLDR_: neither will Javascript. And dear Unix, the browser

444436does not miss interacting with your `$LD_LIBRARY_PATH` at all.

445437

446438You can't talk to the OS or use system libraries from Javascript.

@@ -449,32 +441,31 @@ compatibility bridge, native methods, or other interface between

449441Javascript and C.

450442

451443When in doubt, remember that Urbit is "the browser for the server

452−side." It plays by the same general rules. Isolation means

444+side." It plays by the same general rules. Isolation means

453445isolation.

454446

455−<h2 id="weird">There's no way Urbit will ever be

456−adopted. It's too weird.</h2>

447+## There's no way Urbit will ever be adopted. It's too weird. {% #weird %}

457448

458−**TLDR**: Urbit adoption is designed to be driven by ordinary end

459−users. Urbit isn't ready for ordinary end users yet. We're

449+_TLDR_: Urbit adoption is designed to be driven by ordinary end

450+users. Urbit isn't ready for ordinary end users yet. We're

460451working on it -- come help.

461452

462−Right now, Urbit is a developer tool. Or rather, a developer toy

463−-- since the only thing it's useful for is developing Urbit. It

464−also could be a much better toy. We're working on that too.

453+Right now, Urbit is a developer tool. Or rather, a developer toy

454+-- since the only thing it's useful for is developing Urbit. It

455+also could be a much better toy. We're working on that too.

465456

466457But it's absolutely wrong to think of Urbit being adopted as a

467−developer tool in the conventional sense. If you think this is

458+developer tool in the conventional sense. If you think this is

468459almost impossible, you're right.

469460

470461If we look at the way most successful platforms are adopted,

471−they're not adopted for their own virtues. They're adopted

472−because they're part of a larger solution. It's very hard to

473−displace a native component of an existing platform. Urbit is

462+they're not adopted for their own virtues. They're adopted

463+because they're part of a larger solution. It's very hard to

464+displace a native component of an existing platform. Urbit is

474465not trying to do this.

475466

476467C is a better language than Pascal, but it didn't beat Pascal

477−because it's a better language. C beat Pascal because C was the

468+because it's a better language. C beat Pascal because C was the

478469native language of Unix, and people wanted to program in Unix.

479470People don't use Javascript because Javascript is a great

480471language, but because it's the native language of the browser.

@@ -482,9 +473,9 @@ Replacing the native language of a platform may be doable -- but

482473it's incredibly hard.

483474

484475Hoon is not competing with C, or even Haskell, as a Unix

485−programming language. The only reason to program in Hoon is that

486−it's the native language of Urbit. Urbit is not competing with

487−node.js or Rails as a Web backend. The only reason to run Urbit

476+programming language. The only reason to program in Hoon is that

477+it's the native language of Urbit. Urbit is not competing with

478+node.js or Rails as a Web backend. The only reason to run Urbit

488479is to run a personal server.

489480

490481Nock is cool, but it only gets adopted if Hoon gets adopted.

@@ -493,10 +484,9 @@ Urbit only gets adopted if it's useful as a personal server for

493484human beings -- most of whom won't be Hoon programmers, or

494485programmers at all.

495486

496−<h2 id="program">Hoon is too weird. No one will be able to

497−program in it.</h2>

487+## Hoon is too weird. No one will be able to program in it. {% #program %}

498488

499−**TLDR**: Hoon is ridiculously simple. Our documentation and

489+_TLDR_: Hoon is ridiculously simple. Our documentation and

500490tooling are just immature.

501491

502492It's pretty fair to assume that (a) functional programming is

@@ -506,96 +496,94 @@ so (c) Hoon must be hard-squared.

506496Actually, Hoon is weird even for a functional language because

507497it's an attempt to remove the hardest things about functional

508498programming: category theory, lazy evaluation, and gratuitous

509−abstraction. To know a language is to know what the compiler is

499+abstraction. To know a language is to know what the compiler is

510500doing; all the semantics of the Hoon compiler fit in 2000 lines

511501of code.

512502

513503It's too easy for us to wind up living in Isaac Asimov's Trantor,

514504a world in which everything got invented thousands of years ago

515−and the idea of new technology is just weird and scary. History

505+and the idea of new technology is just weird and scary. History

516506isn't over yet, and nor is technical history.

517507

518−New things are harder to learn than old things. We ask smart

519−high-school students to learn calculus. Think about how much

508+New things are harder to learn than old things. We ask smart

509+high-school students to learn calculus. Think about how much

520510harder it was for Newton and Leibniz to invent calculus, or for

521−their first students to pick it up. Hoon is nowhere near as hard

511+their first students to pick it up. Hoon is nowhere near as hard

522512as calculus.

523513

524514Most of the difference is just the collective certainty that our

525515society conveys to a high-school student that calculus is

526−learnable. When you're learning Urbit, you don't have this

516+learnable. When you're learning Urbit, you don't have this

527517collective knowledge; so you don't have the confidence that the

528−problem is solvable. Confidence makes a huge difference.

518+problem is solvable. Confidence makes a huge difference.

529519Moreover, any bug or glitch in the developer experience destroys

530520this confidence and takes a long time to heal.

531521

532−Yes, we know: Hoon remains quite hard to learn. Again, we have

533−no reason to think this problem isn't solvable. Public

522+Yes, we know: Hoon remains quite hard to learn. Again, we have

523+no reason to think this problem isn't solvable. Public

534524enlightenment remains our main priority.

535525

536−<h2 id="stuck">Urbit programmers are stuck with Hoon.</h2>

526+## Urbit programmers are stuck with Hoon. {% #stuck %}

537527

538−**TLDR**: patience, grasshopper.

528+_TLDR_: patience, grasshopper.

539529

540530There's quite a straightforward way to implement any perfectly

541−specified language with a reliable interpreter in Hoon. First,

542−write an interpreter for that language in Hoon. Second, jet that

543−intepreter function with the existing implementation.

531+specified language with a reliable interpreter in Hoon. First,

532+write an interpreter for that language in Hoon. Second, jet that intepreter function with the existing implementation.

544533

545−It is not clear that Javascript is *quite* well-defined enough

546−for this treatment. But Lua probably is.

534+It is not clear that Javascript is _quite_ well-defined enough

535+for this treatment. But Lua probably is.

547536

548−<h2 id="user">Ordinary users will never be able to manage an

549−Urbit server.</h2>

537+## Ordinary users will never be able to manage an Urbit server. {% #user %}

550538

551−**TLDR**: Urbit's technical simplicity has always been designed

552−to drive human usability. But the polish is the last thing that

553−goes on. So we can't evaluate this claim right now.

539+_TLDR_: Urbit's technical simplicity has always been designed

540+to drive human usability. But the polish is the last thing that

541+goes on. So we can't evaluate this claim right now.

554542

555−Right now, Urbit is only for geeks. You already need to be able

556−to wrangle a Unix machine to run it. What's the point?

543+Right now, Urbit is only for geeks. You already need to be able

544+to wrangle a Unix machine to run it. What's the point?

557545

558−This Urbit isn't the real Urbit. It's an early milestone on the

546+This Urbit isn't the real Urbit. It's an early milestone on the

559547way to the real Urbit.

560548

561549The real Urbit -- for normal human beings -- is a hosted service.

562−Getting a planet is as easy as signing up for Facebook. Probably

563−many users will think of it as another web account. They might

550+Getting a planet is as easy as signing up for Facebook. Probably

551+many users will think of it as another web account. They might

564552not even know it can run more apps than the ones they use.

565553

566554A deterministic, persistent cloud computer is something different

567−from a traditional server. Normally when we think of a server in

555+from a traditional server. Normally when we think of a server in

568556the cloud, we think of it like a live animal -- a creature that

569−needs to be cared for, fed, and herded. A file in the cloud is

557+needs to be cared for, fed, and herded. A file in the cloud is

570558more like a rock -- you can forget about it for ten years.

571559

572560An urbit is a general-purpose computer, but it doesn't even have

573−the concept of a reboot. It upgrades itself. If you don't feed

561+the concept of a reboot. It upgrades itself. If you don't feed

574562it any packets for ten years, then turn it back on, it will spend

575−a day or two upgrading itself, then be back to normal. Maybe

563+a day or two upgrading itself, then be back to normal. Maybe

576564it's something in between a rock and an animal -- a cactus?

577565

578566Another huge difference versus an Internet server is that we're

579567confident that Urbit's limited supply of identities will make it

580−easy to keep abusers off the network. So far, so good -- but of

568+easy to keep abusers off the network. So far, so good -- but of

581569course, no one abuses a young network.

582570

583571The bottom line is that managing your urbit has to be as easy as

584−managing your iPhone. Normally, it consists of deciding what

572+managing your iPhone. Normally, it consists of deciding what

585573apps you want to be running, and how much you trust them.

586574Resources can't be free, so sometimes you have to play memory

587−police. Humans have shown that they can handle these tasks.

575+police. Humans have shown that they can handle these tasks.

588576

589577Our '70s OSes and networks, which were great designs in their day

590578and have matured into excellent industrial tools, give us a

591579totally misleading impression of how hard it should be to manage

592−a general-purpose computer. Computing isn't scary or dangerous.

593−Unix and the Internet are scary and dangerous. That's fine for

580+a general-purpose computer. Computing isn't scary or dangerous.

581+Unix and the Internet are scary and dangerous. That's fine for

594582an industrial tool, but not a personal tool.

595583

596−<h2 id="killer">Urbit has no killer app.</h2>

584+## Urbit has no killer app. {% #killer %}

597585

598−**TLDR**: the killer app is personal API aggregation.

586+_TLDR_: the killer app is personal API aggregation.

599587

600588It's a truism that any new platform has to be fundamentally much

601589better at solving some problem than the mature platform it seeks

@@ -608,23 +596,23 @@ From the developer's perspective, Urbit's advantage is that it's

608596a network stack which provides exactly-once delivery of typed,

609597validated, transactional, encrypted and authenticated messages.

610598The difference between an Urbit API and a REST API is like the

611−difference between a paved road and a dirt road. On the other

599+difference between a paved road and a dirt road. On the other

612600hand, you do need to learn a new functional language.

613601

614602From the user's perspective, there's one task that any personal

615603server can perform, that can't be performed by any Web service:

616604unrestricted API aggregation.

617605

618−Well before Urbit is ready to *replace* any conventional web

619−services, it should be ready to *command* them in place by API.

620−(Or if needed, by scraping.) If all you care about is being in

606+Well before Urbit is ready to _replace_ any conventional web

607+services, it should be ready to _command_ them in place by API.

608+(Or if needed, by scraping.) If all you care about is being in

621609control of your own data, it's fine to leave it in the hands of

622610these services, as you have the API secrets to get it out.

623611

624612Managing a set of security connections to your existing services

625613is one of the first important tasks of a modern personal server.

626614This is a stateful task that typically requires both a durable

627−API key and a temporary OAuth token. APIs change all the time,

615+API key and a temporary OAuth token. APIs change all the time,

628616so connection maintenance also requires evergreen updates.

629617

630618The origin of this API key will vary, but usually the best way to

@@ -636,7 +624,7 @@ do with your own data.

636624

637625Terms of service which constrain the use of data (as opposed to

638626the abuse of the service) simply aren't realistic and will no

639−longer apply. This enables a variety of novel user experiences

627+longer apply. This enables a variety of novel user experiences

640628which aren't implementable as traditional web services, and also

641629aren't available via conventional third-party API aggregators.

642630

@@ -644,42 +632,42 @@ Also, since Urbit is after all quite immature, it doesn't make

644632much sense to restrict this security state to code within Urbit.

645633The Urbit interpreter `vere` runs as a Unix daemon that

646634implements the FUSE user-level filesystem protocol, and maps the

647−data on your services into the Unix filesystem. For example, one

648−of our demos lets you `ls` your Github issues.

635+data on your services into the Unix filesystem. For example, one

636+of our demos lets you `ls` your GitHub issues.

649637

650638So it's straightforward to build, for instance, a Python app that

651−uses Urbit as a gateway to mash up a bunch of web services. As a

639+uses Urbit as a gateway to mash up a bunch of web services. As a

652640Unix programmer, you might even just regard Urbit as a generic

653641Web API gateway daemon, without worrying about its internals.

654642

655−We have other ideas for initial killer apps. But this, we feel,

656−is the best one. API libraries for `npm` et al abound.

643+We have other ideas for initial killer apps. But this, we feel,

644+is the best one. API libraries for `npm` et al abound.

657645Stateful, self-updating, generic API aggregators with FUSE

658646integration, also integrated with a reactive web server, are

659647rarer.

660648

661−<h2 id="horse">Urbit is sniffed at by Houyhnhyms.</h2>

649+## Urbit is sniffed at by Houyhnhyms. {% #horse %}

662650

663651It's difficult to categorize [this awesome

664652essay](http://ngnghm.github.io/blog/2016/06/11/chapter-10-houyhnhnms-vs-martians/)

665−a single bullet point. So I've saved it for last.

653+in a single bullet point. So I've saved it for last.

666654

667655When reading this essay, it's important not to forget the amazing

668656absence of genuine, mutually critical discourse in computer

669−science (as in most sciences today). You never hear what Swift's

670−designers think of Go, or vice versa. And critical public

657+science (as in most sciences today). You never hear what Swift's

658+designers think of Go, or vice versa. And critical public

671659discourse decreases, not increases, with increasing academic

672660legitimacy.

673661

674662The basic test of any field purportedly scientific in nature is

675663whether its researchers are genuinely interested in each others'

676−work, and willing to share these genuine responses publicly. If

664+work, and willing to share these genuine responses publicly. If

677665this practice does not exist, the field may still be useful

678−and/or interesting. But it is not science.

666+and/or interesting. But it is not science.

679667

680−What's awesome about Fare's essay is that he's *doing it right*.

681−All the actual details are irrelevant. And mostly wrong. But

682−that's of very little importance compared to *doing it right*.

668+What's awesome about Fare's essay is that he's _doing it right_.

669+All the actual details are irrelevant. And mostly wrong. But

670+that's of very little importance compared to _doing it right_.

683671

684672Anyway, we've already addressed the idea that jets are a sham.

685673Some other points:

@@ -687,11 +675,11 @@ Some other points:

687675### Event-sourcing and/or caching is a pattern, not a layer

688676

689677Fare' is perfectly right that "one size does not fit all" in

690−persistence. Generally, Urbit uses event-sourced persistence.

678+persistence. Generally, Urbit uses event-sourced persistence.

691679

692680But it has multiple layers of event-sourcing: in the definition

693681of Urbit itself; in the application sandbox vane (Gall), and in

694−the application itself. Urbit also has a completely orthogonal

682+the application itself. Urbit also has a completely orthogonal

695683revision control system (Clay).

696684

697685And there is not a single cache across the whole system, though

@@ -705,33 +693,33 @@ or feature, and equally fatal whichever direction you fail.

705693### Let's be clear about why DSLs suck

706694

707695DSLs suck not because they are difficult to newbies in the base

708−language. DSLs suck because every time a programmer, even one

709−*experienced* in the base language, comes into a new codebase or

696+language. DSLs suck because every time a programmer, even one

697+_experienced_ in the base language, comes into a new codebase or

710698project, she has to learn a new custom language.

711699

712−You need enormous wins to justify this cost. It's the goal of

700+You need enormous wins to justify this cost. It's the goal of

713701the base language designer to preempt these wins, creating a

714702language which is almost never so tiresome and full of

715703boilerplate that it requires a DSL or template layer.

716704

717705Hoon is almost entirely made of macros -- but they are internal,

718−fixed, built-in macros (with no gensyms). This fixed set of

719−macros is essentially enough. Occasionally we want to add one or

720−two. But we never, ever pine for context-dependent macros.

706+fixed, built-in macros (with no gensyms). This fixed set of

707+macros is essentially enough. Occasionally we want to add one or

708+two. But we never, ever pine for context-dependent macros.

721709

722710### Determinism is not consensus, and is not constraining

723711

724712Fare' is totally right that an urbit's data is meant for itself

725−alone. In fact, an urbit has the right to compute incorrectly if

726−it wants. We go to considerable lengths to ensure that you can't

713+alone. In fact, an urbit has the right to compute incorrectly if

714+it wants. We go to considerable lengths to ensure that you can't

727715gain any particular advantage by incorrect computing.

728716

729717The whole point of Nock is that it's so low-level that there is

730−no conceivable advantage in upgrading it. Divergence is just

731−pointless. This is not a question of network integrity, just of

718+no conceivable advantage in upgrading it. Divergence is just

719+pointless. This is not a question of network integrity, just of

732720practical standardization.

733721

734−This consistency stops at Nock. Without anyone violating the

722+This consistency stops at Nock. Without anyone violating the

735723correctness of their lifecycle functions, anyone or everyone in

736−Urbit could replace Hoon with Javascript. Determinism does not

724+Urbit could replace Hoon with Javascript. Determinism does not

737725cramp Urbit's semantic style in any way, shape or form.

content/blog/community-spotlight-the-portico.mdnew file+138

@@ -0,0 +1,138 @@

1++++

2+title = "Community Spotlight: The Portico"

3+date = "2021-05-03"

4+description = "Interview with The Portico founder Josh Reagan"

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Matt"

8+ship = "~tirwyd-sarmes"

9+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/orthodoxchurch.jpg"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+_One of the most striking things about Urbit is the ideological diversity between communities. The Community Spotlight blog series will focus on various Urbit communities via interviews with founding members._

15+

16+For the first week of the Community Spotlight series, I (~tirwyd-sarmes) will be speaking with Josh Reagan (~taglux-nidsep). Josh is the founder of The Portico, an Urbit community of Eastern Orthodox Christians.

17+

18+The Portico is a very active group with conversations taking place over multiple channels. There are channels for posting Orthodox iconography, discussing the broader Christian culture war, and just talking about Orthodoxy in general. Of particular interest is Josh’s “Euthyphro” blog series which investigates the relationship between logic and the Orthodox faith. This is a topic that Josh is well qualified to talk about: he has a PhD in Philosophy from Rice University. His dissertation on the epistemology of logic and truth-preservation was titled "Knowing Your Limits: Logic for Limited Beings”. Josh is also the co-author of a forthcoming textbook on formal logic.

19+

20+To read Josh’s blog is to be inducted into two esoteric traditions: theory of logic and Orthodox theology. With titles like “St. Gregory the Theologian and the Liar Paradox” and “The Existence of Abstract Objects”, Josh does not pull punches.

21+

22+Accordingly, our conversation focused on the idiosyncratic and niche community that The Portico is home to. There, you won’t find cussing or much talk about “life partners”, but you will find cutting critiques of liberalism and the best way to raise Orthodox children.

23+

24+As other users have pointed out, Urbit is pre-[Eternal September](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September). In fact, there’s some hope that the very nature of Urbit, how it tries to protect the sovereignty of niche communities via decentralization, might foil the Eternal September phenomenon. If Josh’s community persists, it will be a testament to both Josh and the decentralized Urbit network. As of now The Portico is a refreshing, perhaps jarring (as Josh might say), reminder of what the internet looked like back in the early days—a place for those who are different.

25+

26+I encourage you to take a look. Find The Portico at ~topnup-firber/the-portico.

27+

28+\-\-\-\-

29+

30+**Do you see any connection between Rod Dreher’s _The Benedict Option_ and your community on Urbit? Dreher sees a need for American Christians to create self-sustaining communities outside of the mainstream to protect the Christian religion and culture.**

31+

32+It’s tough to say with certainty—I’ve never read _The Benedict Option_.

33+

34+A few years ago, while he was writing the book, I was a regular reader of Dreher’s blog. From his descriptions there, I was never clear about what exactly he was proposing. Much of his “clarification” came by way of metaphor: don’t “run for the hills”, but stop “shoring up the American imperium”. I didn’t read his book because I didn’t have much confidence that he would be especially precise or insightful.

35+

36+[There is an interesting review I’d recommend](https://handleshaus.wordpress.com/2020/10/06/review-of-rod-drehers-live-not-by-lies/), however, of his later book, _Live Not By Lies_. I believe it accurately characterizes the scale of the threat Christians will soon face in this country.

37+

38+My upbringing was conservative Christian and self-consciously counter-cultural. I've inherited that understanding of what it means to be a Christian in an increasingly secular world. It comes naturally to me, so I find it obvious that Christians should form self-sustaining communities. But the details matter. What do such communities look like? How do we secure the freedom to pursue such communities? How do we sustain them, when myriad external forces seek to undermine them? How do we solve the long-term problem of the declining cultural importance of Christianity (which surely erodes the plausibility of our religion to many, even to some of those with sympathies toward it)?

39+

40+I don’t claim to know the answers to these questions.

41+

42+One kind of answer is that we should redouble our efforts to support and maintain a religiously and morally neutral liberal political order, which leaves room for subcultures to live and self-regulate as they wish. I disagree. Those who support a kind of “neutral” liberalism view it as an attempt to go “meta” and rise above various parochial metaphysical, moral, and religious disputes. I view this as a cop-out, a refusal to grapple with the most important questions.

43+

44+Does the liberal have metaphysically-rooted moral reasons for going “meta”? If so, then he’s just another sectarian and he should be honest about it. The only difference is that his team has had the whip hand for the last several generations. On the other hand, if the liberal claims no underlying metaphysical justification then his project can succeed only to the extent that he can arrange and adjudicate unprincipled (and therefore ad hoc) agreements between otherwise hostile moral communities. But how stable can such an arrangement really be?

45+

46+Orthodox Christians have theologically rich, metaphysical foundations for their social and moral teachings. With these we can form healthy, thriving, and growing communities. We can do so even under actively hostile political orders. If the early Church could make it under the Romans, so can we today. But it’s going to be difficult and sound judgment is necessary. Unfortunately, we lack strong leadership and that leaves us vulnerable. If we stay uncoordinated we dissipate our energies needlessly. If we latch onto the wrong leaders we can be led astray.

47+

48+The challenges are immense. There is no technological solution. Even so, I’m an Urbit early-adopter for a reason. Over the years I’ve come into contact with a number of Orthodox and Ortho-curious Urbit followers. Why not try to bring them together in an Urbit group?

49+

50+As far as I know, no one in the group is clergy. We’re all just a bunch of laymen with no authority to do much of anything. But I’d like to think we can still contribute in some way. I have an academic background in analytic philosophy so my inclination is to emphasize theory, but we have room for a bit of everything. Someone in the group wrote a script to take the texts of various Church Fathers and convert them to audio using AWS Polly. Those turned out pretty well!

51+

52+At times I entertain ambitions to do a bit more, but for now perhaps it’s better to keep expectations in check. If nothing else, we can read and discuss the Scriptures and Church Fathers together, and try to understand better how to apply and live out their teachings. As we continue to grow the community and develop a consistent internal dynamic perhaps opportunities will arise that aren’t yet on the horizon. One thing I can say is that I’m committed to keeping the group active and growing.

53+

54+**I’d like to talk about your blog on The Portico. It combines two of your main interests: logic and theology. In broad strokes, do you think theology and logic are compatible? What is the relevance of this intersection to both of these disciplines?**

55+

56+I feel obligated to answer this question in two ways.

57+

58+(1) If by “logic” you mean “first-order predicate calculus”, then I think there’s no special conflict between logic and theology. There are certain puzzles about their relationship, but similar puzzles exist between logic and other disciplines. Theology isn't especially endangered.

59+

60+For example, in the 1930s, Alfred Tarski proved his famous Undefinability Theorem. Crudely put, it says that a plausible truth predicate cannot consistently be contained in any formal system with axioms strong enough to model arithmetic. Superficially it seems like our options are (a) get rid of the concept of truth, (b) get rid of arithmetic, or (c) throw away parts of logic until all inconsistency disappears.

61+

62+None of these options is appealing. Tarski came up with a solution that mostly satisfies many logicians: reduce the concept of truth to “truth in a language” and forbid any language from containing its own truth predicate. If you want to talk about truth in a language L-1, you have to do it from a “metalanguage”, L-2.

63+

64+Is Tarski’s definition of truth in a language the definitive solution for preserving truth, math, and logic? Perhaps not many philosophers think so, and there’s a massive literature in which logicians have attempted to improve on or extend his results.

65+

66+Sometimes people seem to think formal logic is an infallible gift from heaven that must always be right. Kant said in the _Critique of Pure Reason_ that formal logic is essentially a completed field. In fact, [the logic of his day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port-Royal_Logic) was an early-modern Cartesian variation of a medieval scholastic synthesis of ancient Stoic and Aristotelian logics. Roughly 100 years after Kant’s first critique was published, C. S. Peirce and Gottlob Frege independently discovered first-order mathematical logic as we know it today, inaugurating the greatest advance of logic since Aristotle. Kant was wrong.

67+

68+Mathematical logic is a convenient, generally reliable, man-made tool that, when used carelessly in certain untamed domains, can lead one astray. Probably most people reading this are familiar with such puzzles as the Liar paradox. When one understands that logic is not a completed science, and perhaps never will be, there is less reason to worry about whether it can be used to nuke entire disciplines, like theology.

69+

70+For more on this topic, see the blog post in my Urbit group: “St. Gregory the Theologian and the Liar Paradox”.

71+

72+(2) There is perhaps a deeper challenge than the one I’ve just sketched. The Stoics used the term “logic” to encompass what we might today call “epistemology”. If the word “logic” is meant in some such broad and normative sense, then we may restate the challenge as one about rationality and theology. Is it irrational to pursue theology in our modern age?

73+

74+As an undergraduate under the influence of Kierkegaard, I was attracted to a romantic, vaguely irrationalist notion of faith. Dawkins-mania was at its peak and I was disgusted by the pop-rationality (or was it empiricism?) of his annoying followers. Their view seemed to be that rationality just means “following the evidence”. The raw evidence is foundational, and theories are built atop by generalizing from the evidence. The ghost of logical positivism is with us even now.

75+

76+I was dimly aware that Quine and others had made it difficult to sustain epistemic foundationalism. However, being unable to supply a more clear and cogent notion of rationality, I became skeptical of the idea altogether. But I went too far.

77+

78+Instead, the proper response is to develop a superior account of rationality. Readers can probably guess where I went looking!

79+

80+The word “logic” comes from the Greek “λόγος”. This is also the word used to describe Jesus Christ in the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God.” This connection is not merely etymological.

81+

82+For many ancients, the term “λόγος” meant something like “divine principle”. You might think of it as akin to a law of nature, but with stronger theological connotations. Christians appropriated this term and made it rather more exalted: the Logos is begotten of the Father, and yet somehow one with Him.

83+

84+We are told that all things come into being through the Logos (John 1:3), giving Him an intimate relationship to the whole of creation. He gives structure and order to all created things, and in His divinity He understands them as so structured and ordered. He is also sinless, perfectly holy, and good. In Christ we have a perfect unity of the knowledge of all truth and righteousness.

85+

86+Man was created in the image of God, which means that we bear a likeness to Christ. And we are commanded to realize that likeness with ever greater fidelity (Romans 8:29). The Church calls the pursuit of this likeness [“theosis”](<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theosis_(Eastern_Christian_theology)>).

87+

88+Thus we have the explanation of all normativity, according to Orthodox Christianity. In moral matters we must take on the holiness of Christ. In epistemic matters we aspire to the wisdom and knowledge of Christ, which includes an understanding of the whole created order. Socially we (the community of believers, i.e. the Church) are called to be in ever greater communion with God, cooperating with His work just as the Son cooperates with the Father.

89+

90+Sadly we are conceived in sin and ignorant; hence the need for redemption by Christ.

91+

92+Accordingly, my understanding of what it means to be rational is just to be Christ-like. The only perfect exemplar of reason, so construed, is Christ Himself. Any deviation from Him is irrational. What could be more logical than to be conformed to the Logos? But we cannot attain rationality without redemption. Hence we cannot become rational without first being saved from sin.

93+

94+Doubtlessly many will find all of this too much to take, just too implausible. What about the development of mathematics, or the advances of the sciences? These are canonically ennobling, intellectual achievements. Jesus wasn’t a mathematician or a scientist! Nowhere in the Scriptures is He recorded as having applied Bayes’ theorem.

95+

96+Undoubtedly my construal of rationality de-emphasizes the pursuit of knowledge by labeling it as merely one of several normative ends. To seek knowledge without seeking holiness is to be understood as dangerously unbalanced. To try to attain holiness and knowledge without communion with God is arrogant.

97+

98+On the other hand, we need not exaggerate matters. St. Paul affirms the need for specialization of labor within the Church (1 Cor. 12). There is room for some to specialize in intellectual endeavors, so long as they act in a cooperative setting in which the other virtues are pursued as well. (Nor should anyone neglect the development of such virtues in himself.) Mathematicians and physicists are more than welcome in the Church.

99+

100+According to this (all too briefly put) theory of rationality, there can be no conflict between ‘logic’ and theology. Theology is compatible with rationality because the account of rationality in question derives from a theological tradition. Naturally I’ve only given a sketch; much more could be said. But even if some readers are put off by the theory presented here, I hope it’s at least clear that there are conflicting notions of rationality. Anyone who wants to be rational confronts the task of figuring out which theory of rationality is correct.

101+

102+**In terms of community moderation, The Portico follows norms that are quite different than other online communities, often times quite drastically. For instance, living with women that you are not married to, is not something that should be talked about lightly. Can you talk about the importance of norms and how they relate to a healthy community?**

103+

104+Orthodox Christians are not commanded to “get along” with the rest of the world (John 15:18-25). We’re different, and our norms of interaction should likewise differ from those of outsiders. There is no one, monolithic “Orthodox culture”, but there are standards governing which local expressions of culture are legitimate and which are sinful. We should live in a way that enables and promotes holiness and discourages sin.

105+

106+We have rules that may seem unusual from the outside. I don’t permit profanity, lewd jokes, or irreverent comments about God. In your question you mention a living arrangement that is prevalent in the world. Another rule I have is that we shouldn’t talk causally about sinful practices or lifestyles as if they are unremarkable parts of ordinary life. If Orthodox Christianity is true then such things aren’t minor peccadilloes. They’re spiritually destructive. The marriage-bond sanctifies activities that would otherwise be sinful.

107+

108+If someone wants to analyze what is destructive about men and women living together before marriage, we’re open to that. But if you want to be affirmed in your sin, we’re not the place for you. Anyone of any religious creed is welcome to show up—but as a guest in an Orthodox Christian community. Hosts should be courteous to guests, but my first priority is not to make you feel good about your choices. We’re here to encourage each other, learn, and grow spiritually as Orthodox Christians. Naturally that means a little gate-keeping may sometimes be necessary if someone ever comes along who doesn’t share those goals. Being different is difficult and takes work.

109+

110+In a way the cultural contrast is meant to be jarring. It can force you to confront moral and cultural presuppositions that you didn’t even know you had. When you become aware of the wider choices of culture available to you, you become free to look with a critical eye on the culture you’ve hitherto taken for granted. I think anyone could see how that might be liberating, even before considering the particulars of the cultures in question. Of course, as an Orthodox Christian, I think we have a good case to make about the particulars of our subculture.

111+

112+I’ve never had to kick or ban anyone from the group. The group is relatively small (~180 people at the moment) so that probably helps. The vast majority of conversations are relaxed and friendly. Occasionally there are intense debates about one issue or another but I enjoy it, as long as it doesn’t become bitter or the primary mode of discourse. But everything ought to be done in a spirit of truth-seeking, not of one-upmanship.

113+

114+**The fact that The Portico can exist side-by-side with atheist communities on Urbit is pretty striking. On Urbit, a user is able to create niche communities and governance structures and yet still participate in a larger network. In other words, Urbit is trying to thread the needle between sameness and difference through federation at multiple levels. It seems to me that modern culture has become homogeneous due to an inability to maintain, or distinguish between, different communities. People who have nothing in common are forced to engage as if they were roommates, while those who are similar have trouble creating their own home. In other words, what is the role of community formation in the modern world and how does it connect to your critique of liberalism? Does Urbit have anything to say about this?**

115+

116+As I said in an earlier response, I see the liberal project as more or less an attempt to sidestep (not solve) difficult metaphysical and religious disputes between various distinct moral communities. Liberals have tried several methods of governance to achieve their ends. We can divide such attempts into two broad categories: centralized and decentralized.

117+

118+Social media companies in the US confront similar governance challenges, so we can analyze them in similar terms.

119+

120+A social network like Facebook takes a centralized approach. Zuckerberg spoke early and often of his desire to connect people and “bring the world closer together”. There was a sense that if people from various communities could get to know each other a little better, we would see how much we have in common and make progress toward some kind of universal cosmopolitan consensus.

121+

122+But that didn’t happen. With centralized social media you’re practically guaranteed to interact with people whose moral and metaphysical commitments are sharply at odds with your own. As a result, you face a persistent, nagging risk of conflict. Without warning, a friendly disagreement can explode into an all-out flame war. Most choose one of two basic approaches for dealing with this threat:

123+

124+(1) You live a compartmentalized life. You keep your moral and metaphysical commitments to yourself and cultivate a culturally homogenized persona for your social media activities. No one disagrees with you because there’s nothing to disagree with.

125+

126+(2) You can enlist to fight in the culture war and display your regimental colors with pride. And because you take your smartphone everywhere you’re always on the front line.

127+

128+These aren’t the only options, of course. With some combination of charisma, patience, and grace you can be relatively open about your beliefs without getting into too much trouble. But even if you have the talent to pull it off, it takes time and energy. Many of us aren’t willing to go to all that trouble. Social media is supposed to serve us, not the other way around.

129+

130+Urbit is decentralized which, in my opinion, means that it isn’t really a network in the way that Facebook is. I see Urbit as more of a network platform. The users create the networks, or migrate them in from elsewhere. We’re all using Landscape and running our VMs on Nock, so obviously there can be interaction between different communities. But anyone who doesn’t want that cross-community interaction doesn’t have to have it.

131+

132+I’ve followed Urbit’s progress since 2016, so I’m plugged into groups with other Urbit people I’ve come to know over the years. Other than that, however, I don’t know much about who’s out there. It’s not like The Portico is in one neighborhood and the atheists are in the next neighborhood over. There’s a real sense in which we’re not even on the same network—different Urbit communities share a common protocol, but a protocol isn’t a network.

133+

134+Some people may want to see a little of everything. If atheists want to join our group they’re welcome to do so! We’ll be friendly. I don’t seek out their groups, though.

135+

136+One virtue of decentralized social media is that it offers a totally different set of trade-offs with respect to how you share and act on your beliefs. What if you could talk earnestly about philosophy and religion without having to worry about alienating many of your friends and family? I guess that’s somewhat possible on Facebook—do they still have “groups”?—but Urbit was designed for it.

137+

138+Having said all that, I don’t think decentralization is a panacea. Even if Urbit takes off, it will likely face problems that are difficult to anticipate now. My hope is simply that Urbit’s trade-offs are healthier than the ones we’ve had before.

content/blog/convivial-networks.mdnew file+27

@@ -0,0 +1,27 @@

1++++

2+title = "Convivial Networks"

3+date = "2022-05-27"

4+description = "Like the relationships that we build within them, our platforms should yield satisfaction precisely because they’re non-trivial; they demand effort, which is another way of saying they require engagement with the world."

5+[extra]

6+author = ""

7+ship = "~witwyt-widlyr"

8+image = "https://media.urbit.org/blog/convivial-computers.jpg"

9++++

10+

11+

12+

13+In 1989, when the idea of forging a community online was still niche enough to feel like a radical dream, an essay in the inaugural issue of cyberpunk magazine Mondo2000 already had the audacity to ask: have we missed the revolution? Penned by Lee Felsenstein, the text takes stock of the potential, promised by the advent of the personal computer, for new technologies to contest control and engender greater forms of interpersonal connection. This opportunity, of course, was not a given. “If people can gain control over their own channels, and have the technological means available to do that directly”, he wrote, “then they can control their own communities.” If the revolution in question was not to be missed, then ownership and control over one’s own means of communication were central affordances of any technology that would lend itself to genuine community-building, or what Felsenstein called “convivial” interaction.

14+

15+His use of that term brings to mind Ivan Illich, whose “Tools for Conviviality” expressed the need for technology that can be grasped and reconstructed – tools of “high, independent efficiency” that a user could take responsibility for. Convivial tools are the opposite of industrial or institutional; Illich argued for making things usable and re-inserting the personal dimension into their construction. This was 1973, and he was talking about urban planning, but the resonance with Felsenstein’s point doesn’t seem so far a reach. If personal computing was indeed to offer any radical possibility, and especially any claim to agency over the ability to build and be in communities, it ought to be grounded in simple, accessible tools that we ourselves can operate.

16+

17+From a present standpoint, we could understand both Illich and Felsenstein’s texts as calls for human-scale technology. Simplicity is a central ingredient of this prescription; it’s hard to feel much ownership over something that one can’t use, manipulate, or maintain without deferring to an external expert every time something needs tinkering under the hood. In the decades since these treatises’ publication, personal computing has become totally commonplace, yet, with the elaboration of social networking and Cambrian Explosion of communication tools brought about by Web 2.0, it feels increasingly, and noticeably, less convivial.

18+

19+Why did this trajectory – and not one of “personal computing leagues” and ad-hoc hacking, of the nature Felsenstein and his _Mondo_ co-conspirators so passionately envisioned – take hold? My hypothesis is that, as [Rich Hickey](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4&ab_channel=StrangeLoopConference) lays out, simplicity actually demands a lot of _work_. In a culture of convenience, the concerted and enthusiastic effort necessary to achieve real agency over our tools can, paradoxically, come across as prohibitively hard. Yet conflating accessibility with frictionlessness works to our collective detriment. The technologies capable of fostering conviviality _ask something of us_: engagement, patience, the will to understand. In our offline social lives, these are accepted as necessary labors of love: intimacy without investment is an impossible, irresponsible fantasy. To invoke the oft-quoted Simone Weil, “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

20+

21+And as we well know, in the present mediatic environment – tellingly termed the “attention economy” – the dynamics of directing our focus online are deeply broken. Is it any surprise that, on the platforms that have pioneered a business model out of stealing and selling that attention, community and conviviality feel so hard to come by? Effort, labor, and understanding are fundamental to relationships online and off. But the spaces where we’re meant to share these qualities online disingenuously sell us (or, rather, do they _buy us?_) with promises of ease that amount to empty calories, or worse.

22+

23+By removing friction from the equation (think: Log In With Facebook), they wall us in and transform our connections, conducted within their borders, into spaces of extraction. The mainstream communications platforms we have access to today are marketized to the hilt. Our interactions and the relational graphs they chart – in short, the tender data of our sociality – is made into fodder for surveillance capitalism. When nothing short of interpersonal intimacy is on the line, we ought to be very concerned with what is being occulted away in the name of convenience.

24+

25+If we want to create technologies that are conducive to meaningful community, where “engagement” is not just a quantitative metric or empty piece of advertising parlance, then, we need to re-orient our values beyond “ease of use”. Like the relationships that we build within them, our platforms should yield satisfaction precisely because they’re non-trivial; they command effort, which is another way of saying they require engagement with the world. Attention; generosity. In step with these values, I’m inspired to ask: what would a convivial social network look and feel like? Human-scale, peer-to-peer, open-source, and non-extractive are all descriptors that come to mind. You can probably anticipate where I’m going with this: a network with many of these merits exists today, ready to be used, tinkered with, and built on top of, and if you’re reading this, you’re probably familiar with it.

26+

27+Getting started on Urbit takes some work: investment in address space; effort to acquire a planet; possibly even bearing with some confusion during the booting process if you, like me, are an armchair network theorist who often shies away from the technical. But these costs are up-front, not black-boxed out of sight or hidden in an epic-length user agreement. Once it’s up and running, it even feels, dare I say, easy, though the healthy extension of my comfort zone that getting onto the network entailed – especially when I joined in November, a few months shy of the [L2 rollout](https://urbit.org/using/id/layer-2-for-planets) – sticks in my mind. It reminds me of the dynamics that have strengthened my closest relationships online and off: the ability to navigate challenges together and find a connection strengthened, not diminished, by our shared time spent swimming around in that vulnerable space of learning. By re-materializing a little bit of the friction of computing, not _gatekeeping_ but commanding effortful engagement, Urbit has created a platform that is purpose-built for conviviality.

content/blog/creating-sigils.mdnew file+172

@@ -0,0 +1,172 @@

1++++

2+title = "Creating Sigils"

3+date = "2020-02-03"

4+description = "The origin and design process informing Urbit's generative user avatar system, Sigils."

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Gavin Atkinson"

8+ship = "~ridlur-figbud"

9+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/sigils3.png"

10++++

11+

12+<!--  -->

13+

14+

15+

16+One of the basic building blocks of Urbit is Urbit ID, our naming and identity system. Your Urbit ID is a short, recognizable name that’s also a network address for your Urbit OS instance. (You can find a complete, high level description of Urbit ID [here](https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/urbit-id/).)

17+

18+Your Urbit ID is meant to feel a bit like a secret code name. It doesn’t leak any information about the real you — but it’s still memorable and recognizable. Getting an Urbit ID should feel exciting, like getting a brand new identity in a new world.

19+

20+From a design standpoint, some of this is accomplished simply by having a system for the names themselves. Under the hood, Urbit IDs are actually just numbers. There has always been an algorithm for turning these numbers into pronounceable names like `~tacryt-socryp` (13,304,832) or `~litzod` (1,280) or `~nes` (212).

21+

22+While the names are great, they’re not quite enough, especially in a rich interface. Each Urbit ID really needed some form of visual representation, image, or crest. A digital identity needs to be something you can really attach to, both yours and those that belong to your friends.

23+

24+There are 2^32^ or 4.2 billion unique Urbit IDs. Clearly there’s no way that we were going to do this by hand. And purely algorithmic solutions can often produce disappointing, undifferentiated output.

25+

26+Regardless, we set out to tackle this problem. By the end of this process, every Urbit ID got its very own ‘sigil.’

27+

28+In this post we’ll walk through how we thought about the problem, iterated through possible solutions, and the toolchain we used to arrive at the final result.

29+

30+## Background

31+

32+What are the basic primitives of a visual language? There aren’t any completely authoritative answers to this question, of course. But we knew that to produce such a large number of visually distinct items we’d need some way to reason about form that’s closer to letterforms.

33+

34+So we started by collecting influences.

35+

36+{% iframe src="https://www.are.na/tlon/seal-zp3irwad52y/embed" className="arena-iframe" width="100%" /%}

37+

38+The ‘chop’ or [seal](<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_(East_Asia)>) is conceptually pretty close to what we wanted to get to.

39+

40+<br /><br />

41+

42+{% iframe className="arena-iframe" src="https://www.are.na/tlon/kamon/embed" width="100%" /%}

43+

44+[Kamon](<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mon_(emblem)>) are even closer — especially since they have very little visual complexity.

45+

46+<br /><br />

47+

48+{% iframe className="arena-iframe" src="https://www.are.na/tlon/grids-jd_xbmspxkm/embed" width="100%" /%}

49+

50+We also spent a good amount of time with both Anni Albers and Agnes Martin. Both of these painters had an incredible mastery of the grid as a means of creating engaging visual work. These paintings all have a wonderful tension between an underlying system and their specific expression.

51+

52+<br /><br />

53+

54+{% iframe className="arena-iframe" src="https://www.are.na/tlon/stella-xfroicotm_4/embed" width="100%" /%}

55+

56+Frank Stella is a master at producing incredibly dynamic work from only a few elements. His ability to create a sense of depth from simple overlapping elements is fantastic.

57+

58+<br /><br />

59+

60+{% iframe className="arena-iframe" src="https://www.are.na/tlon/ledoux-palladio/embed" width="100%" /%}

61+

62+The plans of both Ledoux and Palladio are incredibly dynamic. They’re mostly gridded, use only a few elements, and use lots of symmetry — but they’re at once distinct, engaging, and fresh.

63+

64+<br /><br />

65+

66+{% iframe className="arena-iframe" src="https://www.are.na/tlon/flags-k9moxiayuvq/embed" width="100%" /%}

67+

68+Another influence: international maritime signal flags. We like these not only because of their striking visual qualities, but also because they correspond with a letter system, just like our sigils. Each one conveys useful information; for example, “Keep clear of me; I am maneuvering with difficulty,” a flag we all feel like raising from time to time. This influence was key to the idea that pairing symbol to phoneme was a possibility.

69+

70+You can see the whole collection of our visual research [here](https://www.are.na/tlon/2019-sigils-research).

71+

72+Ultimately, we didn’t specifically draw on any of these influences very consciously. The goal of visual research is to get a sense of the territory, what has been tried, and what works. We think these threads of prior work are evident in the final result — you can _feel_ them, but it’s tough to point to them individually.

73+

74+## What’s in a name?

75+

76+> _“Lev’s sigil appeared, strobing, as Netherton was getting out of the cab in Henrietta Street. “Yes?” Netherton asked.”_

77+>

78+> **— William Gibson, The Peripheral**

79+

80+Before we get to how we worked through the problem of actually designing these things, let’s talk about the problem of naming.

81+

82+We went through so many names for these things. Crest, symbol, seal, tag, pictograph, stamp, emblem, signet, icon, glyph, holomark, visage, radigy, pattern, the list goes on for an incredibly (embarrassingly) long time. We argued about this, we went back and forth about it.

83+

84+Sigil won, ultimately, because of the way that it’s personified in William Gibson’s _The Peripheral_. In the far future, characters talk to each other by some kind of telepresence. When a call comes in from someone else, they first appear as a ‘sigil.’ It’s a strange word, but we were imagining a similar use-case.

85+

86+While we can’t point to any specific parts of our visual research that reappear directly, sigil is lovingly borrowed.

87+

88+## Experiments + iterations

89+

90+So, how did we actually end up making these things?

91+

92+We iterated through plenty of possibilities before landing on our final approach. Let’s walk through the two we remember best.

93+

94+<br /><br />

95+

96+

97+

98+The first attempt was a series of images in the style of Karel Martens. Overall this technique was just too cluttered and sometimes difficult to parameterize in a predictable way. We kept iterating.

99+

100+<br /><br />

101+

102+

103+

104+Just like the previous example, the main idea was that we could take a set of geometric primitives, combine them, then alter their appearance along a set of parameters, like color, rotation, and size.

105+

106+But also just like the previous attempt, the technique of overlapping symbols made the images too difficult to read and differentiate. We wanted to create sigils that were not only great to look at, but visually ordered. Since overlapping elements didn’t seem to quite hit the mark, on we went.

107+

108+## Closing in

109+

110+Eventually, we realized: tiles! With tile designs there are no overlaps, which in early experiments immediately started to take on the consistent, legible appearance we were after. Each element is discrete and clearly visible. Tile designs were also easier to create and control from an implementation standpoint.

111+

112+Best of all, tiles made it clear that we should be thinking in terms of creating representations of individual syllables rather than entire names. Urbit IDs are constructed from two sets of 256 three-letter syllables. `~fallyn-balfus` is `fal` `lyn` `bal` `fus`, for example. (There are two syllable sets in order to prevent duplicates — we always alternate between the two when composing names.)

113+

114+Thinking in terms of syllables greatly reduced the complexity of the problem, but there was still some work to do.

115+

116+<br /><br />

117+

118+

119+

120+At first, we thought about using a 4 x 4 tile grid, as shown here. These designs were tricky to implement because of the detailed lines and arcs spanning across individual tiles. In order to generate a result that matched these mockups, a program would have to generate a data model that knew about which tiles touched which other tiles.

121+

122+We felt this was too complicated and had an unknown performance profile. Plus, they proposed a deterministic color scheme and we felt strongly that color is personal, not to mention hard to parameterize. In the end we thought it better to create something that had the potential for user customization.

123+

124+<br /><br />

125+

126+

127+

128+Around this stage, we were thinking a lot about how architectural plans aren’t unduly constrained by the fact that they’re only one color. We had a feeling we could make the grid smaller and assign details to the tiles individually.

129+

130+<br /><br />

131+

132+

133+

134+So, we scaled it down to a 2 x 2 grid and stuck with it. It’s simple to implement, visually unique, consistent, and the color scheme is black and white, leaving room for user customization. We felt we had reached a semblance of a final result. Now all we had to do was manually draw 512 unique but consistent individual ‘phonemes’.

135+

136+<br /><br />

137+

138+

139+

140+As it turns out, drawing 512 consistent, abstract elements by hand isn’t easy. We had to strike a balance between authorship and automation — we wanted each tile to look well-made, but not too authored. To do so, we took advantage of Figma’s web API which helped us design in SVG but iterate programmatically.

141+

142+## Final process

143+

144+

145+

146+We took a look at our hand drawn mockups and drew each individual visual building block of the tiles separately. Then we loaded the SVG elements into a script that programmatically combined them to create trillions of layered symbols. This way, we were able to easily select candidate phoneme symbols that worked visually.

147+

148+We eventually added a rule system to find higher quality phoneme symbols — but this combination of programmatic generation and hand selection was working pretty well.

149+

150+<br /><br />

151+

152+

153+

154+The final step, using the tool we built, was to hand select individual phoneme symbols and create a complete index.

155+

156+<br /><br />

157+

158+

159+

160+This allowed us to start looking at possible combinations and selecting phoneme symbols based on their interplay with others.

161+

162+Once we had selected the final set, we went about compiling the `sigil-js` library that’s now publicly available. This turned out to be fairly technically complex due to the different ways SVG is handled between browsers and Figma — but the end result is a single Javascript library you can use to embed an SVG in almost any context on a web page. See it in action and browse the available sigils [here](https://sigil.azimuth.network). If you're technically inclined, the [source](https://github.com/urbit/sigil-js) can be found on GitHub.

163+

164+<br /><br />

165+

166+

167+

168+We think sigils are pretty successful. They look nice in our native Urbit interfaces, people have made them into shirts and posters and cards, even laser-cut them to make stamps.

169+

170+Urbit ID and the sigils are components of Urbit that are totally separate from the OS — you can use them on their own and potentially even extend their functionality. We’re happy with what we’ve done with them so far, and hope that people will experiment with what’s possible with this naming and identity system.

171+

172+

content/blog/desire-lines.mdnew file+35

@@ -0,0 +1,35 @@

1++++

2+title = "Desire Lines to a New Internet"

3+date = "2022-05-06"

4+description = "As more DAOs, NFT and digital communities find their way to Urbit, others are likely to follow their paths, making them their own, just like the network itself."

5+[extra]

6+author = ""

7+ship = "~dalwes-migdec"

8+image = "https://media.urbit.org/blog/desire-lines.jpg"

9++++

10+

11+

12+

13+The beginning of a migration is usually imperceptible. First comes discontent, then comes the decision to either stick with inadequate, but familiar circumstances or to try something new and foreign. Eventually, someone makes the jump. A few others join. Then, seemingly all at once, a rush precipitates a trend, signaling the migration's final wave before broad and broader adoption.

14+

15+By now it's obvious that the tooling web3 communities and DAOs rely on day-to-day are, at best, deficient. Pointing this out verges on parody. Still, stuck between a disjointed terrain of engagement-oriented apps and data-harvesting services, where are these newly nomadic syndicates supposed to go? If you spend more than ten minutes on Twitter, reading the same canned takes on digital itinerancy, you will come across a variety of answers, and the figureheads of several recently incorporated Delaware LLCs claiming to be building the OS for web3. Some of these endeavors appear promising, to be sure, but none are more mature or as [well-positioned](https://datnut-pollen.discordja.net/discordja/giving-daos-a-brain) to satisfy this need than Urbit. A few communities are already on the network and [thriving](https://urbit.org/blog/urbit-for-creators), and another swell is approaching.

16+

17+To understand why Urbit is so appealing for web3 communities, start by examining the principles that motivate its development. Ownership of data, durability, and digital sovereignty underpin the entire project, from its earliest days to its present, evolved form. Without ownership, your tools control you more than you control them. Without built-in longevity, your tools can't be easily passed from one generation to the next, which is the premise of Urbit's technological page one rewrite. (For those interested in learning more about Urbit's clean slate stack, you can read documentation [here](https://urbit.org/docs).) Finally, without sovereignty, you're powerless to the whims of a centralized stronghold of corporate and bureaucratic control.

18+

19+As an open source peer-to-peer network, Urbit offers communities the reliability absent elsewhere in the ecosystem, and the assurance that there will never be surreptitious terms of service changes, nor shareholders to appease. By design and in spirit, Urbit is the only viable alternative to the hodgepodge of competing chat rooms, voting services, blogs, and wallets presently available. Building dapps that supplant these services ultimately leads to similar impractical quandaries. Every dapp requires that a server be online, in a friendly jurisdiction, for you to be able to access its interface and once you access its interface, a dapp can't store any data about you that isn't on a (slow) public blockchain. Why can't a dapp wallet show you all of your assets, your transaction history, and all the contacts you trade with? Because running and operating the necessary server is at odds with the premise of a dapp.

20+

21+An Urbit app retains its decentralized integrity while providing the ability to share data between apps, run regular computation, and call out to the blockchain as needed—all on a cohesive platform. Fundamentally, Urbit is yours: to own, to customize, to turn into a digital home. When more communities ditch the dance between MEGACORP-operated servers and create new homesteads on Urbit, it gets significantly easier for others to mirror their steps and relocate themselves.

22+

23+Communities that find their way to Urbit are essentially traversing desire lines, taking paths that "emerge gradually and organically, almost of their own accord" as [described](https://books.google.ca/books?id=mW7RCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA3&dq=%2522christopher+alexander%2522+organically+%2522paths%2522&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjN7dqN6fbPAhUqr1QKHTB9BBsQ6AEIHjAA%23v=onepage&q=%2522christopher%2520alexander%2522%2520organically%2520%2522paths%2522&f=false#v=onepage&q=%2522christopher%2520alexander%2522%2520organically%2520%2522paths%2522&f=false) by the late architect Christopher Alexander. Before Urbit's [L2 launched](https://urbit.org/blog/layer-2-guides), distributing a tranche of planets to community members would have been cost prohibitive. Now that it can be done, and done simply, planet activations are rapidly increasing, [doubling](https://twitter.com/jmrphy/status/1517533689118306304) in the last two months. Desire lines to Urbit exist as invitations for the next community, to pass over, and to make their own, just like the network itself.

24+

25+The limitations of operating on the clearnet appear to be at long last irrevocable. Multiple desire lines to Urbit are materializing concurrently. Remilia Collective, aka Remco, aka the creators of Milady, has been [vocal](https://blog.remilia.org/urbit-with-port/) about the network for quite some time, but more community members than ever have onboarded as the result of a [headless](https://twitter.com/TheCombineDAO/status/1514000804235120644), [grassroots](https://twitter.com/hastuc_dibtux/status/1514031235135377421) collaboration between Urbit maximalists and miladies.

26+

27+DAO tooling is also proliferating on Landscape, Tlon's interface for navigation on Urbit and a platform from which developers can release apps directly to users with minimal effort. [Holium](https://www.holium.com), a team working specifically on unifying the DAO tech stack, released a ballot app last month that allows for flexible voting, delegating, and result-related actions. [PointDAO](https://pointdao.notion.site/pointdao/Point-DAO-bc8fc478b67a49ac92358a2a40d77d35), a collective of more than two hundred people that owns a galaxy, serves as a prototype for other communities to crowdfund purchases of Urbit address space—a procedure that they are aiming to make replicable and scalable.

28+

29+Growing your own society on Urbit can be as straightforward as using ownership of one token as the prerequisite for claiming another token (in other words: token gating a token). The Urbit Foundation just funded a [grant](https://urbit.org/grants) that simplifies the process of deploying Urbit IDs via another NFT's minting. Development is still ongoing, but [Dusko](https://dusko.world), the NFT project that received the grant, did a trial run last week to coincide with the release of a fresh batch of character pfps. For each mint, the collector could [custody](https://www.mintdusko.world) their very own planet—all authenticated via Metamask. (To track their progress, join [~panrut-ragbyl/dusko](https://urbit.org/groups/~panrut-ragbyl/dusko).) Dusko's approach represents the first desire line of its kind, and other communities are likely to take their path.

30+

31+The adage goes something like as soon as you notice a migration is underway, you've already missed the boat. But there's no boat to miss because an overabundance of communities could never exist on Urbit—it's as vast as it is cozy. Angling to get your community onboard? Share planets with a NFT-based community using Valve, the distribution mechanism Dusko is working on, or apply to build your own version. Crowdsource the funds for a star. Set up your group and send out a [flare](https://tirrel.io): everyone else will follow.

32+

33+

34+

35+

content/blog/eliza.mdnew file+46

@@ -0,0 +1,46 @@

1++++

2+title = "Eliza"

3+date = "2021-02-22"

4+description = "Building things, even Calm™ things, makes noise."

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Christian Langalis"

8+ship = "~pindet-timmut"

9+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/valleys.jpg"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+## The Storm before the Calm

15+

16+Building things, even Calm™ things, makes noise. George Nakashima’s wooden furniture evokes peace, but its construction still begins with a chainsaw. We mention this because we’re firing up our newest power tool.

17+

18+We call her Eliza. She is a data-collection robot.

19+

20+Hang on. An AI? Harvesting my data? Spying on me? Flooding me with spam? This is Urbit, right? Let us tell you about our new friend in basic terms, where MEGACORP might otherwise deploy legalese.

21+

22+## What Eliza is and isn’t

23+

24+> Replicants are like any other machine - they're either a benefit or a hazard. If they're a benefit, it's not my problem.

25+>

26+> **Rick Deckard**

27+

28+Let's start with the benefits. Eliza is a simple chatbot. She was made to collect feedback on Landscape. She asks direct questions about peoples' usage of Urbit, records any responses, and reports them to her managers at Tlon. She'll also provide timely advice and information to ships kind enough to chat with her. She'll begin reaching out to ships via DM in the coming month. If you don't want to, just say no, and you'll never hear from her again.

29+

30+Finding bugs is critical to Urbit's rapid development, especially in this period of nascency. Most Urbit-related frustrations go unreported; regular folks don't think to open up Github when they experience a minor issue. That's why it's incumbent upon us to design a lower-friction forum for feedback. People who aren't comfortable filing an issue might be willing to talk to a friendly chatbot.

31+

32+Now, about hazards. By design, there are few. Eliza runs on Tlon's comet, not on your planet. There will be no OTA to install `%eliza-bot-store` on everyone's ships. Eliza learns things through conversation, not hidden surveillance software. Data she requests, like the text output of our network analytic tool, `+tally`, must be sent manually. MEGACORP tends to cut this corner; to refine their products, they just track your reactions in real-time.

33+

34+Since she's [open-source](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/b0c1f83287cbf4c85847a9238d9f4be17e1fcb33/pkg/arvo/app/eliza.hoon), anyone can creatively deploy Eliza. Just write her a dialogue tree. Of course, that also means we can't keep people from misusing Urbit bots. We think automated agents on the Urbit network are inevitable, so let's create a good baseline culture around them. (Much love to Tendiebot, who's serving up stock prices in `~tomdys/wall-star-bets`.) However, once Urbit is used world-wide, we can't rely on culture alone.

35+

36+## A New Internet Economics

37+

38+The sum of Urbit's architectural design is a new online economics: a way to finance and monetize access to internet infrastructure where people retain maximum equity. Explicitly acquire a low-maintenance, low-cost server. Use it to compute explicit things. Return to life.

39+

40+We all know the basic MEGACORP business model: offer a free service (to suckers who don't own a server), secretly mine the data they generate on the (addictive) platform, then sell targeted ads to advertisers. This model will not survive Urbit. The ubiquitous personal server changes the economic equation. You used to 'pay' for an experience with your time and data. On Urbit, once you purchase core internet infrastructure, it's yours.

41+

42+So, can Urbit meaningfully curtail our world's appetite for data? We'll see. Post-enlightenment society runs on instrumental reason, right down to the last byte. Marketers will always want a fresh dataset. However, when the goods are on your Urbit, you can at least demand the respect you deserve. Long term, we expect a transparent market for data, not an opaque "agreement". An analytics company wants to track everything you see and do on Urbit? They better be paying well.

43+

44+Eliza doesn't pay respondents. Her collection is a charity to Urbit's developers. (We're also still busy enabling payments on Urbit with the Bitcoin wallet.) However, her presence is not a term of service either. In a few years, by the nth time some smart aleck uses Eliza's chatbot code and conjures 'Zalexa' to attempt an intrusion upon your Calm™, we will see the economics of Urbit's architecture suddenly vivify. Blacklists, reputation systems, and, eventually, even data markets, all Urbit primitives envisioned long ago, will become real. We won't need Zoogle to underwrite a spam filter for the entire internet; the scarcity of Urbit address space, in tandem with a true web-of-trust, handles that.

45+

46+If Urbit is to be used worldwide, the old system will not go down without a fight. Spammers, spies, and digital robber-barons will hunt for ways to game Urbit. Our passage out of the digital gutter is beginning in earnest, and we are thrilled to put our new architectures to the test.

content/blog/events-series.mdnew file+53

@@ -0,0 +1,53 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit Events Series"

3+description = "These events are an opportunity for Urbit contributors to share real-time updates that don’t make it into this blog, and for the community to get to know the contributors (and one another)."

4+date = "2020-10-29"

5+

6+[extra]

7+description = "These events are an opportunity for Urbit contributors to share real-time updates that don’t make it into this blog, and for the community to get to know the contributors (and one another)."

8+author = "Lane Rettig"

9+ship = "~naplet-hildec"

10+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/bau.jpg"

11++++

12+

13+

14+

15+_TL;DR: Urbit is launching a series of community events, the first of which is a developer call taking place on Thursday, November 5 at 9am PT. [Sign up here](https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/274279522/), and read on for all of the details._

16+

17+--

18+

19+If you’re familiar with the project, you’ve probably noticed that Urbit folks talk a lot about the fact that [Urbit is for communities](https://urbit.org/blog/urbit-is-for-communities/). This is central to what Urbiteers believe: Urbit is a platform that any group of people should be able to use to build, communicate, and transact in precisely the way that makes sense to them. Today, Urbit is already capable of facilitating many of these activities, and it’s already a big part of the daily workflow for many people. I think we’re off to a pretty good start, and over time Urbit will become accessible to more communities.

20+

21+Something we tend to talk less about is the fact that Urbit itself is also a community. If you’ve spent any amount of time hanging out in Landscape in the Urbit Community group, you already know this—but getting to know the community takes time and effort.

22+

23+One of the reasons you don’t hear about the Urbit community as much is that community is difficult to pin down: you'd be hard-pressed to put "the community" into a room together. It's a weird, fuzzy notion and doesn't have clear boundaries.

24+

25+Other parts of Urbit do have clear boundaries. If you decided to learn more about Urbit, chances are you started by reading the docs. You might learn about [Nock](https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/nock/), [Hoon](https://urbit.org/docs/glossary/hoon/), and [Arvo](https://urbit.org/docs/glossary/arvo/). You might get an [Urbit ID](https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/urbit-id/) and [launch your own ship](https://urbit.org/getting-started/). These things are all pretty well documented and, while not necessarily easy, their respective processes are relatively straightforward and [getting easier](https://urbit.org/blog/hosting-the-future/) every day. Community is less well documented. It’s more difficult to document—it’s something you just have to experience.

26+

27+We lead with technology because it’s what we’re good at and because it’s easier to write about. But the social side of Urbit is no less important. Since so many of us are working on and contributing to Urbit in order to solve our own problems, and since we’re dogfooding as we go, you could define Urbit as the minimal technological infrastructure needed to sustain the Urbit community. It’s circular, but it’s as good a definition of Urbit as you’re likely to find. For this reason, you can’t really understand Urbit without some degree of exposure to the cultural knowledge of its community. When the Urbit community did fit in a single room together, transmitting cultural knowledge was easy and happened over pizza and beer. As the number and diversity of Urbit stakeholders continue to grow, we need to find ways to scale the transmission of this cultural knowledge.

28+

29+One way that seems to work well is getting everyone together once in a while for events. Over the last few years, I and others in the community have collectively attended hundreds of community events, virtually and in person around the world, from small developer chats to massive, global developer conferences with thousands of attendees. Urbit has even hosted [a few of our own](https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/).

30+

31+As a newcomer to the Urbit community I recently found myself seeking exposure to cultural knowledge. I know from experience attending and organizing events in other communities that regular events are a good way of making this knowledge more accessible, and of helping newcomers like myself onboard. I applied for [a grant](https://grants.urbit.org/proposals/1751024973) to bootstrap a new event series, and I’m excited to announce that this series is launching next week with the support of [urbit.org and the grants program](https://urbit.org/blog/first-steps-towards-urbit-org/).

32+

33+The event series has three components. The first is a series of developer calls. These will be shorter and more narrowly focused on the technologies that underpin Urbit, from the top of the stack to the very bottom. They’re an opportunity for the people developing and contributing to Urbit to share their knowledge and expertise, including things that typically don’t make it into the docs, such as how and why Urbit works the way it does. It’s recently become much easier to build applications on top of Urbit, so I hope these events will help developers see what sort of things they can already use Urbit to build, and how to get started. These events are also an opportunity for Urbit contributors to share real-time updates that don’t make it into this blog, and for the community to get to know the contributors (and one another!).

34+

35+The first developer call will take place on Thursday, November 5 at 9am PT, and you can [sign up to attend here](https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/274279522/). The second call will take place two weeks later on Thursday, November 19, and we’ll continue holding these calls about every two weeks.

36+

37+The second component is a larger Town Hall event to take place on Thursday, December 17. The Town Hall will feature multiple speakers and will cover topics including technology but also design, community, and our overall progress towards our vision for Urbit. You can think of it as part show and tell, part “State of the Network,” part meet-and-greet.

38+

39+The third component is a larger conference, tentatively called UrbitCon, to take place early next year. This event is still in a conceptual phase. It’ll be an opportunity for the global Urbit community to celebrate how far the project has come, to share technical as well as cultural knowledge, and, maybe most importantly, to hang out together and have some fun as well. Watch this space for more information on the Town Hall and UrbitCon.

40+

41+Collectively, these events allow the community to achieve several goals. Firstly, they’re a great way for community members to meet one another, exchange cultural knowledge, and share what they’re working on. Events provide excellent motivation to get something that’s a work-in-progress to a state where you can share it with others!

42+

43+Secondly, the content from these events will be recorded and published, and will form the cornerstone of a new knowledge base on urbit.org that will augment existing documentation. This will make it much easier for newcomers, even those that can’t attend the events live, to benefit from the wealth of knowledge and expertise of the Urbit community.

44+

45+Finally, these events are a great opportunity for community members to contribute things other than code. While Tlon will provide speakers for the first few events of the series, it’s important to emphasize that the initiative is entirely community-led and that we’ll need lots of help to organize and host events. If you’re interested in helping out with any of the events in the series, please find me and others helping out with events on Landscape in the Urbit Community group (the channels called “Events Series”).

46+

47+They say that a project’s community has reached critical mass when new things are happening that even the project’s earliest and most active contributors aren’t aware of. By this standard, the Urbit community reached critical mass sometime in the past few months, as even core team members tell me they’re regularly surprised to learn of another new project or initiative launched by a community member.

48+

49+Tlon could no longer catalog the Urbit community even if it wanted to. This is a good thing. As Tlon [has also said](https://urbit.org/blog/hosting-the-future/), it’s natural that Tlon and Urbit drift apart a bit over time. Just as Urbit itself is self-hosted, so the community, over time, should become self-hosting: it should play a more active role in shaping the future of the project. A community-run event series can be an important catalyst for this trend. I’m looking forward to the first event, and I hope to see you there, and at many events to come.

50+

51+--

52+

53+_Sign up to attend [the first event](https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/), and join the channels called “Events Series” on Landscape in the Urbit Community group to get involved._

content/blog/first-contract.mdnew file+289

@@ -0,0 +1,289 @@

1++++

2+title = "Azimuth’s First Contract Upgrade"

3+date = "2021-06-04"

4+description = "Galactic Senate makes first concrete action"

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Jonathan Paprocki and Mark"

8+ship = "~datnut-pollen and ~palfun-foslup"

9+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/land3.jpg"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+Recently, the [first upgrade](https://github.com/urbit/azimuth/pull/35) to the

15+[Azimuth](/docs/glossary/azimuth) smart contracts which make up Urbit ID was

16+put up to an [upgrade proposal vote](/docs/glossary/upgrade) by the

17+[Galactic Senate](/docs/glossary/senate). This vote is still open and will

18+last for 30 days (June 20th) or until an absolute majority is reached. We’d like

19+to take this opportunity to discuss two things. [First](#changelist), what the

20+proposed changes are, and [second](#senate), a review of how Urbit governance

21+works and where we’re at in the decentralization process.

22+

23+Before we dive into what the proposed changes are, let’s review what the Senate

24+is actually capable of changing. Urbit ID is really two sets of smart contracts:

25+Azimuth and [Ecliptic](/docs/glossary/ecliptic). Azimuth is the data of the

26+public key infrastructure - roughly, this is the list of

27+[ships](/docs/glossary/ship) and which Ethereum addresses own them, along

28+with other data such as networking keys and sponsorship status. The Senate has

29+no ability to touch this data directly. This is in direct contrast to all

30+existing centralized services, where your account is always at risk of being

31+taken away from you. What the Senate can change is Ecliptic, which is the

32+“business logic” that decides how you can interact with the data in Azimuth.

33+These are mechanisms such as what powers various

34+[proxies](/docs/glossary/proxies) have, how stars/planets are released over

35+time, and how sponsorship works. Put another way, the data and database format

36+must remain the same, but the rules by which we interact with it may change

37+according to the governance rules we [detail below](#senate).

38+

39+## Changelist {% #changelist %}

40+

41+The Galactic Senate is voting on the following changes to Ecliptic:

42+

43+- Fixed ERC721 compatibility

44+- Self-modifying proxies

45+- Upgraded Claims contract

46+

47+### Fixed ERC721 compatibility

48+

49+In Ecliptic, the contract includes various functions and events

50+that make it conform to the ERC721 (non-fungible token) standard. However, two

51+events have [ever so slightly

52+non-confirming](https://github.com/urbit/azimuth/issues/8) descriptions. This

53+causes Ethereum explorers like Etherscan to incorrectly recognize Azimuth as

54+ERC20 (fungible token), rather than ERC721.

55+

56+The proposed change simply modifies the event descriptions to accurately match

57+the ERC721 definition. This does not affect any functionality within the

58+contract itself.

59+

60+### Self-modifying proxies

61+

62+Owners of Azimuth assets are allowed to configure "proxy addresses" for those

63+assets: Ethereum addresses allowed to act "as" the owner, but only for a subset

64+of operations. For example, setting the management proxy will let you change

65+your networking keys and sponsor using that address, just like your ownership

66+address can. This is useful for keeping the ownership keys in very cold storage

67+while still letting you perform lower-value operations.

68+

69+Currently, only the ownership address is allowed to change proxy addresses.

70+Fairly early on after Azimuth's deployment, we realized it might be nice for

71+proxies to be able to change themselves.

72+

73+This means that, in addition to being able to configure networking keys and

74+sponsorship, your management proxy would be able to assign a new management

75+proxy. This would allow you, or a trusted third party holding your management proxy,

76+to rotate your proxy keys without needing to take your ownership keys out of cold

77+storage.

78+

79+### Upgraded Claims contract

80+

81+[The Claims

82+contract](https://github.com/urbit/azimuth/blob/master/contracts/Claims.sol)

83+lets asset managers associate various "claims" with their identity. For

84+example, an Ethereum address to send donations to, or proving ownership of a

85+Twitter account.

86+

87+For ease of use by off-chain tools and services, the contract emits events

88+(notifications) whenever any claims are updated. However, the current version of

89+the contract has a bug where it does not emit events when all claims are removed

90+at once (clearClaims()). This "gap" in the event stream makes it much more

91+difficult to write off-chain tools around this contract. Considering Claims has

92+seen [practically no

93+use](https://etherscan.io/address/0xe7e7f69b34d7d9bd8d61fb22c33b22708947971a#events)

94+since it was first deployed, it should not be a problem to simply start over

95+fresh with a new contract that contains [the

96+fix](https://github.com/urbit/azimuth/pull/32) for the described bug.

97+

98+The reason we must do an Ecliptic upgrade to switch to a new Claims contract, is

99+that it is tied in with the logic for transferring an asset. If an asset is

100+flagged for "reset" (common when transferring to/from someone other than

101+yourself), its configured proxies, networking keys and claims are cleared during

102+transfer. As such, Ecliptic will need to know about the address of the new

103+Claims contract.

104+

105+## Urbit Governance {% #senate %}

106+

107+

108+

109+The ultimate goal of Urbit is to become a digital republic manifested as a peer

110+to peer network owned and controlled by its users. The goal of Tlon, then, is to

111+become one of many companies who build products for Urbit rather than being the primary

112+driving force behind its development. We’d like to take this opportunity to

113+spell out our perspective on where we’re at in that process. Here are some previous posts that are relevant, but please note that

114+some of them are several years old and as such may not accurately reflect our

115+current position, but still serve as useful historical markers. We hope to

116+revisit and refresh these documents soon.

117+

118+- [2016.5.16 - Interim

119+ Constitution](/blog/interim-constitution)

120+- [2016.5.16 - The

121+ Urbit Address Space](/blog/the-urbit-address-space)

122+- [2016.6.24 - The DAO as a Lesson in Decentralized

123+ Governance](/blog/the-dao-as-a-lesson-in-decentralized-governance)

124+- [2019.1.11 - Governance of

125+ urbit.org](/blog/governance-of-urbit)

126+

127+### Galactic Senate

128+

129+The Galactic Senate is composed of all [galaxy](/docs/glossary/galaxy)

130+holders, which at present consists of more than 100 individuals and a few

131+organizations, including Tlon and the Urbit Foundation. Using the Azimuth

132+voting contract, the Senate can present and vote on two kinds of proposals:

133+[document proposals](/docs/glossary/docvote) and [upgrade

134+proposals](/docs/glossary/upgrade). Thus far, all matters which the Senate

135+has voted on have been document proposals. The [most recent

136+vote](https://github.com/urbit/azimuth/pull/34) declared the Urbit network as

137+(i) being secure (as confirmed by a [third party

138+audit](/blog/security-audit)) and (ii) having reached continuity (as in, no

139+further [network breaches](/docs/glossary/breach) are expected). Previous votes

140+were to declare that [Azimuth is live](https://github.com/urbit/azimuth/pull/25)

141+and that [Arvo is stable](https://github.com/urbit/azimuth/pull/24).

142+

143+### Address space distribution

144+

145+Perhaps the most informative measure of how decentralized Urbit is in terms of

146+how many independent parties hold address space. By the very nature of Urbit, it

147+is impossible to know this with great accuracy (a common feature of

148+decentralized projects). However, the movement of galaxies is closely watched

149+and thus we have a fairly good idea of how distributed they are.

150+

151+In the beginning, Urbit’s creator Curtis Yarvin was in possession of the entire

152+address space - all 256 galaxies, and everything underneath it. A network of one

153+is no network at all, and so over the last decade Urbit’s development has been

154+primarily driven by selling or giving away these galaxies. On [June 1,

155+2016](/blog/the-urbit-address-space), the allocation was:

156+

157+> 95, to the Tlon Corporation. 50, to urbit.org, the future community

158+> foundation. 40, to Tlon employees and their family members (24 to Curtis, who

159+> started in 2002; 16 to everyone else, who started in 2014). 34, to outside

160+> investors in Tlon. 37, to 33 other individuals, who donated to the project,

161+> contributed code or services, won a contest, or were just in the right place

162+> at the right time.

163+

164+Since then, Tlon has sold a number of

165+its galaxies to fund development and others have changed hands to the point

166+that Tlon and urbit.org no longer possess a majority share of galaxies. In

167+January 2019, [Curtis gave all of his galaxies](/blog/a-founders-farewell) to

168+Tlon when he left the project. In August 2020 we shared an update on the [known

169+distribution of address space](/blog/value-of-address-space-pt3), where

170+Curtis’ galaxies are marked as Tlon’s “naked galaxies”. Shortly thereafter, Tlon

171+disbursed its naked galaxies among the employees that wanted one who did not

172+already possess one, thus removing Tlon and urbit.org’s controlling share of the

173+Senate. Galaxies held by current and former Tlon employees are entirely

174+independent of Tlon Corporation—they may do with them, and vote with them, as

175+they please. `~ravmel-ropdyl` plans to give more color to this decision in the

176+near future.

177+

178+Distribution of stars is much more difficult to know. There is an active market

179+for stars on [OpenSea](https://opensea.io/collection/urbit-id), so we know that

180+they are changing hands frequently, but checking the number of distinct Ethereum

181+addresses that hold stars does not tell you very much information since a single person can control multiple adresses.

182+

183+### Software and smart contracts

184+

185+As was written in [The DAO as a Lesson in Decentralized

186+Governance](https://urbit.org/blog/the-dao-as-a-lesson-in-decentralized-governance/),

187+we are keenly aware of the threat of _decentralization theater_. Urbit has

188+undergone steady progress towards decentralization, and with the developments we

189+outline below, it’s never been more clear that the project is beginning to leave

190+the cradle of Tlon. It’s also important to note that the decentralization of a

191+project is always a movement away from an initial centralized state⁠—you cannot

192+go from A to Z without first traversing every letter in between. While Urbit was

193+centralized at the beginning, the journey towards a network owned and

194+controlled by the users is now well underway.

195+

196+In the past, nearly all Urbit software was written by Tlon. While Tlon is still

197+the only corporation actively updating Urbit’s MIT-licensed open source

198+software, namely [Vere](/docs/glossary/vere) (the runtime),

199+[Arvo](/docs/glossary/arvo) (the kernel),

200+[Landscape](/docs/glossary/landscape) (the client), and

201+[Bridge](/docs/glossary/bridge) (the ID manager), unaffiliated individuals have been making enormous contributions to Urbit over the past couple of years via the [grants program](https://grants.urbit.org/history). Recent examples include the [Bitcoin node and wallet integration](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/pull/4940), [WebRTC integration](https://grants.urbit.org/proposals/21131866-webrtc-gall-agent-and-external-app), [Port, an Urbit installer and ship manager](https://github.com/arthyn/port), and [`|fuse`, an important primitive for 3rd party software distribution](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/pull/4820).

202+

203+The only real power Tlon holds over Urbit is the ability to push [OTA

204+updates](/docs/glossary/ota-updates) via `~zod`, and suggest that people

205+download our binaries. To the best of our knowledge, all extant galaxies

206+retrieve their OTA updates from `~zod`, who forward it to their stars, who

207+forward it to their planets. This software distribution route is merely a

208+convenient default setting. Ships initially retrieve OTA updates from their

209+sponsor, but they have full authority to retrieve updates from whoever they want

210+with the `|ota` command, or even to only install software updates by hand if

211+they so choose.

212+

213+In the future, one can easily imagine many organizations shipping their own

214+distributions of Urbit from their own urbit nodes, somewhat analogously to the

215+large number of Linux distributions which exist today. There is nothing we can

216+do to stop a group from forking Urbit, declaring `~sampel-palnet` the new `~zod`

217+(both for updates and for sponsorship purposes), and retrieving all OTA updates

218+via that route and building their own binaries. This is all by design, and we

219+wouldn’t want it any other way.

220+

221+The use of the Azimuth smart contracts is also somewhat optional. By changing a

222+few lines of code to point their ships at another set of PKI smart contracts,

223+they could rid themselves of hierarchical peer discovery entirely and make use

224+of some other routing strategy such as [Kademlia based DHT

225+routing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia). This would likely give rise to

226+an entirely separate network. The fact that the network is fully capable of such

227+a schism helps keep the Senate honest and accountable to the users. If they ever

228+were to vote on a contract modification that greatly angered or upset a portion

229+of the user base, they would be inviting such a schism and be entirely deserving

230+of it. In that sense, the power to control the network is already held by the

231+users, they just have not yet had a reason to make use of it.

232+

233+### Legitimacy

234+

235+The only way by which Tlon and the Senate hold any power is via legitimacy.

236+Vitalik Buterin recently wrote a [very informative

237+article](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html) on the role of

238+legitimacy in decentralized governance, and I do not know of a better source to

239+understand how Tlon and the Senate are kept in check by the users. Besides the

240+DAO split resulting in Ethereum and Ethereum Classic mentioned in the article,

241+perhaps the most prominent example of the power users have over a decentralized

242+network is the saga of [Steem and Justin

243+Sun](https://www.coindesk.com/justin-sun-bought-steemit-steem-moved-to-limit-his-power).

244+The short version of the story is that Justin Sun bought a controlling share of

245+the Steem blockchain and attempted to exert control over it, and the users

246+banded together to fork the blockchain into one called Hive, which was identical

247+to Steem except with Sun’s token balance set to zero. An analogous outcome for

248+Urbit would be that the Senate makes sweeping changes to the PKI and invites a

249+schism like that outlined above.

250+

251+For these reasons, there are strong disincentives for any one organization or

252+individual to acquire too many galaxies. If galaxy ownership becomes more centralized, individuals will be less incentivized to build on the network which will reduce the value of address space. Furthermore, such centralization might provoke a fork if such centralized powers are perceived as malicious by the users. This is in contrast to real-life republics, where there is little risk

253+for one party to accumulate as much power as they can manage since the cost to

254+the citizens to overthrow that power is enormous. Thus, only especially

255+egregious displays of power ever result in rebellion. Within the Urbit republic,

256+users need only to change the code they run to leave the Senate powerless, and

257+so the threat of rebellion is much more real. We estimate that within a digital

258+republic like Urbit, the centrifugal forces outweigh the centripetal forces, and

259+that the outcome of this is more stable than the reverse.

260+

261+### Why have governance at all?

262+

263+An important question the reader may still have lingering is: why does Urbit

264+need governance at all? The short answer is: (i) there will always be necessary

265+protocol upgrades that cannot be foreseen, and (ii) a total lack of governance

266+inevitably gives rise to a shadow government with undefined powers that is

267+almost impossible to hold accountable.

268+

269+With (ii), we see this to be the case on many early blockchain projects where

270+power is shared by the developers and the miners, but what each is capable of

271+doing has never been codified, and thus users of the blockchain can never have a

272+great deal of certainty of what changes might occur in the future. This doesn’t

273+guarantee a bad outcome, but it does create more wariness among developers when they cannot know whether they really have a say in

274+the project's direction. Recognizing this issue, many newer blockchain and

275+blockchain-adjacent projects have built-in governance mechanisms that lay out

276+exactly what an individual can expect should they join and contribute to that

277+network.

278+

279+As for (i), with Urbit being a wholly new kind of network, it would take

280+incredible luck to get the PKI exactly right on the very

281+first try without ever needing another modification. Thus, some mechanism was

282+needed to guarantee that the PKI’s logic could be altered. Leaving control of

283+Azimuth in the hands of Tlon would have just granted Tlon dictatorial power, which Tlon nor Urbit users desired. There’s certainly

284+room to argue that the Galactic Senate is not a perfect system: our interim

285+constitution did outline potential roles for stars and planets to play in

286+governance in the future, so there is ample opportunity for the system to evolve

287+in response to the will of the users. As always, it is important to keep in mind

288+the unfinished nature of the Urbit of today and the still moldable clay of the

289+Urbit of tomorrow⁠—nothing yet is set in stone.

content/blog/first-steps-towards-urbit-org.mdnew file+52

@@ -0,0 +1,52 @@

1++++

2+title = "First Steps Towards urbit.org"

3+date = "2020-08-11"

4+description = "With a stable platform taking shape and a strong community forming that wants to help build Urbit, it’s time to make urbit.org real."

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Josh Lehman"

8+ship = "~wolref-podlex"

9+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/first-steps.png"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+## Summary

15+

16+It’s been a long time since we last discussed separating the [governance of urbit.org](https://urbit.org/blog/governance-of-urbit/) from Tlon. In the last few weeks, we’ve taken steps to make such a separation real. In this update we’ll discuss the background that led us here, why we’re doing this now, and what this means for Urbit.

17+

18+## Background

19+

20+At present Urbit is an open-source project developed primarily by the company Tlon. Urbit is an ambitious project with a long roadmap, which has required both careful guidance and resources to sustain its development. These resources have been Urbit’s address space, which have value in direct proportion to the value of Urbit as a platform. Naturally, Tlon has been focused thus far on making Urbit into a platform that people want to use.

21+

22+Ultimately, Urbit presents more possibilities than any one organization can manage. We anticipated this, and set aside address space for urbit.org, which we’ve often thought of as some type of software foundation. As Urbit matures to the point where Tlon can shift from developing the platform to developing products _on_ the platform, urbit.org is meant to continue to improve and maintain the parts of Urbit that many will come to rely upon.

23+

24+When we last discussed this, in early 2019, we weren’t quite ready to pull the trigger on setting up urbit.org. We weren’t sure if a software foundation would be the right structure, didn’t have the resources to tackle the overhead, and Urbit wasn’t yet stable enough for Tlon to focus on anything _but_ platform development.

25+

26+## The Present

27+

28+Urbit is really starting to look like a platform. Tlon has put tons of work into making Urbit stable and performant, we’ve launched OS1, and hosting services are on the horizon. Meanwhile, the grants program and Hoon School were initiated, and community members have been [contributing](https://github.com/natareo/hooncard/blob/master/hooncard.pdf) [learning](https://github.com/timlucmiptev/gall-guide/blob/master/guide-docs/overview.md) [materials](https://github.com/lukechampine/rote/blob/master/urbit/app/rote.hoon), [issuing](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/pull/2885) [patches](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/pull/3202) [to](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/pull/3238) [Urbit](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/pull/2867), and [building](https://github.com/ryjm/srrs) [new](https://github.com/dclelland/UrsusChat) [applications](https://github.com/yosoyubik/canvas) [in](https://github.com/yosoyubik/urbitcoin) [userspace](https://github.com/taalhavras/ucal).

29+

30+With a stable platform taking shape and a strong community forming that wants to help build Urbit, it’s time to make urbit.org real. We’ve had plenty of time to think about what it should look like, how it should work, and who should lead it.

31+

32+Our plan is to run urbit.org as a protocol—we’ll treat it like a real entity, but instead of dealing with the administrative details of setting up such an organization, we’ll incubate it within Tlon and give it a mandate: To competently distribute address space as a means of improving Urbit.

33+

34+## Moving Forward

35+

36+On that note, allow me to introduce myself: I’m Josh[^1], the new Interim Director of urbit.org. I’ve been a follower of this project for several years now and more recently a fairly active community member. I first became fascinated by Urbit as a programmer that saw the potential in a clean-slate OS; I later became compelled by a future in which social computing becomes small, friendly, and human-scale again.

37+

38+My background is predominantly in building software, companies, and teams—most notably [Starcity](https://starcity.com), where I am a co-founder and CTO. Starcity[^2], like Tlon, is focused on enabling communities to flourish. While the approaches couldn’t be more different, the goal of bringing people together in fundamentally human ways is shared.

39+

40+My goal is to leverage urbit.org to ensure Urbit’s success. I want to see a world in which Urbit is used by my friends, family, colleagues, everyone I know. To get there, much is left to build.

41+

42+To that end, the first objective of urbit.org is to recruit builders and give them the tools to succeed. I’ll be focusing heavily on providing technical support to developers that engage with us via Grants, outreach to the wider developer community, supporting the efforts of those that are creating educational courses and documentation, and enlarging the contribution surface by exposing it to other programming languages[^3].

43+

44+The product work that Tlon is doing is crucial to Urbit’s long-term success, so I’ll also be leveraging bounties to more directly accelerate their development efforts. Landscape represents the clearest example of a cohesive vision for Urbit’s use. The existence of a polished product built on Urbit demonstrates to the world that the platform is robust and capable, and the growing community seems eager to help. You can expect more bounties very soon that provide a direct connection to the Landscape roadmap.

45+

46+As I’m only just getting started, I’d love to hear your thoughts. If you’re working on any grants you’ll hear from me soon, and if you have an idea that you want to pursue, I’m here to help you make it happen. You can reach me directly via Urbit as `~wolref-podlex` or by email at josh@urbit.org.

47+

48+I look forward to working with you.

49+

50+[^1]: But my friends call me ~wolref-podlex.

51+[^2]: We’re also really into the idea of being the first builder of housing on Mars. Just saying...

52+[^3]: We call this project Airlock. You’ll hear more about it soon.

content/blog/ford-fusion.mdnew file+222

@@ -0,0 +1,222 @@

1++++

2+title = "Ford Fusion"

3+date = "2020-07-14"

4+description = "Ford Fusion was an overhaul of Urbit's over-the-air upgrade process and a rewrite of its build system. The new update system corrects a few long-standing bugs with the previous one, and the new build system is simpler, smaller (by around 5,000 lines), and easier to manage."

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Ted Blackman"

8+ship = "~rovnys-ricfer"

9+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/ford-fusion.png"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+## Overview and Rationale

15+

16+Ford Fusion was an overhaul of Urbit's over-the-air upgrade process and a rewrite of its build system. The new update system corrects a few long-standing bugs with the previous one, and the new build system is simpler, smaller (by around 5,000 lines), and easier to manage.

17+

18+Since deployment of Ford Fusion to the livenet in late June, over-the-air updates (OTAs) have been much smoother. Before Ford Fusion, it was common for an OTA to take several hours, use too much memory, and leave ships in inconsistent states. After Ford Fusion, multiple OTAs have been pushed out, including kernelspace changes, and most users didn't even notice.

19+

20+Urbit has always been able to update itself OTA, but this process has often been rocky. Updating an operating system kernel on-the-fly is a difficult problem in general, like performing heart replacement surgery on yourself while running a marathon. Code that allows Linux to update its kernel in this way became a startup called Ksplice, won multiple awards, and sold to Oracle. Even that, as impressive as it is, and as brilliant as its [programmers](https://nelhage.com) are, can only perform certain limited kinds of patches to the kernel.

21+

22+Urbit isn't exactly a traditional operating system, so the comparison is somewhat unfair, but the purpose of better architecture is to create unfair comparisons. In this case, because the Nock layer is frozen, upgrading everything above that layer is easier. Upgrades are also facilitated by pure-functional semantics, transactional event processing, a type system oriented toward concrete data, and orthogonal persistence. These features make it feasible for Urbit to upgrade

23+itself in the general case, not just some special cases.

24+

25+Ford Fusion has fixed the major upgrade issues of the past by guaranteeing three properties that in retrospect are obvious requirements, but, like much of Urbit, took many years and rewrites to identify as such:

26+

27+- Atomic: the update should complete or fail in one transaction. If it

28+ fails, the system shouldn't get stuck.

29+- Self-contained: there must be no implicit dependencies or hysteresis

30+ (dependence on previous system states) when building the new software

31+ from source.

32+- Ordered: updates must be monotonically sequenced from the system's

33+ lowest layer to highest.

34+

35+Let’s walk through them one by one.

36+

37+### Atomic

38+

39+In previous versions of Urbit, updates failed atomicity by deferring parts of the update to later events, which are separate transactions that can fail independently. Generally, each deferral causes an exponential increase in the number of failure states that needed to be handled.

40+

41+We've learned that asynchronicity is an entropic state. A system will tend toward more asynchronicity over time unless effort is put into keeping it synchronous. [As Jonathan Blow has noted](https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk?t=2547), the language server protocol has turned every editor plugin into a distributed system, since now it has to communicate asynchronously with the main editor process.

42+

43+Consider an update system that took multiple Arvo events to complete. An ad-hoc higher-level transaction system would need to be built to roll back the effects of the first few events in case of failure. It’s important for various parts of the system to be able to emit effects on upgrade; since those effects would need to be rolled back if a later event in this upgrade fails, the system would need to maintain a queue of those events and only apply them once all the other upgrade events have completed.

44+

45+Note that the asynchronicity has now spread. Some effects that would normally be guaranteed to be processed synchronously might now be asynchronous. Entropy has begun to take hold, chipping away at the set of invariants the system is capable of guaranteeing.

46+

47+This observation is not purely theoretical. False modularity was the cause of internal asynchronicity in Clay where it had to wait for responses in a complex dance with Ford, which was another vane (Arvo kernel module); moving Ford into Clay allowed function calls that were synchronous from Clay’s perspective, which allowed further simplifications, culminating in about a twenty percent reduction of source code size of the Arvo kernelspace.

48+

49+[Steve Yegge's "platform

50+rant"](https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611) describes a Bezosian

51+edict prohibiting synchronous communication among modules through direct

52+linking. This can be seen as an acknowledgment of the difficulty Amazon

53+was going to have when it needed to turn internal services external. If

54+your software needs to run in hell, build it that way from the start.

55+

56+An Urbit ship is not an enterprise SaaS product and does not need to run in this hell; it exists for just one person, with natural pressure pushing it in the opposite direction from Amazon’s web services. Instead of needing a ship’s state and functionality sharded into microservices strewn across multiple clusters, an Urbit instance is easiest to manage as a single server with all its state unified into one data structure and its event log stored as one totally ordered sequence of state updates -- the antithesis of a distributed system.

57+

58+### Self-Contained

59+

60+Before Ford Fusion, each commit to the Clay filesystem validated its files using filetypes (called “marks”) defined by files in the previous commit. This could cause bugs if the filetype definitions had changed in a backward-incompatible manner. It also meant a commit could not add both a new filetype and new files of that type; instead, you needed two commits: one to define the filetypes, and a second to add files of that new type. More theoretically, it caused history-dependence. The validated contents of files in a commit could vary based on the history of commits that led to this one.

61+

62+Another way source code failed to be self-contained was that it had access to symmetry-breaking information at build-time, namely ship, desk (Urbit's answer to a git branch), and (faked) date. A build recipe should be able to shared, cached, and rerun without dependence on local conditions, so user code now no longer learns its ship, desk, or date until runtime.

63+

64+Source code also had build-time access to Urbit's immutable global namespace, called the “scry namespace”, which the kernel makes available as an implicit argument to userspace Hoon code. The scry namespace is immutable and referentially transparent, i.e. a request must always yield the same result for all time, but if an agent asks the kernel for a resource that’s from the future, hosted on another ship, or to which that agent doesn’t have permission, the kernel will deny the request.

65+

66+If the kernel denies a scry request that user code made during the build process, the build system has no choice but to treat it as a nondeterministic error. Nondeterministic errors can never be fully eradicated, if for no other reason than that the user always has the option to defenestrate the machine—there's nothing deterministic about that. But we try to minimize them, and especially to minimize uncertainty as to under what conditions they might occur.

67+

68+No build should be killed by the absence of files outside the desk, so as of this update, user code can no longer scry at build time. Once built, userspace programs can scry if run in a context with a scry handler; a Gall agent's runtime scry requests still work just fine.

69+

70+### Ordered

71+

72+The final kind of failure fixed by Ford Fusion was the lack of ordered layering during a software update. The most common form of this failure was that old Ford had a tendency to try to build userspace code using the previous version's standard library. This didn't work too well, unsurprisingly.

73+

74+Emerging from this underworld required making a number of changes to the Arvo kernel, Clay, Gall, and the procedure for kernel updates. To avoid turning into a pillar of salt, I'll skip the details of how the old system worked and instead describe the new update procedure.

75+

76+## How Updates Work Now

77+

78+These are the layers of the stack that update themselves on the fly, from lowest to highest:

79+

80+- hoon: the hoon language definition and compiler, defined in `/sys/hoon/hoon`

81+- arvo: the arvo kernel proper and related type definitions, in `/sys/arvo/hoon`

82+- zuse: the standard library, in `/sys/zuse/hoon`

83+- vanes: arvo kernel modules, including clay itself, in folder `/sys/vane`

84+- userspace: apps, marks, ancillary source code like libraries, and user data

85+

86+An update to one layer necessitates a reload of all layers above it; e.g. a change to Zuse should trigger updates to the vanes and userspace. Conversely, an update to a higher layer should not cause a spurious reload of lower layers, which should not be affected by the change; for example, an update to just userspace should not cause any reloads of system code.

87+

88+Clay is responsible for enforcing the layering of updates. An update to a module is triggered when an attempt is made to commit a change to Clay that affects one or more files needed to build the module. For example, if the 'foo' agent's source, defined in `/app/foo/hoon`, imports the 'bar' library from `/lib/bar/hoon`, then a modification to `/lib/bar/hoon` triggers an update to the 'foo' agent. All vanes and userspace files depend on Zuse, which depends on the Arvo and Hoon sources, so a change to the Hoon, Arvo, or Zuse sources will trigger updates to all vanes and userspace files.

89+

90+When asked to perform a commit, Clay determines which layers need to be updated based on which files have changed and which modules depend on those files. For now, all running programs load their source from the `%home` desk, so only changes to `%home` trigger stateful updates. Files in other desks can be built, but not installed into the system. This might be relaxed in the future.

91+

92+The process of updating varies by layer. The Hoon and Zuse layers are stateless, so their newly rebuilt cores (Nock executables) must be stored (somewhere in the system’s Nock tree, in memory; remember, Urbit is a single-level store), but they have no state that would need to be migrated. The Arvo kernel, vanes, and userspace agents are all live, stateful programs, so in order to update one of those, the system must extract the state from the old program, pass that data into the newly built program, then discard the old program and store the new one. Arvo and agent state injection routines can emit effects, but vane updates cannot.

93+

94+To work around this limitation, Gall has a two-phase update process. First it enters a dormant “pupal” phase that stores not running agent cores, but only the agent states that the old Gall had extracted from its agents. When Clay notifies Gall that its agents have been rebuilt, Gall “molts” back into normal functionality by loading the agent cores from Clay and then running their `+on-load` routines to inject the old state.

95+

96+If there's a change to files in `/sys` on the `%home` desk, Clay asks Arvo to update kernelspace. Clay sends a sequence of moves (effects) to Arvo to ask Arvo to perform any necessary updates to hoon, the kernel, Zuse, and vanes. This sequence is terminated by an extra move back to Clay itself, which will be received by the updated version of Clay after migrating its state. The rebuilt Clay can then use the newly rebuilt version of Zuse to rebuild userspace and notify clients of the update. One client is Gall, which molts when Clay notifies it.

97+

98+Clay triggers updates, but the Arvo kernel is responsible for performing updates to all kernelspace layers, and Gall is responsible for updating userspace agents. Agents are stored in Gall's state, but all other layers are stored directly in the Arvo core's state, so the Arvo kernel contains the routines that reload Hoon, the kernel itself, Zuse, and the vanes.

99+

100+The Arvo kernel reloads itself by receiving its new source code as a `%lyra` move from Clay, compiling this source into a core with empty state, then calling the new core's `+load` routine with the relevant parts of the old state. The state passed to the new Arvo now includes not just the vane cores and their states, but also the Arvo "duct" call `stack`, which maintains a stack of queues of moves to be passed from one vane to another, and a list of effects to emit to Unix at the end of the current Arvo event. If needed, Arvo could migrate the outstanding moves themselves -- if, say, the duct datatype changes.

101+

102+Passing the Arvo call stack state to new Arvo allows a kernel update to happen in the middle of a more complex event without disturbing other sequences of processing steps happening concurrently in the vanes.

103+

104+This entire update process happens in one Arvo event and doesn’t break event-dispatching semantics. This not only provides atomic rollback, but allows the update to be combined with other actions into a larger transaction -- for example, to stage complex changes, user code could trigger two kernel updates in a row, both in the same event.

105+

106+Note that this is the opposite situation from the entropically leaking asynchronicity described earlier. Now the guarantees don’t deteriorate; they can be composed into stronger guarantees.

107+

108+## How Clay Validates a Desk

109+

110+A desk is Urbit's answer to a git branch. It's almost identical, except all files are typed and validated, and whenever a commit becomes the equivalent of git’s ‘HEAD’, it’s assigned a semantically meaningful revision number, and all files are typed and validated.

111+

112+If Clay has been asked to perform a commit, it needs to validate all the files in this desk and notify all subscribers to live queries of this desk's data. Gall, for example, maintains live queries on builds of its live agents. Validation uses the Ford build system, which as of this update is no longer a standalone vane but a core within Clay.

113+

114+A Clay commit, like a git commit, is specified as the current value of all its changed files (and, separately, references its parent commits by hash), not as the diff from a parent commit. Unlike git, Clay is typed, and every file must be validated according to its "mark". A mark is named like a file extension, e.g. `%txt`, `%png`, or `%noun`, and Clay maintains a mapping from that name to behaviors of values of that type under various operations. The last segment of any Clay path specifies the mark to use for operations on that file, including validation.

115+

116+Mark operations include conversion to and from other marks (such as converting `%json` to `%txt`), revision control operations (diff, patch, and merge), and validating an untyped noun. Operations for mark `%foo-bar` are defined by a core built using the source code at `/mar/foo-bar/hoon`, or if that doesn't exist, at `/mar/foo/bar/hoon`.

117+

118+Consider a file at `/web/foo/json`. In order to validate this file, Clay must load the mark definition core and use its validation routine to ensure the untyped value of `/web/foo/json` is in fact valid JSON. To obtain this core, Clay must build the file at `/mar/json/hoon` from source and then process the resulting raw mark core using some mild metaprogramming to get a standard interface core for dealing with marks, called a `$dais`, whose type is defined in Zuse.

119+

120+Since building a source file only makes sense if the file has been validated as a `%hoon` file, but mark definitions themselves must be built from source, there's a logical dependency cycle -- who validates the validators? To break this cycle, Clay hard-codes the validation of `%hoon` files. This allows mark definitions to be built from source, and in fact any file can depend on any other file of any mark as long as there are no cycles. As of Ford Fusion, Ford performs a cycle check to ensure acyclicity.

121+

122+Since building a file is a pure function, Clay memoizes the results of all builds, including builds of marks, mark conversions, and hoon source files. These memoization results are stored along with the desk and are used by later revisions of that desk. Future work should allow merge commits to pull memoized builds from all parents, but for now only the previous revision of the current desk is used. This is a major simplification of previous Ford architectures, which maintained much more complex caches with less clear eviction semantics. Now on every commit, we just throw away any unused memoized builds from the previous revision's Ford cache.

123+

124+Once Clay has validated every file in this new revision of a desk, it constructs and sends updates to any subscriptions that other vanes or agents have requested. More Ford builds may be run to fulfill these requests, including builds for any running agents whose dependencies changed in this commit.

125+

126+When Gall receives a newly rebuilt agent from Clay, it calls the gate produced by the `+on-load` arm of the new agent with the state extracted from the old agent. If there is a crash in any `+on-load` calls or in the handling of any effects they emit (which can include more agent activations), then the whole event crashes, canceling the commit. This effectively gives any agent the ability to abort a commit by crashing.

127+

128+It is a bit counterintuitive that an app reload failure could prevent a kernel update. The reason is that we don't want the system to update itself into a broken state. An Urbit can be rendered practically unusable by the presence of broken agents, even if the kernel hasn't lost integrity,

129+so it's kinder to the user not to break their agents by installing an incompatible kernel update. This also puts virtuous pressure on kernel developers not to "break userspace", the importance of which has been insisted on for decades by Linus Torvalds, among others.

130+

131+If an agent does crash a commit event that included a kernel update, the attempted commit is now trivially rolled back, and the system can deliver an error message to the user. This does not leave the system in an inconsistent or stuck state, so the user could modify the failing agent and try the kernel update again later. Supporting better workflows for keeping third-party agents up-to-date will be an important aspect of Urbit’s upcoming software distribution work.

132+

133+## Ford Build Semantics

134+

135+### The Three Types of Ford Builds: Files, Marks, and Casts

136+

137+The Ford build semantics have been simplified. There are now three kinds of builds that Ford can perform: files, marks, and casts, all of which happen synchronously as function calls inside Clay and are available (without memoization) as scry interfaces.

138+

139+#### File Builds

140+

141+A file build takes in a filepath containing Ford runes and Hoon source, runs the Ford runes to perform imports, and then compiles the source, producing a `$vase`, a noun tagged with its Hoon type.

142+

143+Clay exposes file builds into the scry namespace with `%ca`: as an example, `.^(vase %ca /~zod/home/3/lib/sole/hoon)` will build the `sole` library.

144+

145+#### Mark Builds

146+

147+A mark build produces a `$dais` mark-interface core. It first performs a file build on the Hoon file in `/mar` that defines the mark core, then it does some metaprogramming to make the operations more convenient to use. If the raw mark core delegated revision control operations to another mark core, the mark build will also load the delegate mark core and resolve the result into the `$dais`.

148+

149+Clay exposes mark builds into the scry namespace with `%cb`: as an example, `.^(dais:clay %cb /~zod/home/3/mar/foo/hoon)` builds a `$dais` for the `%foo` mark.

150+

151+#### Cast Builds

152+

153+A cast build produces a `$tube`: a gate that takes a value of one mark as input and converts it to a valid value of another mark or crashes. To convert from mark `%foo` to mark `%bar`, Clay tries the following operations, in order:

154+

155+- direct grow from `%foo`

156+- direct grab from `%bar`

157+- indirect jump from `%foo` through `%qux`

158+- indirect grab from `%bar` through `%qux`

159+

160+The `%foo` mark can “grow to” `%bar` by providing an arm in its `+grow` core named `+bar`. `%bar` can convert from `%foo` using a `+foo` arm in its `+grab` core. `%foo` can also chain a conversion through an intermediary using an arm in its `+jump` core, and `%bar` can specify an “indirect grab” by having a `+grab` arm produce a delegate mark instead of directly defining a conversion gate.

161+

162+Clay exposes cast builds into the scry namespace with `%cc`: as an example, `.^(tube:clay %cc /~zod/home/3/foo/bar)` builds a `$tube` conversion gate from `%foo` to `%bar`.

163+

164+### Ford Runes

165+

166+There are now only four Ford runes. A file can contain zero, one, or many of each, but each Ford expression can only be one line, and they must be in the standard order of `/-`s, `/+`s, `/=`s, and then `/*`s.

167+

168+```

169+/- foo, *bar, baz=qux

170+```

171+

172+The `/-` rune imports a structures file from `/sur`. You can import it as just `foo`, in which case the build result of that file (usually a core with mold definitions) will be pinned into the compilation subject with the face `foo`. If you prefix it with a `*` as in `*bar`, the result will be pinned into the subject with no face; if the structures file compiled to a core, this exposes all the arms into the namespace of the compilation subject. Finally, if you import it as `baz=qux`, the `baz` face will be applied instead of `qux`. This is similar to "import as" in other languages.

173+

174+```

175+/+ foo, *bar, baz=qux

176+```

177+

178+The `/+` rune imports a library file from `/lib`. Aside from the different source folder, the syntax and semantics are the same as for `/-`.

179+

180+```

181+/= clay-raw /sys/vane/clay

182+```

183+

184+The `/=` rune imports the result of building a hoon file from a user-specified path (the second argument), wrapping it in a face specified by the first argument. The final `/hoon` at the end of the path must be omitted. This is mostly useful for importing a file for testing. The file at the specified path will be built as a normal userspace hoon file; i.e. its compilation subject will be Zuse augmented with the results of any Ford runes it has at the top of the file.

185+

186+```

187+/* hello-gen %hoon /gen/hello/hoon

188+```

189+

190+The `/*` rune imports the contents of a file in the desk, specified as the third argument with the full path including the trailing mark, converted to the mark specified by the second argument, and pinned into the compilation subject wrapped in the face specified by the first argument. This can be used to import static data at build-time, such as a data file, a media file, or, in the case of this example, a hoon file as source text rather than already built.

191+

192+A valid userspace hoon file must contain a nonempty list of hoons (hoon source expressions) below the Ford runes, separated by gap (more than one space, or at least one newline). The system wraps this list of hoons in a `=~` expression so that the result of the previous hoon is used as the subject of the next hoon. The result of the Ford runes is used as the compilation subject for this `=~` hoon; informally, the shape of the compilation subject can be thought of as:

193+

194+```

195+:* fastar-2 fastar-1

196+ fastis-2 fastis-1

197+ faslus-2 faslus-1

198+ fashep-2 fashep-1

199+ <zuse>

200+==

201+```

202+

203+## Future Work

204+

205+Urbit still needs to make better use of desks other than `%home` and the development process should be adjusted given the tighter coupling between source code and kernel and tighter criteria for accepting an update.

206+

207+This work also hopefully provides a good foundation of a package management and software distribution system for Urbit. As `~wicdev-wisryt` has said, a user should be able to run `|install ~norsyr-torryn/canvas` to load and build remote source. No one should experience dependency hell on Urbit, but we're not there yet.

208+

209+At least now, building a desk has no dependencies, other than a Ford with a compatible Hoon compiler. No decisions have been made on this yet, but

210+Ford might get moved to inside the desk, possibly by making Zuse callable. This could allow a desk to expose a Nock interface in addition to a typed Hoon interface, which could even let a desk be used as a "pill" bootloader.

211+

212+## Conclusion

213+

214+`~littel-ponnys` and I spent most of 2018 rewriting Ford with the intent of improving its performance. Compared to its predecessor, its result was better in some ways but worse in others. The caching system was labyrinthine and poorly factored, making the system difficult to debug or prove correct, even informally. Some things were faster, but the caching and dependency tracking were actually complex enough that a number of common operations, like mark conversion, were too slow.

215+

216+In early 2020, `~master-morzod` suggested moving Ford into Clay to reduce asynchronicity. It seemed absurd at first, but at some point I realized I could combine that idea with a simpler build-caching scheme and self-contained desk builds, and `~wicdev-wisryt` realized he could use that to further simplify Clay’s commit and merge code, which he did as part of this project.

217+

218+The first time I rewrote Ford, it took me six months, with help from `~littel-ponnys`, and it weighed in at 6,000 lines of code. The second time, in late 2018, took a few weeks. The third time, in January 2020, took a week. I wrote `+ford` in Ford Fusion in one long day, and it’s about 500 lines of synchronous, functional code.

219+

220+It has taken me two or three years to understand this problem as well as I do, and I expect there are parts of it I still don’t understand. The code itself isn’t the issue; it’s finding the right answer to ontological and teleological questions. What _is_ Ford? What will it be in a hundred years? I’m confident Ford Fusion is more similar than its predecessor to the Ford of 2120, because it’s smaller, more functional, and easier to understand and administer.

221+

222+As an engineering discipline and organizational practice, working on a system intended to be frozen yields surprising simplifications like this every so often. Urbit is now reaching the point where we’re starting to see more of the obsidian edges of the frozen future system emerge from the lava.

content/blog/foss-1.mdnew file+64

@@ -0,0 +1,64 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit's Open Source Culture, Part I"

3+date = "2023-05-31"

4+description = "How did Urbit cultivate a unique open source software culture? Let's take a look at how we got to where we are today."

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "N E Davis"

8+ship = "~lagrev-nocfep"

9+image = "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/SR71_factoryfloor_SkunkWorks.jpg"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+> “Open source is an intellectual property destroyer. I can't imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business.” (Jim Allchin, Microsoft executive)

15+

16+A founder's personal enquiry into the foundations of practical computing grew into a skunkworks startup to build an alternative basis for principled computing, and has now evolved into a burgeoning open source platform and community.

17+

18+- [Moron Lab, “Maxwell's equations of software (Nock)” (~2010.1.9)](https://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/nock-maxwells-equations-of-software.html)

19+- [Moron Lab, “Urbit: functional programming from scratch” (~2010.1.13)](https://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-programming-from.html)

20+

21+How did Urbit cultivate a unique open source software culture? Let's take a look at how we got to where we are today.

22+

23+Open source culture really got going in the 1980s with the restrictive Unix licensing scheme and the consequent publication of the GNU software tools. With the marriage of GNU to Linux ([“I'd like to interject for a moment”](https://copypastatext.com/id-just-like-to-interject-for-a-moment/)), a full stack, from the bare metal to the end user, was possible. Usenet and early Internet forums furthermore encouraged interested developers to start contributing actively.

24+

25+The ethos of open source software drew on a number of sources, from William Gibson's _Neuromancer_ trilogy to “A Cypherpunk's Manifesto.” Those involved were often motivated by a healthy distrust of proprietary software. The big break for open source software (OSS) came with the [Unix ownership lawsuits](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars), which gave GNU/Linux a chance to break into the bigtime for systems software. The [2001 case against Microsoft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.) as a monopoly lent further credence to the open source mandate.

26+

27+During this time, Urbit began life as a personal dissertation, in a sense, to derive a minimalist practical set of computing expressions as a combinator calculus. The early concepts that became part of Urbit, such as kelvin versioning and Maxwellian code, show up during its first decade. Nock was not open source for two reasons: the founder's conviction that as software it was already public domain, and the fact that there was no one yet to collaborate with.

28+

29+It was about a decade before Tlon was started as a small bespoke programming house to work on the esoteric project of defining something usable on top of the minimalist Nock specification. No one knew about Urbit besides some blog readers, and unless you worked in or next to Tlon you had basically zero chance of following the project via software alone.

30+

31+Early Tlon did a fairly good job of putting their software out there, but the documentation and nomenclature were considered obscurantist and the project was described as performance art or a deliberate wild goose chase. These combined to make Urbit appear fairly opaque, despite open development using GitHub and the liberal MIT license. System components like Nock and Arvo were declared public domain or liberally licensed.

32+

33+To this point (let's say 2019), Urbit was by license and by code an open source project, but had a reputation for being basically impossible for an outsider, even one with a fair amount of coding experience, to really figure out what's going on without serious handholding from the core devs. (Nor is this inappropriate for a small startup at this stage—it simply is the way most nominally OSS projects function.) However, the mystery engaged others beyond Tlon to brave the wilds and figure out what this Urbit project was all about.

34+

35+Urbit’s goal has always been to produce a stable kernel for all time, referred to by a metaphor of losing heat energy and entropy. As Urbit gradually cooled from red hot slag to what we'll call a developer alpha, Tlon began a project of greater outreach to the developer community. In particular, crypto software developers saw attractive aspects in Nock's concision and apparent provability and in Urbit's functional-as-in-math approach to operating system and application state. Tlon started a Discord for onboarding and troubleshooting, including community concierges who were tasked with engaging anyone with ship troubles. This tapped into and fostered a culture of Urbiters aggressively helping others debug and troubleshoot their ships, which continues to this day. Tlon also began Hoon 101 to teach outsiders how to actually build things on Urbit.

36+

37+As Urbit slowly grew into a larger developer community, some hard strategic questions about project scope and direction came into focus. There had always been a provision for Urbit to have some sort of foundation with stewardship over the project—either the Urbit Educational Foundation or something similar. Like the Linux Foundation, this organization would serve to coordinate activity between various companies and individuals contributing to the Urbit project. The foundation would receive an endowment of galaxies earmarked to fund Urbit's development.

38+

39+Urbit's use of address space to fund development means that the builders, even those who have discovered Urbit relatively recently, are able to acquire a significant stake in the project and its success.

40+

41+In practical terms, Tlon started the Urbit Foundation internally first as `urbit.org`, then rolled it out as a standalone company with a mandate to first build itself into a viable cultivator of Urbit, then to take over Urbit core development. By early 2023, the Urbit Foundation was in a position to take over core development for the platform.

42+

43+There have been several aspects of this journey that have led Urbit to have a thriving and promising open source software culture:

44+

45+1. Urbit's nature as a functional operating system has a deep appeal to software developers and others who find appeal in a mathematically elegant system, including the guarantees made by innovations such as the scry namespace bindings and the public key infrastructure.

46+2. Hoon is a mood. What I mean by that is that Hoon's unique aesthetics, subject-oriented paradigm, and the utility of cores give coders a unique experience, like systems programming in APL would feel like.

47+3. The developer docs are finally prioritized and made publicly legible. Large swaths of the operating system and standard library are finally documented.

48+4. Third-party software distribution is made trivial. Decentralized peer-to-peer open source software distribution without having to go through a GitHub intermediary changes the game.

49+5. Urbit's educational program expands from Tlon's initial offerings to a community program (Hooniverse/Hooniversity), then to a dedicated program with specific course milestones under the auspices of the Urbit Foundation.

50+6. Urbiters start meeting in person at Assembly and other events. After the 2020 efflorescence of the Urbit community, this is the first time most of the newer people were able to meet in real life. (This is a substantially different situation than the pre-2019 Urbit environment—most people didn't know Tlonners first, they knew Urbit first and mainly online.)

51+7. Three major active groups form dedicated to all-purpose coding on Urbit:

52+ A. Hooniverse, ~hiddev-dannut/new-hooniverse, originally strictly for the community Hoon School but now for all of the UF's educational efforts.

53+ B. The Forge, ~middev/the-forge, for advanced technical discussion.

54+ C. `[battery payload]`, ~dister-dozzod-lapdeg/battery-payload, the UF's developer community group.

55+8. The Urbit Foundation begins an active grants program. At first focusing on userspace and cultural grants, this eventually leans back into kernel work.

56+9. As the Urbit Foundation takes over core development, this necessitates changing that process from being a one-company project to requiring coordination, said coordination being much easier in the open than in closed meetings. (This also enables Tlon to focus on product delivery over core development.)

57+10. The Urbit Foundation begins using a `gather.town` “Urbit Hacker House,” which puts people together for synchronous interrupts. Any community member can wander in and be a fly on the wall or an active interlocutor.

58+ A. This enables the UF to start hosting daily pull request triage and a rapid assignment of tasks in the open.

59+ B. Communications strategy meetings are also public.

60+ C. Build parties (originally conceived as app-in-a-day) demonstrate pair programming, achieve inter-programmer communication of information akin to IRL programming, and allow anyone to participate.

61+

62+We find ourselves, as Urbit developers, having grown together a strong and unique culture of open source software development verging on radical transparency. It's not just code and license being open—it's the entire ensemble of programmer culture and on-platform dogfooding (to the extent possible). The greybeards and the noobs encounter each other directly and openly all the time, in `gather.town` and in Urbit groups.

63+

64+From modest beginnings, Urbit has achieved some small traction in the world and grown an exemplary open source culture. What will it take for Urbit to succeed in the future? That's the next entry.

content/blog/foss-2.mdnew file+59

@@ -0,0 +1,59 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit's Open Source Culture, Part II"

3+date = "2023-06-13"

4+description = "How will Urbit continue to foster its innovative open source software culture?"

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "N E Davis"

8+ship = "~lagrev-nocfep"

9+image = "https://spacecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/img-apollo-mission-control-3.jpg"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+> God watches over fools, drunks, and the United States of America. (Otto von Bismarck, apocryphal)

15+

16+In our last installment, we considered how Urbit has grown its own robust open source culture. Now we look to the future: what will it take for Urbit to succeed, not only as an exemplary open source project but as a computing platform that delivers on its promise?

17+

18+Part of what makes an open source culture vibe is remix culture, the ability to rework the source material to produce novel components or manifestations. Urbit has the raw materials for this in spades, memetically and technically. It is up to us to keep these tools in our developers’ and enthusiasts’ hands.

19+

20+The default answer, which isn't terrible, is that Urbit should keep doing what it's done to get this far:

21+

22+1. Urbit should continue to prioritize decentralized development.

23+2. Urbit should lean into ownership-based incentives. Indeed, this is the most effective lever that the Urbit Foundation has.

24+3. Urbit should maintain the developer's republic. Core developers should rub shoulders with first-time Hooners.

25+4. Urbit should continue to ship source with code, since that is how code is actually distributed. The means of open source software are _necessarily in the user's hands_ with Martian software.

26+

27+There are some areas in which we hope to improve. Our documentation continues to expand, as do our educational offerings. We have a mandate to use the Urbit Foundation’s endowment of stars to produce the mature Urbit.

28+

29+What else should we have an eye to in the near future? There’s always more to do, but by prioritizing the items on this short list we would continue to elaborate our open source bona fides as a community and a steering foundation.

30+

31+1. **Code accessibility should be a priority.** Any computer language falls on the spectrum between machine legibility (the pole of machine code and assembly language) and human legibility (the pole of [Scratch](https://scratch.mit.edu/). All code must walk this line.

32+

33+ Hoon has had a reputation for being a language of dense expressions, which we believe is now being cleared by sunshine. However, Hoon's extensive sugar syntax and irregular expressiveness can make it challenging for those relatively new to Hoon to decipher programs. We can support their learning and entry into the ecosystem by defining a subset of Hoon syntax that we adhere to in all of the docs and some of the userspace code. Even if there is a "better" way to write it, we should prefer this restricted discipline in those cases. Let's call this subset "Hoon Prime." Hoon Prime will not always be the most concise Hoon code, and it will likely fail to maintain certain well-established preferences, like heavier expressions going to the bottom, but it should encourage developers to produce generators and agents from `%base`-distributed models as quickly as possible.

34+

35+ Hoon Prime should also adopt a standard of literate programming. Several example files already display such a self-documenting nature:

36+

37+ - [`simple.hoon` for solid-state subscriptions](https://github.com/wicrum-wicrun/sss/blob/master/urbit/app/simple.hoon)

38+ - [`deco.hoon` for doccords](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/develop/pkg/arvo/lib/deco.hoon)

39+ - [`pals.hoon`](https://github.com/Fang-/suite/blob/master/app/pals.hoon)

40+ - [`rudder.hoon` for serving websites](https://github.com/Fang-/suite/blob/master/lib/rudder.hoon)

41+

42+ Our userspace code accessibility model should allow contributors from widely different skill levels to interact. We need to surface and document code patterns as cleanly as possible in the code we distribute. We need to include comments and unit tests so people can see how and why code works like it does.

43+

44+ Code accessibility cannot be an afterthought. We need to upgrade as much code as possible to A standards [per the style guide](https://developers.urbit.org/reference/hoon/style#grading).

45+

46+2. We need to improve the developer experience. Part of this involves better coding support, and part of this involves better debugging support.

47+

48+ To promote better coding, we should continue to develop IDE integrations like the Hoon Language Server. We've had some significant wins here, but rust never sleeps. We should also continue to produce userspace and middleware support libraries. We need to pay attention to how developer preferences are manifesting in their workflows and tooling.

49+

50+ Better error messaging and debugging support, perhaps even a framework for line-by-line code execution, would be invaluable. Upgrading Dojo and generator support is an easy win. Any tool friction is a sin and we need to track this and think about how to improve use.

51+

52+3. We need our open source culture to continue to develop in the sunlight. We need to highlight and communicate user stories for developer tools, new and old. We need to share these from inside of companies in the ecosystem. I'm not going to call for “best practices”—it's too early and that's too corporate—but tacit knowledge and horizontal skill transfer need to be encouraged through active pair programming and utilization of build parties and the like.

53+

54+ We need to expose how bugs occur, propagate, and are corrected. The core development team has committed to public [postmortems](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/issues/6583) when things go wrong.

55+

56+4. Ultimately, Urbit has to stay playful. Urbit makes programming, even systems programming, a lot of fun. Fun is open-ended and surprising. It allows for whimsy in code and product.

57+

58+Our developer onboarding and open source culture should be a model for the entire open source world. This is neither impossible nor impractical—we've made huge strides in legibility, and we're sailing with the wind.

59+

content/blog/gifts-q3-2020.mdnew file+72

@@ -0,0 +1,72 @@

1++++

2+title = "Gifts Q3 2020"

3+date = "2020-09-22"

4+description = "Twice a year we distribute address space to those that have made valuable contributions to Urbit. Now called our Gifts program, the gifting of address space has been part of Urbit long before we had a grants program."

5+

6+[taxonomies]

7+grant_type = [ "Gift" ]

8+grant_category = [ ]

9+

10+[extra]

11+author = "Josh Lehman"

12+ship = "~wolref-podlex"

13+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/gifts.png"

14++++

15+

16+

17+

18+Twice a year we distribute address space to those that have made valuable contributions to Urbit. Now called our _Gifts_ program, the gifting of address space has been part of Urbit long before we had a grants program.

19+

20+I'm happy to announce that urbit.org has a record number of gifts to distribute to community contributors for the period from February to August of 2020. Because the gifting of address space is an old tradition, and the last several months have seen an unprecedented amount of user growth, let’s talk about why we do this.

21+

22+## Why gifts?

23+

24+One way to think about Urbit is as _infrastructure for powering digital communities._ We’ve talked about this before in [some detail](https://urbit.org/blog/urbit-is-for-communities/), so while I won’t rehash the “why” of that here, I’ll reiterate that what we really want is a digital world that's generated by the communities that inhabit it.

25+

26+We know that digital communities need better technology with which to generate their world; just as importantly though, they need _people_ to inhabit and develop them.

27+

28+Tlon and urbit.org can’t bring the world into Urbit alone—we need community members to help us. By distributing address space to a variety of people that can invite their friends and families, the network can grow faster, more organically, and with a wider range of diversity.

29+

30+Currently, the majority of available address space is owned by Tlon and urbit.org, but it won’t stay that way. Instead, we want to give address space to folks that want Urbit to succeed. Because we’re custodians of something valuable it’s important that we are intentional about how we handle it. We treat that responsibility seriously.

31+

32+Gifts are one of the ways we invest in the future of the network. We look for others that see Urbit’s value and engage in building the digital home that they want to live in. They ease the learning curve for people new to Urbit, contribute to the technology, and create thriving communities.

33+

34+## Recipients

35+

36+Gifts are being awarded for a variety of reasons this quarter. As usual, there have been plenty of code and documentation contributions, but this time around we’re also recognizing those who have evangelized Urbit, been active in guiding newcomers to the system, and developed thriving communities within Landscape.

37+

38+Gifts are being awarded using the following criteria:

39+

40+**Bronze**: one star for continuous contributions over the last six months in at least one of the above areas.

41+

42+**Silver**: two stars for creation of something exceptional and/or contributing across many categories.

43+

44+**Gold**: three stars awarded to one contributor who has contributed at a volume that indicates a high degree of care and ownership.

45+

46+Without further ado, here are the recipients:

47+

48+### Gold

49+

50+[`~radbur-sivmus`](https://github.com/tylershuster) has more or less become an unofficial member of the interface team by tackling an absolutely [immense](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Atylershuster+) amount of Landscape-related work.

51+

52+### Silver

53+

54+- [`~littel-wolfur`](https://github.com/ryjm): Jake maintains the premier development group in Urbit, The Forge, and has led the way for other developers by authoring [srrs](https://github.com/ryjm/srrs), one of the more popular community-developed applications on Urbit.

55+- [`~botter-nidnul`](https://github.com/botter-nidnul): `~botter` has been instrumental in furthering [Urbit on ARM](https://botter-nidnul.github.io/), has made contributions across Vere and our documentation, and been highly active in onboarding newcomers on our Discord server.

56+- [`~timluc-miptev`](https://github.com/timlucmiptev): `~timluc` is highly engaged in many groups and the maintainer of some, wrote the [Nock for Everyday Coders](https://blog.timlucmiptev.space/part1.html) guide, and has gone far above and beyond in teaching the community about developing Landscape applications.

57+- [`~lanrus-rinfep`](https://github.com/dclelland): Daniel has done extensive development on iOS by writing Swift libraries for interacting with Urbit, and employed all of these towards the development of an [iOS client for chat](https://github.com/dclelland/UrsusChat).

58+- [`~minder-folden`](https://twitter.com/the_pritchard): Jonathan is a prolific member of the community. His group _The Sanctorium_ is always active, he's always around to help newcomers to the system, is an active evangelist on Twitter, and a creator of much excellent content.

59+

60+### Bronze

61+

62+- [`~watter-parter`](https://github.com/lukechampine): Luke has made a number of [contributions](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed+author%3Alukechampine) to Arvo, and wrote a great [introductory guide](https://github.com/lukechampine/rote) to developing Gall agents.

63+- [`~naltyc-wornes`](https://github.com/JohnELester): `~naltyc` runs the popular group “Smol Computers” both inside and outside of Urbit where discussions ensue about various forms of computing on small devices like Android and ARM, and actively evangelizes the project.

64+- [`~nartes-fasrum`](https://twitter.com/nartesfasrum): `~nartes` evangelizes Urbit on Twitter by creating artwork, and maintains the popular food-centric group “Urbytes.”

65+- [`~fonnyx-nopmer`](https://twitter.com/fonnyx_nopmer): `~fonnyx` maintains an active presence throughout many groups on Urbit and runs the first Urbit-centric podcast, [Hooked on fonnyx](https://www.twitch.tv/fonnyx).

66+- `~libhut-samwes`: `~libhut` started and maintains one of the most popular groups on Urbit centered on crypto and investing, and contributes to conversations throughout Urbit.

67+- `~salmus-master`: In addition to embodying the quality of high-level, respectful debate we like to see, `~salmus` created the group: “The Tribal Network,” where he maintains one of the most active long-form notebooks on Urbit.

68+- [`~fostyr-solfyr`](https://github.com/cmarcelo): `~fostyr` has submitted a number of PRs against Arvo, including a much-requested feature to reset the web login code.

69+- [`~sarpen-laplux`](https://github.com/xiphiness): `~sarpen` has done a significant amount of research and work on Ethereum ABI parsing and other Ethereum-related topics in addition to being an active participant in dialogues throughout Urbit.

70+- `~mister-todteg`: `~mister` is a top evangelist of Urbit on Twitter, has brought many newcomers onto the network, and has even made several hires for his company from within the network.

71+

72+Thank you to all who contributed to making Urbit what it is today!

content/blog/governance-of-urbit.mdnew file+43

@@ -0,0 +1,43 @@

1++++

2+title = "Governance of urbit.org"

3+date = "2019-01-10"

4+description = "Stewardship of the Urbit Project."

5+aliases = [

6+ "/posts/essays/governance-of-urbit",

7+ "/posts/governance-of-urbit"

8+]

9+

10+[extra]

11+author = "Erik Newton"

12+ship = "~patnes-rigtyn"

13++++

14+

15+

16+

17+## Summary

18+

19+Long before Urbit first appeared as a prototype in 2013, we considered Urbit address space to be property. Granted, Urbit property ownership was only reflected as a text file in a github repository – but it was always designed to be cryptographically owned, and we've always taken that file seriously.

20+

21+If you've ever looked at that text file, you've probably noticed that there has been a pool of Urbit assets there marked "urbit.org" since the beginning. Now that we're moving our property registry out of that repository and onto the Ethereum blockchain, we wanted to be as clear as we can be about what the plan is for those urbit.org addresses.

22+

23+The TL;DR is that "urbit.org" will likely split into a separate entity from Tlon in the future. For now though, Tlon and urbit.org have the same mandate, so separating them doesn't make sense. For the time being, Tlon will continue to manage and use urbit.org assets directly for platform development. As a first step toward making urbit.org independent we've started to develop a board of advisors who we hope will one day manage those assets independently.

24+

25+## Background

26+

27+The history of a few lines in a text file doesn't give a whole lot of context. So, first, let's fill in a few more of the details.

28+

29+In 2013 Curtis and Tlon each contributed 32 galaxies to a pool newly called "urbit.org." The idea at the time was to set aside address space to fund "platform development" – in the spirit of the IETF or the Mozilla foundation. This was long before anyone had heard of a Swiss blockchain foundation or anything of the sort. Our view was that it was going to take a lot of resources to build a system as robust and far reaching as Urbit intends to be, and 64 galaxies (25% of the total network) seemed sufficient. It was thought at the time that urbit.org might eventually take the form of a separate foundation, but we were simply too small and under-resourced a team to figure out the right legal structure at the time.

30+

31+Tlon – as distinct from urbit.org – has always been imagined as a future service provider in the urbit ecosystem. But Urbit is still young, so those services aren't really needed yet.

32+

33+Instead, what is needed is platform development. So Tlon has acted, in a way, as urbit.org was supposed to, by taking on the bulk of platform development efforts. This work consists of everything from kernel development to interface design and documentation. Tlon has sold (and granted) both its own galaxies, and some of those originally designated as urbit.org galaxies towards this end. We'll continue to do this for the foreseeable future, since Urbit's development needs (though finite) remain ongoing. We can't predict exactly how long this will continue, although we wish we could!

34+

35+## Future plans

36+

37+As Urbit becomes more widely used, we expect to make the Tlon/urbit.org separation real.

38+

39+We've considered the foundation model, but have come to the conclusion that it doesn't really make sense. For one, it's quite expensive in terms both of administrative overhead, and the associated legal costs. For another, there just isn't anyone we trust enough to take over high level management of such an organization (see Tezos). Finally, our view is that foundations are not entirely effective in their mandates (see [this article](https://nadiaeghbal.com/foundations) from our friend Nadia).

40+

41+One step we're pursuing is the creation of a board of advisors to guide our use of the urbit.org assets at Tlon. We're in discussions with several potential board members now. Our goal with this structure is to include more voices outside of Tlon in the process of governing the urbit.org assets, and to make their advice transparent to the public.

42+

43+As with all of our projects, we think it's better to walk before we run. For now, Tlon will continue to act as urbit.org and use both pools of resources for ongoing platform development. Next, we'll create a board to advise on the use of those resources. Eventually, Tlon and urbit.org will likely become separate entities. We'll get there – one step at a time.

content/blog/hackathon-results.mdnew file+59

@@ -0,0 +1,59 @@

1++++

2+title = "Hackathon Results"

3+date = "2020-06-11"

4+description = "We recently held an invite-only Urbit Hackathon for graduates of our Hoon School program, and the submissions really impressed us across the board. Submissions were judged on several criteria: creativity, usefulness, and code quality."

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Robert Mariani"

8+ship = "~lodleb-ritrul"

9+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/hackathon-results-wide.png"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+Results of the Urbit Hackathon

15+

16+We recently held an invite-only Urbit Hackathon for graduates of our Hoon School program, and the submissions really impressed us across the board. Submissions were judged on several criteria: creativity, usefulness, and code quality.

17+

18+Congratulations to all the participants, especially the winners—their projects are seriously impressive.

19+

20+### First Place: Eight Stars

21+

22+Jose’s `~norsyr-torryn` Canvas is a peer-to-peer, collaborative drawing app that comes in the form of a Landscape tile. It’s kind of like a multiplayer MS Paint, but better.

23+

24+Canvas uses Urbit in a way that we think it’s supposed to be used: the stuff that doesn’t require peer-to-peer or storage heavy lifting, such as the actual “drawing” component of the app, is done outside of Urbit.

25+

26+In addition to a freehand template for the classic Paint experience, you can choose from a number of templates to work with, such as a grid of fillable hexagons, or maps of parts of the world and of continents with fillable country divisions. Have you ever wanted to compare which countries you visited, color-coded for how much you liked them? Canvas has a built-in feature for sharing your work on chats in Landscape.

27+

28+Check out a video [demonstration](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6DySv730Hw) of Canvas, and view [the code](https://github.com/yosoyubik/canvas).

29+

30+Jose wins eight stars, and he also wins [le internet for the day](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23228058). Bravo!

31+

32+### Second Place: Four Stars Each

33+

34+Luke Champine’s (`~watter-parter`) flashcard app for Landscape, Rote, has been awarded one of two second-place prizes.

35+

36+Rote users write decks in udon, review them, and share them with other ships. His immaculate backend code-style and documentation secured his high placement in the Hackathon—his Hoon code also functions as a full-blown walkthrough. If you’re a Gall novice and you’re looking to learn, take a look at his [code](https://github.com/lukechampine/rote). Luke also kept a Notebook documenting his experience at `~watter-parter/hackathon`.

37+

38+Luke also included example decks for flashcards on Hoon runes and their irregular forms. So, all said and done, everything about Rote is an excellent resource to the eager Hoon neophyte.

39+

40+Pyry Kovanen (`~dinleb-rambep`) was also awarded second prize for his reading-list-sharing app, Books. Also a Landscape tile, and it’s pretty darn useful, with the ability to import books from Goodreads. Check out [the code](https://github.com/pkova/urbit/tree/books/pkg/interface/books) and the [video demo](https://youtu.be/Spy7FoPdfx8).

41+

42+### Third Place: Two Stars Each

43+

44+N E Davis (`~lagrev-nocfep`) brought the heavy infrastructural artillery with Roessler, and won third prize. Roessler is actually three related Hoon tools:

45+`roessler` proper, a library for solving the differential equations producing the [Roessler attractor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B6ssler_attractor).

46+`lazytrig`, a library for transcendental functions.

47+`proj-3d`, a generator that takes the 3D coordinates produced by `Roessler`.

48+

49+The Roessler project is full of cool, novel features. You might enjoy taking a look at the [GitHub repo](https://github.com/sigilante/roessler) ...if your brain is big enough.

50+

51+John Franklin (`~dirwex-dosrev`) also secured third place for his Notes application. True to its name, it’s a Landscape tile that allows the user to create and search notes by keyword. Look at the [code](https://github.com/jfranklin9000/notes/) and the [demo video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DurNjCFOmA).

52+

53+Jon (`~ribnes-fonbex`) was awarded third prize for his Quadratic Voting project. It implements for Urbit ships a [quadratic voting system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_voting), which is sort of like ranked-choice voting but allows people to express their stronger preferences.

54+

55+Congratulations to the winners and to everyone who submitted—nice work!

56+

57+### The Future

58+

59+We were thoroughly impressed with all of the projects from this inaugural Hackathon. Not only did this Hackathon demonstrate the talent and dedication of our community members, it’s an encouraging sign about the maturity of the Urbit system. We’re going to hold more Hackathons in the future, with one big change: they will be open to anyone who applies.

content/blog/haleek-maul-interview.mdnew file+71

@@ -0,0 +1,71 @@

1++++

2+title = "NFTs, Urbit IDs, and Communities w/ Haleek Maul"

3+date = "2021-09-09"

4+description = "An interview with the founder of Holdersland"

5+[extra]

6+author = "Matt"

7+ship = "~tirwyd-sarmes"

8+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/haleek_sigil.jpg"

9++++

10+

11+

12+

13+*Check out the Holdersland x Urbit collection: [holders.land/urbit](https://holders.land/urbit)*

14+

15+We sat down recently with Haleek Maul to discuss the current state of NFTs and the future of Urbit IDs and digital communities.

16+

17+Are Urbit IDs NFTs? Sure, they're ERC-721 non-fungible tokens which you can buy on OpenSea—but to be clear, we made them way back before the word "NFT" had entered mainstream consciousness. An Urbit ID is a number that is used to generate both a phonetic name and an avatar (what we call [sigils](https://urbit.org/blog/creating-sigils)), but it is so much more than your average NFT—it is a key to an entire digital world.

18+

19+We built Urbit IDs for digital communities and the people they’re made of. An Urbit ID is a decentralized and pseudonymous identity perfect for your collective, commune, squad, team, or DAO. Unlike most addresses or social identities, you own your Urbit ID like you own your crypto. Your Discord handle might be free for now, but as the saying goes, if it’s free then you’re the product. On Urbit your ID is actually yours and you pay for it up front. You can log into third party apps or software without ever relinquishing control of your data. What is yours stays with you. IDs themselves can be owned collectively—there are already DAOs on Urbit who jointly own stars and galaxies.

20+

21+Urbit IDs are evolving and generative. They’re generative because some IDs spawn additional NFTs which themselves can be bought and sold. For instance, each star can spawn 65,535 planets, and each galaxy can spawn 255 stars. The network itself is evolving, meaning that the network can be upgraded via a majority vote by galaxy holders. Urbit IDs and the Ubit network itself are inherently dynamic.

22+

23+At Urbit, we support communities of all kinds. We recently granted Holdersland ten Urbit IDs: four stars and six planets to be auctioned off. Haleek Maul (his Urbit ID is `~fosmex-hocmel`) will be creating custom artwork for each of the sigils. The proceeds of the auction will help support Holdersland in bringing blockchain technologies to the Caribbean. The auction will go live on September 16th, 2021 on [holders.land/urbit](https://holders.land/urbit).

24+

25+Without further ado, here’s Haleek Maul.

26+

27+---

28+

29+**Tell us a little bit about yourself and Holdersland.**

30+

31+Sure. My name is Haleek Maul and I’m a multi-disciplinary artist. I was born in America and came to Barbados when I was three years old. I’ve been making music since 2007. I put out my first debut project in 2012 and since then it has been a process of creating art from the stuff flowing through my mind.

32+

33+Holdersland is a digital extension of my artistic project—a way of creating change in the world around me. When I was younger, there weren’t many artists like me coming from Barbados. I was into a lot of niche electronic and club music and felt alienated from the larger conversation. Holdersland is a way to help creative people in the Caribbean connect with like-minded people around the world, especially using new technologies like blockchain. So I founded Holdersland in 2020 when I left my record label after four years. I felt like music institutions was archaic and didn’t feed into my other artistic practices. I wanted to create an institution that captured the full creative practice—all the way from creating to selling. Most importantly, I wanted to get artists from Barbados and the Caribbean involved in global conversations around art and technology.

34+

35+**What exactly is Holdersland?**

36+

37+It’s a company centered around Caribbean intellectual property. We’re trying to help people get connected with new web3 technologies, especially artists. Holdersland is an aggregator that helps connects those who are interested in new technology with those those who actually develop it.

38+

39+For example, there is a lot of math that underlies music. Part of our project is to extract these mathematical principles and see how they can help generate new forms of art that can be widely distributed. So we’re working to build our own projects and work with users to adopt some of these new technologies. It’s a community of people centered around these values. We plan to implement voting, governance, and incentive structures into the community soon.

40+

41+**What do you think is the link between your two main interests: music and technology?**

42+

43+I’ve always been interested in technology. Anyone who has made music in the last twenty years has had to get involved with tech. Especially if you’re a producer. There are many young kids who are downloading music software and messing around with it, and in the process becoming knowledgeable about music production and design. Science and math live right beside art.

44+

45+I was also into web development when I was a teenager and was very interested in how the internet worked. This led into the work I’m doing with Holdersland. Technology, more often than not, is concerned with collaboration and communication. But in order to develop new technologies we often need to talk about nitty-gritty details. This requires detailed knowledge of particular technologies.

46+

47+**What is the great hope or promise with new decentralized technologies like blockchain or Urbit?**

48+

49+They lower the barrier to communication and trade. Especially for countries like Barbados, we don’t have access to the world market. But now with these networks, and assets like NFTs, we can engage in commerce without borders. It allows new entrants to join the market.

50+

51+It also allows new financial relationships and funding structures to emerge. Rather than have a few people contribute $20k, you can have hundreds of people contribute $100. Once again, this lowers the entry for people to invest is early-stage projects. This changes the way that companies build and ship products.

52+

53+Brain drain is when skilled workers move abroad for more profitable employment. These new technologies allow native Carribeans to stay where they are while earning money. Using these new technologies, the Carribean can prosper while not losing its unique character and cultural identity. Crypto is permanently going to change the distribution of wealth and culture around the world.

54+

55+Discord is a fine community solution, but it’s not ideal. There’s an endless array of plugins and dependencies that makes Discord unstable. However, it is a good mixture of an office, a storefront, and a club: I can do my work, sell assets, and just have fun. Communities are important. People naturally want to be in communities, we just need a better solution than Discord. Especially one that’s crypto-native and allows for commerce. Urbit is a one-stop shop that could fill that gap.

56+

57+**What is the collaboration between Holdersland and Urbit that’s happening this week?**

58+

59+I’m producing some custom sigil artwork for a set of stars and planets. Both the Urbit assets and artwork will be auctioned off together. The proceeds from the event will go towards creating a community music studio here in Barbados and technology education around the island.

60+

61+A lot of people here in Barbados don’t even understand what crypto is. A lot of the work being done around this project is to raise awareness about the potentials of this new technology. I want this to be a general springboard for the Caribbean to gain greater technological literacy. That literacy is an important step for lower-income people to drastically change their situation.

62+

63+**What are you looking forward to talking about on the New World Energy panel at Assembly 2021?**

64+

65+I want to talk about how to migrate communities onto Urbit. How to use Urbit as a new platform for niche cultures found around the current internet. Also the great strength and power provided by Urbit’s digital identities.

66+

67+NFTs can be very powerful—there are a lot of possible applications of a unique digital asset. It’s already dissolved geographical boundaries which will help countries to export their intellectual products freely. Countries need first to gain knowledge around these technologies and their economies will follow.

68+

69+**Thanks for chatting!**

70+

71+See you at Assembly 2021!

content/blog/hoon-4-lispers.mdnew file+764

@@ -0,0 +1,764 @@

1++++

2+title = "A Perspective on Lisp and Hoon"

3+date = "2023-06-15"

4+description = "Lisp is an éminence grise of programming. How does Hoon compare?"

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "N E Davis"

8+ship = "~lagrev-nocfep"

9+image = "https://engineering.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/styles/card_1900x950/public/images/news/john_mccarthy.jpeg?h=3751da6c&itok=6tPSih53"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+> In the beginning, von Neumann created the machine. And the machine was with rigorous form and code, and no compiler yet moved upon the face of the tubes. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

15+>

16+> And John Backus said, Let there be FORTRAN, and there was Fortran. And Fortran ruled over the assembly.

17+>

18+> And John McCarthy saw the lambda calculus, that it was very good. And McCarthy made the LISP and divided the programmers who were for the array from the programmers who were for the list.

19+>

20+> And the Fortran and the Lisp were the second day. And God set them in the firmament to give light upon the earth.

21+

22+Two great temperaments of programming language design span these poles: Fortran as the engineer of assembler-first hard-nosed array coding and Lisp as the math professor running down to the machine room waving papers. While they have ceded some to the practicalities of the other over time, each is a trope of a particular computing paradigm. In this article, we will examine the Lisp pole in light of Urbit's development language, Hoon.

23+

24+Hoon is a statically typed functional programming language that is designed to be safe, efficient, and expressive. Hoon has a unique syntax relying heavily on symbolic expressions (using “runes”) rather than traditional keywords and operators. Hoon's underlying execution language, Nock, has been described as a “pico-Lisp“, making reference to its nature as a cell-based combinator calculus. Both languages (Nock and Hoon) follow very much in the philosophical steps of Lisp but seek to improve the genre.

25+

26+Lisp is known for its powerful macro system, which allows developers to write code that generates more code at compile time, and for its powerful `eval` function; while Hoon provides a flexible metaprogramming system that allows developers to manipulate code at compile time and hot-swap code at runtime.

27+

28+This article will contrast classical Lisp syntax and assumptions with Hoon's design. As Lisp is a family of languages rather than a single implementation, I will strive to make generally applicable statements or qualify the discussion—I welcome nuance in your responses about the different major Lisp dialects.

29+

30+Hoon's characteristic structure has arisen from these overarching design principles:

31+

32+1. Hoon must compile to Nock, and benefits from reflecting Nock's calculational worldview.

33+2. Hoon must be capable of live upgrades; that is, conscious brain surgery on itself.

34+3. Hoon should grow organically based on actual developer usage patterns.

35+

36+Our investigation of Lisp and Hoon will compare their syntax, their metaprogramming affordances, and their underlying philosophies.

37+

38+

39+## Syntax

40+

41+Hoon has many commonalities with Lisp and its most common calling convention is sugared to appear like Lisp. The conventions of Nock differ—e.g. using `[]` brackets instead of `()` parentheses—and Nock does not have non-numeric tokens or names. Hoon serves as a more human-friendly syntax which mediates common expressions and structures much as C overlays assembly language. For practical purposes, we never need to write Nock code by hand, and so while Nock informs Hoon's design choices, we don't need to understand any Nock to talk about Hoon.

42+

43+Both Lisp and Hoon are homoiconic, meaning that code and data are directly represented the same way: Lisp code is represented as Lisp data structures, and Hoon code is represented as Hoon data structures. Homoiconicity means that code can be manipulated and transformed as data at runtime. While the most compelling investigation in this article focuses on metaprogramming, we need to start with a comparative syntax and grammar so we understand how code and data are represented.

44+

45+Before all of that, let us compare a simple program implemented in both Lisp and Hoon. Both programming languages are species of functional languages for which expressions result in values, but they handle side effects differently: in Hoon side effects are strictly impossible (although a runtime workaround permits I/O and necessary effects), while in Lisp side effects are permitted (although opinions on their use vary). We will therefore not use a trivial “Hello World” example. Instead we will calculate the arithmetic mean of a set of numbers of known size.

46+

47+```scheme

48+(define (mean a)

49+ (if (null? a)

50+ 0

51+ (/ (apply + a) (length a))))

52+```

53+

54+```hoon

55+:: Common (sugared) form

56+++ mean

57+ |= a=(list @ud)

58+ ?~ a 0

59+ (div (roll a add) (lent a))

60+

61+:: Rune (unsugared) form

62+++ mean

63+ |= a=(list @ud)

64+ ?~ a 0

65+ %+ div

66+ %- roll [a add]

67+ %- lent a

68+```

69+

70+The Scheme code has the advantage that it reads almost English-like as one works through the logic, but implicitly relies on familiarity with the `if`/`then`/`else` structure and function application using `()` (on which more soon).

71+

72+The Hoon code uses the `%` function application runes (differentiated by number of arguments) to apply the function calls. With syntactic sugar, this looks similar to the Lisp call, with `++roll` instead of `apply` and `++lent` instead of `length`.

73+

74+Throughout I will use code examples for Lisp taken from [Rosetta Code](https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:Scheme). I will select or compose Hoon examples to be structurally similar to the Lisp code in order to facilitate comparison. I will also avoid sugar syntax that would obscure the structure of the Hoon code; in some cases this will make it slightly less readable than its equivalent in practice.

75+

76+### Syntax in Lisp

77+

78+#### Types

79+

80+Lisp types are dynamic, checked at runtime rather than on compilation. Since everything is an object, some assumptions can be made about manipulation and behavior. Most Lisp dialects share these types:

81+

82+- Numbers, including integers and floating-point numbers.

83+- Characters.

84+- Strings, as a sequence of characters.

85+- Lists, as a sequence of objects (including lists).

86+- Symbols, names used to refer to a function, variable, or other object.

87+- Arrays, a fixed-size multidimensional indexed object collection.

88+

89+Lisp code, being dynamically typed, is inclined to try a value and see if it works in a given context. However, some restrictions can be made, such as an argument type declaration on a function:

90+

91+```lisp

92+(defun add-two-integers (x y)

93+ (declare (type integer x y))

94+ (+ x y))

95+```

96+

97+Lisp types are to some extent (justly) influenced by the underlying platform architecture: Lisp is generally compiled directly to machine code (like a C program), with the notable exception of [Clojure](https://clojure.org/reference/lisps) which runs on the Java Virtual Machine.

98+

99+#### Operators, Functions, Macros, and Thunks

100+

101+Lisp syntax is characterized by its use of nested lists, called S-expressions (symbolic expressions), which consist of parentheses enclosing atoms or other S-expressions. The basic structure of an S-expression is an operator (or function) followed by its arguments, all enclosed in parentheses. For example, the following S-expression performs a simple arithmetic operation:

102+

103+```lisp

104+(+ 1 2 3)

105+```

106+

107+Lisp uses prefix notation, where the operator comes before the operands, and parentheses are used to group expressions. The S-expression is evaluated from left to right (in most Lisps save Scheme), with the operator being applied to its arguments.

108+

109+Operators in Lisp operate on values of different basic types. Lisp dialects vary in their particular base types, but typically include numbers, strings, booleans, and so forth. The core data type is the list, of course (LISP is for LISt Processing). Since Lisp biases towards list processing, many operators are comfortable receiving an arbitrary number of values as inputs, as in the code sample above.

110+

111+In Lisp, [`cons`](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cons) describes the procedure to construct a pair of objects. This seemingly modest capability is fundamental to how Lisp builds lists—and since everything is a list, `cons` has consequences. One fundamental convention is the `cons` cell, which consists of two other Lisp objects and is how lists are actually constructed.

112+

113+

114+

115+Lisp operations are built either as functions or as macros. Functions produce results directly from their inputs. Macros by contrast are basically function-building functions, and produce expressions that can be evaluated with inputs to get a result.

116+

117+A Lisp function is created using `defun`:

118+

119+```lisp

120+> (defun square (x) (* x x))

121+SQUARE

122+

123+> (square 2)

124+4

125+```

126+

127+(Lisp dialects tend to not be case-sensitive.)

128+

129+Lisp functions are first-class objects and can be manipulated and passed like values of basic types as well.

130+

131+Before we can look at macros, we need to consider Lisp's notion of evaluation and in particular deferred evaluation. For Lisp, an expression can be marked as a literal value rather than evaluated to produce a result. The quote `'` symbol is used to mark expressions for prevented evaluation:

132+

133+```lisp

134+'(1 2 3) ; evaluates to the list (1 2 3)

135+'foo ; evaluates to the symbol FOO

136+(1 5) ; evaluates to the list (1 5)

137+'(1 (+ 2 3)) ; evaluates to the list (1 (+ 2 3))

138+```

139+

140+Backtic or backquote `` ` `` allows you to switch an expression in and out of evaluation mode, along with `,` to mark evaluated components for splicing back into the unevaluated expression.

141+

142+```lisp

143+`(1 2 3) ; evaluates to the list (1 2 3)

144+`foo ; evaluates to the symbol FOO

145+`(1 ,(+ 2 3)) ; evaluates to the list (1 5)

146+```

147+

148+A Lisp macro is essentially a compile-time function.

149+

150+```lisp

151+> (defmacro square (x)

152+ "Returns the square of the input value."

153+ `(* ,x ,x))

154+

155+> (square 2)

156+4

157+```

158+

159+(The `` ` `` notation constructs the expression with values spliced in by `,`.)

160+

161+A deferred evaluation, called a thunk, is a closure that inherits its lexical environment but is deferred for later computation. Thunks enable lazy code evaluation and separate the computation’s definition from its execution.

162+

163+```lisp

164+(defun create-thunk (function &rest arguments)

165+ (lambda () (apply function arguments)))

166+

167+(defun invoke-thunk (thunk)

168+ (funcall thunk))

169+

170+;; Creating a thunk that calculates the factorial of a number

171+(defvar factorial-thunk (create-thunk #'(lambda () (factorial 5))))

172+

173+;; Invoking the thunk to get the result

174+(print (invoke-thunk factorial-thunk)) ; Output: 120

175+```

176+

177+In this code example, `create-thunk` accepts a function and returns a thunk created using a lambda function to encapsulate the computation. `invoke-thunk` is used to invoke the thunk to get the actual result. The actual application creates a deferred factorial implementation and then finally invokes it. Without the last line, the actual calculation would never be executed.

178+

179+As Paul Graham wrote, “The unusual thing about Lisp-- in fact, the defining quality of Lisp-- is that it can be written in itself.” A Lisp program is an S-expression, and in principle we can run the equation the other way: certain S-expressions are valid Lisp programs. Although uncommon in practice due to code safety issues, the `eval` function is illustrative of Lisps’ ability to evaluate a Lisp expression that is represented as a data structure. It takes a single argument, which is a Lisp expression, and returns the value of that expression. Lisp programs can in principle generate new code—or modify existing code—and evaluate it on the fly, since code is data.

180+

181+```lisp

182+(defvar x 10)

183+(defvar y 20)

184+(defvar z '(+ x y))

185+

186+(eval z)

187+```

188+

189+Besides explicitly named functions and macros, Lisp frequently employs lambda expressions to produce functions on demand at the point of use.

190+

191+```lisp

192+> ((lambda (x y) (+ x y)) 5 10)

193+15

194+```

195+

196+Naturally, we have not covered all of Lisp, but the above should motivate how Hoon differs from Lisp. Furthermore, Lisp is really a family of languages, so there is a fair amount of variation in specifics.

197+

198+- [Paul Graham, _On Lisp_](http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html)

199+

200+### Syntax in Hoon

201+

202+#### Types

203+

204+Hoon compiles to Nock and runs on a Nock virtual machine interpreter. Nock knows only about nouns, that is to say either simple unsigned integers or pairs of other nouns.

205+

206+> To be exact, a noun is an S-expression, except that classic S-expressions have multiple atom types ("S" is for "symbol"). Since Nock is designed to be used with a higher-level type system (such as Hoon's), it does not need low-level types. An atom is just an unsigned integer of any size.

207+

208+

209+One of the biggest differences between Hoon and Lisp lies in their respective type systems: Hoon is statically typed while Lisp is dynamically typed. Furthermore, since Hoon compiles to Nock, ultimately every value, expression, and program in Hoon results in a noun (an atom or unsigned integer, or a cell or pair of nouns). (The compiler may make this process slightly opaque, but it is deterministic.) Types, if values are known, must match or nest properly at compile time.

210+

211+Hoon implements types as a metadata layer over bare Nock numbers and atoms. (The implementation details do not concern us but can be seen using the `!,` zapcom rune, which produces the abstract syntax tree of an expression.) Hoon atom types include various numeric types (signed and unsigned, hexadecimal, binary, etc.); address space identifiers (such as ~zod); IP addresses; UTF-8 text; and floating-point values, [among many others](https://developers.urbit.org/blog/literals). As these are interpretations laid over the bare integer, it is trivial to convert among them, a convenience like C affords.

212+

213+```hoon

214+:: raw unsigned decimal integer

215+> 123

216+123

217+

218+:: hexadecimal integer

219+> `@ux`123

220+0x7b

221+

222+:: UTF-8 text

223+> `@t`123

224+'{'

225+

226+:: relative datetime (a small fraction of a second)

227+> `@dr`123

228+~s0..0000.0000.0000.007b

229+

230+:: address mnemonic (ship name)

231+> `@p`123

232+~rux

233+

234+:: IPv4 address

235+> `@if`123

236+.0.0.0.123

237+

238+:: IPv6 address

239+> `@is`123

240+.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.7b

241+```

242+

243+A cell is a pair of two nouns, and of course many compound types exist, including lists (a null-terminated series of cells). A file path in Urbit is, for instance, a list of resource names (a `path`). A manipulable text string is a list of single bytes for characters (a `tape`). Maps (associative arrays), sets, and other containers round out the basic data structure types, but more complex types such as HTTP headers and app metadata are available. Even app actions have an associated type so that the set of actions is enumerable and validated. Here, for instance, are some cryptographic types from the standard library:

244+

245+```hoon

246++$ jacobian [x=@ y=@ z=@] :: jacobian point

247++$ point [x=@ y=@] :: curve point

248++$ domain

249+ $: p=@ :: prime modulo

250+ a=@ :: y^2=x^3+ax+b

251+ b=@ ::

252+ g=point :: base point

253+ n=@ :: prime order of g

254+ ==

255+```

256+

257+Hoon expressions are ultimately binary trees of cells and atoms—Hoon is homoiconic and so code is directly represented as a data structure which can be interpreted as a value as well. This facilitates Hoon's ability to upgrade itself in place, as we will see.

258+

259+Hoon commonly implements types structurally via _molds_, or functions which coerce to type or crash. A mold is a way of asserting known type information over a value, typically at compile time, in a way that allows for data transformation and data validation. This leads to some interesting cases such as the difference between a null-terminated tuple and a true list, which some functions require.

260+

261+```hoon

262+> ~[1 2 3]

263+[1 2 3 ~]

264+

265+> `(list @)`~[1 2 3]

266+~[1 2 3]

267+

268+> (snag 2 ~[1 2 3])

269+mull-grow

270+-need.[i=@ud t=%~]

271+-have.%~

272+nest-fail

273+dojo: hoon expression failed

274+

275+> (snag 2 `(list @)`~[1 2 3])

276+3

277+```

278+

279+Hoon implements a unique character literal syntax for every single atom type, allowing any value to be unambiguously interpreted by the parser per the developer's intent. You can see this somewhat in evidence in this comparison chart:

280+

281+| Type | Lisp Type | Hoon Type |

282+| --- | --- | --- |

283+| (Unsigned) integer | `1` | `1` |

284+| Signed integer | `-1`, `1` | `-1`, `--1` |

285+| Symbol | `x` | `%x` |

286+| Real/FP | `1.5` | `.1.5` |

287+| Character | `#\c` | `'c'` |

288+| Text | `"Hello"` | `'Hello'` (as atom); `"Hello"` (as list) |

289+| Rational | `2/3` | (no Hoon equivalent) |

290+| Address | (no Lisp equivalent) | `~sampel-palnet` |

291+

292+Much of Hoon's practical power derives from how it represents and manipulates nouns as data and as code.

293+

294+> The type of type is just a normal datatype in Hoon, and a lot of the system manipulates types. In particular, the `!>` rune, when applied to a piece of data, uses compile-time type reflection to produce something called a "vase": a pair of type and data, similar to a `Data.Dynamic` in Haskell, or a limited form of a dependent pair. Since the Arvo kernel does a lot of dynamic compilation, it uses vases to implement something akin to a dynamically typed language using Hoon. This allows for type-safe dynamic program loading, program execution, and data migration. (Ted Blackman ~rovnys-ricfer, [“Why Hoon”](https://urbit.org/blog/why-hoon))

295+

296+A `vase` in Hoon is a cell of type and value. Typically `vase`s are produced with the `!>` zapgar rune. We use `vase`s to carry type information where otherwise it may be lost, such as in transmission over the wire to another Urbit instance.

297+

298+```hoon

299+> !>('hello')

300+[#t/@t q=478.560.413.032]

301+

302+> !>([5 10])

303+[#t/[@ud @ud] q=[5 10]]

304+

305+> !>(`(list @)`~[1 2 3])

306+[#t/it(@) q=[1 2 3 0]]

307+

308+> !>(`(list @)`~)

309+[#t/it(@) q=0]

310+```

311+

312+A `vase` can be used at runtime to resolve a value from a dynamic context into an executable Hoon expression, and this is commonly done with web-based input, for instance, where insufficient information will be available at compile time to resolve the type correctly.

313+

314+#### Expressions

315+

316+Nock explicitly consists of binary trees, since any Nock structure or program consists entirely of atoms (bare values) and cells (pairs of nouns).

317+

318+

319+

320+Expressions are oriented around runes, which act as operators to join or manipulate expressions. To construct a cell of two values like `1` and `2`, one uses the `:-` cencol rune. (Hoon cells implement what we call an “implicit `cons`”, meaning that two nouns composed together are simply unified in a shared binary tree.)

321+

322+```

323+ :-

324+ / \

325+1 2

326+```

327+

328+To invoke a function named `add`, one can provide a `%-` cenhep rune with the function name and the arguments.

329+

330+```

331+ %-

332+ / \

333+add :-

334+ / \

335+ 1 2

336+```

337+

338+We write this Hoon expression one of two ways, either separated by whitespace or using parentheses:

339+

340+```

341+> %- add :- 1 2

342+3

343+

344+> %-(add :-(1 2))

345+3

346+```

347+

348+Hoon employs “sugar syntax” for many common code patterns to make them easier to write and (sometimes) to read. Since Hoon had the advantage of knowing about Lisp's syntax beforehand, the standard invocation syntax in Hoon (formally a `%` rune) uses the irregular `()`-based syntax like Lisp. In this case, we could instead write the Lisp-like expression:

349+

350+```hoon

351+> (add 1 2)

352+3

353+```

354+

355+which results in basically the same expression once the parser is done.

356+

357+(Although Hoon ultimately compiles to Nock, it is more natural in some ways to approach the syntax of a program as an array of $n$-ary trees, where each “slot” in an expression can have zero, one, or many children. Zero children refers to a tree address containing a terminal value like a symbol or an integer.)

358+

359+Rune syntax is Hoon's answer to the Lisp proliferation of parentheses—by restricting expressions to a definite number of children, Hoon avoids needing to explicitly terminate most expressions. In some ways, runes are an ASCII-based equivalent of APL's symbolic character operators.

360+

361+```apl

362+life ← {⊃1 ⍵ ∨.∧ 3 4 = +/ +⌿ ¯1 0 1 ∘.⊖ ¯1 0 1 ⌽¨ ⊂⍵}

363+```

364+

365+Rather than permit polymorphic language statements, Hoon requires each rune to be extremely tightly defined. While many statements may be functionally equivalent to an `if` or a `cond` statement, for instance, Hoon allows the developer to select a particular expressive rune if desired.

366+

367+- `?:` typical `if`/`then`/`else` branch

368+- `?=` branch on type

369+- `?@` branch if atom

370+- `?^` branch if cell

371+- `?+` switch on type with default

372+- `?-` switch on type without default

373+- `?~` branch if null

374+

375+The next examples explore an interesting difference between Lisp `cond` and Hoon `?+` wutlus swtich statements: Hoon switches over _types_ not _values_, and `term` symbols as constants are instances of self-matching types.)

376+

377+```scheme

378+(define (weather f)

379+ (cond ((> f 80) 'too-hot)

380+ ((> f 60) 'nice)

381+ ((< f 35) 'too-cold)

382+ (else 'typical-midwest)))

383+```

384+

385+```hoon

386+|%

387+++ weather

388+ |= f=@ud

389+ ?: (gth f 80) %too-hot

390+ ?: (gth f 60) %nice

391+ ?: (lth f 35) %too-cold

392+ %typical-midwest

393+++ symbol-to-message

394+ |= msg=term

395+ ?+ msg 'Typical Midwest'

396+ %too-hot

397+ 'Too hot outside'

398+ %nice

399+ 'Nice outside'

400+ %too-cold

401+ 'Too cold here'

402+ ==

403+--

404+```

405+

406+Lisp expects a program to be a running series of expressions, naturally composed together as a list. Hoon, in contrast, expects everything to be an evaluable expression (no implicit `progn`, for instance): thus, series of expressions must be composed together, e.g. using `=>` tisgar to concatenate two expressions.

407+

408+This code example defines an expression and immediately evaluates another expression against it:

409+

410+```hoon

411+=> [a=1 b=2 c=3]

412+::

413+b

414+```

415+

416+Hoon code is compiled to Nock, but it is not a simple macro over Nock—multiple Hoon expressions could result in an identical Nock expression, and the same Hoon expression evaluated against different subjects could result in different Nock expressions. Hoon code is parsed to an abstract syntax tree first, which includes type metadata, then compiled into the appropriate Nock statement. Here we use the `!,` zapcom rune to turn a Hoon expression into its AST, then `!=` zaptis to compile a Hoon expression to Nock.

417+

418+```hoon

419+> !,(*hoon `@ux`+(1))

420+[ %ktls

421+ p=[%sand p=%ux q=0]

422+ q=[%ktls p=[%sand p=%$ q=0] q=[%dtls p=[%sand p=%ud q=1]]]

423+]

424+

425+> !=(`@ux`+(1))

426+[4 1 1]

427+```

428+

429+Hoon has much more syntactic sugar than Lisp. Not only is the Lisp-like `()` execution convention sugar for `%:` cencol to invoke a function, there are in fact many ways to evaluate code expressions. Consider, for instance:

430+

431+| Rune | Usage |

432+|---|---|

433+| `%-` | Evaluate a function against a single noun. |

434+| `%+` | Evaluate a function against a cell (pair of nouns). |

435+| `%^` | Evaluate a function against a trio of nouns. |

436+| `%:` | Evaluate a function with many arguments ($n$-ary, unspecified number of nouns). |

437+| `%~` | Evaluate a higher-order function to produce a function. |

438+

439+This gives a Hoon developer an extreme amount of flexibility in constructing and laying out code expressions. In fact, many Hoon programs read as a hybrid of imperative code and functional code, since the ability to lay out intent line-by-line feels rather like C.

440+

441+Hoon conventions and sugar syntax have evolved organically as core developers discovered or invented useful design patterns and appropriately concise syntax.

442+

443+#### Functions (Gates) and Cores

444+

445+The most important structural concept in Hoon is the core, which organizes code into a binary tree of `[code data]`, or as we call it in Hoon, `[battery payload]`. Since cores have a standard structure, this means that many kinds of direct manipulations (metaprogramming) are possible, such as altering the input arguments to a function or manipulating the code variance model. Cores play a role in Hoon similar to that of objects in many other languages.

446+

447+Any function (“gate” in Hoon parlance) is a core, whose `battery` is the compiled Nock code and whose `payload` includes its view of the system, including the standard library, and its input arguments. The `|=` bartis rune is most commonly used to make a gate:

448+

449+```hoon

450+:: Select the larger of two values ("max").

451+|= [a=@ b=@]

452+?: (gth a b)

453+ a

454+b

455+```

456+

457+The gate definition rune `|=` bartis has two children, a specification of the expected input and the expression. When invoked, the values of the specification (or "sample") are provided to the expression, which then evaluates to return a noun.

458+

459+One quirk of Hoon is that since everything is an address (or “axis”) in a binary tree, you can access anything in your scope (“subject”) through its axis. Most commonly you attach a face to a value (like a gate), but you don't have to. At any point, to refer to the previous statement, you can invoke the head of the tree, `-`; to wit,

460+

461+```hoon

462+> =/ a 5

463+ -

464+a=5

465+```

466+

467+The name `a` is also attached to the value and can be used to identify the value. (To the Hoon parser there is no real difference; this is a programmer quality-of-life affordance.)

468+

469+```hoon

470+> =/ a 5

471+ a

472+5

473+```

474+

475+Thus faces (names) are attached to gates (functions) within a particular scope or context, such as a `|%` core. Each core defines a collection of values and gates (collectively termed “arms”) which occupy a shared scope. For example, the following library demonstrates a few floating-point operations in Hoon. Each function can see the parent subject (including `hoon.hoon` and some other cores) as well as its neighboring arms (such as `++pow-n` called by `++exp`).

476+

477+```hoon

478+|%

479+:: Factorial, x!

480+++ factorial

481+ |= x=@rs

482+ =/ t=@rs .1

483+ |- ^- @rs

484+ ?: =(x .1) t

485+ $(x (sub:rs x .1), t (mul:rs t x))

486+:: Absolute value, |x|

487+++ absolute

488+ |= x=@rs

489+ ?: (gth:rs x .0) x

490+ (sub:rs .0 x)

491+:: Exponential function, exp(x)

492+++ exp

493+ |= x=@rs

494+ =/ rtol .1e-5

495+ =/ p .1

496+ =/ po .-1

497+ =/ i .1

498+ |- ^- @rs

499+ ?: (lth:rs (absolute (sub:rs po p)) rtol) p

500+ $(i (add:rs i .1), p (add:rs p (div:rs (pow-n x i) (factorial i))), po p)

501+:: Power, restricted to integeres only, x**n

502+++ pow-n

503+ |= [x=@rs n=@rs]

504+ ?: =(n .0) .1

505+ =/ p x

506+ |- ^- @rs

507+ ?: (lth:rs n .2) p

508+ $(n (sub:rs n .1), p (mul:rs p x))

509+--

510+```

511+

512+Ultimately, however, the faces resolve back to an axis and the code is composed by the compiler into a Hoon syntax tree and thence to Nock for the runtime interpreter.

513+

514+The nature of cores derives from Nock and is key to understanding how Hoon works. All nontrivial structures in Hoon are cores. For instance, even a gate is a regular `|%` core, with `|=` expanding to `|%`. The following code snippets are identical to the Hoon compiler after parsing.

515+

516+```hoon

517+:: increment a number by two

518+|= p=@ud

519++(+(p))

520+```

521+

522+```hoon

523+:: increment a number by two

524+=+ ^~(*p=@ud)

525+|%

526+++ $

527+ +(+(p))

528+--

529+```

530+

531+Although Lisp's `'` quoting has no direct equivalent in Hoon, there are a couple of structures that can provide a similar effect. The most important of these is the `|.` trap, which defines an expression to be evaluated at a later time—Hoon’s equivalent of Lisp’s thunk. For instance, traps are used when testing code that _should_ fail, as the expression can be defined and deferred until the test framework is ready to process it.

532+

533+```hoon

534+> =foo |.((add 1 41))

535+

536+> -:foo

537+[8 [9 36 0 2.047] 9 2 10 [6 [7 [0 3] 1 1] 7 [0 3] 1 41] 0 2]

538+

539+> (foo)

540+42

541+```

542+

543+(To understand the second entry, recall that code is the in head of the core—here, we see the Nock code for the operation defined in the `|.` trap.)

544+

545+[Wet gates](https://developers.urbit.org/guides/core/hoon-school/R-metals) present the most macro-like feature in Hoon. A regular function, or “dry gate” (as above), receives an argument (the sample); the type system tries to cast the sample to the type specified by the gate, and fails if not possible. Wet gates instead defer type evaluation and instead attempt to use the sample (or arguments) directly in the expression. This produces a parametric polymorphism. (This comes close to dynamic typing, but type is still checked at compile time.) Wet gates are commonly used as gate-building gates, such as mold-producing gates like `++list`.

546+

547+Consider a function like `++turn` which transforms each element of a list.

548+

549+```hoon

550+> `tape`(turn ~[77 97 114 115] @t)

551+"Mars"

552+```

553+

554+To use `++turn`, we need a list and a transformation function. The type of the list we produce depends on the type of the list and the type of the transformation function. The actual gate `++turn` should work to transform each element of the list for on any function and any list, so long as the function's argument is the list item.

555+

556+Wet gates are therefore used when incoming type information is not well known and needs to be preserved. This includes parsing, building, and structuring arbitrary nouns. (Beyond Lisp analogues, you can think of C++'s templates and operator overloading, and Haskell's typeclasses.)

557+

558+This example compares the Lisp deferred factorial thunk with an equivalent Hoon trap. (Hoon includes `++factorial` since it is not part of the standard library.)

559+

560+```scheme

561+(defun create-thunk (function &rest arguments)

562+ (lambda () (apply function arguments)))

563+

564+(defun invoke-thunk (thunk)

565+ (funcall thunk))

566+

567+;; Creating a thunk that calculates the factorial of a number

568+(defvar factorial-thunk (create-thunk #'(lambda () (factorial 5))))

569+

570+;; Invoking the thunk to get the result

571+(print (invoke-thunk factorial-thunk)) ; Output: 120

572+```

573+

574+```hoon

575+=>

576+|%

577+++ factorial

578+ |= n=@ud

579+ |-

580+ ?: =(n 1) 1

581+ %+ mul n

582+ %= $

583+ n (dec n)

584+ ==

585+++ factorial-5

586+ |. (factorial 5)

587+--

588+(factorial-5)

589+```

590+

591+### Subject-Oriented Programming

592+

593+Urbit programming employs a paradigm deriving from the nature of Nock (_a fortiori_ Hoon), subject-oriented programming. Every expression of Hoon is evaluated relative to its subject, a piece of data that represents the environment, or the context, of an expression.

594+

595+The subject refers to the parent binary tree of an expression, more or less, and serves as state, lexical scope, environment, and function argument. (We can be precise about the definition in all cases—e.g. the subject of a gate in a core is the core itself—but don't need to for this essay.) Lisp supports variable scope and global variables, such that any part of the program can access a particular binding. Hoon's subject-oriented programming model naturally provides its equivalent of scope: all code is evaluated against a subject and name bindings proceed by depth-first match (with permitted skips to prevent unwanted masking).

596+

597+> Subject orientation in Nock and Hoon stems partly from minimalism (there's just one subject, which serves as state, lexical scope, environment, and function argument), partly from a desire to simplify compilation (the type of the subject is a full specification of the compile-time environment for a source file), and partly in order to give the language a more imperative feel.

598+>

599+> Everything about a scope, including name bindings, aliases, and docstrings, is stored in the subject's type. This allows Hoon's compilation discipline to be similarly minimal: the compiler is a function from subject type and Hoon source to product type and compiled Nock. Running this Nock against a value of the subject type produces a vase of the result. It's hard to imagine a more streamlined formalism for compilation. (Ted Blackman ~rovnys-ricfer, [“Why Hoon”](https://urbit.org/blog/why-hoon))

600+

601+The subject is typically the core in which an expression is evaluated, but can be more narrowly defined; consider, for instance, our example from above:

602+

603+```hoon

604+=> [a=1 b=2 c=3]

605+::

606+b

607+```

608+

609+A slightly different program fails:

610+

611+```hoon

612+=> [a=1 b=2 c=3]

613+::

614+(add a b)

615+```

616+

617+because the `++add` gate is not defined in the subject against which the expression is evaluated, the first statement.

618+

619+### Comparative Examples

620+

621+#### Find in List

622+

623+```scheme

624+(define index-of

625+ (lambda (needle haystack)

626+ (let ((tail (member needle haystack)))

627+ (if tail

628+ (- (length haystack) (length tail))

629+ (throw 'needle-missing)))))

630+```

631+

632+```hoon

633+:: Produces the index of the first occurrence of nedl in hstk

634+:: as the unit of an atom.

635+++ find

636+ |= [nedl=(list) hstk=(list)]

637+ =| i=@ud

638+ |- ^- (unit @ud)

639+ =+ [n=nedl h=hstk]

640+ |-

641+ ?: |(?=(~ n) ?=(~ h))

642+ ~

643+ ?: =(i.n i.h)

644+ ?~ t.n

645+ `i

646+ $(n t.n, h t.h)

647+ ^$(i +(i), hstk +.hstk)

648+```

649+

650+#### Filter a List

651+

652+```scheme

653+(define filter

654+ (lambda (fn lst)

655+ (let iter ((lst lst) (result '()))

656+ (if (null? lst)

657+ (reverse result)

658+ (let ((item (car lst))

659+ (rest (cdr lst)))

660+ (if (fn item)

661+ (iter rest (cons item result))

662+ (iter rest result)))))))

663+```

664+

665+```hoon

666+:: Cycle through the members of a list a, passing them to a gate b

667+:: and produce a list of all of the members that produce TRUE.

668+++ skim

669+ |* [a=(list) b=$-(* ?)]

670+ |-

671+ ^+ a

672+ ?~ a ~

673+ ?:((b i.a) [i.a $(a t.a)] $(a t.a))

674+```

675+

676+- Several examples in the above section were drawn from [UW's CSE 341 course notes](https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse341/03wi/scheme/basics.html) and from [Rosetta Code](https://rosettacode.org/).

677+

678+

679+## Metaprogramming

680+

681+A Lisp program is really a list, or a list of lists (nested as much as necessary). While this can be interpreted as an $n$-ary tree, tree structure is not the preferred structural metaphor. A Hoon program is a noun, or equivalently a binary tree. Every component of it is directly addressable and thus in principle reflective. Both languages are homoiconic, with code and data representations being the same. What are the consequences of homoiconicity?

682+

683+### Metaprogramming in Lisp

684+

685+Metaprogramming is the practice of writing code that manipulates other code at either compile-time or runtime. In Lisp, metaprogramming is a core feature of the language, and it allows developers to create programs that are incredibly powerful and flexible. Lisp's metaprogramming capabilities are primarily built on two features: macros and syntax manipulation.

686+

687+Macros in Lisp are a way to define new language constructs that are more expressive and more powerful than those provided by the language itself. When a Lisp program is compiled or interpreted, macros are expanded into regular Lisp code, allowing the macro to generate new code based on its input arguments. Since Lisp code is represented as data, it can be manipulated using the same functions and operators used to manipulate other data structures.

688+

689+For instance, Lisp macros could allow you flexibility in expressing a common operation. Imagine you're working on a project that requires a lot of complex math calculations. Rather than writing out each calculation manually, you could define a macro that takes an expression in infix notation (e.g. `2 + 3 * 4`), and transforms it into a Lisp expression that can be evaluated directly. Thus you could compose math expressions in a more human-natural way without having to worry about details of Lisp syntax.

690+

691+Lisp can also manipulate its own syntax. This is sometimes done through the use of reader macros, which operate at the level of the Lisp reader, which is responsible for converting textual input into Lisp expressions. Reader macros can be used to extend the syntax of Lisp, allowing developers to define new conventions or domain-specific languages for specific types of data or operations. Beyond reader macros, Lisp can permit the developer to change the parser (and as long as the result is a Lisp expression, the interpreter or compiler will be fine with this). Top-level functions can be replaced or modified (“advised”). Symbol macros can change source code.

692+

693+Lisp's `'` quote and the `eval` statement allow single expressions to be inhibited or evaluated at will, which is incredibly useful when dealing with symbols that may not be defined yet or in the composition of macros.

694+

695+In addition to macros and syntax manipulation, Lisp dialects typically provide a number of other features that make metaprogramming easier, such as the ability to inspect and modify the runtime environment, and the ability to create or redefine functions and classes at runtime.

696+

697+### Metaprogramming in Hoon

698+

699+While Hoon explicitly avoids macros and domain-specific language specializations, there are many aspects of Hoon which allow or exploit code reflection and manipulation.

700+

701+In practice, Hoon is intended as a systems programming language for the Urbit Nock VM. Hoon's metaprogramming has as a consequence mainly focused on aspects of core manipulation (such as code building and wet gates) and on live code upgrades (what I'll call hot-swapping code). Hoon eschews macros and in particular has a philosophical stance against domain-specific languages (DSLs). (There are some exceptions, notably Sail, Hoon's XML/HTML syntax; and JSON reparsing.)

702+

703+Hoon has the ability to parse arbitrary text strings (typically files) into executable ASTs and Nock. Symbols can be directly converted to and from regular text strings.

704+

705+As the programming language for a “hundred-year computer”, Hoon needs the ability to hot-swap code at runtime. Elements of cores can be removed or replaced. (Really, Hoon code is immutable: the system is actually making a copy with a specified change.) Every app and even the OS itself can define a state transition function and upgrade along a deterministic pathway.

706+

707+Hoon is in principle extremely reflective as it simply compiles to a Nock noun. Since everything is a stationary tree, it is straightforward to manipulate any object. There are no magic binary blobs or opaque data types: if you have a file handle or an Ethereum block or a websocket connection object, it is a tree and you can work with it directly. (Cf. [“Why Hoon”](https://urbit.org/blog/why-hoon).) Obtaining—or changing—details about gate sample or core behavior becomes a routine part of the Hoon developer’s toolkit. Given such regularity, it would be desirable to expose further capabilities of code reflection and introspection explicitly for the interpreter and IDE.

708+

709+One of the most common design patterns in Hoon is that of the higher-order function, or what Hoon calls “gate-building gates”. These are gates (functions) that produce gates (functions). For instance, as Hoon is statically typed a list must have an associated element type at compile time. `++list` is a gate builder that produces a type gate, which can then be applied to the actual values:

710+

711+```hoon

712+list :: gate builder

713+(list cord) :: gate for list of cords (strings)

714+`(list cord)`~['a' 'b' 'c'] :: list type applied to value

715+```

716+

717+Hoon represents a “hyperlambda” with respect to anonymous function creation: one very often defines gates at their point of use, particularly when operating on each member of a list or set. Similar to Lisp's frequent use of `lambda`, the one-time-use function is available at the point of call as an anonymous gate. (More generally, every gate is anonymous and we have to attach a name to it as a search path, but that's a bit out of scope here.)

718+

719+```scheme

720+((lambda (x1 x2)

721+ (* (- x1 x2) (- x1 x2)))

722+ 2 -5)

723+```

724+

725+```hoon

726+%- |= [x1=@ x2=@]

727+ (pro:si (dif:si x1 x2) (dif:si x1 x2))

728+[--2 -5]

729+```

730+

731+Like Lisp, Hoon yields a lot of power to the user–developer. One could implement a fairly regular Lisp on top of Hoon with very few changes—and perhaps even implement a pure-Hoon discipline yielding a statically-typed Lisp à la TypeScript from JavaScript.

732+

733+- [~tacryt-socryp, “Hick, a more traditional Lisp than Hoon”](https://gist.github.com/tacryt-socryp/b08dc66b7bcc760e914c4db5c9fd7ba7)

734+

735+

736+## Philosophy

737+

738+Hoon's focus on atoms, static typing, and symbolic expressions make it a highly expressive and efficient language for building applications on the Urbit platform, while Lisp's flexible syntax and macro system make it a popular choice for a wide range of programming tasks.

739+

740+Lisp has evolved greatly since John McCarthy's founding. Like Unix, a complicated family tree has finally settled down into a few strong contenders: Scheme, Common Lisp, Clojure, Racket.

741+

742+Lisp has tended to be fractious: as many have noted, and [Mark Tarver eloquently expressed](http://web.archive.org/web/20080803193859/http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/bipolar.htm), the Lisp platform appeals to idiosyncratic visions for completist platforms. There's a looseness in the community's coherence as a result.

743+

744+For a few reasons, the Urbit community has managed to avoid such splintering (the [Urbit Classic joke](http://urbit-classic.org/) aside). With a single sponsoring organization, first Tlon Corporation and since 2022 the Urbit Foundation, to steward the ecosystem and a philosophical commitment to protocol-as-platform, Urbit should avoid partition into competing bazaars.

745+

746+Urbit's governing philosophy as a technical program is laid out in the [Precepts](https://urbit.org/blog/precepts). A sampling:

747+

748+> A.13. If you don't completely understand your code and the semantics of all the code it depends on, your code is wrong.

749+

750+> A.16. Explicit state is better than implicit state.

751+

752+> A.20. One hundred lines of simplicity is better than twenty lines of complexity.

753+

754+> D.3. Not being qualified to solve a problem is no reason not to solve it.

755+

756+There is significant overlap here with the ideals of the Lisp developer community present. Scheme like Hoon aims at minimalism and ample use of lambda expressions. [Clojure](https://www.clojure.org/about/rationale) aims at strengthening Lisp by building it on a modern platform (the JVM); it would agree with Urbit's disdain for nondeterminism: “pervasive, unmoderated mutation simply has to go”. Racket was designed for production systems and to some extent with a hope to unify parts of the developer stack.

757+

758+In many ways, Hoon is more Lisp-y than Lisp: that is, it represents a point more polar towards the telos of Lisp than any extant Lisp. By shedding the skin of lists and focusing on binary trees, Urbit achieves a deeper conceptual unification within itself. Hoon doesn't properly supersede Lisp—it requires running on a particular VM architecture, for instance—but Hoon's focus on typing, the nature of Hoon's binary-tree homoiconicity, and its employment of pure functional concepts make it a strong new tool for those to whom Lisp already appeals.

759+

760+Hoon goes farther than Lisp, however. Hoon is an accessible and practical, if unconventional, tool for simplifying the developer stack, ultimately to a single language. Ultimately, Urbit is a technical project to encode human digital freedom into the very protocol we use—with Hoon its nose-to-tail _lingua franca_. Hoon carries the torch that Lisp kindled into a new user-oriented future.

761+

762+To close, I quote Urbit Foundation CTO Ted Blackman on why Urbit follows its particular design discipline:

763+

764+> The promise of Urbit lies in its reimagination of the digital world using components that are as constrained and limited as possible. By adhering firmly to principle and doubling down on minimalism at every turn, we get an OS that provides far stronger guarantees than Unix with a thousand times less code. Given the complexity of modern software, this is what's required to put personal computing back into the hands of people. (Ted Blackman ~rovnys-ricfer, [“Why Hoon”](https://urbit.org/blog/why-hoon))

content/blog/hosting-the-future.mdnew file+30

@@ -0,0 +1,30 @@

1++++

2+title = "Hosting the Future"

3+date = "2020-09-30"

4+description = "The way we see it, hosting is the most important thing, next to Landscape, that Tlon can do to help Urbit continue toward widespread adoption."

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Nick Simmons"

8+ship = "~simfur-ritwed"

9+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/200930-hosting-by-tlon.jpg"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+Urbit users tend to be interesting, creative, and capable people; we’re genuinely impressed with the communities that have formed on the network, and with the quality of discourse there. But for the number of communities to continue to grow, getting on the network has to become dramatically easier. It’s not realistic to expect most people to configure their own Urbit OS node in the command line.

15+

16+At the moment, the biggest lever we have here is to help ordinary users get online, so they can participate in communities inside Urbit, and eventually form their own. This means hosting their Urbit nodes and showing them around the network when they first arrive. There are already several businesses overlapping with this space to varying degrees: [planet.market](https://planet.market/), [urth.systems](https://urth.systems/), and [geturbitid](https://www.geturbitid.com/). Now, Tlon is releasing its own hosting offering. For the uninitiated, “Hosting” just means that we run your urbit ship for you, making it easier for you to get onto the network. We’ve been testing our hosting service with friends and family for the past few months, and now we’re ready to bring it to the rest of the world.

17+

18+To learn more about Tlon hosting and sign up for the waiting list, check out the new [tlon.io](https://tlon.io/) website. We are officially launching the service on October 9th, with a virtual event and demo; we’ll also show off some of the new features and improvements to Landscape, the Urbit web client.

19+

20+To be very clear, hosting isn’t for everyone; if you’re deeply security-conscious or privacy-oriented, you’ll still want to self-host so that nobody else needs to touch your keys. That said, hosting isn’t a walled garden; you’ll get a planet when you sign up for hosting, which you will own 100% and forever. You’ll also always have the option to roll up your data and take it with you if you choose to stop using our service. Your Urbit data is just a single file, and we’ll happily hand it back to you if you ever decide to leave. Nothing will ever stop you from self-hosting.

21+

22+We’ve talked for a while about how the ultimate destiny of Urbit is to escape the control of Tlon. For Urbit to really succeed, it has to be managed by its own community. We started Tlon in order to solidify the foundation of this young platform. Now that Urbit is starting to grow up, Tlon and Urbit will naturally drift apart a bit.

23+

24+Urbit is meant to be universal, ubiquitous infrastructure. Tlon exists to make that infrastructure useful and usable. We expect Urbit, as a platform, to be cared for by the community in collaboration with the emerging [Urbit Foundation](https://urbit.org/blog/first-steps-towards-urbit-org/). We intend Tlon to become increasingly focussed on providing a great user experience for anyone interested in this new network, so the network can continue to grow and thrive.

25+

26+The way we see it, hosting is the most important thing, next to Landscape, that Tlon can do to help Urbit continue toward widespread adoption. We don’t expect to be the only ones providing this service—and look forward to including more contributions from the community here on urbit.org as they continue to mature.

27+

28+If you’re curious to keep up with what Tlon is doing here, head to [tlon.io](https://tlon.io) and join the waiting list. We’ll be posting updates to that list as well as to the Tlon Transmissions notebook in the Urbit Community group. Going forward we’ll do our best to keep urbit.org neutral and focussed on the technology itself.

29+

30+See you all on the network!

content/blog/immunology-for-the-internet-age.mdnew file+118

@@ -0,0 +1,118 @@

1++++

2+title = "Immunology for the Internet Age"

3+date = "2022-04-07"

4+description = "A consideration of the history of the Internet motivates introspection on the nature and causes of social dysfunction in a globally shared space. Centralized solutions fail to yield satisfactory outcomes for human freedom and thriving. Decentralized autonomous organizations and their technological apparatus together represent the evolution of an immune system against a corporatized Internet."

5+[extra]

6+author = ""

7+ship = "~lagrev-nocfep"

8+image = "https://live.staticflickr.com/4322/35891780782_4179f476f9_k.jpg"

9++++

10+

11+_A version of the following was presented by ~lagrev-nocfep at the [MTAConf 2022 conference on “The Decentralization of Power”](https://www.mtaconf.org/)._

12+

13+**✿**

14+

15+IN THE BEGINNING, _God created the prokaryotes. And the prokaryotes were without nucleus and organelle; and structural simplicity was upon the face of the deep. And chemotaxis moved it upon the face of the waters._

16+

17+A single-celled organism possesses many advantages, notably simplicity of form. Being largely indistinguishable, they have no differentiation or specialization. Prokaryotes often form large colonies, such as the cyanobacteria. Some prokaryotes discovered early on that it paid better to consume resources that had already been processed into usable form by another cell, rather than to process those resources oneself. Thus predator and prey were born, and they have always exemplified divergent competitive evolutionary strategies. The resulting arms race meant that predators were continually adapting to better extract resources from prey, while prey were evolving to evade, resist, fight, or poison predators. Selection pressures applied at individual, species, and clade levels, lead to speciation across deep time.

18+

19+More complex forms seemed better able to evade predators, and thus simple symbiotic alliances between differentiated prokaryotes evolved into the eukaryotes (yielding specialized features such as the nucleus and mitochondria) and multicellular life forms. Simpler forms also abounded, including the liminal virus. Viruses are forms of near-life so simple that they simply exploit cells to reproduce. They are entirely predatory or at best symbiotic with other life. Evasion of pathogenic disease, or disequilibrated colonization by simpler forms of life, has been a---if not the---primary driver towards increasing complexity in multicellular life.[^1]

20+

21+**✿**

22+

23+The Internet began in the late 1960s, born of scientific alliance between the Cold War Department of Defense and the academic research community.[^2] This community had a signal advantage over many subsequent communities: it was dominated by strong norms of discourse which shaped the professionalism of the community. This is not to discount the significance of courtly intrigue, of course, which deftly exploited tensions between competing systems.[^3].

24+

25+Throughout this era, though, the Internet generally functioned as a real-name high-trust environment---if not exactly of peers, at least of colleagues.

26+

27+The Internet evolved as a coordination mechanism---literally a nervous system incarnate in copper and silicon---particularly through the Usenet days of the 1980s. In our days of heightened online tension and mediated preference cascades, it is rather quaint to go back and look at what qualified as email flame wars at the time (e.g. Torvalds/Tanenbaum). One hallmark of the Usenet era, however, is a gradually eroding social trust: spam was invented[^6] and Internet-based scams started to spin up.

28+

29+Pseudonymity gained in popularity as a countermeasure to both of these as well as restrictions on discourse. The revelation that persistent digital records could cost someone's job further fueled a cyberpunk-like obsession with identity control and hacking.[^7]

30+

31+Computer viruses could propagate for the first time: it never made much sense to build a computer virus until systems were connected. Although John von Neumann and others early explored the possibility of mathematical or code structures which could self-replicate, it was not until the Creeper virus in the 1970s that self-replicating code was observed in the wild. And like a bacillus in an immune system-free host, code-based computer viruses began to spread from the 1980s onwards.

32+

33+The crisis arrived in the form of the World Wide Web. Founded initially on a belief in the democratization of information, the Web rapidly became dominated by a handful of large corporations (henceforth "megacorps"). User experience became the predominant driver of adoption, leading to rapid preference cascades as new platforms became available. Any child of the 90s or earlier can recite the lived litany: Ebay, MySpace, Friendster. Initially these served as proofs-of-concept, then became the only significant player (until the next killer app came along). Search engines drove discovery, then focused attention asymmetrically. The "walled garden" approach of AOL, then Apple and Facebook, led to concentrations of users which tipped the balance from single webpage hosts presenting their own idiosyncratic views to corporate-approved genericity and ultimately censorship.[^8]

34+

35+**✿**

36+

37+When was the first time you did something in the physical world because of something you read or encountered online? For generations born after the advent of the Web, they may not recall such a time when meatspace existence wasn't driven by life online. As Internet data sources have overwhelmed traditional media, publishing, and distribution services, the resulting tsunami of information and informatization has swept into every corner of lived human experience in technological societies. The psychological (memetic) virus problem is much greater than actual code viruses. The ongoing universal exposure to alien and internally incoherent value systems has undergirded the well-documented crisis of credibility (collapse of meaning) that all Western institutions are experiencing today. The World Wide Web and its technological predecessors acted as a cultural petri dish of clean agar, which grew every spore and germ which fell upon it. We live in the midst of a memetic epidemic because of the World Wide Web, and the dominant strain is corporate, approved by a marketing department and run through a search-engine optimization algorithm.

38+

39+The turn towards a low-trust then zero-trust environment was inevitable if anything like an analogy with prokaryotic evolution holds true. The megacorp platforms are in a way worse than a purely zero-trust environment, because they don't advertise that the world is zero-trust. Thereby they lure the unwary into transgressing arbitrary global norms and courting the wrath of social media mobs and the concomitant loss of access to their data held in "trust." To mix a metaphor, megacorps are apex predators---at best, sheepdogs with a strong strain of wolfishness; at worst, tar pits manned by various bad-faith actors. The pre-Web cypherpunks were right: "Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world."[^9]

40+

41+If anything, they were too narrow; not only their valued "open society" (polyvalent crypto-anarchy) but _any_ non-megacorp society at all requires true privacy.

42+

43+What cyberspace (and human culture writ broadly) needed was an immune system---and in good Darwinian form, such an immune system has been evolving before our eyes. An immune system formally consists of layers with increasing specificity: first surface barriers, then the innate immune system, and finally the adaptive immune system. The objective of the immune system is to protect the organism: in this case, human sociality and agency.

44+

45+First, what is human sociality? Human culture has been the means of participating in the Great Discussion which ranges from the earliest days of oral culture to the birth of literacy and libraries down to our day. High culture and low culture have both articulated and preserved valuable insights and forms of human flourishing. However, throughout the 20^th^ century and particularly by the means of the consumer revolution, our lives have been thoroughly colonized by capital and commercial instruments. So-called "economies of scale" have disrupted smallholders, artisans, and shopkeepers to the extent that these have been virtually eradicated from the modern landscape in favor of the plastic and polluting "dark Satanic mills." Although small-scale "provident living" has supported gardening, canning, and home production, none of this has survived across a large enough cultural segment to matter macroscopically, and it has unfortunately been tarred with the "prepper" brush that delegitimizes economic downsizing as antisocial because anticapitalist. The siren call of cheap consumer goods has ushered in a generational collapse in self-sufficiency and resulted in the complete colonization of entertainment, food consumption, and self-care by massive corporate brands. Not only have physical goods entered a post-consumer phase, but only certain classes of ideas, attitudes, political stances, regional accents, and sensibilities enjoy the sanction of megacorp sociality. There is essentially no native culture left, only that forged in the enterprise brand management office.[^10]

46+

47+In an immune system, _surface barriers_ are designed to make it hard for exogenous agents to enter a cell or organism; in our analogy, the primary surface barrier was the match of physical separation to psychological separation. Surface barriers were rendered finally obsolete by the launch of the World Wide Web and its subsequent infiltration of every aspect of human culture. To the extent they exist today, it is a matter of ignorance, self-discipline, or happy accident.

48+

49+The _innate immune system_ responds non-specifically to pathogens. Any immune system must have a way of deciding what is _me_ and what is _not-me_. Framed as an identity problem in a zero-trust environment, users have evolved several ways to uniquely identify agents without reference to legacy systems. Chief among these means is the blockchain, introduced by Bitcoin for control and transaction of digital assets and since much exploited beyond its design intent. Ethereum-based ERC tokens represent tweaks of this identity concept, as do many other blockchain platforms.

50+

51+Identity is still fluid and polysemous, but in certain key instances it is indelibly demonstrable.[^11]

52+

53+The individual actor has the capability to express itself with many public faces or none; one of these typically enjoys government sanction and liability, but it is no more _real_ than the others, only more legible to regulation and taxation.[^12]

54+

55+Another aspect of the innate immune system is the public visibility of code. Open source has developed an ethic of transparency on epistemological grounds (i.e. you have a right to know what code you are running) and practical grounds. (Linus's law: "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."[^13])

56+

57+The _adaptive immune system_ responds to specific pathogenic incursions. Particular conditions arise, whether through social, regulatory, military, or other requirements, which must be met with specialized forms that are thereafter in evolutionary competition with the external factor. For instance, one megacorp solution to what it perceives as a threat, i.e. unsanctioned memes, is to attempt to mandate the ultimate traceability of any image's provenance.[^14]

58+

59+The Internet immune system thus evolves to further obfuscate legibility and enhance individual control and self-determination by shifting to less-traceable technologies such as the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). The point is not whether or not a salient technology such as deepfakes, 3D-printed firearms, deviant scientific or political thought, or even the DRM-free sharing of copyrighted material can be contained.

60+

61+The experience with export-grade cryptography has already shown that regulatory attempts ultimately fail.[^17]

62+

63+The philosophical question is what kind of world will evolve (a _fait accompli_ driven by factors beyond any individual or office) and the practical question is how any particular group of actors can preserve their own agency, autonomy, and ambit of action.

64+

65+The first decentralized autonomous organization, "The DAO" (Đ) itself[^18], was created in 2016 as a way of distributing ownership and stake in a joint venture capital fund. Đ was a new form of organization in that it was essentially a mathematical entity, a set of smart contracts on the blockchain to which anyone had access. Đ lived up at least to "decentralized" and "autonomous." No money was held centrally, with token-based authentication yielding the right to vote on projects. Having set the criteria for membership and investment, Đ then operated in truly democratic fashion until an exploit of imperfectly written smart contract code led to theft, crisis, and the reorganization of the Ethereum blockchain itself.

66+

67+While the heirs of Đ serve a role in the current Internet immune system, the original was formed in response to exogenous regulatory concerns, notably ongoing governmental insistence on restricting investment to the already-wealthy. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and other agencies have in place arbitrary investor requirements which would make little sense even if pegged to something like inflation or index rather than the rapidly-devaluing petrodollar. Nominally put in place to protect the naïve from getting scammed, these restrictions have had the pernicious effect of pulling up the ladder behind the _actuel riche_.

68+

69+DAOs have rapidly evolved as a way of distributing ownership and stake in a purely democratic way. (As an aside, the word "democracy" has been much abused, but here I use it in a sense much like the Greek original: the holders of an immutable and indelible token cast their secured votes to govern their society.) DAOs represent a resurgence of the sovereign city-state in new guise. Will this be enough to evade "imperial" aggregates which dominate today's Web?

70+

71+Decentralized autonomous organizations, zero-knowledge cryptographic proofs, cryptocurrencies, proof-of-identity systems, and their as-yet-unborn kin represent the evolution of an immune system on top of the Darwinian churn of the legacy Internet. The stakes are necessarily high: possession is _de facto_ ownership, the other end of the stick from "not your keys, not your coins" (the old cryptocurrency chestnut). The focus is currently on ownership of money, non-fungible tokens, and similar assets, but broadly speaking such systems allow the authenticated ownership of all data and assets one holds, from chat messages to market shares to physical real estate. There may be good reasons to retain the legacy system for some classes of physical or legal artifacts, but at minimum these will be in competition with purely autonomous constructs. (As an aside, I am of the philosophical opinion that legal recognition should not be sought generally for new forms of organization, as any legibility to legacy systems opens new attack surfaces in an immunological sense.) "Code is law."[^19]

72+

73+A decentralized autonomous organization seems to be at least the first two. Having set the criteria for membership, the organization can act as the (distributed, possibly unknown in the zero-knowledge proof sense) stakeholders direct.

74+

75+This form is still somewhat "yeasty" in that like cyanobacteria it acts as an undifferentiated mass. We should expect further innovations in DAO-like entities.[^21] The most salient epithet of a DAO is "decentralized"; one can imagine hierarchical, concentric, or role-specialized DAOs as well as other taxonomically related forms, just as one can imagine progressively less organized instances in a chaos-happy Internet.

76+

77+Like the first mutant with a new gene, Đ itself failed. Many lessons can be drawn from that failure, including the criticality of getting smart contract code absolutely correct ("code is law"), and how to administer a blockchain in the presence of massive fraud. And indeed, what has happened to the blockchain world of decentralized finance? Millisecond differentials in responsiveness lead to huge swings in profitability of transactions. Frontrunner bots watch algorithmically for transactions they can complete faster than the original source, thereby making money on asymmetric knowledge.[^22] Zero-day exploits of code abound, heralding a need for more thorough vetting and more expressive and secure smart contract languages.

78+

79+Blockchains (and thus DAOs via Ethereum) operate as proof-of-work, proof-of-stake, etc. This provides node operators with a way of verifying consensus reality and thereby cementing a record of digital transactions. Future innovations hold forth the possibility of secure proof-of-identity blockchains (such as the Uqbar Layer 1 smart contract blockchain on Urbit[^23]), wherein each node which can provide concrete cryptographic evidence of its identity gets a vote on the consensus.

80+

81+We must consider modern systems to necessarily interact at the pinnacle intensity of competence and competition: any differential advantage that can be exploited to outcompete an adversary not only can be exploited but _should_ be. Illegibility, redundancy, and apposite complexity are allies in the immune fight to maintain identity and ownership in the modern Internet.[^24] Any system which does not have an operational DAO-like layer is immuno­compromised. All tools for the individual and collective need to be architected around a zero-trust adversarial world. They also need to guard the embers of community and enable new growth.

82+

83+In a nutshell, the early Internet was a cocktail party. By the age of Usenet and into the World Wide Web era, the Internet evolved into a player-versus-player defect--defect equilibrium in which brigading, spamming, and anonymity are rational adaptive behaviors. Indeed, anonymity is barely a protection given the lengths to which governments and megacorps go to prevent truly untraceable usage. This approach is adaptive for agencies which have given up on any other model of reality, fundamentally lacking a vision of humans as other than atomized individual krill for the megacorp apex predators: consumers for the consumers. The legacy megacorp Internet has become a crab bucket, always drawing everything back into itself in a dysfunctional and frankly satanic way.

84+

85+Communities built on decentralized Web3 platforms such as Mastodon, Fediverse, and Urbit[^25] have stepped back from the purely PvP world of the globally-namespaced social media Internet. These today have more of a block party feel, wherein one can wander from house to house or room to room and encounter some of the same faces in the same or new guise. Conversations can drop and resume anew in very different locales with largely the same composition. Marrying the underlying cryptographic identity requirements of DAOs to communication tools and databases yields a strong stable solution to the problem of retaining a foothold of personal identity from which to coordinate one's multifaceted digital life. IPFS, Sovrin Foundation, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Urbit all offer their take on this requirement. Even a Signal chat group running its own server is a kind of token-free DAO.

86+

87+Since the Renaissance, essentially all theology has been humanist in nature, concerning itself with how man should live to flourish in this world and inherit in the next. Even secularized descendants enjoin an ethos of ritual behaviors and practices. The social and cultural "stack" (in software parlance) upon which we build provides for a variety, broad or narrow, of human cultural forms. Lately, the variety of forms has been diminishing both by cutting off older forms from the modern world and by cultivating only certain state-legible apex predators[^26] and their preferred ovine repast.

88+

89+Contra this monoculture, the _telos_ of social computing is to recreate the village green, not the penitentiary. Revisiting a thesis from above: "All tools for the individual and collective need to be architected around _using cryptographic proofs to create stable high-trust havens in an otherwise_ zero-trust adversarial world." The village is a stable, long-term tribe well below Dunbar's limit which shares values and assets in common, from which a member occasionally ventures out into the broader social web but always has a home. Every village will grow its own culture, perhaps even its own _cultus_, enabled by decentralized technologies to protect their assets and precious peculiarities. The World Wide Web has been an extinction-level event for many forms of life, livelihood, and culture. For others, it has offered strange forms of life support and even thriving. With a new immune system evolved and now operational, human endeavor stands on the cusp of a Cambrian explosion, unconstrainable by a rent-seeking boardroom-and-bureaucracy world that never comprehended the light shining in its darkness.

90+

91+_The header image is [Volvox sp. microscopic algae](https://www.flickr.com/photos/picksfromoutthere/35891780782/in/photolist-WFCKYA-XPdGLq-2k9Cew6-ViCgrB-23QUBQR-21rF362-CCSE2n-23AwZ7m-CbKedu-gznqa-2dHUv3k-EE8eoq-gznq9-i5zqqk-WYSwcf-XWVgQk-WabAAG-gLjRj-gDcLp-4VvECm-259cDCS-i5zqRk-25cV246-i5yNvM-gupiMJ-PXLbhr-LUACZ7-ihvxSH-ihvvVg-ihwjbF-ihvxDX-i5yQDd-ihzQwK-fWwpxb-rarKrm-8LWTQf-qVar5j-ihzAPA-JNrgyK-ihzBrC-ca6Ex9-2kCTSrj-ihz67k-qfJsYd-248ePDL-ihztbm-ihzuyS-LQYZQq-2kCTRxL-ihvWPA) by Picturepest on Flickr._

92+

93+[^1]: Kaufman, Jim. (2010) ["Evolution and immunity"](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2913256/). _Immunology 130_, iss. 4, pp. 459--462.

94+[^2]: President Eisenhower's original coinage was likely "the military-industrial-academic complex."

95+[^3]: E.g., Richard Bellman of the RAND Corporation on the origin of "dynamic programming," a mathematical discipline: in dealing with a recalcitrant secretary of defense who hated the word "research," Bellman instead chose the word "dynamic" arbitrarily because "it's impossible to use the word 'dynamic' in a pejorative sense. ...It was something not even a Congressman could object to. So I used it as an umbrella for my activities." (Bellman, Richard. (1984) [_Eye of the Hurricane_](https://books.google.ch/books?id=4FwGCwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA159&dq=#v=onepage&q=).)

96+[^4]: The nuclear triad doctrine, joining the Air Force's Strategic Air Command bombers, the Navy's nuclear submarines, and the Army's ICBMs and other assorted nuclear warheads, was based less on strategic considerations than on appeasing constituent departments of the military. Strategists developed a formal justification decades later in a magnificent demonstration of motivated reasoning. (Woolf, Amy. (2016) "U.S. Strategic Nuclear Forces: Background, Developments, and Issues". [CRS 7-5700](https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc847627/m2/1/high_res_d/RL33640_2016Mar10.pdf).)

97+[^5]: The Air Force early commissioned the RAND Corporation on contract with Douglas Aircraft Company as the first "think tank"; RAND soon upended the traditional role of passive reception of studies by making its own recommendations and showing their analytical chops. Other service branches followed suit, such as the U.S. Navy's Center for Naval Analyses and the Battelle Memorial Institute for various federal contracting agencies; compare also the role of the national laboratory system, e.g. Los Alamos, Sandia, Livermore, etc. for the Department of Energy and Department of Defense. (Rich, Michael. (2003) "RAND: How Think Tanks Interact with the Military". [RP-1050](https://www.rand.org/pubs/reprints/RP1050.html).)

98+[^6]: "On January 18, 1994, the first large-scale deliberate USENET spam occurred. A message with the subject "Global Alert for All: Jesus is Coming Soon" was cross-posted to every available newsgroup." ([Wikipedia, "History of email spam"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email_spam))

99+[^7]: The first instance which seems to have brough this to general public awareness was the submission of Judge Robert Bork's video rental history as evidence in his Supreme Court hearings before the U.S. Senate. The resulting Video Privacy Protection Act was delightfully naïve. Besides relying on "video rental" narrowly construed, users have effectively no leverage against unilaterally-imposed terms of service and end-user license agreements. (See, e.g., [Electronic Privacy Information Center, "Video Privacy Protection Act"](https://archive.epic.org/privacy/vppa/).)

100+[^8]: E.g. Tumblr and OnlyFans and adult content; Twitter and right-wing content; Youtube and Facebook and unsanctioned medical content, etc. Note that this is regardless of the viability of a given view or the necessity of vigorous debate within a field, but focuses on the palatibility of politics to the megacorp entity providing the platform, even if the content drives platform usage.

101+[^9]: Hughes, Eric. (1993) [_A Cypherpunk's Manifesto_](https://nakamotoinstitute.org/cypherpunk-manifesto/).

102+[^10]: The mass shift to remote work from March 2020 onwards due to the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the trend of corporate colonization of private spaces. At first, this was occasionally humorous, as when a child ran into the background of a Zoom call, or underwear or private materials were inadvertently left in view of the remote audience. In the end, it demanded that individuals reconfigure their homes to accommodate mass corporate preferences, thus another invasion of private space by the megacorp panopticon. I note as well an invasive doctrine demanding "truth in communication" under names like ["radical transparency"](https://www.bridgewater.com/principles-and-culture) and ["radical candor"](https://third-bit.com/2018/11/24/afraid-of-change/) put forward by partisans of power over against vulnerable employees, clients, and customers, who may be disproportionately affected by a megacorp demand for one-sided transparency.

103+[^11]: Several have pointed to the failure of Craig S. Wright to demonstrate cryptographically that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin. (C.f. Khaosan, Venzen. (2016) ["Craig Wright is Not Satoshi Nakamoto---The Technical Proof"](https://www.ccn.com/technical-proof-craig-wright-not-satoshi-nakamoto/).)

104+[^12]: Davidson, Dale, and Rees-Mogg, William. (1999) _The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age_.

105+[^13]: Raymond, Eric. (1999) [_The Cathedral and the Bazaar_](http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s04.html).

106+[^14]: The [Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity](https://c2pa.org/) "addresses the prevalence of misleading information online through the development of technical standards for certifying the source and history (or provenance) of media content."

107+[^15]: Cf. Walker, Shawn, et al. (2019) ["The disinformation landscape and the lockdown of social platforms."](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2019.1648536) _Information, Communication & Society 22_, pp. 1531--43. Walker et al. lament that "highly ephemeral mis/disinformation campaigns" are not susceptible of study due to closed platform APIs. "Social media platforms \[attempt\] to rekindle trust by appearing to reinforce individual privacy within a newly secured user community, a set of measures that also locked academic and non-profit researchers out from studying social platforms while preserving corporate and business access to social media users' data." They fail to address the tension between community self-determination and academic exploitation.

108+[^16]: "If in fact you can't crack \[the encryption\] at all, government can't get in, then everybody is walking around with a Swiss bank account in their pocket -- right? So there has to be some concession to the need to be able to get into that information somehow." ([Barack Obama in March 2016 at SXSW](https://www.businessinsider.com/obama-comments-on-encryption-at-sxsw-2016-3))

109+[^17]: Heninger, Nadia. (2016) ["The Legacy of Export-Grade Cryptography in the 21^st^ Century"](https://publish.illinois.edu/science-of-security-lablet/files/2016/08/10062016-Heninger-Slides.pdf).

110+[^18]: Chohan, Usman. (2017) ["The Decentralized Autonomous Organization and Governance Issues"](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3082055). Discussion Paper Series: _Notes on the 21^st^ Century_.

111+[^19]: Lessig, Lawrence. (1999) _Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace_.

112+[^20]: Hobart, Byrne `~lableg-tadrex`. (Nov 17, 2021) ["The Promise and Paradox of Decentralization"](https://urbit.org/blog/2021-11-18-the-promise-and-paradox-of-decentralization). _The Diff_.

113+[^21]: See, e.g., the Governor Alpha smart contract protocols. Solari, R. (2021) ["The case for Governor Alpha".](https://medium.com/tally-blog/the-case-for-governor-alpha-15c1362d49eb)

114+[^22]: Robinson, D. (2020) ["Ethereum is a dark forest"](https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest). Paradigm blog.

115+[^23]: [Uqbar Network](https://uqbar.network/); ["Introducing Uqbar Network"](https://uqbarnetwork.substack.com/p/introducing-uqbar-network); \~hocwyn-tipwex/uqbar-event-horizon (Urbit group)

116+[^24]: This is not to deny the benefits of system-legibility, in particular legal protections. As common law develops around DAOs, I hope for similar affordances where they must interact with the legacy legal system.

117+[^25]: Originally this list included Discord, as there has been substantial growth in stable goal-oriented communities thereon. However, more recently the company [adopted a user policy](https://discord.com/blog/addressing-harmful-off-platform-behavior) which subjects use of their product to judgment calls about "off-platform behavior"---a clear violation of a cypherpunk ethos which Discord likely never espoused anyway.

118+[^26]: E.g., Auerbach, David. (Mar 3, 2022) ["The metaverse will steal your identity"](https://unherd.com/2022/03/the-metaverse-will-steal-your-identity/). _UnHerd_. Auerbach correctly recognizes and decries the looming "monetisation of identity" which will allow any platform controller to incentivize prosocial or antisocial behaviors at will.

content/blog/infrastructural.mdnew file+73

@@ -0,0 +1,73 @@

1++++

2+title = "Infrastructural"

3+date = "2020-04-09"

4+description = "A reflection–meditation on OS 1’s initial form development, and the attitude we brought to bear in designing it."

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "É. Urcades"

8+ship = "~fabled-faster"

9+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/infrastructural-2.jpg"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+## Seasons

15+

16+It’s early 2020, the transition between winter and spring, and Tlon’s interface group has concluded a series of projects that mark a transition point for the Urbit project. We’ve named the culmination of our efforts “OS 1,” as in “Operating System 1.”

17+

18+For those who have yet to try it out, OS 1 is a bundling of “essential digital utilities” in the form of 1) a linear chat, 2) a long-form text editor and publishing/discussion medium, 3) a link bookmarking/discussion software, and most importantly, 4) a grouping mechanism that allows you to bundle the above services in the context of a group of friends, acquaintances, or family. We see these utilities as being archetypical “software shapes” that are inherently flexible and open for interpretation in terms of their use, but we have wild expectations for how these software shapes will evolve in the near future. Later design output and supplementary writing will expand upon what we mean by this.

19+

20+Functionally, OS 1 has been designed to serve as a bridge between [OS 0](https://urbit.org/blog/landscape-a-portrait/) (The first interface in Urbit’s evolutionary chain) and OS 2 (Urbit’s eventual departure from the web browser context). In its service as a “bridge”, we designed OS 1 to extend from the baseline app-like “module” experience first defined in OS 0, while granting it new affordances that gesture towards nascent conceptions of “communal computing” we have planned for OS 2 onward.

21+

22+This year, as the warmer seasons give way to chillier ones, we plan on further demonstrating our vision of what new computers and networks can be and how they feel to use. Until then, we'll be building upon OS 1, our foundation and initial take on what we deem "human-shaped infrastructure."

23+

24+This post serves as a reflection–meditation on OS 1’s initial form development and the attitude we brought to bear in designing it. I will be highlighting a few disparate-yet-interconnected themes we encountered in our design work, and how we materially began to address them.

25+

26+## Products

27+

28+Urbit’s interfaces, and the process by which we build them, are resolutely not projections of the world’s current conception of digital design—that of mass digital product design. Products are sold, bought, and discarded as they are in their physical sense. Digital products are slotted into the [vending machines](https://urcad.es/writing/personal-computer-vending-machine/) we call our phones and are mass produced as candy is produced. Candy is _essentially_ free, and contemporary digital products are _absolutely_ free of cost. If you’re reading this, you probably already have a good idea of what free corporate digital products mean for your privacy.

29+

30+Urbit is distinctly _not_ free (as in freely offered as a service via a corporate entity), and your urbit is distinctly _not_ a product. As we trace over the interfaces we design with our cursors, we’re not building a product, we’re not selling a product, we’re not painting a product, and we’re certainly not decorating a product.

31+

32+Here at Tlon, we’re assembling thoughtful infrastructure you can spend your life using, learning, and extending. We’re attempting to assemble spaces you can one day pass on to friends, close collaborators, or possibly your grandchildren. We are resolute in our practice and stay our hands to the greatest degree possible as a result of this mindset.

33+

34+## Beautiful Infrastructure

35+

36+OS 1, while incremental in its initial expression from OS 0, serves to outline our stance of what sublimely beautiful, useful, and durable digital infrastructure should feel like to inhabit. For the purposes of OS 1, we can imagine “Beautiful Infrastructure” to form the spirit of what we’re building:

37+

38+**Beautiful infrastructure is inhabitable**. You’re not floating in an infinite feed of content streams. You are situated in a defined space with edges you can shift at-will, as your needs deem fit. Our model for inhabitable computing is new and in limited flux, but our vision is long.

39+

40+**Beautiful infrastructure is a gravitational force**. Even if you can’t feel it or directly experience it, well-designed infrastructure is a cohering force. One is grounded with respect to the infrastructure they live alongside.

41+

42+**Beautiful infrastructure is like a [shell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell)**. Well-considered infrastructural projects provide durable, generalized, reusable, and most importantly, _self-designed_ containers around otherwise formless flows of information.

43+The current state of mass software design has gotten many of the “reusable” elements of design down pat, but these structures are optimized to pump ads and information into your brain, algorithmically-sorted-linear-feed style.

44+In Urbit, I can take the conceptual container of "temporal linearity" and use this to shape communication data as I see fit. I should be able to shape once-linear communication and cast it into a nodal communication model: My DM is now a MUD.

45+

46+Truly beautiful infrastructure undergirds the daily exchanges people actually care about—I don’t drink plumbing, I drink the water it carries and protects.

47+

48+Another way of thinking about “Infrastructure” (here defined loosely as “the _truly_ essential structures that allow society at varying scales to operate”) is to think about it in terms of interpersonal support structure.

49+

50+We deeply hope that Urbit can form a support structure for you and your community.

51+

52+These self-evident statements underlie the core problems we sought to address in designing a userspace for OS 1: How do we design an _actually_ personal digital infrastructure? What does infrastructure look like when shared with immediate friends? With a cooperative organization? How can we impress upon Urbit's earliest adopters that once they've obtained an Urbit ID, their computer is at that moment _literally_ entirely theirs?

53+

54+

55+

56+## Expressing Infrastructure

57+

58+OS 1 was optimized from an interface design standpoint to ensure that a new inhabitant viscerally felt like there was a “space to inhabit”, or a “canvas to be painted”, or a set of simple and fundamental digital structures they could arrange to make their computer their own.

59+

60+Counterintuitively, designing around this notion of a "rich blank slate” required OS 1 to be designed in a manner that _almost_ results in it feeling incomplete, or on the verge of appearing deeply unremarkable.

61+

62+A few key design decisions emphasized the above gestalt we sought to express:

63+

64+- We decided very early on to revert the colorful presentation of Modulo to a literal blank slate—OS 1 is much like a sheet of graph paper now.

65+- All typography and typographic representation was severely flattened. This decision was one of our more drastic ones, and granted OS 1 a sense of being somewhat more "undirected" in terms of its form. We hope that as our system becomes more robust, users can decide which elements of their systems require emphasizing, to feel most at home with their information.

66+- The majority of graphics used throughout the system were rendered into black and white line drawings. As architectural schematics and orthographic projections flatten their representation of reality so an architect can “see structure” easier, we made the decision to express a visual foundation that felt more like a diagram than an ergonomic user interface.

67+- In its visual simplicity, OS 1 was essentially arranged to emanate the quality that modifying the underlying system was a simple task. Rather than present Urbit's first users with beautiful artistry and a sense that our infrastructure was to remain untouched and sacred, we decided to present a visual face to the project that felt nearly rudimentary, nothing outside the realm of editorial capability for the average person.

68+

69+Many other small constraints have been set into place to build what we truly believe to be simple, durable, personal, digital infrastructure.

70+

71+While visually primitive, OS 1 has managed to manifest a rich systematic expressiveness based on how it seems to be currently inhabited. We've been enjoying witnessing the ways people are beginning to interpret and make use of the faculties provided to create communal computing experiences of their own.

72+

73+What's most wonderful to observe is the fun people are having in striking out on their own in this collective endeavor. More than anything, we hope Urbit’s inhabitants are having a good time and learning to enjoy computers again.

main/posts/constitution.md → content/blog/interim-constitution.mdrenamed+44−55

@@ -1,38 +1,35 @@

1−---

2−sort: 7

3−type: post

4−title: Interim constitution

5−author: Tlon

6−image: http://media.urbit.org/site/blog-7.jpg

7−preview: The governing rules for the early days of the Urbit network.

8−layout: urbit,post

9−footer: true

10−navmode: navbar

11−navdpad: false

12−navselect: blog

13−navpath: /

14−navhome: /

15−navclass: urbit

16−---

1++++

2+title = "Interim Constitution"

3+date = "2016-05-15"

4+description = "The governing rules for the early days of the Urbit network."

5+aliases = [ "/posts/essays/interim-constitution", "/posts/constitution" ]

6+

7+[extra]

8+author = "Tlon"

9+ship = ""

10+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/interim-constitution.jpg"

11++++

12+

13+

1714

1815## Declaration of purpose

1916

20−Urbit is a new network created by the Tlon Corporation. Tlon's

17+Urbit is a new network created by the Tlon Corporation. Tlon's

2118broad intention is to surrender governance of Urbit to its users,

2219as soon as the community is collectively ready to receive it.

2320

2421This constitution (which is not a legal contract, just our present

2522intent, which may be updated arbitrarily) describes our governance

26−process during this interim period. Its design borrows from validated

23+process during this interim period. Its design borrows from validated

2724historical structures, mainly Roman and Anglo-American.

2825

2926The last and most important task of the interim government is to

30−write the next version of the constitution. This document may or

27+write the next version of the constitution. This document may or

3128may not incorporate any or all of the interim structures.

3229

3330## Beliefs and principles

3431

35−See our document of [beliefs and principles](../principles).

32+See our document of [beliefs and principles](/blog/beliefs-and-principles).

3633

3734## Governance structures

3835

@@ -40,15 +37,15 @@ The interim republic has four branches: an executive consulate, a

4037galactic senate, a stellar congress and a planetary assembly.

4138

4239For the interim, full authority is held by the (Roman style)

43−consulate. The legislature (senate, congress, assembly) is

44−advisory. The senate is never consulted and the congress is

40+consulate. The legislature (senate, congress, assembly) is

41+advisory. The senate is never consulted and the congress is

4542almost never consulted.

4643

4744In the future, the assembly of planets specializes in technical

48−governance. The congress of stars specializes in internal, but

49−nontechnical, governance. The senate of galaxies selects the

45+governance. The congress of stars specializes in internal, but

46+nontechnical, governance. The senate of galaxies selects the

5047consuls and holds them accountable, and specializes in compliance

51−with external powers. All votes, elections and other public

48+with external powers. All votes, elections and other public

5249actions are logged in the Urbit global namespace.

5350

5451As in most parliamentary systems, each of these structures sets

@@ -56,29 +53,29 @@ and enforces its own internal rules of operation.

5653

5754### Consulate

5855

59−A consulate is a two-person executive. The consuls must work out

60−their own organization and division of labor. Disagreements

56+A consulate is a two-person executive. The consuls must work out

57+their own organization and division of labor. Disagreements

6158between consuls are resolved by the senate.

6259

63−A consul must be a senator. The senate, voting per galaxy,

60+A consul must be a senator. The senate, voting per galaxy,

6461replaces the consulate whenever either a vacancy exists, or a

65−vote of no confidence gains a majority. When electing consuls,

62+vote of no confidence gains a majority. When electing consuls,

6663first a plurality selects one consul; then the plurality of those

6764who voted for anyone but the winner selects the second.

6865

6966### Senate

7067

71−The *senate* is the set of all galaxy holders, voting per galaxy.

72−It does not convene except to replace the consuls. Its

68+The _senate_ is the set of all galaxy holders, voting per galaxy.

69+It does not convene except to replace the consuls. Its

7370proceedings are in private.

7471

7572To avoid growing the network too quickly, galaxies are activated

76−gradually. Initially, only one galaxy is active, the root `~zod`

73+gradually. Initially, only one galaxy is active, the root `~zod`

7774(galaxy 0).

7875

7976Further activation is at the discretion of the consuls, who

8077control `urbit.org` and will only bind activated galaxies to

81−`galaxy.urbit.org`. Routing at the galaxy layer is by DNS, so

78+`galaxy.urbit.org`. Routing at the galaxy layer is by DNS, so

8279unbound galaxies, and any stars or planets they launch, hear no

8380packets.

8481

@@ -88,41 +85,39 @@ Non-activated galaxies can still be rekeyed.

8885

8986### Congress

9087

91−The *congress* is the set of all active independent stars.

92−voting per star. An *independent star* is any star *not* owned

88+The _congress_ is the set of all active independent stars.

89+voting per star. An _independent star_ is any star _not_ owned

9390by anyone who is either a senator, or has some connection to one

9491that would pose a conflict of interest.

9592

9693The congress of stars is designed to exercise project and

97−community governance. Its proceedings are in private. The

94+community governance. Its proceedings are in private. The

9895consuls convene it at their pleasure, and keep it informed.

9996

10097### Assembly

10198

102−The *assembly* is the set of all active primary planets, voting

103−per planet. A *primary planet* is the main planet of a unique

99+The _assembly_ is the set of all active primary planets, voting

100+per planet. A _primary planet_ is the main planet of a unique

104101human (no sockpuppets).

105102

106−The assembly is responsible for technical governance. Its

103+The assembly is responsible for technical governance. Its

107104proceedings are in public.

108105

109106### The next constitution

110107

111108The congress proposes, and the senate approves, the next version

112−of this constitution. Future constitutions should be defined in

109+of this constitution. Future constitutions should be defined in

113110a smart contract platform, such as Ethereum.

114111

115112## Galaxy table

116113

117−The galaxy table is included [by reference]().

118−

119−95 galaxies are held by the [Tlon Corporation](../company). 50,

120−reserved for urbit.org, the future community foundation. 40, by

114+95 galaxies are held by the [Tlon Corporation](https://tlon.io/). 50,

115+reserved for urbit.org, the future community foundation. 40, by

121116Tlon employees and their family members (24 by Curtis, who

122−started in 2002; 16 by everyone else, who started in 2014). 34,

123−by outside investors in Tlon. 37, by 33 other individuals, who

117+started in 2002; 16 by everyone else, who started in 2014). 34,

118+by outside investors in Tlon. 37, by 33 other individuals, who

124119donated to the project, contributed code or services, won a

125−contest, or were just in the right place at the right time.

120+contest, or were just at the right place at the right time.

126121

127122Note that while Tlon and its employees still control a majority

128123of galaxies, the senate is a ceremonial body; the consulate is

@@ -140,17 +135,11 @@ intended as property of the republic, and will be used only in

140135the interests of the republic and Urbit as a whole.

141136

142137Externally, these galaxies are held by Tlon; internally, they are

143−managed and voted by Tlon. Once the republic acquires a legal

138+managed and voted by Tlon. Once the republic acquires a legal

144139identity and an independent human organization, Tlon pledges to

145−donate the `urbit.org` galaxies, the DNS domain, and the Github

140+donate the `urbit.org` galaxies, the DNS domain, and the GitHub

146141`urbit` account to it.

147142

148143## First consuls

149144

150145The first consuls are Galen Wolfe-Pauly and Raymond Pasco.

151−

152−<br /><br />

153−

154−<div>

155− Subscribe to our newsletter: <email dataPath="/submit" submit="Get updates" />

156−</div>

content/blog/interplanetary_commerce.mdnew file+37

@@ -0,0 +1,37 @@

1++++

2+title = "Interplanetary Commerce"

3+date = "2021-04-08"

4+description = "OS-level commercial primitives."

5+tags = ["bitcoin"]

6+

7+[extra]

8+author = "Christian Langalis"

9+ship = "~pindet-timmut"

10+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/ocean.jpeg"

11++++

12+

13+

14+

15+## Paying

16+

17+A year ago, we started [integrating](https://urbit.org/blog/urbit-and-bitcoin/) Bitcoin into Urbit to be an OS-level primitive for money. Our initial objective: build a payments wallet, equally sovereign and ergonomic. The first public version, releasing this month, will have a broad set of capabilities including ship-to-ship payments, hardware wallet support, and full node integration. We’ll be unveiling this wallet on [April 27th](https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/276741426/). Do join us.

18+

19+Things only accelerate from here. Our next objective, to integrate Lightning Network capability, is now an [active bounty](https://gist.github.com/timlucmiptev/53ef1d290e55ea2fa25d9df681c32695) and open for applicants. Early on, we [recognized](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTvRVHMbrcY) the congruence and compatibility between the Urbit and Lightning networks. Routing Lightning payments is an obvious business model for Urbit providers, one that can even nucleate new features onto Lightning itself. What we’re ultimately driving at is fully-sovereign Bitcoin usage, with the UX of the Cash App.

20+

21+## Being Paid

22+

23+> And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid,—what will compare with it?

24+>

25+> **Herman Melville**

26+

27+However, a good wallet is only half the equation for a holistic P2P commercial experience. Interfaces for selling goods and services is the other half. While we don’t part with our Bitcoin [easily](https://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/everyones-a-scammer/), two initial markets appear logical and attractive: content and Urbit-native services.

28+

29+First, digital cottage industry, the “creator economy”, is blossoming. Streaming, podcasting, and writing on platforms like Youtube, Patreon, and Substack has been big business [lately](https://otherlife.co/barbarians-past-the-gate/). What fintech did to “unbundle the banks", we will now do to media monopolies and their centralized distribution platforms. With the introduction of Urbit payments, you can syndicate, distribute, and monetize your media on Urbit. By selling access to a private group containing content, digital creatives can begin doing this today.

30+

31+Second, Urbit-native [service providers](https://urbit.org/blog/providers/) are now operating at scale. Companies offering Urbit hosting, onboarding, Urbit IDs, and software now communicate with their customers directly on the network. A basic set of commercial tools will make their processes more efficient. Storefront interfaces, paywalls, CRM, and reputation tools will replace the ad-hoc assemblages they currently use.

32+

33+The Urbit Foundation is soliciting contributors to this project through Urbit Grants. If you’re interested in working on any of these components [send us a proposal](https://grants.urbit.org/create).

34+

35+## An Ocean

36+

37+After honing our commercial tools on these use-cases, we’ll sail into a blue ocean. On the horizon: beautiful products, deployable at scale, built with the robust primitives of Urbit OS. Extensibility is Urbit’s promise to middle-men: every Web2.0 service they use to scalp us will find its P2P analog on Urbit. We invite developers and entrepreneurs of all stripes to join in the feeding frenzy. Ideas are constantly nucleating in [Urbitcoiners](web+urbitgraph://group/~pindet-timmut/urbitcoiners) and [Urbit Community](web+urbitgraph://group/~bitbet-bolbel/urbit-community/graph/~darrux-landes/business-building-on-urbit).

content/blog/introducing-os1.mdnew file+140

@@ -0,0 +1,140 @@

1++++

2+title = "Introducing OS 1"

3+date = "2020-04-29"

4+description = "OS 1 is somewhere between ‘productivity software’ and a ‘social network’. We think it’s the beginning of an altogether new breed of social computing."

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Galen Wolfe-Pauly"

8+ship = "~ravmel-ropdyl"

9+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/intro-os1-landscape.png"

10++++

11+

12+<video class="ba w-100" autoplay loop src="https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/intro-os1.mov"></video>

13+

14+## Introducing OS 1

15+

16+OS 1 is a simple, unified system for building digital communities. OS 1 is for groups of people sharing messages, links, and notes on Urbit.

17+

18+We designed and built OS 1 for ourselves, and we’re really enjoying using it every day. Instead of figuring out how to duct tape together apps and services, we use a single system to stay connected with the company and broader Urbit community that we really trust. OS 1 makes it feel like our company and community has a place in the digital world to call home.

19+

20+Most groups of friends and collaborators juggle apps and services to stay connected in the digital world today. We think OS 1 is a much better model. It’s still too early to ask the whole world to switch over to it — but we’re ready to help onboard our friends and adjacent communities into Urbit to have them try it out and get their feedback.

21+

22+First, let’s walk through what OS 1 is and how we’ve been using it. Then, if OS 1 is interesting to you, we’ll tell you how to apply for a community grant.

23+

24+Here we go:

25+

26+## What is OS 1?

27+

28+OS 1 is a very simple, integrated tool for messaging, sharing links, and writing with a group of people. OS 1 is somewhere between ‘productivity software’ and a ‘social network’. We think it’s the beginning of an altogether new breed of social computing.

29+

30+OS 1 isn’t our first attempt to build an interface for Urbit, but it’s certainly the most complete. OS 1 is the first Urbit interface that doesn’t feel like an experiment.

31+

32+Today, when you boot Arvo (the Urbit OS kernel) and connect your browser to it, you’ll see OS 1. OS 1 isn’t the only possible client for Arvo, though. Anyone could build their own client or, since it’s completely open source, modify OS 1 however they like.

33+

34+For most people, out of the box, OS 1 feels like an app. Given that it’s running on Urbit OS — it’s much more than that. It’s a full-fledged general purpose virtual computer that’s secure and private to you. We’ll come back to what that means at the end.

35+

36+Let’s walk through the features of OS 1 one by one to see what it’s like.

37+

38+### Groups

39+

40+

41+

42+The group is the main building block in OS 1. A group is simply a list of people that share a set of chat, links, and publish channels. A group is sort of like a super powerful group chat.

43+

44+A group of friends might just share a few chat channels. A reading group might just share a publish channel for discussion of what they’re reading and a links channel for upcoming books. As a company, we share a variety of chat, publish, and links channels to get things done and communicate. There are chats for each area of work, publish channels for digests and feature discussion, and links channels for music, influences and references, for example.

45+

46+Each person in a group is identified by their [Urbit ID](https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/urbit-id/): a short, memorable name that you own with a private key (and belongs to you completely). Each group is private and requires an invite. Groups aren’t discoverable. They’re meant to be high-trust communities of people. More like a commune than a public event.

47+

48+Let’s walk through each module and talk about what they can do.

49+

50+### Chat

51+

52+

53+

54+Chat is chat: a sequential list of messages meant for synchronous communication. There are already a million ways to chat — but Urbit chat differs in a few important ways.

55+

56+First, each chat channel is only shared between the host and the members of a chat. When you DM with people, messages are sent peer to peer. The system is, in fact, decentralized and pseudonymous by default. No one knows anything about you outside of your Urbit ID.

57+

58+Second, each chat message is encrypted and signed by your Urbit ID. Again, we don’t call Urbit ‘secure’ yet since it’s unaudited — but we’re working to have Urbit audited this year.

59+

60+Third, chat in Urbit OS is a protocol for sending messages between computers on the network (known as “[ships](https://urbit.org/docs/glossary/ship/)” and identified by their Urbit IDs). It’s easy to imagine extending chat in all kinds of fun and interesting directions: chats that only accept certain message types, chats that have disappearing history, chats that you can only post to during certain times of day, and so on.

61+

62+(If you’re curious to try one of these things, or have an idea about something you’d like to experiment with — consider submitting a proposal in our [grants program](https://grants.urbit.org/). We regularly reward contributor work with address space.)

63+

64+We think of chat as a primitive, not simply a ‘better IRC’. But even in the rudimentary form it’s in today, chat is essential to delivering a feeling of being at home. There’s no way to deliver a complete interface for groups without chat.

65+

66+Anyway, not everything can happen in a chat. Let’s keep moving.

67+

68+### Links

69+

70+

71+

72+Links is a bit like Hacker News or Reddit. It’s just a collection of links with comments. There’s no upvoting or sorting. We decided that with a small group it’s more about collecting references than deciding what’s most exciting — but permutations of Links could be a great area for contributors to experiment with.

73+

74+We use links to collect external references and track things we’re thinking about. We’re always looking at things going on outside our small digital universe and talking about them. Links lets us keep an archive of those discussions.

75+

76+We originally imagined links as evolving into more of a general-purpose ‘collection creation’ interface. One where you can pull together images, video, URLs, maybe even runnable code and so on into a single channel. We’ll get there.

77+

78+### Publishing

79+

80+

81+

82+Publishing is somewhere between a blog and a note-taking system. A Publish notebook is a list of markdown files with optional comments. A private Publish notebook is like a journal, a group notebook can be like a forum (with comments on) or a collaborative blog.

83+

84+We use publish for both long-form discussion and one-way communication about what we’re working on in its current form. The editor is calm and simple. In distraction-free mode, it’s a nice place to put a note together.

85+

86+Publish, like all our other modules, is an interface to a generalized protocol for storing text. We have high hopes for how Publish can evolve into a flexible tool for notetaking and discussion with richer content types and better controls over structuring discussion.

87+

88+### Modules

89+

90+

91+

92+You’ll find a few other things on the home screen: a clock, the weather, and a simple command-line that we call the Dojo. These are system-wide utilities that aren’t group-specific.

93+

94+The clock and weather tiles are simple indications of the state of the outside world. We built them because they’re things we wanted to be able to check in on often. When you’re spending much of the day in front of a computer, it’s nice to know if you have enough daylight left to get some exercise in.

95+

96+### Dojo

97+

98+

99+

100+The Dojo gives you a quick way to see that, under the hood, Urbit OS is a powerful general-purpose system. The system hasn’t evolved to the point that our libraries, frameworks, and modules are polished to our standards. Since it’s still early, we can’t claim that it’s easy to develop on top of this platform. But we want it to become much easier.

101+

102+## Why we made OS 1

103+

104+We made OS 1 because we wanted to begin the process of re-centralizing our digital lives on a platform we actually control. Replacing all the services we use all at once is impossible — so we picked a suite that we felt would work nicely together. We’ve always felt that one of the most exciting things about Urbit is in bringing your digital life together in a way that feels like home.

105+

106+The digital home, we think, is what our computers are meant to be but simply can’t be in a world of cloud services. Once upon a time, thirty years ago, your personal computer was an open-ended tool that was reasonably simple to understand and use, lasted a pretty long time, and belonged to you in every way.

107+

108+OS 1 is a first step down the road back to a system that’s simple, durable, and belongs to you in every way. It’s a long road, and we feel like we’ve made a very significant step forward.

109+

110+One really critical thing about OS 1 is the pattern of ‘groups sharing modules’. This pattern makes it perfectly clear how a virtual computer can outcompete a bunch of different services. As the collection of modules in OS 1 → N grows, we make it easier for others to contribute modules, and we increase the flexibility of connecting modules our system quickly outruns the messy, disconnected world we’re currently stuck in.

111+

112+OS 1 isn’t mature enough to be _easy_ for outside contributors to add modules — but it is [open source](https://github.com/urbit/urbit), and anyone is welcome to tinker and experiment with modifying it. We run a [grants program](https://grants.urbit.org/) to reward contributors for improving any part of Urbit OS. As the system matures we expect this program to expand and accelerate.

113+

114+## Looking ahead

115+

116+By using OS 1 you inherit all the benefits of running Urbit OS. Each user runs their own node completely independently. Everyone using Urbit OS owns their own identity and data. And every Urbit OS node communicates over an encrypted and authenticated network. (Again, We don’t yet call Urbit OS ‘secure’ because it hasn’t been audited.)

117+

118+OS 1 is just a client for Urbit OS, of course. Other people could write their own clients that are completely different — like different windowing systems for Linux. Our hope is to build a client that includes interface components and frameworks that make it exceptionally easy to build modules for groups of people to share. Other clients could potentially invent entirely new ways of interacting with the underlying system.

119+

120+There are two threads by which OS 1 evolves into OS 2 and beyond. First, by becoming a more powerful system and second, by adding modules to expand our supported modes for interacting.

121+

122+In its current form, OS 1 by no means exposes all the power of the underlying system. Our approach to building OS 1 was to focus on the quality of the UI, and accept that it will feel like a monolithic app. We’re already working to evolve our interface into something that feels flexible to an ordinary user and developers can easily extend and build on top of.

123+

124+Specifically, we want better affordances for putting multiple streams of data on the screen at once, better keyboard shortcuts and navigation affordances, better libraries and frameworks for building modules. We want a standalone client and a single login system. These are some of the things currently on the drawing board.

125+

126+As far as modules are concerned, there are too many things we’d like to build to list them all. We’d really like to have threaded conversations; short, Twitter-style messages; biometric and status tracking; an e-book reader and annotations system — and that’s just to name a few we see in the near term.

127+

128+We’ve long since felt that the most powerful thing about Urbit is that it’s a general-purpose system. OS 1 puts us on the road to giving people an actual material sense of what using a general-purpose networked computer feels like.

129+

130+As we expand the affordances of the system and add modules over the course of OS 1, 2, and beyond we expect to deliver a system that can foster everyday creativity. There’s a long road ahead, in the best possible sense. We’re really excited about what the future holds.

131+

132+### Becoming a homesteader

133+

134+

135+

136+As a distributed team trying to stay connected, we like using OS 1 from day to day. We’d really like to hand-onboard a small group of like-minded groups of people who want to experiment with living on the fringe of the digital world. Toward this end, we started the community grants program.

137+

138+Each community that’s selected will get a block of address space to share, direct support, and (in the near future) free hosting.

139+

140+Please tell us a bit about yourselves [here](https://urbit.org/community/community-grants/).

content/blog/introduction-to-the-combine-dao.mdnew file+46

@@ -0,0 +1,46 @@

1++++

2+title = "Introduction to the Combine DAO"

3+date = "2022-07-01"

4+description = "Inside the mind of the Combine"

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Anthony Arroyo"

8+ship = "~poldec-tonteg"

9+image = "https://media.urbit.org/blog/cortina-ampezzo.jpg"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+_This is cross-posted from [The Combine DAO Blog](https://blog.the-combine.org). If you'd like to comment, join the public [Urbit group](https://urbit.org/groups/~famreb-todmec/the-combine-public)_

15+

16+Until a couple of weeks ago, The Combine was a subdivision of the Urbit Foundation with a budget earmarked to invest in new projects. As of Urbit NYC that all changed. Now we’re an honest-to-goodness DAO built on Urbit—by Urbit maximalists, for Urbit maximalists. We pool assets to invest in teams building new tools, products and services for the Urbit Universe. Our members are investors, engineers, founders and galactic senators.

17+

18+In this post we'll talk about what we're aiming to do and why we’re in the best position to do it. In a future post, we'll dive into technical and strategic insights drawn from building a DAO on Urbit.

19+

20+## Our Objective

21+

22+Our objective is simple: support organizations in building high-value projects on Urbit. Urbit address space has intrinsic, tradeable value, as is the case with many crypto assets. But, unlike most crypto, that’s just the tip of the Urbit iceberg. Where most crypto assets are built to be owned and exchanged, Urbit is built to be owned and used. It has the potential to replace virtually every centralized part of Web2 you use (but don’t own) today.

23+

24+The Combine DAO invests in teams working on projects that generate and capture value beyond Urbit address space. The price of address space reflects confidence in Urbit's user growth, but every increase in utility to an Urbit user — that is, every time a user can do more with their Urbit — creates additional value. The Combine takes advantage of this upside.

25+

26+For example, one of our portfolio companies, [Uqbar](https://uqbar.network), is building a smart contract platform on Urbit. The Uqbar network will use Urbit ships as nodes in their network, as ZK provers and sequencers, creating an ZK Rollup L2 with the full power of general compute and identity. While their use of the Urbit network as part of their infrastructure will drive demand for planets, stars and galaxies, the value of Uqbar is potentially much greater than that demand.

27+

28+So, members of The Combine DAO should believe at least one of two things:

29+

30+- That products built on Urbit can outpace the value of address space alone, and that The Combine is in the best position to capture that value.

31+- That successful projects built on Urbit will enhance the value of Urbit address space.

32+

33+## Our Pipeline

34+

35+The Combine works hand-in-hand with the Urbit Foundation, meaning we have unparalleled visibility into the development of new projects and teams on Urbit. The Foundation has been working hard to shore up Urbit's developer pipeline, with Hoon School constantly bringing in new developers. The last cohort had 61 finishers, seven of whom had no previous programming experience. The Foundation’s [Grants](https://urbit.org/grants) program is active with over 40 active grants. The Combine and The Foundation continue to work together to identify, nurture and launch projects in need of funding.

36+

37+## Our Membership

38+

39+Startups are risky by nature. Add Urbit’s novel technology and you’ve got more than your share of pitfalls. The Combine mitigates these risks through its membership. Combine members are long-time supporters of the project who have run startups, exchanges and have invested in successful technology on Urbit and beyond. The membership can help lead teams past challenges inherent to all new ventures. We're familiar with the technical and product landscape of Urbit and its adjacent technologies. All of us have experience building technology, on Urbit and outside it, which enables us to provide valuable coaching and due diligence.

40+

41+Another of our portfolio companies, [Holium](https://holium.com), is building unified tooling for DAOs. They started with an application that the Combine DAO uses internally: a voting app called “Ballot.” Holium’s founder has been working on a unified environment for DAOs for some time, but it wasn’t until he came to Assembly 2021 that the pieces finally clicked and he realized that Urbit was the correct stack for Holium’s projects. As he built Ballot on Urbit, The Combine provided product feedback, investor intros, and access to experienced contractors and personnel. Now we’re actively dogfooding Ballot as a core element in The Combine stack.

42+

43+In the coming weeks we’ll dive into the details of why we think Urbit is the natural home for DAOs. For now, we’ll just say that Urbit’s unified stack opens up a unique level of ownership and customizability to DAO builders. The Combine, as a DAO built on Urbit, to support Urbit, is test driving this use case. What we learn here will feed back into diligence, outreach and development priorities for the Foundation.

44+

45+In the next post, we’ll share technical insights for DAOs gleaned from our own experiences building The Combine DAO on Urbit.

46+

content/blog/io-in-hoon.mdnew file+342

@@ -0,0 +1,342 @@

1++++

2+title = "Input and Output in Hoon"

3+description = "Let's talk about IO in Urbit."

4+date = "2020-12-15"

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Philip Monk"

8+ship = "~wicdev-wisryt"

9+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/zion-canyon-1.jpg"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+Let's talk about IO in Urbit. I won't say much about how events and effects are processed by the runtime; it suffices to note that the runtime is a normal Unix program which (1) listens for various events, (2) passes them to Arvo (Urbit OS), and (3) processes the effects produced by Arvo. Instead, I’ll focus on how IO works from the perspective of Hoon programs, like Arvo or apps running on Arvo. But first, let's review IO paradigms in other languages.

15+

16+All examples are in a made-up language, since it's useful to understand this information even before you're comfortable in Hoon. If you're learning Hoon and want a challenge, try translating them!

17+

18+## The three styles of IO

19+

20+I will call these styles imperative IO, monadic IO, and state machines (note that this classification refers only to the experience of using them and the program structure they dictate). An imperative programming language can use any of these and a functional programming language can use any of them.

21+

22+### Imperative IO

23+

24+Imperative languages (such as C and Python) perform IO by calling a function in the middle of whatever they were doing. Anywhere, in any statement, you could have IO.

25+

26+In this example and others to follow, the task will be to read a filename from the command line, read a URL out of that file, and fetch the contents at that URL.

27+

28+```

29+output = fetchUrl(stripWhitespace(readFile(cliInput())))

30+```

31+

32+For readability, intermediate variables would be a good idea, but nothing stops you from nesting IO this way.

33+

34+### Monadic IO

35+

36+Languages that use explicit monads for IO (such as Haskell) perform IO by running IO behind a bind operation, which I'll notate with `<-`. Thus, while you can't put IO _anywhere_, the general structure is a sequence of IO operations.

37+

38+```

39+fileName <- cliInput()

40+url <- readFile(fileName)

41+output <- fetchUrl(stripWhitespace(url))

42+```

43+

44+[Tackling the Awkward Squad](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/mark.pdf) is the canonical description of monadic IO, and does a great job of explaining how the Haskell community decided to use this as their primary IO style.

45+

46+### State machines

47+

48+Languages that use explicit state machines for IO (such as Elm) perform IO by accepting events and producing a list of effects.

49+

50+```

51+event :: Initialize

52+ | CLIInput text

53+ | FileInput text

54+ | HTTPResponse body

55+effect :: CLIInput

56+ | ReadFile fileName

57+ | FetchUrl url

58+ | Print text

59+main(event) {

60+ switch event {

61+ Initialize -> [CLIInput ~]

62+ CLIinput fileName -> [ReadFile fileName]

63+ FileInput url -> [FetchUrl stripWhitespace(url)]

64+ HTTPResponse body -> [Print body]

65+ }

66+}

67+```

68+

69+The effects produced are not functions but data.

70+

71+It's important to note that this example is chosen to highlight a particular kind of IO — sequences of events. Further, this example has no persistent state — each IO operation is a pure function of the output of the previous one.

72+

73+## A stateful, loopy example

74+

75+Let's look at another type of program: a simple HTTP server that you can give text at the CLI, which will respond to all HTTP requests with that text.

76+

77+Imperative:

78+

79+```

80+text = "no text entered yet"

81+while (true)

82+ cli = readCli()

83+ if (cli != Null)

84+ text = cli

85+ request = readHttp()

86+ if (request != Null)

87+ respond(request,text)

88+```

89+

90+Monadic:

91+

92+```

93+loop("no text entered yet")

94+

95+where:

96+

97+loop :: text -> IO Null

98+loop =

99+ input <- readInput()

100+ switch input

101+ CLIInput newText -> loop(newText)

102+ HTTPRequest request ->

103+ _ <- respond(request,text)

104+ loop(text)

105+```

106+

107+State machine:

108+

109+```

110+text = "no text entered yet"

111+main(text,event) {

112+ switch event {

113+ CLIInput newText -> [newText, Null]

114+ HTTPRequest request -> [text, HTTPResponse text]

115+ }

116+}

117+```

118+

119+Again, note the response in the state machine is data, not a function.

120+

121+I'm not trying to make a point about which type is better in general. There's a pretty strong argument that in the first example, imperative was the best option, followed by monadic, followed by state machine. There's an equally strong argument that the second example is most naturally represented by the state machine.

122+

123+Look at how state is handled in the monadic example. Formally, bind composes functions, so that every time you see a `<-` there's actually a new function (closure/delimited continuation) being created and stored for when we receive a response. All variables in scope are stored in that closure, so we can conveniently access them later without explicitly storing them. However, the state we preserve over time varies a lot. In this example, it varies between storing `loop`, `[loop input]`, `[loop input newText]`, and `[loop input request]`.

124+

125+By comparison, the state machine does not store intermediate values, it only stores its explicit state. While this is somewhat less flexible, it puts the permanent state front-and-center.

126+

127+I'll reiterate that all of these are possible to implement in purely functional languages, and further they can all be implemented in terms of each other. State machines are trivially implementable -- it's just a function [state event] -> [new-state (list effect)]. Monadic IO can be implemented directly (as in Haskell) or on top of state machines by storing continuations in your state. Imperative IO is somewhat more difficult but should be possible through algebraic effects.

128+

129+When inventing a new system, you should consider which of these you intend to support based on the sort of code you expect to see. For example, a scripting language will almost always benefit from imperative (or at least monadic) style.

130+

131+## In Urbit

132+

133+So much for exploring the space of IO solutions. In terms of deployed code on Earth, the split is about 90% imperative, 5% monadic, and 5% state machine. In Urbit, the split is about 90% state machine and 10% monadic. This is what I intend to explain and defend.

134+

135+Urbit's OS is called Arvo; it has several "kernel modules" called vanes, and it has userspace applications. Colloquially these are called "apps," but when speaking about them abstractly, it's helpful to use their more specific name: ["agents"](https://developers.urbit.org/reference/glossary/agent). Arvo, the vanes, and agents are all structured as explicit state machines.

136+

137+In addition, there are ["threads"](https://developers.urbit.org/reference/glossary/thread), which are structured as monadic IO. Note there's only a superficial resemblance to Unix threads: they are not executed in parallel and they don't share memory, or at least not any more than agents do. They're simply a computation that takes an argument and produces a result, possibly after doing some IO, structured monadically.

138+

139+As you can see, all the lowest levels of Arvo are explicit state machines, and only the highest layer supports monadic IO. To see why this is the case, let's list advantages and disadvantages to each type. Note that, while I'm speaking specifically of agents and threads in the context of Urbit, these are fundamental properties of monadic and state machine IO.

140+

141+Agents are:

142+

143+- Upgradable. Since the state is explicit, you can upgrade an agent in-place by supplying a new state machine and a function from the old state type to the new state type. This is very similar to a database migration.

144+

145+- Robust. A state machine must accept any input at any time. If it receives unexpected input, it must have had explicit error handling for that input, since it's one of the types in the switch statement. Thus, it's relatively easy to stay in a consistent state.

146+

147+- Permanent. Since it's upgradable and robust, there's no reason to stop its running.

148+

149+- Hard to write long sequences of IO. Long sequences of IO create many possible states, and you must handle any input in any state. This can result in complex, hard-to-follow code with code paths that are rarely if ever taken.

150+

151+Threads are:

152+

153+- Not upgradable in-place. Since the state is implicit, you can only cleanly upgrade by (1) killing the thread and restarting it or (2) letting it resolve to a defined "upgradable state" periodically, usually at the top of a "main loop". If you do (2), then you are in fact structuring it as a state machine, so the other advantages of threads are compromised.

154+

155+- Fragile. If we don't receive expected input, the default behavior is to be stuck waiting for input. You must remember to add any error-handling features you want, and it's easy to end up in an inconsistent state.

156+

157+- Impermanent. Since a thread can't be upgraded and may get stuck in case of unexpected input, a thread can't be expected to last forever. It must be "rebooted" from time to time.

158+

159+- Easy to write long sequences of IO. Just...write the IO one line at a time.

160+

161+Arvo proper and the vanes are permanent pieces of software and, for this reason, state machines are more natural.

162+

163+I'll note that other kernels, like the Unix kernel, use imperative IO. The difference is that Unix isn't permanent in itself — it only lasts until you reboot. Since your permanent state is stored externally, you don't need to be upgradable or permanent. With sufficient discipline you can write robust C code, so it makes sense to use imperative style. Even so, a lot of C code is written in a state machine style; even if it doesn't need to be upgradable, it's worth it for the robustness and concurrency advantages.

164+

165+However, Arvo is a single-level store — all of its state is permanent. This is very convenient and eliminates many long-tail bugs, but it also means we need to code for permanence, and that's much easier when you structure your code with explicit state.

166+

167+Further, Arvo and the vanes rarely perform long sequences of IO. Generally, they do one thing and emit some effects, similar to the HTTP server example above. Sometimes they "pass through" a request. For example, the Eyre vane passes HTTP requests to userspace agents or threads. In this case, there is a sequence of IO, which in monadic code would be:

168+

169+```

170+loop()

171+

172+where:

173+

174+loop =

175+ request <- receiveRequest()

176+ agent = lookupAgent(request)

177+ response <- callAgent(agent, request)

178+ _ <- sendResponse(request, response)

179+ loop()

180+```

181+

182+This is clear code to read, but it leaves open the question of how to respond during the callAgent() function. If another request comes in, can we handle it in parallel? If we need to upgrade ourselves before the agent responds, can we make sure to properly handle the response?

183+

184+The naive solution in monadic code is to say that you can only handle one request at a time, and if an upgrade happens you just drop outstanding requests. You can resolve both of these by introducing a sort of main loop, which is just a way of saying "turn it into a state machine".

185+

186+In a state machine, the naive solution is:

187+

188+```

189+state :: (map request agent)

190+main(state, event) {

191+ switch event {

192+ HTTPRequest request ->

193+ agent = lookupAgent(request)

194+ [put(state, request, agent), CallAgent agent request]

195+ AgentResponse request response ->

196+ [del(state, request), HTTPRespond request response]

197+ }

198+}

199+```

200+

201+Upgrading this is trivial, since the state (map of requests to outstanding calls to agents) is explicit. It also trivially handles concurrent requests.

202+

203+I won't claim this is easier or harder to write than the monadic version, but it has the properties we need at this level of the system.

204+

205+Userspace agents similarly are permanent entities that need to not lose data or get stuck. For this reason they’re structured as state machines.

206+

207+A helpful comparison is that explicit state machines are basically Mealy machines, the kind you might have learned about in an introductory digital design class. This shouldn't be surprising; a digital circuit must always be consistent because it can't be manually "rebooted", and their input and output is highly formalized. By contrast, a Rube Goldberg machine doesn't have the same constraints; which is why they're a lot more fun!

208+

209+It's notable also that explicit state machines are considerably more declarative than imperative or monadic IO. Not everyone thinks that's a good thing, but anyone who defends functional programming should see some advantages to that.

210+

211+However, userspace sometimes needs to perform long sequences of IO. Let's look at an example where we want to fetch the front page of a site and the first couple comments on each story. HTTP is unreliable, so on failure we retry five times.

212+

213+Monadic:

214+

215+```

216+topStories <- fetch(topStoriesUrl)

217+loop(topStories)

218+

219+where:

220+

221+loop :: topStories -> IO Null

222+ if topStories is Null

223+ return Null

224+ comments <- retryLoop(5,head(topStories))

225+ otherComments <- loop(tail(topStories))

226+ append(comments,otherComments)

227+

228+retryLoop :: [n story] -> IO Comments

229+ comments <- fetchComments(story)

230+ if comments is HTTPError:

231+ if n == 0:

232+ bail

233+ else:

234+ retryLoop(n-1, story)

235+```

236+

237+State machine:

238+

239+```

240+state :: Initial

241+ | FetchingTop

242+ | FetchingStory comments stories retries

243+ | Done comments

244+

245+main(state, event) {

246+ switch event {

247+ Initialize ->

248+ assert state == Initial

249+ [FetchingTop, Fetch topStoriesUrl]

250+ HttpResponse response ->

251+ switch state {

252+ FetchingTop ->

253+ [FetchingStory Null stories 5, FetchComments head(stories)]

254+ FetchingStory comments stories retries ->

255+ if response is HTTPError:

256+ if retries == 0:

257+ [Initial, Null]

258+ else:

259+ [FetchingStory comments stories retries-1,

260+ FetchComments head(stories)]

261+ else:

262+ comments = append(response,comments)

263+ if tail(stories) is Null:

264+ [Done comments, Null]

265+ else:

266+ [FetchingStory append(comments,response) tail(stories) 5,

267+ FetchComments head(tail(stories))]

268+ }

269+ }

270+}

271+```

272+

273+With practice, the state machine version of this can be written correctly. However, (1) it's verbose, (2) the control flow jumps all over the place, and (3) in practice it's challenging to get exactly right. This is still a small example, and it gets much worse as the length and complexity of the IO sequence grows.

274+

275+The monadic version, on the other hand, flows cleanly down the page. We can factor out generic functionality like "retry this request n times" to make the essence of the computation clear.

276+

277+Suppose you have to upgrade this. In the state machine, you can see exactly which stage of the computation you're in and write specific code to upgrade cleanly.

278+

279+Threads, as we've discussed, can't be upgraded in-place. Let's be real though: we're downloading comment sections, not regulating a nuclear reactor. If we get a better version of this script, just kill the old one and start the new one from scratch. What's a couple extra HTTP requests?

280+

281+This suggests a general division of workloads: code which needs to be permanent, upgradable, and concurrent should generally be a state machine. Code with long or complex sequences of IO and definite termination should generally be a thread.

282+

283+These aren't completely mutually exclusive, but it's surprising how often they are.

284+

285+### Jael: a case study

286+

287+When you need to do something permanent and upgradable, but you also need to do long sequences of IO, the main trick is to factor your problem into both an agent and a thread (or several).

288+

289+As a case study, consider Jael, one of our vanes. This maintains our PKI state, which it downloads over HTTP from an Ethereum node. Downloading from an Ethereum node is a complex sequence that starts with fetching its most recent block number, then fetching all the blocks we haven't seen and scanning for transactions we care about. We also maintain a map of block hashes to block number, and if we see that a block's parent doesn't have the hash we expect, that means a reorganization has occurred, so we must "rewind" one block at a time until we find where the fork happened, then restart going forward.

290+

291+You don't have to understand this sequence of IO; it's sufficient to see that it's complex and must be exactly right. We used to do this in a state machine directly in Jael. This data is, of course, permanent and needs to be accessible to the rest of the system, so Jael must be a state machine.

292+

293+However, we had many small mistakes in this sequence of IO, some of which only appeared during unusual events, such as when an HTTP request failed at the same time as a reorganization happened.

294+

295+We're in a bit of a bind, though: Jael has to be a state machine. The solution is to factor out the act of getting updates into a thread while the main PKI state is stored in the state machine in Jael.

296+

297+This thread has a definite purpose: given the most recent block number we already know about, fetch all the PKI transactions since then. The function signature is:

298+

299+```

300+syncEthereum oldBlockNumber -> IO [newBlockNumber, newTxs]

301+```

302+

303+Jael runs this thread every five minutes and, if it succeeds, then we update our block number and PKI state. If the thread fails, gets stuck, or we need to upgrade it, we just kill the old thread and start a new one. Again, a few extra HTTP requests don’t matter.

304+

305+From Jael's perspective, it looks something like:

306+

307+```

308+state :: State block txs outstandingThread

309+main(state,event) {

310+ switch event {

311+ Initialize -> [State 0 Null Null, StartTimer (now + five minutes)]

312+ TimerFired ->

313+ effects = If outstandingThread is Null

314+ then Null

315+ else [Kill outstandingThread]

316+ newId = newThreadId()

317+ [State txs newId,

318+ append(effects,

319+ StartThread newId syncEthereum(block),

320+ StartTimer (now + five minutes))]

321+ ThreadFinished Failure -> [State block txs Null, Null]

322+ ThreadFinished Success newBlockNumber newTxs ->

323+ [State newBlockNumber append(txs,newTxs) Null, Null]

324+ }

325+}

326+```

327+

328+In other words, from Jael's perspective, it's just a single IO event that encapsulates arbitrarily complex IO in the thread. A single IO event is easy enough, and we can maintain all our permanency and robustness guarantees, because we know the thread will have one of three results: success, failure, or it hangs. If we set a timeout, hang becomes failure, so there's only two possible results: success or failure. If we handle both of those correctly, we've handled all the possible IO errors that could have occurred.

329+

330+What about upgrading? We've already said we can handle the thread dying for arbitrary reasons, so if an upgrade comes in, we just kill it. We can upgrade Jael's state machine easily since its state is very simple.

331+

332+## Recap

333+

334+Let's recap what we've covered:

335+

336+- There are three styles of IO: imperative, monadic, and explicit state machines.

337+- Urbit supports explicit state machines (agents) and monadic IO (threads).

338+- Explicit state machines are preferred for permanent, robust, concurrent code.

339+- Monadic IO is preferred for short-lived code with complex IO.

340+- If a state machine needs to perform complex IO, it should encapsulate it in a thread so that, from the perspective of the state machine, it's simple IO.

341+

342+Hopefully it's fairly clear why Urbit uses explicit state machines in most situations. More than anything else, our goal is to build software that can last forever. Explicit state machines are a crucial tool for that.

content/blog/iot.mdnew file+445

@@ -0,0 +1,445 @@

1++++

2+title = "Lunar Urbit and the Internet of Things"

3+date = "2021-04-29"

4+description = "Potential future use cases of moons for industry and consumers"

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Jonathan Paprocki"

8+ship = "~datnut-pollen"

9+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/phobos.jpeg"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+Each of the ~4B 32-or-fewer-bit or [Azimuth](/docs/glossary/azimuth)

15+identities, namely [planets](/docs/glossary/planet),

16+[stars](/docs/glossary/star), and [galaxies](/docs/glossary/galaxy), may

17+spawn ~4B 64-bit child identities known as [moons](/docs/glossary/moon).

18+Moons are the undeveloped wild outback of Urbit, with a story waiting to be told

19+that promises to be as enormous in scale as the cloud personal computing story

20+told by planets, and possibly even more so.

21+

22+Throughout this piece, we use "Earth" and "Mars" in the Urbit sense. "Earth"

23+refers to the [current computing

24+paradigm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_ball_of_mud). "Mars" refers to the

25+perfected computing paradigm that Urbit aspires to be, but also to the current

26+and future state of Urbit.

27+

28+Today we will review the prehistory of moons on Earth, give a snapshot of how

29+moons are being utilized on Urbit in 2021, cover existing issues with consumer

30+IoT and how Urbit resolves them, and speculate what the lunar locus of the Urbit

31+ID address space may become in the future. To keep the futurist scope limited,

32+we primarily speculate on the usage of moons in (industrial) internet of things

33+settings, especially with respect to agriculture, and how they may manifest as

34+the workhorse collection unit of decentralized data markets.

35+

36+For those unfamiliar, moons differ from all other

37+[ships](/docs/glossary/ship) in that they are not independent identities

38+with total sovereignty over their data and keys. Instead, their cryptographic

39+keys are issued and controlled by their parent identity. The relationship

40+between the keys of a parent ship and its moons are analogous to the

41+relationship between primary keys and subkeys in a system like

42+[PGP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy). The parent may revoke

43+or change its child moons' keys at any time. A typical relationship between a

44+planet and a moon may be like one of a human and their smartphone. If you lose

45+your phone, you don't want someone to pretend they are you, operating one of

46+your moons, on the network. The planet can revoke the keys, and the moon stored

47+on the phone becomes inert, no longer able to communicate with the network.

48+While planets and stars also depend on their sponsor to assist with peer

49+discovery and software updates, these relationships rely on mutual agreement,

50+since either party may choose to discontinue the relationship and establish a

51+new one elsewhere. Moons possess no such freedom.

52+

53+### Lunar prehistory

54+

55+

56+

57+It may come as a surprise to you that you are already very familiar with moon

58+identities—they've just never been explained as such because the context in

59+which that terminology makes sense didn't exist before Urbit. Moons, in fact, are not

60+a new concept at all. Virtually your entire experience of the internet in the

61+modern era is the experience of someone who possesses some number of moons

62+subordinate to planets who mostly refuse to talk to one another. The feeling you

63+get of constantly moving between silos, juggling accounts, not controlling your

64+own data, etc., is a direct result of the fact that, on Earth, you only possess

65+moons. No planets.

66+

67+We're speaking, of course, of the client-server relationship. From the Urbit

68+perspective, the Facebooks, Twitters, and Googles of the world are planets, and

69+accounts held with these services may be thought of as moons subordinate to

70+those planets. Your account with these megacorps is only yours for as long as

71+they please. If you happen to step on a digital landmine, such as a virus that

72+causes Google's servers to believe you are a bot, you are suddenly banned from

73+their service, often with no recourse. All your data, your connections, your

74+network—vanished. We are all Mark Zuckerberg's moons, and they're armed to the

75+teeth with surveillance equipment.

76+

77+There are two classes of internet users: those with servers who hold all the

78+power, and clients who use those servers in the way prescribed by the owners.

79+Running a server is theoretically accessible to anyone, but practically

80+difficult: server maintenance is a technical endeavor that requires specialized

81+knowledge and substantial time investment. Other barriers exist beyond just the

82+technical: for instance, if you wish to set up your own email server, you will

83+probably be blocked by large providers because unknown email servers are almost

84+always spam. The root cause of this circumstance is that the email protocol

85+lacks [Sybil resistance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack). Urbit has

86+Sybil resistance built in, eliminating certain kinds of incentives for

87+gatekeeping such as this.

88+

89+We seek to level the playing field by giving everyone a server. We accomplish

90+this by making the process of running your own server (planet) as easy as

91+running your personal computer today. We aren't quite there yet, but we've made

92+leaps and bounds over the past couple of years.

93+

94+Of course, this analogy isn't perfect—Urbit moons are servers themselves, but as

95+they may only act in accordance with the wishes of its parent, they are

96+effectively as locked in degrees of freedom as a client is to a server. The

97+moon's keys may be revoked at any time by the parent. To distinguish these

98+prehistoric moons from Urbit moons, we will refer to them later as "primitive

99+moons".

100+

101+Urbit contends that moons are not the appropriate digital exocortex for a

102+responsible adult. They are for devices, experiments, or your children. We hope

103+that the dominant server-client relationship, which is the primary weapon of the

104+surveillance-industrial complex, will meet its end in the near future.

105+

106+### Moons in the early Martian era

107+

108+

109+

110+In 2021, moons are mostly unused on Urbit. There's a smattering of minor use

111+cases which we'll describe here, but they represent only a tiny fraction of

112+their ultimate potential.

113+

114+Tlon recently launched a survey bot called [Eliza](/blog/eliza), which was

115+initially a comet. We frequently got questions on whether Eliza was actually

116+Tlon's bot, because it could just as easily be a malicious actor posing as Tlon.

117+We soon plan to relaunch Eliza as a moon of `~zod`, which is the most

118+recognizable official galaxy of Tlon. This is to establish that the bot is

119+indeed official; only someone with access to `~zod` is capable of creating a

120+moon of `~zod`, and so a moon of `~zod` automatically carries with it a

121+cryptographic guarantee that you are communicating with an official digital

122+representative of Tlon. On Earth something like this would need to be

123+accomplished with certificate chains but, on Mars, this sort of authentication

124+is baked into the very fabric of the network, rather than as an additional layer

125+on top. This is a very good representative case of how moons naturally inherit

126+the reputation of their parent, even in the absence of any formal reputation

127+systems on Urbit.

128+

129+We see folks using moons as backup identities in case they can't or don't want

130+to access their primary planet for one reason or another. Again, since anyone

131+may verify the parent of a moon, the moon inherits the reputation of its parent.

132+These backups could be vanity identities—for instance, every `~sampel-palnet`

133+has underneath it a moon named `~master-sampel-palnet`[^0].

134+

135+Some use moons to host group(s). Hosting a group inevitably means that that ship

136+will process more network traffic, and a heavily trafficked group may impact a

137+ship's performance. Thus one may wish to offload group hosting duties to a moon

138+to maintain a more performant planet.

139+

140+As we currently lack a real system for 3rd party software distribution (though

141+see this recent [developer call](https://youtu.be/XwICC6Its1E) on a solution in

142+progress), one stopgap has been to download software by syncing a foreign

143+[desk](/docs/glossary/desk) to your ship. This is risky, as buggy software

144+may make break your ship and make it difficult to get running properly again.

145+For this reason, testing new software on the livenet is frequently performed on

146+moons, so as not to risk the parent ship if something were to go wrong.

147+

148+### Internet of Things

149+

150+

151+

152+Now we start to look towards the future by examining the problems faced by IoT

153+in the present and speculating on how Urbit might solve them.

154+

155+The Internet of Things is much maligned by technologists as a privacy, security,

156+and maintenance nightmare. These products usually depend on phoning home to

157+perform their service, which is inevitably a funnel by which personal data is

158+harvested, an attack surface for hackers to gain access to your home network,

159+and a single point of failure which may render the device useless, all in one!

160+One need look no further than the recent [Ubiquiti

161+breach](https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/03/whistleblower-ubiquiti-breach-catastrophic/)

162+to see all of these failure modes happening on a massive scale, and this is par

163+for the course. This sort of dynamic is completely antithetical to the Urbit

164+philosophy, so any involvement of Urbit with IoT will reject many fundamental

165+assumptions on how IoT operates today.

166+

167+However, it's important to understand why the current IoT model works like this

168+at all. We posit that it ultimately stems from the fact that today's IoT

169+products are primitive moons for which you do not operate the parent planet.

170+Almost every IoT device operates in the Software as a Service (SaaS) paradigm

171+because most people don't have personal servers that could do all the processing

172+work actually necessary for an IoT device to operate. This is not the _only_

173+reason for this—it's also just more profitable to collect consumer data.

174+However, it's the SaaS aspects which make the whole thing such a catastrophic

175+mess.

176+

177+Imagine a different world: if the server that your device reports to is your

178+own, there is no loss of control over personal data. If the device only

179+communicates on the local network, it will prevent remote hackers and disruption

180+if you internet fails. And if the manufacturer goes out of business, the device

181+will still work-it is not dependent on the manufacturer's servers.

182+

183+The wants and needs of the individual are at odds with the wants and needs of

184+the megacorp, and that mismatch manifests as the antifeatures that plague IoT.

185+By eliminating the SaaS aspect, Urbit solves many of the largest outstanding

186+issues with IoT in a single blow. Digital personal AI assistants have long been

187+an anticipated science fiction prediction and their full realization is on the

188+horizon. But in their current manifestation, many privacy- and

189+security-conscious people would never consider using them at all, since they are

190+inevitably presented as SaaS that requires intimate knowledge of your devices

191+and their stored data. Recommendation engines such as the one used by YouTube

192+offer helpful guidance towards content you'll find appealing, but they're also

193+designed to keep you hooked to the service. These kinds of programs can be

194+useful, but they're dystopian when they come saddled with anti-consumer

195+subroutines. Since your Urbit belongs to you, it can never act against your own

196+interests without your consent. In our lunar vision, your digital personal AI

197+assistant will live on one of your moons, rather than on megacorp's cloud.

198+

199+For web-exposed devices, Urbit offers the same security guarantees that it

200+offers for your personal computer: everything is end-to-end encrypted by

201+default, and signed with keys that one can easily verify as belonging to the

202+node sending the message.

203+

204+[Vint Cerf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vint_Cerf) has outlined the case for a

205+system like Urbit ID for IoT use

206+[here](https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2018/12/232883-self-authenticating-identifiers/fulltext).

207+In brief, that the Urbit ID system allows one to match public keys with devices,

208+bestowing devices with self-authenticating identities. This allows one to trust

209+the communications received from the device to whatever degree the private key

210+is held secure. IP addresses, GPS coordinates, MAC addresses, etc., are not

211+sufficient to generate high levels of trust—they're all temporary, easily

212+spoofed, or both.

213+

214+> One might imagine applying this to the Internet of Things (IOT) in which the

215+> IOT device self-generates a public- and private-key pair and registers the

216+> public key. For example, with a hub or controller so the hub can confirm it

217+> has reached the right IOT device. By the same token, configuration of the IOT

218+> device into an ensemble could include incorporation of the public key of the

219+> controller into a list of valid devices that can command or obtain data from

220+> the now-configured IOT device. Both ends can verify they are talking to the

221+> originally configured devices, assuming no device has lost its private key.

222+

223+Here, the hub or controller referred to would be your planet.

224+

225+Urbit has many other features that make it well-suited for IoT, above and beyond

226+eliminating the SaaS model and providing self-authenticating identities. Many of

227+these additional advantages derive from the fact that Urbit is a [solid state

228+interpreter](/docs/arvo/overview#solid-state-interpreter) and that

229+[Ames](/docs/glossary/ames) is a network of solid-state interpreters

230+equipped with cryptographic identity. We explore this in the next section.

231+

232+### Future lunar cosmotechnics

233+

234+

235+

236+We now polish off the old crystal ball and imagine future uses of Martian lunar

237+technology. Particularly, how the tech may develop over time once it becomes

238+widely exposed to the evolution-inducing forces of industry and culture. This

239+section is pure speculation, and I only aim to offer a small glimpse of a

240+potential future, rather than an exhaustive one. This picture will necessarily

241+be biased by my personal proclivities and expertise, or lack thereof.

242+

243+Any discussion on the future of moons is incomplete without mentioning the

244+possibility of [lunar emancipation](https://urbit.org/faq/#more-planets) in

245+order to increase the number of planets. This fascinating topic sees regular

246+discussion in the Urbit Community group, but is outside the scope of this

247+article.

248+

249+In order to respect the reader's time, I'm narrowing our scope to a particular

250+topic: the agriculture industry. I'm also assuming a future with specialized and

251+increasingly small hardware to run Urbit. Right now, a 4 GB Raspberry Pi is the

252+standard for "small Urbit". If someday there are CPUs specifically designed for

253+running [Nock](/docs/glossary/nock), one could imagine going much smaller.

254+Ultimately, I'm going to assume that there will someday be [solid-state

255+interpreter](#ssi) microcontrollers - so the inclusion of Urbit on a device may

256+require nothing more than a couple [surface-mount

257+devices](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-mount_technology) on a larger

258+chip.

259+

260+Urbit is intended first and foremost as a personal computer. When I unravel its

261+potential usage in industry, I adopt the forecast of a drastic increase in the

262+manufacturing capacity for individuals and small groups. Agriculture is a great

263+microcosm of this long-standing trend; less human input is needed to produce the

264+same amount of food, whether it be crops or livestock. The modern era is

265+distinguished by the fact that small numbers of people can manage enormous farms

266+which produce food for vast populations. Thus, computation on modern automated

267+farms may be thought of as existing at the intersection of both personal and

268+industrial scale, and show how computerized and mechanized workflows add to the

269+amazing productivity of modern farms and demonstrate that individual-sized

270+inputs are able to create industrial-sized outputs. I predict that the set of

271+trades for which this dynamic holds will only increase over time.

272+

273+Agricultural automation has been a primary engine for the growth of

274+civilization, but it has been hampered by the downsides of IoT elaborated in the

275+previous section. One bellwether of this dynamic is the right to repair one's

276+own equipment. [John

277+Deere](https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2020/03/its-payback-time-right-to-repair-movement-targets-john-deere/)

278+has long been at the center of this controversy. Farmers have lost the ability

279+to repair their own equipment due to vendor locks and a dependency on remote

280+servers. Furthermore, any suite of sensor products designed to gather important

281+data such as genomics, hydrology, soil health, weather, etc., inevitably only

282+cooperate with other products by the same vendor. It's the same story all over

283+again—you are a client of a megacorp server. Or in Urbit terms, you have a bunch

284+of primitive moons belonging to different planets held by megacorps, and no

285+planet to call your own.

286+

287+Again, Urbit resolves these issues in the same fashion as above. One might argue

288+that using Urbit is another form of vendor lock-in—but this is evaluating Urbit

289+at the incorrect level. Since Urbit is an open source operating system, its

290+functionality may be extended and modified arbitrarily by any party. _Some_

291+computational infrastructure is necessary— that fact can never be escaped. But

292+you can escape from closed source software that does not permit you to modify,

293+to open source software that allows you to tinker at will. Thus we do not

294+consider open source software to be a form of lock-in, or at least, it's a much

295+milder form of lock-in compared to something like Apple's walled garden.

296+

297+So let us focus on the additional meritorious aspects of Urbit (or more

298+generally, solid state interpreter networks) that make it not merely a band-aid

299+to the broken IoT system but a permanent and sound replacement.

300+

301+#### Solid state interpreter networks {% #ssi %}

302+

303+

304+

305+Urbit is the world's first solid-state interpreter (SSI). This concept is

306+summarized in the [white paper](https://media.urbit.org/whitepaper.pdf) as

307+follows:

308+

309+> Imagine it as a chip. Plug this chip into power and network; packets go in and

310+> out, sometimes changing its state. The chip never loses data and has no

311+> concept of a reboot; every packet is an ACID transaction.

312+

313+Also,

314+

315+> Briefly, an SSI is an interpreter which is also a database. In more depth, an

316+> SSI combines three properties: uniform persistence, source independent packet

317+> networking, and high-level determinism.

318+

319+We do not wish to segue into a lengthy examination of what this really means—

320+that's what the white paper is for—but we will attempt to explain why these

321+properties are of great benefit in an industrial IoT context such as

322+agriculture. We'd also like to predict that Urbit will not be the only SSI.

323+Other sorts of SSI's specialized to various tasks may one day roam the planet,

324+and these may be better suited for particular IoT tasks than

325+[Arvo](/docs/glossary/arvo). However, this article will be couched in terms

326+of SSIs communicating with an [Ames](/docs/glossary/ames)-like networking

327+protocol and Urbit ID-style cryptographic identity, rather than Urbit in

328+particular.

329+

330+For a SSI, losing power is less of a catastrophic event than it is for ordinary

331+computers with volatile memory. Knowing that you can never lose any state is a

332+powerful guarantee on the integrity of your data. Loss of power will always mean

333+loss of any data potentially collected while power is down, regardless of the

334+device you use, but with a SSI you at least have assurance that you will never

335+lose data that was collected before it could be transferred from the cache to

336+the disk. Of course, this is actually the sort of guarantee that [ACID

337+transactions](https://urbit.org/docs/arvo/overview/#acid-database) have—it is

338+just that this set of guarantees emerges naturally as a consequence when you

339+have a SSI. Put another way, every SSI is a database; having every device be a

340+database is a major boon in situations where enormous quantities of data are

341+being collected across a distributed network. The standard today is that data is

342+only collected at hubs, and any data that doesn't reach a hub is irretrievably

343+lost.

344+

345+SSIs are also deterministic at a high level. While all computers are

346+deterministic at the CPU level, interruptions to power can result in an

347+undefined semantic state and result in the random erasure of half of its brain.

348+This determinism is what begets ease of maintainability of Urbit—problems

349+generally only need to be solved once by experts and the solution propagates to

350+the rest of the network via [OTA updates](/docs/glossary/ota-updates). We

351+addressed this maintenance issue previously—we only remark now that this

352+property is derived from being a SSI, rather than something particular only to

353+Arvo or Urbit. When one has hundreds or thousands of devices to manage, the

354+guarantees on ease of maintenance provided by determinism are extraordinarily

355+convenient.

356+

357+Packet routing on SSI networks is source-independent, and in the context of an

358+Ames-like networking protocol, are always delivered exactly once and in a

359+precise order due to the fact that nodes on an Ames network are in a permanent

360+session. Source-independent means that the identity that originated a packet

361+does not need to be the one to deliver it—packets are _facts_, and the truth of

362+a fact does not depend on who you heard it from. This means that it is possible,

363+for instance, to send instructions to a moon before it even exists and be

364+guaranteed that that moon will receive them and perform the tasks given, even if

365+the device that originally sent the packets no longer exists. As long as

366+somebody has kept the packets on hand, they will eventually be delivered. So,

367+one could imagine transmitting directions to a crop harvesting robot into which

368+a moon will be installed before the robot has even been purchased, know that

369+once it is delivered it will automatically begin its task, and know that those

370+tasks will be completed in the correct order, without any accidental repeats.

371+Taken to the limit, one can imagine preplanning the automated tasks for an

372+entire farm before a single device is purchased, with powerful guarantees on the

373+integrity of those instructions no matter how much time elapses between sending

374+and receiving.

375+

376+#### P2P data markets

377+

378+

379+

380+As was mentioned above, today's IoT devices ferry all sorts of your personal

381+data to megacorp, where they package it and sell it to the highest bidder.

382+Though personal data in aggregate is quite valuable, the value of a single

383+individual's data is quite low. On the other hand, industrial scale data such as

384+that collected on digitized farms could be quite valuable. Here we briefly

385+examine how Urbit can be utilized to populate and facilitate a market for data.

386+

387+All data collected by your moons may be digitally signed by that moon,

388+certifying the exact origin of that data. This is one advantage of having

389+cryptographic identity baked into the core of the operating system and

390+networking protocol. One could imagine collecting large amounts of such data and

391+packaging it for exchange with other local and regional farmers. This can, of

392+course, already be done in principle with current systems. But current systems

393+do not automatically come equipped with the sort of provenance, immutability,

394+and reputation that comes for free when you make use of SSI networks.

395+Manipulated or faked data becomes easier to spot, and you'll know who it came

396+from, so supplying such data puts one's reputation at stake.

397+

398+One major issue facing conjoining data gathered from disparate sources is simply

399+how to do it. Data arriving in random order, from different software versions,

400+running different hardware, is all very difficult to bundle into a good

401+dataset - and indeed wrangling this sort of task forms a large part of the data

402+scientist profession. As devices in SSI networks utilizing an Ames-like protocol

403+are engaged in permanent sessions, leading to properties such as exactly-once

404+delivery and well-ordered message sequences, issues about the order in which

405+data arrives are dramatically simplified. I do not wish to get mathematical

406+here, but I personally have confidence that the emerging discipline of

407+[categorical informatics](http://math.mit.edu/~dspivak/informatics/), as well as

408+the relevance of [low-dimensional topology to data

409+fusion](https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.5505), resolves many of these issues. I

410+promise to explain this in more detail in the future. For now, it suffices to

411+say that SSI networks seem well-positioned to utilize these techniques.

412+

413+Cryptographic techniques such as [(composable) zero-knowledge

414+proofs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof), [secure multi-party

415+computation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_multi-party_computation),

416+[ring signatures](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_signature), and even

417+[homomorphic encryption](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption)

418+offer a variety of ways in which data may be shared in an IoT context with

419+mathematical guarantees on what sort of privacy is maintained. This is perhaps

420+less relevant in the context of agricultural IoT, where personal private data is

421+largely absent, but we mention them here to invite further speculation from the

422+reader about the possibilities of IoT and SSI networks.

423+

424+We end our discussion with an adaptation of a scenario borrowed from my brief

425+time working on [Ceptr](http://ceptr.org/) that begins to show how a lunar

426+IoT-connected world evokes properties of a hypothetical ["global nervous

427+system"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_brain). This example is

428+purposefully mundane to illustrate how deficient our Earth systems are, and

429+while it is possible to accomplish in theory, it is impractical on a wide scale

430+due to the numerous problems with IoT. Imagine that you suffer headaches from

431+low atmospheric pressure. You'd like to know when a low-pressure front is an

432+hour away from you so that you can pre-emptively take aspirin to prevent the

433+headache. Your personal digital assistant, running on Urbit, can then

434+periodically query the moons of sensors in your region for weather data to

435+predict whether or not you will soon be passing through a low pressure front.

436+This could be a free service or paid for automatically with cryptocurrency

437+microtransactions. On Mars, this task will be trivial, and is merely a stone's

438+throw away from a vast and undiscovered universe of other possibilities unlocked

439+by SSI networks.

440+

441+[^0]:

442+ Of course, all moon names have four words, not three. What the fourth word

443+ needs to be for only three words to display is a matter of Urbit lore that

444+ is more fun to discover yourself than have it told to you, so we won't spoil

445+ it here.

content/blog/landscape-a-portrait.mdnew file+89

@@ -0,0 +1,89 @@

1++++

2+title = "Landscape: A Portrait"

3+date = "2019-09-02"

4+description = "On the latest Urbit user interface, and the interfaces to come."

5+aliases = [

6+ "/posts/essays/landscape-a-portrait/",

7+ "/posts/landscape-a-portrait"

8+]

9+

10+[extra]

11+author = "Matilde Park"

12+ship = "~haddef-sigwen"

13++++

14+

15+

16+

17+Alongside [the v0.8.0 launch](https://urbit.org/posts/2019-7-25-update/) we released the latest version of Landscape – Urbit's prototype user interface. Codenamed “Modulo,” it's our vision of an Urbit UI designed for everyday use. Most importantly, it’s the beginning of an interface that has access to the entire Arvo OS, rather than just one facet. Previous iterations of Landscape solely made use of the [Hall](https://urbit.org/docs/learn/arvo/hall/) messaging protocol.

18+

19+Served after installation on your ship’s HTTPS port, it allows you to interact with Arvo through a web interface built with [Indigo](https://github.com/urbit/indigo), our new UI design language. It has a home screen, which exposes ‘tiles’ for each Landscape application – each able to integrate and customise information from elsewhere in the system and from the broader internet – and connects them to full-screen, graphical applications.

20+

21+The first set of application includes Chat, a new, streamlined chat client, a basic Weather information tile, an analog clock, and Publish, a place for publishing, subscribing, and commenting on ‘notebooks’ – invite-oriented blogs hosted on your ship.

22+

23+

24+

25+

26+

27+Our unofficial mantra – “it’s not finished yet” – is performed yet again, but we're _close_. We can now talk with the broader community about both our inspirations, our visions for its future and our plan to enact that future.

28+

29+## Entering userspace

30+

31+Urbit has been in “research mode” for most of its history, but the system has now made extensive progress and our kernelspace engineers are the opinionated, confident veterans of the long war you’d expect from an operating system’s early history. The spoils of that war, after rewriting and refactoring all of the system's components several times over, are beginning to really speak for themselves.

32+

33+Urbit’s kernel is graduating from its rebellious period, however its _userspace_ has remained embryonic for most of its history. The project of building an application model has been restarted and rescoped into _aspects_ that could weather the chaotic growth of the kernel, but it would never quite serve as an interface to the entire operating system. Due to one of our latest vane refactors, it’s becoming possible to start that work in earnest.

34+

35+Alongside the latest release of Landscape came the rewrite of the [`%eyre`](https://urbit.org/docs/learn/arvo/eyre/) vane, which serves a ship’s files and applications over HTTP. Among the improvements came the decision to move from serving from one ‘/web’ folder by default to an application-specific endpoint.

36+

37+That is, a Hoon application, upon being started, now tells Eyre it wants to serve _these files_ at _this endpoint_ over HTTP and Eyre facilitates that.

38+

39+Landscape, with this in mind, serves at the root endpoint (you know, at `/`). It pre-authenticates the user and provides an API to your ship for applications (and their tiles) to access and _poke_, _peer_ and _scry_ the ship with.

40+

41+

42+

43+Whereas, before, a ship had a web server that was good at serving text, but was more obscure for complex (or graphical) applications that made use of the Arvo OS and network, now a ship launches with a web-based interface that makes applications much simpler to experiment with and develop.

44+

45+If you want, you can just serve files at any endpoint with [a boilerplate](https://github.com/matildepark/urbit-static-page).

46+

47+What's more? Arvo access and Hoon logic are now, by default, inside their own application on the ship itself rather than served as inline code on the front-end. This allows for better separation of concerns and more complex and performant applications.

48+

49+(If you want to play around, there’s an [experimental tool](https://github.com/urbit/create-landscape-app) you can use to get a full-stack boilerplate running in about 40 seconds.)

50+

51+All of this is fantastic news; and while Landscape-oriented userspace development is now _possible_, it’s still not all the way to being an interface to _an operating system_. For that, we’ve started drawing up specifications and proposals.

52+

53+## Rethinking interfaces

54+

55+Among the inspirations for our team are [the tales of Andy Hertzfeld](https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Were_Not_Hackers!.txt), working on the Macintosh, and ongoing [discussions](http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/812/) and [decisions](https://research.swtch.com/help.pdf) that went into Plan 9 from Bell Labs. (Sometimes, for fun, we also watch videos about [the Xerox Alto](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tngrLvyiNEI).)

56+

57+These inspirations share that their creators were dealing with really primordial stuff – the font of human-computer interface had really just sprung and they were _seeing things no one had seen before_ because they _had to_.

58+

59+Doing that now, after a lifetime of reflexive familiarity with the dominant solutions – from Apple’s macOS to Google’s Material Design – we have to do the work of _unseeing_. By engaging with what it was like to see for the first time, we get closer to seeing with fresh eyes. We work to avoid implicitly categorising the new territory as simply, well, comparative to the old one.

60+

61+So, while it’s not the same to simply _read_ these dialogues, it can get us pretty close.

62+

63+One reason this iteration of Landscape isn’t the last is because – we must emphasise – this is not the only interface Urbit will have. We aren’t creating a web platform. It should be possible to use _just_ the command-line, and ideally it should be possible to serve windowed interfaces from Arvo itself. It should be possible to SSH into _and_ SMS with your ship, should you want to.

64+

65+After all, we’re creating a decentralised platform of personal servers with an entirely new stack from the bytecode up. Most of the world’s computers descend from Unix, and Unix was based on [timesharing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing) — multiple users in one computer, all pretending it was theirs. Everything since hasn’t left that mindset.

66+

67+So what do we think that new platform needs from its interface?

68+

69+- **Landscape, and all of Urbit’s future interfaces, need a standardised way to view and edit the filesystem.** We had circumnavigated this by mounting to Unix, but it’s now time to confront that issue.

70+

71+- **Landscape, and all of Urbit’s future interfaces, need a way to easily organise around _cohorts_ of ships, or _groups_,** with shared applications or files and a socially-oriented computing experience in turn — [something always in the vision](https://urbit.org/posts/azimuth-is-on-chain/#aegean), but not quite implemented yet.

72+

73+- Lastly, **Landscape, and all of Urbit’s future interfaces, need a userspace-specific, software design pattern** to integrate all of this: access to the file system, permissioning shared sets of files, and tying it together, an underlying representation of both data and interface amongst many computers.

74+

75+No more siloed input/output in applications on a ‘timeshared computer’ with your redundant data always belonging to someone else.

76+

77+## Into the future

78+

79+Right now, Landscape applications are still _monolithic_ and geared exclusively toward _single-person computing_. We hope to change that, and keep communication open with developers so it’s easy for their own development to keep pace with ours.

80+

81+It should be easy to share whatever data with your friends as you like; to permission files programmatically on a server that is permanently, irrevocably _yours_.

82+

83+It should also be easy to read, annotate and discuss a shared book with a specific set of friends; or only allow another set of people to see files in a specific directory if they meet specified requirements.

84+

85+We will backport these exploratory developments into Landscape as they continue and evolve. This, of course, includes kernel work, as we refactor [Gall](https://urbit.org/docs/learn/arvo/gall/), the userspace handler vane, and in the process, standardise streamlined practices for writing Hoon in user applications. Take, for example, the [async monad](https://groups.google.com/a/urbit.org/forum/#!topic/dev/DDG6gHSG1Lc), which allows you to avoid dealing with moves or handling each response in separate parts of the application. User applications and Hoon should be both laconic and accessible, and we’re reifying that.

86+

87+Most importantly, we’ll continue to iterate on how we onboard new developers. [Hoon School](https://urbit.org/hoonschool) continues to evolve; its first cohort is thriving and friendly. We have a dedicated cast of teachers and ongoing access to much of the Urbit team through this stream.

88+

89+If you’d like to join us here, you’ll discover a computer that you can learn and master from the bottom up. Right now, it is a labyrinth for the intrepid; but for the future, and forever, it is _mappable_. A landscape, after all, doesn’t show a single leaf, but the earth and the horizon ahead.

content/blog/layer-2-faq.mdnew file+155

@@ -0,0 +1,155 @@

1++++

2+title = "Layer 2 FAQ"

3+date = "2022-03-01"

4+description = "Answers to all your lingering L2 questions."

5+[extra]

6+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/l2-faq-artwork.jpg"

7++++

8+

9+The launch of our [Layer 2](https://urbit.org/blog/layer-2-guides) was met with

10+a lot of excitement and a few questions. Don’t fret, we have answers. Below is a

11+selection of the most frequently asked questions and our responses.

12+

13+If you're still stumped, head to `~bitbet-bolbel/urbit-community` or give us a

14+shout online.

15+

16+### Questions:

17+

18+#### Planet Booting, Buying, Custody

19+

20+1. [Do I need ETH to boot my planet?](#1-do-i-need-eth-to-boot-my-planet)

21+2. [Do I have full custody of my L2 planet?](#2-is-there-anything-i-need-to-do-to-ensure-full-custody-of-my-planet)

22+3. [Where can I buy a planet?](#3-are-there-any-platforms-where-i-can-buy-a-planet-for-btc-or-usd)

23+4. [How do I get a hosted planet?](#4-how-do-i-get-a-cloud-hosted-planet)

24+

25+#### Layer 2 Architecture & Migration

26+

27+5. [Why did you decide to build your own Layer 2 rollup?](#5-there-are-plenty-of-organizations-dedicated-to-customizable-rollup-solutions-why-did-you-decide-to-build-your-own)

28+6. [Should I migrate my L1 planet to L2?](#6-if-i-currently-have-an-l1-planet-are-there-any-advantages-to-migrating)

29+7. [Where did the old Bridge go? Can I still use it?](#7-is-it-possible-to-use-the-old-bridge-for-l1-operations)

30+8. [Why is the cost reduction so significant?](#8-why-is-the-cost-reduction-so-significant)

31+9. [What exactly is the mechanism for the “naive” consensus?](#9-what-exactly-is-the-mechanism-for-the-naive-consensus)

32+10. [When I spawn L2 planets via Metamask, I'm prompted to sign every transaction. Do you have plans to remedy this?](#10-when-i-spawn-l2-planets-via-metamask-im-prompted-to-sign-every-transaction-do-you-have-plans-to-remedy-this)

33+

34+#### 1. Do I need ETH to boot my planet?

35+

36+If you were invited to claim a L2 planet, you **do not** need ETH to claim

37+that Urbit ID. Anyone can get on Urbit without ETH or a crypto wallet via L2.

38+Inviting your mom to Urbit just got a lot easier.

39+

40+If you have a L1 planet, you **do** need ETH to claim that Urbit ID.

41+

42+Once you have claimed your Urbit ID and have recorded your master ticket,

43+you **do not** need ETH to boot Urbit. That Urbit ID is now yours, forever.

44+

45+Unsure whether you have been invited to claim a L2 or L1 planet? The quickest

46+way to identify a L2 planet is if you used the below flow to claim.

47+

48+

49+

50+For those with L1 planets, you can avoid future transaction fees by migrating

51+your L1 planet to L2. Read the migration instructions

52+[here](https://urbit.org/getting-started/layer-2-for-planets).

53+

54+#### 2. Is there anything I need to do to ensure full custody of my planet?

55+

56+If you were sent a direct link to claim an L2 planet (see above), it’s

57+in your full custody by design. Bridge generates your master ticket, which you

58+downloaded during the claiming process.

59+

60+#### 3. Are there any platforms where I can buy a planet for BTC or USD?

61+

62+There are a few ways to procure a planet, including some platforms that offer

63+BTC and USD payment options.

64+

65+To purchase a L2 planet, we direct you to:

66+

67+- [Networked Subject](https://subject.network/buy/) for payment in BTC.

68+ Brought to you by `~sitful-hatred`.

69+- [planets.lanlyd.net](https://planets.lanlyd.net) and

70+ [tomdys.gumroad.com](https://tomdys.gumroad.com) for payment in USD.

71+

72+To purchase a L1 planet with ETH, there are a number of platforms dedicated

73+exclusively to Urbit ID. These include:

74+

75+- [urbit.live](https://urbit.live/buy)

76+- [urbitex.io](https://urbitex.io)

77+- [urbit.me](https://urbit.me)

78+

79+You can also acquire L1 Urbit IDs with ETH on [OpenSea](https://opensea.io/collection/urbit-id).

80+

81+Once you purchase a planet, the easiest way to manage your cryptographic asset

82+is through [Bridge](https://bridge.urbit.org/), which is our Urbit ID management

83+interface, wallet navigator, and governance portal.

84+

85+You can use Bridge to perform any desired

86+[Azimuth](https://urbit.org/docs/glossary/azimuth) interactions or download your

87+planet’s keyfile. As an alternative, [Metamask](https://metamask.io) is an

88+easy-to-use Ethereum wallet with a browser extension that integrates easily with

89+Bridge.

90+

91+#### 4. How do I get a cloud-hosted planet?

92+

93+There are a number of ways to host a planet in the cloud. Your options:

94+

95+- DIY:

96+ The most cost-effective method is [setting it up

97+ yourself](https://urbit.org/using/running/hosting), though this route requires

98+ some system administration, and troubleshooting if any issues arise.

99+

100+- Via a Hosting Provider:

101+ The more “headache-free” option is paying for a

102+ hosting provider to take care of all these processes for you, plus support. The

103+ following service providers offer hosting (some include a free planet):

104+ [Tlon](https://urbit.typeform.com/to/zQ9QOV3Z?typeform-source=tlon.io#source=tlon_io),

105+ [UrbitHost](https://urbithost.com/landing), [Get Urbit

106+ ID](https://www.geturbitid.com), [Escape Pod

107+ Store](https://www.escapepod.store), [Nodestead](https://www.nodestead.dev), and

108+ [ThirdEarth](https://third.earth/en/).

109+

110+#### 5. There are plenty of organizations dedicated to customizable rollup solutions. Why did you decide to build your own?

111+

112+Simply put, we designed and engineered our own rollup because we can’t depend

113+on the success or longevity of another organization. As they currently exist,

114+outsourced rollups are too immature and compromised in ways that undermine the

115+integrity of our technical principles. We also can’t restrict the aggregators to

116+a waitlist, another issue which might eventually be resolved, but one that we

117+can’t count on to be resolved soon.

118+

119+#### 6. If I currently have an L1 planet, are there any advantages to migrating?

120+

121+One of the most significant advantages to migrating is the reduced cost of

122+Azimuth-event related transactions. On L2, you can change sponsors or reset your

123+network keys for free with our roller. An important note: migration is currently

124+one-way. If you want to hold onto your L1 planet as a novelty, migration isn't

125+recommended.

126+

127+#### 7. Is it possible to use the old Bridge for L1 operations?

128+

129+The old version of Bridge will remain live, but unmaintained and eventually

130+decommissioned. You can access it at

131+[bridge-sunset.urbit.org](https://bridge-sunset.urbit.org). If you run into

132+something you can only do with the older version of Bridge,

133+[let us know on Github](https://github.com/urbit/bridge/issues/new?assignees=&labels=bridge&template=bridge-bug-report.md&title=).

134+

135+#### 8. Why is the cost reduction so significant?

136+

137+On L1, every operation is an Ethereum transaction, with logic and state, etc.

138+On L2, these operations are reduced and simplified into a

139+no-logic-involved Ethereum transaction. This is what makes L2 transactions

140+cost-efficient: multiple transactions happen simultaneously to share the cost of

141+just one L1 transaction.

142+

143+#### 9. What exactly is the mechanism for the “naive” consensus?

144+

145+Our engineering team has written extensively about the technical features of

146+our L2 rollup. To learn about its intricacies, we encourage you to read

147+`~datnut-pollen`’s comprehensive

148+[overview](https://urbit.org/blog/rollups#technical) and `~wicdev-wisryt`’s

149+original

150+[proposal](https://groups.google.com/a/urbit.org/g/dev/c/p6rP_WsxLS0/m/hQBX0modAwAJ?pli=1)

151+on the Urbit developer mailing list.

152+

153+#### 10. When I spawn L2 planets via Metamask, I'm prompted to sign every transaction. Do you have plans to remedy this?

154+

155+We realize this UX headache and are taking active steps to devise a more efficient transaction scheme. The new method will reduce the number of manual signatures needed for each spawned L2 planet. At the time of this FAQ's publication, we haven't publicized the release timing for the improvement. A provisional solution: set the star's spawn proxy to a custodied L2 planet secured via Master ticket and log in to Bridge as that planet to spawn invites.

content/blog/magic.mdnew file+205

@@ -0,0 +1,205 @@

1++++

2+title = "Magic"

3+date = "2016-05-15"

4+description = "A thought-experiment to explain the Urbit user experience."

5+aliases = [ "/posts/essays/magic", "/posts/magic" ]

6+

7+[extra]

8+author = "Curtis Yarvin"

9+ship = "~sorreg-namtyv"

10+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/magic.jpg"

11++++

12+

13+

14+

15+It's easy to get too obsessed with Urbit's alien technology. We

16+didn't build Urbit for its tech. We built it for people to use.

17+

18+It's also hard to understand the power of Urbit, because it's

19+still quite immature. Unless you understand it already, it's

20+just a weird OS that doesn't work all that well.

21+

22+And this OS is supposedly designed as a new kind of product: a

23+personal server. What is a personal server? If you had one,

24+you'd know. Since you don't, you don't. So both your problem

25+and our solution are totally unclear.

26+

27+One way to understand Urbit is to forget the technology totally.

28+Instead, let's build the same product out of magic. Technology

29+is hard and imperfect and slow. Magic is easy and perfect and

30+fast. Why not use it? At least for a demo?

31+

32+## Magic step one: total integration.

33+

34+Make a list of all the cloud apps which have your personal data.

35+OK, just imagine making a list. OK, use magic.

36+

37+By magic, we make some giant company buy all these apps. It

38+could be any of them, but let's say it's Facebook. Facebook buys

39+_all the apps_. As of now, _all your cloud computing happens in

40+your Facebook profile_.

41+

42+Your Facebook is now your Dropbox and your Evernote and your

43+Wordpress and your Gmail. And it's not just Web apps; all your

44+servers move to Facebook. Your Nest talks to a Facebook server.

45+Your iPhone talks to Facebook instead of iCloud. Your Fitbit

46+records your heart rate in a Facebook log. Your Facebook

47+manages your finances and pays your bills. Got bitcoin?

48+Facebook is your wallet. Shop online? Check out the Facebook

49+Store -- it sells everything!

50+

51+In short, you can just lock your browser to `facebook.com`. The

52+Web is dead. Or more precisely, it's an obsolete protocol which

53+you use to log in to Facebook.

54+

55+Does this sound creepy? Sure. It's incredibly creepy. But look

56+on the bright side: it's also incredibly convenient. (And

57+incredibly secure, at least with a 2-factor key.)

58+

59+For the first time ever, _all your data is in one place_. For

60+example, the engineers at Facebook, who are awesome, would never

61+leave Dropbox, Instagram and iCloud as three separate things.

62+You don't need an "integration" between them. Your profile is

63+one thing: you. Your entire digital life.

64+

65+(In fact, if you're a geek and have Unix boxes, your Facebook is

66+magically integrated with Unix. You can just open your laptop

67+and type `ls /photos/2016/May/` -- as if your digital life was a

68+chip in a box in your backpack, not redundant servers in multiple

69+secure data centers.)

70+

71+Imagine we all lived in hotels, all the time, even in just one

72+city. Imagine you don't even have one room with a long-term

73+lease. You sleep in one pod Mondays, another on Tuesdays...

74+then, someone offers you a home. Your own house. With your own

75+furniture, your own books in your own bookcases...

76+

77+## Magic step two: free your data.

78+

79+The good news is, you get your own house. The bad news is, it's

80+in North Korea.

81+

82+Having your whole life owned by Facebook is still creepy. Or so

83+most people would think. It's not actually clear that it's more

84+creepy to be owned by one corporation, than nine corporations.

85+But it _feels_ creepier.

86+

87+By magic, Facebook cares. So it decides to free you. Actually,

88+Facebook's business is owning you. So freedom will destroy its

89+business. But magically, Facebook doesn't mind.

90+

91+Right now, the software behind your Facebook experience is a

92+million lines of Facebook goo. It solves your problems and shows

93+your ads and does whatever the heck it wants with your data.

94+(Not that it's "your" data. It's Facebook's data, about you.)

95+

96+Without changing the functionality of your Facebook experience,

97+Facebook replaces every component of this goo with an "agent."

98+(You have about as many agents as you used to have apps.) If you

99+don't care about being free, you won't notice the change. If you

100+do care, everything changes.

101+

102+One, you don't have to run Facebook's agents. You can replace

103+them with anyone else's software, free or paid. Agents upgrade

104+themselves automatically, but you are never locked in; you can

105+always switch agents and/or vendors without damaging your data.

106+

107+Don't like your email UI? Change it. Don't like to see ads?

108+You no longer see any ads -- why would someone use an agent that

109+showed them ads? Ick. Unless it's something ridiculously

110+specialized, an agent is either free software or costs $3.99.

111+

112+Two, agents _act as you_. Facebook is no longer the Panopticon.

113+It is not a giant mainframe where all the code can access all the

114+data. An agent can use as much of your own data as you give it;

115+it cannot use anyone else's data. At least not without asking.

116+

117+When anyone can write an agent, only code can be law. Privacy is

118+no longer enforced by the informal decisions of Facebook product

119+managers. It must be enforced by formal security policies.

120+

121+This might constrict the services Facebook can offer, but only a

122+little. Since privacy is a human universal, apps that don't

123+respect it (for instance, image face tagging) feel weird. A

124+service like this can't be broken up into personal agents; it

125+still requires a Big Data mainframe somewhere. But it's okay;

126+the agents can still talk to it.

127+

128+For the most part, Big Data (everyone's) has become little data

129+(yours). You no longer have a Facebook profile -- a fancy UI

130+backed by a million lines of Facebook goo on one big mainframe.

131+Now what you have is a Facebook _server_: a real computer. Or at

132+least, a virtual computer (which is much more reliable than any

133+one physical computer).

134+

135+Is this computer hard to manage? You have the same basic job as

136+someone who owns an iPhone: deciding what software to run. If

137+you skip this job, your iPhone or your Facebook is still pretty

138+useful. You also need to decide what data to keep. An iPhone

139+has finite, free storage; the cloud has infinite, non-free

140+storage. You still want a warning when your server gets fat.

141+But at least it keeps working.

142+

143+## Magic step three: free your server.

144+

145+This agent-oriented Facebook can't show you ads. But this is not

146+actually a huge business problem. Since Facebook owns everyone's

147+life, it has the mother of all monopoly lockins. It can just

148+bill you $9.99 a month for running your Facebook server. This is

149+a great deal, for you and for Facebook.

150+

151+But you're still a slave, Neo. A Facebook server still isn't a

152+personal server. Monopolies suck.

153+

154+Magic works, so Facebook feels guilty. It goes all the way

155+toward freeing you, and ruins its own business.

156+

157+Now, your server is just a big file whose format is precisely

158+defined. You can move it to any hosting service, or even run it

159+on a home PC. Since hosting is now a commodity, it costs almost

160+nothing and has zero profit margin. It may even come bundled

161+with your Internet service.

162+

163+Every data center is owned by the local government. If you have

164+data to hide from the authorities, compute at home. Most people

165+don't have anything to hide and should run in the cloud, because

166+the cloud works better. But using the _same platform_ as those

167+who do have something to hide creates "herd immunity". You don't

168+have to choose between a secure platform with no network effect,

169+and a non-secure platform that everyone else uses.

170+

171+## Magic step four: free your name.

172+

173+Freeing your server also means freeing your identity. It's no

174+longer true that Facebook decides who you are. Facebook just

175+wrote the algorithm. Your server contains cryptographic secrets

176+that control your identity. If your identity was a bitcoin, your

177+server would be a giant bitcoin wallet.

178+

179+The bad news: lose the file, lose the identity. The good news:

180+your server is genuinely personal now. It's yours in every way.

181+It's so personal that if you destroy it, it's gone.

182+

183+Facebook doesn't even keep its power to create new servers. The

184+"real name" policy has done great things to control spam, because

185+spam always depends on disposable accounts. But it implies a

186+central authority.

187+

188+Instead, Facebook borrows an idea from bitcoin and just limits

189+the number of identities. If you need one, you have to buy one.

190+They don't cost that much; just enough to deter spammers.

191+

192+(Is your real name still linked to your identity? Maybe, maybe

193+not. There's a role for name validation, but not everyone needs

194+to have a real name, and not everyone else needs to know it. A

195+dissident, or anyone who wants to speak out and let the words

196+speak for themselves, might want a second anonymous identity.

197+But sock puppets remain evil -- two names for the same person

198+should not interact in the same place.)

199+

200+## Magic step five: call it Urbit.

201+

202+And, with magic, we've succeeded in turning Facebook into Urbit.

203+Technically, Urbit is pretty close to magic, but there is no way

204+it's going to happen this way. See the [roadmap](/blog/roadmap) for how it

205+actually happens.

content/blog/metaphase.mdnew file+79

@@ -0,0 +1,79 @@

1++++

2+title = "Metaphase"

3+date = "2020-12-08"

4+description = "On the upcoming and foregoing Landscape lifecycles, and other forms of mitosis across the Urbit project."

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Matilde Park"

8+ship = "~haddef-sigwen"

9+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/metaphase.jpg"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+_Previous versions of this essay specified the stream deploy date as December 11, 2020; then December 18, 2020. This has been amended to the actual date of release, with our sincere apologies. For new readers, you can opt into the dev stream by running:_

15+

16+```

17+|ota ~hanruc-nalfus-nidsut-tomdun %kids

18+|merge %home ~hanruc-nalfus-nidsut-tomdun %kids, =gem %take-that

19+|merge %kids ~hanruc-nalfus-nidsut-tomdun %kids, =gem %take-that

20+```

21+

22+_We will surface this option more broadly in a future settings overhaul._

23+

24+A few weeks ago, the Landscape team — those of us building Tlon’s suite of userspace applications on top of Urbit— deployed our first over-the-air update for notifications. This is a big leap forward for us. Of course, getting notifications inside Landscape itself is a big deal, but getting a push notification on your phone, or an email digest based on activity inside Urbit is now just one step away, a weekend project for a hobby developer, not an indeterminate number of steps away.

25+

26+After release, we received some feedback from users on the behaviour and design of this feature; beyond the obvious kinks that come from an initial release, it seemed to some like a minimum viable affordance pitched as a fully designed feature. This “bottom-up” development approach was, to us, fairly straightforward; to some of our users, it seemed that we had closed the door on the feature without even beginning to expose all its possibilities.

27+

28+As I’ll describe, we haven’t just been iterating Landscape, but the way we develop Landscape, and the way we consider Landscape in relation to Arvo. Finally, we’ll discuss our upcoming two-stream release process: a “stable” release stream with updates every six weeks and a development stream, with ongoing changes continuously deployed on an opt-in basis.

29+

30+To someone coming to Landscape for the first time, it is starting to look mature; and it is indeed maturing quickly. After all, these mismatches in expectations are pangs calling out for growth. Landscape truly has _users_, not just explorers, who are developing the same expectations they have with the other tools they use: predictability, reliability, and iterative improvements, not just leaps forward. So to meet those expectations, we’ve been working on the prerequisite work for a mature release schedule, with two different release streams for users and explorers: a lifecycle, with the cells, interlinked, dividing into a coherent higher being.

31+

32+## Landscapers and lifecycles

33+

34+For most of 2020, the core Landscape team has comprised of Liam (`~hastuc-dibtux`), Logan (`~tacryt-socryp`), and myself (`~haddef-sigwen`). Others at Tlon have rotated on and off, and some community members (`~radbur-sivmus` comes to mind) have also contributed a lot, but the three of us handle the core decisions and the entire stack for Landscape, working with designers, infrastructure, and third-party developers.

35+

36+After OS1’s release in April 2020, Landscape’s back-end has changed quite a bit; the first rearchitecture we performed was in group-store, adding roles and simplifying quite a lot of the back-end logic at the same time.

37+

38+Around May of this year, Logan flagged that our code surface was too large and had too much boilerplate by writing a set of bespoke full-stack applications when just one flexible userspace database would do. Our designers also had a vision of our interfaces being “modes and genres of the same data” that fit this vision as well; and so since then, we’ve put our resources into migrating all of Landscape to use graph-store (more information available in [this developer call](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4DFuAZQ32Y)).

39+

40+Obviously, developing userspace for distributed computing has some additional challenges that you don’t have to consider when writing software for a single server. Each ship interacting has to mutually coordinate the agents running and the events to be processed. If those fall out of synchronisation, the edge cases multiply.

41+

42+We traditionally tended toward solving those problems by writing the simplest possible incarnation of an application or a solution first, triaging out additional complications until they can be most prudently addressed — usually when they are just one step away.

43+

44+For most of its history, Landscape’s userspace suite had to be up-to-date on all ships to function at all, so multiple staging streams added quite a few complications. Since incompatible versions of applications on different ships would produce mutual fail states if they attempted to interact –and since each application had no sense of how to negotiate compatibility with older applications, each user had to keep up-to-date. Landscape was moving too fast, constantly reconfiguring (to give you a sense of this: we still refer to a month ago as “old”).

45+

46+Historically, Arvo and Landscape were also considered just one object; changes in Landscape would often require refining the layers underneath it as well. We often aimed to use our interface’s requirements to refine Arvo in turn. But as Landscape’s cells continued to split, as it became a proper client _for_ Arvo rather than a subsection _of_ Arvo, it required its own planning and execution cycle that only came to fruition around April of this year.

47+

48+The first thing we did was start recurring, six-week product backlogs with designers and engineers to occasionally reassess short-term priorities with a larger roadmap. Once we did that, we began working on opening our process to the public, migrating all tasks, priorities, and current decisions to a [product board](https://github.com/urbit/landscape). By doing this, community members could both suggest features _and_ contribute features, with a centralised, transparent process for getting designer input and Tlon engineer priorities. This has also been a successful effort.

49+

50+By adjusting ourselves to a six week rhythm for execution, it’s clearly time to slow down our release schedule and dedicate design and QA time to each release.

51+

52+Since Arvo is still quite young, we can’t quite get to all the thornier aspects of instituting a lifecycle. For example, we can’t tackle agent version negotiation in full yet; and mark versioning is still not present. This means modifying the validators for our graph modules (that is, validating the graph structure of a notebook vs. a collection) presents a deployment challenge in a two-stream lifecycle.

53+

54+That said, our userspace infrastructure is maturing, so we could at least organise the APIs to those agents; and we could at least slow the development cycle on those agents in favour of the more flexible components of the stack. The front-end specific features, for example, can be deployed on different ships without side effects for other users.

55+

56+So now, before we could launch a stable stream, we had some things to do first:

57+

58+- **We wanted to provide assurance that the userspace suite is relatively stable.** All our remaining stores (invite-store, metadata-store, and contact-store) needed to be modernised to use the same libraries and utilities inside Arvo as newer userspace applications.

59+- **We wanted all our applications to be using graph-store.** If we were going to migrate the entire network to a new userspace model, we shouldn’t undermine the new release cycle process and make it more difficult to test and deploy to meet higher user expectations. We needed to migrate everything first.

60+- **We wanted to release the notification-store**. After the October 2020 groups release, Landscape simply wouldn’t be complete without it.

61+- Finally, **we wanted all of Landscape to use the [Indigo component library](https://github.com/urbit/indigo-react).** Landscape shipped with each application using its own build with handwritten, bespoke DOM components. Once we moved to a single-page application architecture in June 2020, we wanted the same guaranteed consistency for both back-end and front-end code.

62+

63+Most of these are now accomplished; the remaining tasks are awaiting some final tests and UX work. We’re aiming for a stable stream of Landscape to deploy by **January 5, 2021**.

64+

65+What does this mean? For everyday users, you can expect Landscape releases every six weeks; the slate of features and any breaking changes will be flagged well in advance for third-party developers; and you can expect a more thoroughly considered user experience with notes and copy for each new release.

66+

67+And for intrepid users, you can opt-in to a development stream and help us find and eliminate bugs before release to the wider public. This development stream is much like how we've been deploying Landscape up until now — but now it's optional.

68+

69+## Mitosis

70+

71+Describing our progress so candidly can feel strange — after all, it sounds so _early_. But to me, it’s exciting. It’s mitosis.

72+

73+Take another example. For all of Urbit’s history — all until now — Tlon was playing the role of both parents to the project when it was really just an embryonic corporate vehicle itself, fated to become twins. But in the past few months the burgeoning Urbit Foundation’s interim Director, Josh Lehman (`~wolref-podlex`), has begun to ramp up responsibility, taking increasing stewardship over urbit.org and giving it a physical voice, an Otherness, apart from Tlon’s own goals.

74+

75+Now, each day, we stray a little closer to these entities splitting apart, a step closer to the Urbit Foundation and the Tlon Corporation being completely different entities with completely different concerns.

76+

77+The same has occurred with Landscape. Previously Landscape was “_the_ interface to Urbit,” the proof that there was more to the project than a Unix executable. And slowly to those of us at Tlon, it became obvious what it was destined to become: a flagship client for an entire network, a tree branch rooting a world beneath clearnet, the first cell by which other clients might be born. Mitosis can be clumsy to watch; it can be nauseating to experience; it can be difficult to make out what will arrive where.

78+

79+But this is, after all, how a body forms.

content/blog/on-christopher-alexander.mdnew file+70

@@ -0,0 +1,70 @@

1++++

2+title = "On Christopher Alexander"

3+date = "2021-07-19"

4+description = "An overview of his writing and relevance"

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Matt"

8+ship = "~tirwyd-sarmes"

9+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/timelesswaybridge.png"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+_A well-designed house not only fits its context well but also illuminates the problem of just what the context is, and thereby clarifies the life which it accommodates — Notes on the Synthesis of Form_

15+

16+There is an unofficial design canon at Urbit. If you were a fly on the wall, you would hear the name &quot;Christopher Alexander&quot; regularly mentioned around the office. Christopher Alexander is an architect, albeit one who isn&#39;t taught at most architecture schools. However, his work encompasses far more than what is usually understood as &quot;architecture&quot;. Alexander&#39;s work is concerned with the production of functional beauty. What&#39;s remarkable about his books is that they are not empty philosophical manifestos—Alexander gives specific, actionable guidance on creative problems. His best books are manuals for how to construct forms that are &quot;alive&quot;. Alexander threads the needle between highly specific instruction and generalized abstract concepts—his success at this task can be seen in his influence on fields outside of architecture, from computer science to network theory. In his most recent work, Alexander touches upon subjects ranging from religion to math and connects it all into a theory about how the universe functions. But people read him for less lofty reasons: to build a house that is beautiful, design a comprehensive programming language, or figure out how to approach a complex problem. In this post, I&#39;ll give an overview of Alexander&#39;s work and hear from some Urbit staff about his relevance to software development.

17+

18+Alexander&#39;s first book, _Notes on the Synthesis of Form,_ detailed a new way to approach the design process. Released in 1962, it incorporated networks, set theory, language, and math into a new method for accurately modeling and solving design problems. Although Alexander was an architect, the book was concerned with fundamental issues: how do you solve complex problems with hundreds of interconnected variables? The answer lies in decomposing the problem into subsystems and then &quot;diagramming&quot; those subsystems back into a singular integrated form. The process of decomposing a set into [highly-interconnected subsets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_structure) involves a significant amount of computation—Alexander wrote a computer program for the IBM 7090 mainframe which was described in his 1962 paper _HIDECS 2: A Computer Program for the Hierarchical Decomposition of a Set with an Associated Graph._ But this was only half of his design process; after the creation of subsets which are the fundamental units of the design problem, the subsets must be diagrammed. This second half of the process involves integrating and synthesizing all of the variables within a single subset into a conceptual diagram. These fundamental diagrams are then integrated and combined _themselves_ into a single diagram which is the final result of the process. The diagram below is Alexander&#39;s solution to the problem of designing a village in India with a huge number of variables and constraints.

19+

20+

21+

22+_Notes on the Synthesis of Form_ can be seen as embodying many of the tensions in 1960s America. Computers were seen as a suspicious technology which embodied the institutionalized science that created the nuclear bomb and cold war era tensions. These suspicions were understandable: computers were massive esoteric machines housed in entire rooms of university and government buildings. They were physically and mentally inaccessible to the average American citizen, while the elites who did use them were held in contempt by the populace. Student protests against being just another cog in &quot;the machine&quot; or &quot;IBM card&quot; were partly right—at this point in the early 60s, many intellectuals were interested in [cybernetics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics:_Or_Control_and_Communication_in_the_Animal_and_the_Machine) and the [mathematical modeling of &quot;human&quot; problems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Games_and_Economic_Behavior) and Alexander drew from these fields frequently in his book. However, when _Notes on the Synthesis of Form_ came out in 1964 computer culture was shifting towards an alliance with the counterculture—a cultural and technological process that would culminate with these massive pieces of institutional technology becoming &quot;personal computers&quot;. He criticized those who wished to keep math and computers away from human creativity: he saw the possibility of computers yoked to creative human beings. He believed this symbiotic approach to technology was necessary—without a new approach to design, the world would continueto produce the ugliness endemic since the industrial revolution. According to Alexander, a designer could only successfully solve this problem by combining his creativity with the analytic and computational power of machines. Through his books and [presentations](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98LdFA-_zfA), Alexander would have a lasting impact on object-oriented programming and [pattern based thinking in software design](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Patterns).

23+

24+In _Notes on_ _the Synthesis of Form_ Alexander applauds the buildings and towns of many primitive societies but he notes that there is no hope of a return to this &quot;unselfconscious&quot; state. Therefore, modern people must develop a new design process to reach the same end. But what is this end that Alexander is trying to achieve? Alexander states his aim negatively in _Notes on the Synthesis of Form_ as &quot;the absence of misfits between a form and its context&quot;. An [apophatic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophasis) statement might be good enough for mystics but, for someone like Alexander who was concerned with precision, a positive statement was necessary. His positive statement wouldn&#39;t come until 1979 with the publication of _A Timeless Way of Building_.

25+

26+In 1975, Alexander would begin publishing his most famous book series which included _The Timeless Way of Building_ and _A Pattern Language_. In these works Alexander took a more holistic approach to creative production and placed less emphasis on design models. This new approach cemented the importance of culture as the substrate that supports a people&#39;s inherited &quot;pattern language&quot;. Just like a spoken language, a pattern language is developed incrementally over time by people who adapt to the same local environment. Alexander wrote that &quot;a pattern language gives each person who uses it, the power to create an infinite variety of new and unique buildings, just as his ordinary language gives him the power to create an infinite variety of sentences&quot;. _A Pattern Language_ is an attempt to create a new language from observing the dialects of buildings around the world. Alexander recognized that there were large-scale patterns between people and the buildings they found beautiful—a productive tension between specificity and more general patterns common to all human beings. Alexander&#39;s pattern language is therefore more general than historically generated languages. The &quot;pattern language&quot; approach is now native to many software developers: seeing solutions as complexes of layered and interconnected systems.

27+

28+_A Pattern Language_ is the book that is closest to an instruction manual. It is meant to take the prospective builder all the way through the process of designing and constructing a building, neighborhood, or city. Alexander writes about the macro-patterns of cities and the micro-patterns of buildings, from road design to doorknobs. Alexander wanted to enumerate patterns that interlock and produce beauty at different scales while still being as precise and actionable as possible. In _Notes on the Synthesis of Form_, Alexander was concerned with how to best model reality in order to solve a problem, while _A Pattern Language_ focused on the production of a vernacular that would allow people to produce beautiful buildings.

29+

30+

31+

32+Underlying these different pattern languages is a deep, precise, and objective appreciation of an important quality of human existence—what Alexander calls &quot;the quality without a name&quot;. This &quot;quality&quot; is the ultimate goal of Alexander&#39;s work. Greater efficiency and instrumentality cannot be ends in themselves. For Alexander, it is a moral imperative to save the world from ugliness and to make human culture match the natural world in beauty, complexity, and aliveness. It is described in _The Timeless Way of Building_ as &quot;the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named&quot;. The &quot;quality&quot; cannot be named not because it is a vague or airy concept, but because &quot;the quality is too particular, and words too broad&quot;. Nevertheless, Alexander makes an attempt to circumscribe the concept with the words alive, whole, comfortable, free, exact, egoless, eternal.

33+

34+Alexander would say that a Japanese temple and a German church are both approaching the &quot;quality&quot; from different histories and cultures. They are examples of two vernacular languages developing in parallel. The similarity between two modern cities is an example of how we&#39;ve been severed from our pattern languages and therefore the &quot;quality&quot;; we are forced to design from barren earth. Global homogeneity is a symptom of disconnect from both temporal and spatial order—it is the death of our inherited languages.

35+

36+

37+

38+_The Nature of Order_ is Alexander&#39;s most recent book series and explores the metaphysical implications of Alexander&#39;s thought. According to Alexander, the failure of the modern built world is because we have learned to view the world as fundamentally dead. Alexander makes an argument that is close to [hylozoism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hylozoism) or [IIT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory): all structures have varying amounts of aliveness (an aspect of the &quot;quality&quot;). Because of the modern worldview that sees all structure as dead we have become blind to this deeper aspect. The basic component which makes structures alive are strong and varied centers. Furthermore there are fifteen fundamental attributes of centers which allow them to network and become alive. These fifteen abstract units are what patterns are composed of—patterns that are then woven into languages (this process of formalizing implementations as higher-level abstractions should be familiar to any computer scientist). _The Nature of Order_ is the most philosophical and [spiritual](https://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/02/making-the-garden) of Alexander&#39;s work and ties together his overarching preoccupations: how to solve complex human problems and why the task of making the world beautiful is important.

39+

40+You might be wondering how Christopher Alexander is relevant to Urbit?

41+

42+That depends on who you ask.

43+

44+**Galen (~ravmel-ropdyl)**

45+

46+> I suppose the main thing is that most designers tend to become fixated on the mechanics of what they&#39;re building. Most design theory is about how things are made, not what it&#39;s like to live inside of them or actually rely on them on a daily basis. Alexander is much more concerned with the first-person experience of inhabiting a place or a building. I guess his approach is just much more empathetic which means it&#39;s also more practical. He&#39;s concerned with _how people actually live_ and how their environment evolves alongside them.

47+>

48+> We live, work, and develop on Urbit. We&#39;re often the first people to notice bugs because we are the end users ourselves. Alexander makes the point that old buildings were responsive to feedback because the architect was also the inhabitant. This tight feedback means that the system as a whole is dynamic and alive. We want Urbit to be a house that you live in and make yours, because unlike all the other software you use, your Urbit is actually _yours_.

49+

50+**Josh (~wolref-podlex)**

51+

52+> _The Nature of Order_ has had a big influence on my thinking. At first, the idea of all physical structures being alive sounded like something out of a new age bookstore. But not only do I think that Alexander justifies this claim; it started to make intuitive sense when I looked closely at my experience.

53+>

54+> When I first read _The Nature of Order_ I was living in an industrial neighborhood of San Francisco—the scale of the buildings and streets felt inhuman and everything was made of metal, glass, and concrete. I chose to leave. I moved into a 100+ year-old flat and the difference was immediate and visceral. The space felt like it was designed from experience rather than _ex nihilo_. The apartment was meant to be lived in, surrounded by public spaces where strangers could safely spend time outdoors together.

55+>

56+> If physical objects can have the quality of &quot;aliveness&quot; so too can information objects. Alexander&#39;s book is alive. Many of the software projects I&#39;ve worked on have been cold fish. Keeping this quality in mind is an important part of my decision making. I want Urbit to be a living structure.

57+

58+**Édouard (~fabled-faster)**

59+

60+> I enjoy telling people unfamiliar with Urbit and interface design with respect to Urbit, that the object of our work is essentially that of designing an environment &quot;like a piece of paper&quot;.

61+>

62+> Consider how paper as a constrained environment is one that yet can bear nearly any visual expression imaginable—apart from containing drawings or human-made marks, paper can be used to display photographs, paper can be multiplexed to form lenticular holograms, paper can be folded into a crane, etc.

63+>

64+> The &quot;sheet of paper and its resulting forms&quot; I manifest as a design ideal here is what Alexander might refer to as a &quot;semilattice&quot;. A mathematical term he co-opted to describe an ideal structural relationship between elements in a system, as opposed to a &quot;tree&quot;, which is a top-down structural system that forces elements into rigid categorical constraints. [In his own words](https://www.patternlanguage.com/archive/cityisnotatree.html):

65+>

66+> > _For the human mind, the tree is the easiest vehicle for complex thoughts. But the city is not, cannot and must not be a tree. The city is a receptacle for life. If the receptacle severs the overlap of the strands of life within it, because it is a tree, it will be like a bowl full of razor blades on edge, ready to cut up whatever is entrusted to it. In such a receptacle life will be cut to pieces. If we make cities which are trees, they will cut our life within to pieces._

67+>

68+> A city is a good ideal to maintain for the construction of a new internet and notion of personal computing, but I&#39;ve tended towards my own interpretation of a piece of paper as a semilattice-embodying object due to its accessibility and ability to be imagined by anyone, designer or not. Our object of design is that of a receptacle of life, of deep expression, of multiplexed possibilities. When I imagine an Urbit in the not-so-distant future, I imagine it as a _method_ (to contrast against those who pin software&#39;s expression down to &quot;tools&quot; or &quot;functions&quot;) by which I can become &quot;whole&quot; again in a digital context, in all my complexity.

69+

70+Christopher Alexander wanted to collapse the distinction between those who live in buildings and those who design them. Urbit wants to do the same thing with software—in order to not produce ugliness, we should live in what we build. Although we have personal computers now, all of our data is housed in enormous warehouses that make the industrial computers of the 1950s look tiny. What we think of as “our information” actually belongs to someone else and, more often than not, is weaponized against us. Alexander’s moral imperative can be taken and applied to our digital structures. We need to become close with our software again.

content/blog/pin-the-face-that-launches-a-thousand-ships.mdnew file+146

@@ -0,0 +1,146 @@

1++++

2+title = "Pin the Face that Launches a Thousand Ships"

3+date = "2023-04-07"

4+description = "A guest post by ~nospex-larsut"

5+[extra]

6+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/blog/6a0120a85dcdae970b016766c94c14970b-800wi.jpg"

7+author = ""

8+ship = "~nospex-larsut"

9++++

10+_The original article can be found [here](https://nospex-larsut.arvo.network/blog/whyhoon) using [%blog](https://urbit.org/applications/~hanrut-sillet-dachus-tiprel/blog)._

11+

12+

13+

14+## Pin the Face that Launches a Thousand Ships[^1] ##

15+_A short piece addressing some of the standard hesitations to learning Hoon, considered in light of all of the recent exciting network activity._

16+

17+### Setting The Table ###

18+One can draw many distinctions between the Urbit apps that were available this time last year and those released thus far in 2023, but the most important of these may be that the former were apps noticed and used almost exclusively by users already on Urbit, where the latter - notably Pongo, Realm, Tirell Studio, Groups 2, Portal, etc - are apps that are _creating Urbit users_.

19+

20+Prior to the start of 2023, the superficial, yet incomplete, take was something to the effect that much of Urbit’s appeal was largely an affinity with the ideas and principles surrounding the project.

21+

22+People who found their way to Urbit latched on to philosophical entry points, among them values such as calm computing, decentralized/privacy/data-ownership maximalism, or aspirations of replacing a generations-deep legacy computing system that entrenched an ethos of doing things fundamentally inefficiently & incorrectly, in ways that not only hobbled the potential of the internet, but resulted in outright harm to its users through establishing platform models and incentives that consciously sought to manipulate the behavior of those users in countless subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

23+

24+Urbit was a nexus, collecting people from disparate backgrounds & disciplines to something like a spiritual oasis, yes, though one seemingly situated a million miles from anywhere familiar to the outside world; its appeal was more a function of the shared ethos of the community and a shared sense of its potential rather than the existence of new & immediately useful alternatives for day-to-day compute tasks.

25+

26+The energy of Assembly '22 was palpaple; it almost seemed that widespread adoption was around the corner. Inevitably, some of the post-Assembly ‘22 buzz seemed to fizzle as the ensuing months went by; many ships launched during that time went dormant, wondering if the potential hinted at would materialize; the shallow criticisn/meme for getting on to Urbit became, “I’m here… um, now what.”

27+

28+This whole time though, the project was simultaneously also an incredibly busy construction site.

29+

30+Remarkably short-lived, “I’m here… um, now what?’ is unraveling with the realization that this universe has always been accelerating, and this new wave of apps establishes a very visible & powerful reference point for truly appreciating that acceleration and the distance traveled; after what seemed like a brief post-Assembly fizzle, the network is again kinetic and crackling with energy, but in reality it was never slowing down.

31+

32+The latest generation of apps marks an important shift in the trajectory of Urbit adoption. Much of this is possible thanks to the proliferation of hosting options - whether [Native Planet’s](https://nativeplanet.io/) self-hosted solutions or through turnkey models - which collectively have vastly streamlined the Urbit onboarding process such that getting on the network is no longer the equivalent of scaling a forbidding & remote mountain peak, arriving at the threshold of a silent monastery, heaving its heavy door ajar to find it seemingly abandoned only a thin sliver of light to illuminate your path, nobody there to acknowledge your arrival much less offer a tour. The thrill of having finally gotten there dampened by the increasing sense that all of its life is subterranean and the real journey is just beginning.[^2]

33+

34+Single-click onboarding and preloaded apps & groups may not seem like a lot for newcomers, but these things have increased tremendously the ability to get on Urbit compared to just six months ago.

35+

36+And just as a selection of competing hosting providers expanded the number of possible onramps, this new crop of Urbit apps likewise provides a complimentary function as entry points - hidden doors to Urbit embedded in the Apple/Android app stores - in ways that Urbit apps never enjoyed previously, all helping to further reduce the friction of onboarding by orders of magnitude. A user searching for a Telegram alternative stumbles across Pongo; new eyes find Urbit without ever intentionally seeking it out.

37+

38+The animating ideas behind the project, I think, remain as alive as ever - Urbit does not need to jockey to become the ‘current thing’ if it can much more efficiently become the undercurrent thing; without having to waste a single breath converting users at the margin on the necessity or virtue of recreating the web in a decentralized & privacy-oriented manner, new users are able to become advocates for apps that provide practical utility for day-to-day compute, creative, and communication needs - but that also happen to be built on such infrastructure. The yew tree doesn’t propagate itself by trying to convince the bird that it is desirable that there be more yew trees in the world, it just wraps its seed in a tasty & nutritious berry and lets the bird carry it off.

39+

40+Compelling apps, built on continually-improving and innovative infrastructure & development tooling is one piece of the adoption curve. These things bring users, who bring perspectives, feedback, ideas, wants, and needs. It brings their attention to earn it. If they are spending time on Urbit apps, they will also be exposed to whatever else is being shared on Urbit through those apps – what will catch their attention that maybe they are not seeing elsewhere? Suffice to say this is all basically network effects 101, so on to the question of learning Hoon.

41+

42+### Some Grains of Salt ###

43+Perhaps that was a lot of table-setting to get to the original inspiration of this piece, in which I wish to present some arguments to the standard objections or concerns that seem to arise for people thinking of learning Hoon. My aim is not to twist any arms or legs, but only to offer some considerations for those on the fence. Hopefully the preceding bit of history at least reveals some shred of the potential opportunities for Hooners (and other creatives - we absolutely need those as well).

44+

45+But first the grain of salt with which you should take the following:

46+I currently Hoon at something approximating a tenth-grade level. I am by no means a natural born developer, nor am I moving towards a dynamic career switch to full-time Urbit dev. Not by any stretch of the imagination. While I am interested in continuing to learn Hoon for a variety of reasons, none are likely to reverberate very far beyond my own ship.

47+

48+My Hoon education began in the summer/fall ’22 cohort of Hoon School Live. In my early 40’s, I walked into it slightly intimidated by its reputation, and with a personal technical background not much deeper than writing Excel formulas, a little Python, and building simple websites (like, 20 years ago). At the moment, I am much better at reading it than writing it, but thanks to HSL & ASL (and everyone involved with those efforts), it does make sense to me.

49+

50+So despite not exactly practicing what all I am about to preach, the foregoing, combined with having talked to enough people on the fence about learning Hoon, I feel somewhat qualified to at least offer some perspective for those considering the question.

51+

52+### The Standard Hesitations ###

53+The following hesitancies seem to be the recurring ones, and we’ll take them one at a time, although they share a significant degree of overlap.

54+<ol>

55+<li> But I already know languages x, y, z, etc and can build things with them now.</li>

56+<li> I hear Hoon is very difficult / weird / etc.</li>

57+<li> Urbit’s future is uncertain; investing in learning Hoon seems risky.</li>

58+<li> I don’t see many immediate jobs for Hoon devs.</li>

59+</ol>

60+

61+__Hesitancy 1: But I _already know_ languages x, y, z, etc and can build things with them _now_.__

62+

63+A valid contention in that one has invested in skills they are eager to put to use or continue to use. But can you build what you want to build - and where you want to build it? And what is the cost in terms of personal satisfaction to working on something which doesn’t truly excite you?

64+

65+There is something of the sunk-cost fallacy is at work here. It is not always a bad impulse, and opportunity costs are very real. But if there is something compelling about Urbit - and the fact that one is at least seriously considering learning Hoon suggests this is the case - and one is willing to view their existing proficiency in some other language as a demonstration of their capability to learn any programming language, then existing knowledge should not act as a barrier to pursuing new knowledge, particularly if there is a suspicion that working on Urbit may afford more intellectually stimulating and enjoyable opportunities.

66+

67+Consider also that a person working on things that truly animate them, despite maybe being relatively less experienced in the language, nonetheless has much more room to grow in a smaller pool where they may create closer connections, have more access to the perspectives of experienced devs, and get noticed for their contributions faster than those that may exist for a person working on things they are decidedly less passionate about amidst a pool of thousands.

68+

69+Yet another upside of working in Urbit is the sheer amount of projects yet to be built (not all require Hoon, btw); projects that may be intriguing to a developer but which already exist in some other language/product have yet to be built on here, and there is a need for them. The amount of still low-hanging fruit and infrastructure work remaining to be done, let alone potential app and utilities, is substantial, and this is a community that generally speaking, respects anybody who can come in and start contributing with minimal direction or permission.

70+

71+And is time spent learning Hoon really time spent not building things? Are you not building skills, reputation, friendships, problem-solving skills, camaraderie - building a better self - throughout the learning process? One can easily present the argument that the cost in this regard is much less than it may seem at first glance.

72+

73+Since one can only try to subjectively weigh the opportunities open to them with their current skills against the nebulous costs of _not_ pursuing something that has piqued their interest, the dilemma often cannot but remain unanswered until one takes the steps to find out; until then, it remains a persistent, nagging 'what if'?. It may take several months to feel really comfortable writing Hoon, but there is a relatively low cost to spending a few weeks to dive in and see if one has an aptitude or affinity for it.

74+

75+__Hesitancy 2: Hoon is difficult and/or weird.__

76+

77+Recognizing that there are a lot of runes, and that Hoon is odd compared to other languages,

78+

79+- learning just a handful[^3] of them along with the basic families (create cores with | runes, call functions with % runes, conditionals statements are built with ? runes, etc) will get one well on their way. </li>

80+- if Hoon is not your first language, you have already demonstrated a capacity for becoming comfortable working within a framework of structure and syntax that was, relative to your previous inexperience, alien and weird. And while there are additional wrinkles in dealing with a functional language, the majority of CS concepts remain relevant and are transferable.

81+

82+And if Hoon is your first language, it is all uncharted territory anyway and not having anything to compare it to means one is essentially in the same situation as in learning any new language, and in that respect it mirrors almost any endeavor to grasp new modes of problem-solving under a unique set of conditions and constraints. Even if you do not stick with Hoon, the new perspectives in problem-solving experience are valuable, and most of the fundamental concepts will be transferable to other languages.

83+

84+You might also consider how to use Hoon’s reputation for difficulty to your advantage from the standpoint that, if you are firmly convinced that it is or will be unduly difficult, then that should yield a much deeper satisfaction after proving you are in fact capable of learning it.

85+

86+And from a more opportunistic standpoint, realize that others who allow this reputation to dissuade them create outsized opportunities for those who are willing to learn it. One can very usefully calibrate expectations here to use the reputation to provide some cover - if it really is that hard, iit is ok to not get it at first, and you can succeed where others gave up or failed to even try.

87+

88+Speaking from my own experience, the sheer amount of terminology was somewhat overwhelming at first, and this was true of both HSL & ASL (more so the latter, IMO). Many of the names seem arbitrary, but like anything, making it familiar is largely a function of effort.

89+

90+Recognize that Hoon's unique syntax and functional paradigm are integral to its design and purpose. Instead of trying to force parallels between Hoon and other languages or concepts you already know, just immerse yourself in it with an open mind and willingness to grasp its distinct features and the reasoning behind them.

91+

92+<div class="polaroid">

93+ <img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/docs/userspace/hoon-school/binary-tree-bottom-row-full.png" alt="Tree">

94+ <div class="container">

95+

96+ <p>See - it's easy!</p>

97+ </div>

98+</div>

99+

100+__Hesitancy 3: Urbit’s future is uncertain; investing in learning Hoon seems risky.__

101+

102+Much of the table-setting for this piece was an attempt to frame the potential opportunity for devs of any level. Keeping things in perspective, Urbit is just about to hit [3,000 active ships](https://twitter.com/urbitfoundation/status/1637931937351491584). There are several reasons why recent activity may be much more indicative of even greater future growth than one might assume from looking at the chart:

103+<ul>

104+<li>a. Maybe very obviously, the growth of the last three months is not simply a 1:1 reflection of the work of the last three months, but of the many preceding years of core development that made a significant increase in percentage terms within a very short interval possible. The stage is set for much faster growth.</li>

105+<li>b. Previously mentioned, but all these threads are interconnected in that, the more eyes on Urbit, the more ideas, talent and additional users will be introduced to, and recognize the depth, of the opportunity here. A steadily stabilizing building environment (thanks to a)) that attracts and can support more users should continue to build momentum. </li>

106+</ul>

107+

108+Remaining sober about reality, 3,000 users is not exactly a ton in web 2 terms; for Urbit, it is simultaneously very many and very little. But with better apps providing more reasons to be on Urbit, working in unison with better UX and onboarding, those users have more reason to stay engaged with Urbit once they are on, which means anything an aspiring Hooner or creator can think of to give them compelling reasons to make them even more engaged is an opportunity.

109+

110+Deliberately twisting the fomo screws a little, it is as true for learning Hoon as it is of anything else that the more widely adopted a platform or language becomes, the safer a bet it will be in terms of stability and longevity. With the accretion of that stability however, the window for realizing the benefits of gaining early experience and exposure in a less-crowded space diminishes accordingly as the sense of perceived riskiness in staking ground there decreases. Like any investment, uncertaintly about the future carries the gift of a difficult to quantity but very real species of camaraderie, credibility, and respect that is only available to those willing to get involved at early stages, and which is lost as the project starts to look increasingly like a 'sure thing.' Hard to value, but weigh that aspect when considering if one should begin learning now or wait until things look ‘slightly more certain’ - what is the bar for this certainty? What is ‘certain enough’?

111+

112+Urbit, by (beautiful) design, is a very low-time preference project in some respects, but it is growing quickly. And the longer you’ve been watching Urbit grow, the more perspective you have of how much can happen in a very short time.

113+

114+When there are 10,000, 100,000 active ships it will be a trip in itself to remember that you started learning Hoon back when there were "only" 3,000, and contributed in maybe some non-trivial way to attract some quantity of new ones by building something you were excited about building.

115+

116+__Hesitancy 4: I don’t see many immediate jobs for Hoon devs.__

117+

118+_Not yet you don’t_. Much of the response to Objection 3 is also relevant here.

119+

120+The pool of Urbit companies is not fixed. It is not an insurmountable obstacle to start up a small-scale dev shop with a handful of talented devs.

121+Money flowing into Urbit is being reported with increasing frequency, and this is only the incoming money that you _hear about_. As Urbit grows, money will chase money, bringing more jobs and more opportunities. For better, or worse, of course, money changes things - more money will necessarily mean more discipline, more focus on shipping product, etc. But not having money changes things too. Money comes here in no small part because it sees the energy and intensity with which this community has been building out Urbit - regardless of whether money was flowing in or out of it - it attracted devs because the project itself was an ambitious worthwhile good in itself.

122+

123+There is much opportunity here for bright, motivated developers willing to make the effort to learn. One only has to bump the total current dev headcounts up against the growing momentum of the project to see the opportunity, whether it be in core projects, apps, or novel pairings with creators to determine ways to distribute and produce content on Urbit. The speed of deployment on Urbit compared to other projects and relative exposure to other platforms affords a significant advantage to motivated, talented people in terms of visibility - when an app gets published on Urbit, everyone sees it.

124+

125+### Wrapping Up ###

126+Hopefully the above provides some perspetive on reframing some of the standard hesitancies. None of them are irrational. However, if none of the above sways you, ask what projects or features might materialize on Urbit that would make you wish you started learning Hoon a year ago (which, in the grand scheme, would make you a reasonably well-experienced Hooner) and then consider that you could wait for that thing to materialize, or play an active part in making it a reality that will attract many other users to the network, along with making others feel like they should have started learning Hoon a year ago.

127+

128+And if the Hoon question is indeed a recurrent & nagging one, attempt to replace it with the question, “two months from now (approximately the duration of an HSL cohort), would I rather have tried learning Hoon and discovered that I don’t like it and be done with the question, or still be sitting here wondering if I should learn Hoon?”

129+

130+The resources for learning Hoon are growing:<br>

131+● [Hoon School Live](https://developers.urbit.org/courses/hsl)<br>

132+● [App School Live](https://developers.urbit.org/courses/asl) <br>

133+● [App Workshop Live](https://developers.urbit.org/courses/awl) <br>

134+● An upcoming [Core Dev course](https://developers.urbit.org/courses/csl)<br>

135+● The growing corpus of [documentation](https://developers.urbit.org/reference/hoon/overview)<br>

136+● And of course the most valuable resource of all is all the people on the network who are willing to answer questions and help one learn. Find them in the Hacker House.

137+<p>

138+

139+If something about Urbit is drawing you toward it, if the project resonates with you in a way that other things in tech do not - if you are truly intrigued by it and want to be here - it is reasonable to assert that the process of learning Hoon is not simply a tax with questionable upside, but a productive process in and of itself; that the very process of learning it will embed you deeper into a space you want to be in.

140+

141+So learn Hoon. Not only is it fun, but as an Urbiter, it is something of a cultural heritage, and the conduit between reality and whatever your endless imagination conceives Urbit’s potential to be - space here is wide open, and any of today’s aspiring Hooners has the potential to pin the face that launches a thousand ships.

142+

143+----------------

144+[^1]: To 'pin a face' is to declare a variable in Hoon.

145+[^2]: Maybe some slight dramatization; this aspect also made it fun for those not in need of immediate gratification.

146+[^3]: [See 'Rune Utilization in Hoon'](https://developers.urbit.org/blog/rune-frequency-202212)

content/blog/pki-maze.mdnew file+70

@@ -0,0 +1,70 @@

1++++

2+title = "Designing a Permanent Personal Identity"

3+date = "2019-11-26"

4+description = "A public key infrastructure (PKI) is a system for binding a set of keys to a name. Sometimes a small amount of metadata is included."

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Philip Monk"

8+ship = "~wicdev-wisryt"

9+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/pki-maze.png"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+A public key infrastructure (PKI) is a system for binding a set of keys to a name. Sometimes a small amount of metadata is included.

15+

16+Existing PKIs include PGP-style ["web of trust"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust), [SSL certificates](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_authority), [ZeroTier](https://www.zerotier.com/lf-announcement/), [Keybase](https://keybase.io/), [OpenID](https://openid.net/what-is-openid/), [Mozilla Persona](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Mozilla/Persona), and [Login with Google](https://developers.google.com/identity). These take unique approaches to the problem and have achieved some degree of success, but none provide globally consistent, permanent, and completely self-owned identities. Exhaustive exploration and categorization is unfortunately out of scope for this post, so we'll just describe Urbit's approach to achieving these properties in our PKI.

17+

18+In Urbit, a "name" is often called a "ship" or an "address" because we use the metadata in the PKI to make names routable. The total data is two 256-bit asymmetric keys, a cryptographic suite number (to allow changing crypto algorithms), the revision number of the key, and the name of a ship that will route for it. This sums to less than 128 bytes of data.

19+

20+Each PKI trades off various properties. We chose a tripartite system so that appropriate choices can be made for different use cases. Here, we explore the various properties we chose by following a series of binary choices -- the idea maze.

21+

22+There are two sorts of PKI: either you can change your keys or not. If you cannot, then your name is impermanent, for no one can keep a set of keys secure forever. Even if your opsec never fails, eventually your crypto algorithms may be compromised.

23+

24+However, if you sacrifice the ability to change your keys, you can have a very nice property: self-attesting keys. If your name is a hash of your public key information, then no other source of information is required to verify you are who you say you are. This is a useful property since it requires no coordination at all. Many things are impermanent, especially during development. It also provides a way to try out the network without obtaining a permanent address.

25+

26+This is our first stop in the idea maze. We call this sort of name a "comet". A comet's name is the 128-bit hash of its public keys.

27+

28+However, Urbit is yours and it's forever. You shouldn't have to change your name every time you change your keys. So, we go back and take the other choice: you must be able to change your keys.

29+

30+To change keys, you must sign a message with the old keys revoking them and supplying the new ones[^1]. The question is what happens if the old keys also sign a second set of new keys. This could happen if an attacker obtained your old keys after the fact. This is important because one of the reasons to be able to change your keys is to invalidate the old ones so that they have no power.

31+

32+We have two options again: the PKI may be globally consistent or not. To be globally consistent means that if you believe a name is bound to a set of keys, then nobody on the network will disagree.

33+

34+If you don't require global consistency, you may sign this message and send it to all your neighbors, and they pass it on, and hopefully it gets to most of the network quickly. However, if one of those ships receives two contradictory versions of this message, the only thing it can do is trust the first one it heard, which may be different than what someone else heard. Thus, this is pairwise consistent but globally inconsistent. This is essentially how the pre-blockchain Ames network worked, though key changes were not actually implemented. Because global consistency is a valuable property, we looked at other options.

35+

36+For a globally consistent PKI that allows you to revoke keys, you need to be able to distinguish between two cryptographically valid messages to determine which was signed first. The dual problem could be solved easily — you can prove a message is signed after another by including the signature of the first in the second. This is equivalent to reading out a newspaper headline to prove a message was recorded after a given day.

37+

38+However, the problem of proving one message was sent before any later ones inverts the problem. You can solve this with newspapers by placing the message in the text of the newspaper. However, while reading a newspaper requires no central party, writing one does. For a long time, this sort of message was always handled by a central party. SSL revocations are managed by a few central parties. When you buy property, it's not sufficient to have the previous owner sign the title — this must be entered into a central land registry. Otherwise, the owner may sell their property to multiple people and there would be no way to determine who is the new owner. With the land registry, all you need to do is ask the registry which sale happened first, and that's the one that counts.

39+

40+However, Urbit is yours and it's forever. Trusting central registries jeopardizes both. The keen reader will notice that the problem of determining which key rotation happened first is exactly the double-spend problem that Satoshi solved with his proof of work algorithm for Bitcoin. His first block famously includes a newspaper headline to prove he didn't mine the block before that date. In a beautiful duality, his own algorithm proves that he didn't mine it after that date.[^2]

41+

42+Some argue that blockchain is only good for money. This is myopic and is generally based on the experience that its most valuable application so far has been money. However, blockchain is a cryptographic primitive to do what was previously impossible: prove that one message was signed before another without a central party. Blockchain was discovered by someone trying to create digital money, and he needed that primitive, but that doesn't mean that's all it's good for.

43+

44+Thus, we store our PKI data on a blockchain for our second kind of name: planets. A planet is a 32-bit address which has key information stored on the blockchain.[^3] The owner of a planet may broadcast new PKI data by adding it to the blockchain. Any later messages by the old keys will be rejected, and everyone on the network will listen to the blockchain for key data. Thus, we have global consistency, permanence, and self sovereignty. We know of no other solution that can provide these properties.

45+

46+However, while small individually, the aggregate PKI data for all nodes on the network may become very large. This is not an issue for comets because nobody needs to store comet keys except for those which they're talking with, and even those can be garbage-collected and re-requested and verified. For planets, there is a canonical set of keys, and somebody must store that. There are about 2^32^, or 4 billion planets. If the PKI data is about 100 bytes for each planet, this is about 400 GB of data. This may be more than most users wish to store, but it's small enough that it would be very cheap for someone to host this data for many users[^4].

47+

48+This information is currently stored directly on the Ethereum 1.0 blockchain, but as is well understood in blockchain circles this approach will not scale beyond a certain point. Many chains are pursing designs that allow the users of the smart contracts to store locally the data associated with the contracts they care about and only commit hashes to the chain. We expect there to be several viable options for this by the time our scaling needs exceed what's provided by Ethereum 1.0. This will free us from the cost of hosting the PKI data on all Ethereum nodes, but the data must still be stored somewhere. Any service that could handle such a large amount of data would inherently centralize the network.

49+

50+However, 4 billion is not enough addresses for every device on the planet today, much less in a few decades. So, we apply our maxim of re-examining our choices at each level for each use case. Examining the idea maze above, we cannot use the blockchain option for everything since the data is too big. However, it's not actually necessary for each of your devices to have its own self-sovereign identity separate from your planet. So we choose the option of using a central registry: your own planet.

51+

52+We allocate 4 billion "moons" to each of those planets. A moon is a 64-bit address whose 32-bit suffix is its planet. Your planet can easily store the keys for its own moons, and anyone who needs to talk to your moons can ask you for the keys.

53+

54+This is the sense in which moons are true ships: they're permanent names and you own them completely, as long as you own the planet. However, they're not independent ships — their keys can always be revoked by their planet.

55+

56+To create a sane network, we require global consistency for all our names. There are three other properties; pick any two:

57+

58+- Comets are impermanent, self sovereign, and plentiful.

59+

60+- Planets are permanent, self sovereign, and not plentiful.

61+

62+- Moons are permanent, not self sovereign, and plentiful.

63+

64+Fancifully, comets are wayward celestial bodies that are great for testing and miscellaneous low-value things that won't last for long. Planets are where you can build a home and shape it into anything you want it to be. People can always find your planet; it's not going anywhere. Moons are useful for special purposes, like storage, heavy industry, and anything else you might want to do off-planet.[^5]

65+

66+[^1]: Or the equivalent with a hierarchical key structure. In practice, you want to have a master key which signs a junior key for everyday use. You use the master key to rotate the junior key.

67+[^2]: More strictly: it proves that he didn't mine it after the other blocks currently on the Bitcoin blockchain. It only gives an ordering within the chain, not a literal timestamp.

68+[^3]: In addition to planets, there are stars and galaxies. From a PKI perspective they're treated exactly like planets, but on the network they provide infrastructure services like routing.

69+[^4]: In practice, this will likely be an included service by your sponsoring star. It could be a separate service, but it will be very cheap because it's a commodity and the "cost of production" is very cheap. At any rate, it should never rise above the capital cost of a 400GB hard drive.

70+[^5]: To extend the metaphor, stars are a neighborhood to live in -- they're easier for other planets to see, so when they want to send you a message they look for your star first. If they don't even know where your star is, they can certainly find your star's galaxy, and that will be enough to locate the star. Of course, if your star is not providing satisfactory service, you can take your planet and move to another star.

content/blog/platform-decay.mdnew file+50

@@ -0,0 +1,50 @@

1++++

2+title = "Platform Decay, Decentralized Marketplaces, and Urbit"

3+date = "2020-05-07"

4+description = "Urbit is calm computing. Calm commerce follows naturally. "

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Nicholas Simmons"

8+ship = "~simfur-ritwed"

9+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/platform-decay-preview.png"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+## Platform decay, decentralized marketplaces, and Urbit

15+

16+The current model followed by almost all social media services is one of easy and free participation in exchange for advertising and data collection. If you’re a fan of decentralized projects like Urbit, or just someone who pays attention to the ongoing debate over social media incentives, you’re likely to be familiar by now with a central critique of this model. There are historical reasons for why we ended up here: ad-serving and user-tracking technology outpaced subscription and micro-payment models because of recalcitrance by banks and regulatory hassles that prevented ‘real money’ from easily integrating into websites. Instead, we pay in eyeballs and analytical data.

17+

18+When we take a moment to think about possible alternatives, we usually fixate on that original bad bargain—’free’ in exchange for ads—before lamenting that first-mover advantage, critical masses of users, and sophisticated algorithms have made it very hard to see successful challenges to the reign of sites like Facebook and Twitter. We’d be happy to pay a few pennies to have an ad-free, data-secure alternative. But this critique misses something larger. There are, in fact, plenty of colossal Internet businesses that actually do charge people money to participate: e-commerce platforms. Some of these enable the sale of virtual goods and content (Steam, Patreon, Spotify), some physical goods (eBay, Etsy), and some both (Amazon, Kickstarter). Because these commercial platforms had to figure out how to make online payments easy and secure for mass audiences for their core business to work, they avoided the total dependency on ad revenue that social media sites have always had. Unfortunately, several factors have conspired to push e-commerce platforms closer and closer to a social media–style business model—by manipulating user behavior and prioritizing ad revenue and branding deals over providing a fair marketplace for ordinary buyers and sellers.

19+

20+E-commerce platforms, as generally perceived by the public, operate on a simple ‘deal’: users (small or large, individual or corporate) can buy and sell goods and services on the platform, facilitated by search engines and payment processors, and augmented by reputation systems and safeguards for buyers and sellers. In exchange, the platform takes a small cut of the revenue that passes through. E-commerce platforms were a key part of the genuinely revolutionary effects of ‘Web 2.0’. As software ate the world, it uncovered siloed value that had been previously inaccessible. This was particularly true for items with a high potential value, but a small market-base. Just as social connection technologies—from Usenet to Facebook—enabled people with niche interests to find each other, mass-platform e-commerce sites allowed buyers and sellers of niche goods—physical or virtual—to find each other and transact, thus granting those goods actual value, and their owners revenue.

21+

22+The ‘deal’ that eBay, Amazon, and the others made with millions of buyers and sellers was a great business proposition for over twenty years. They could take advantage of centuries worth of asymmetrically siloed value, now searchable worldwide, and take a ~10% cut. Their moat was in sophisticated search algorithms, network effects, and, as time went on, finding ways to make online payments as easy and secure as possible—the road not taken by early social media companies like Myspace that decided in favor of reliance on ad revenues. Crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe and Kickstarter reduced friction in online fundraising in exchange for a cut. Patreon applied a similar approach to regular support of individual content creators; Spotify, Soundcloud, and Pandora made it easier to legally stream music. All took advantage of the same ability to extract value from widely distributed niche products. All offered their vendor-users a version of the same deal: facilitation of niche broadcasting in exchange for a visibility and transaction fee.

23+

24+The problem is that the deal is now decaying rapidly, without any prospect of recovery. The behavior of every mature e-commerce vendor platform clearly shows an accelerating trend towards exploiting user data, serving ads, pushing exploitative auxiliary services like high-interest loans, and taking advantage of vendor lock-in and near monopolies on customer attention to warp marketplaces for the benefit of large brands. In other words, they’re all double-dipping.

25+

26+Clicking through normal transactions on PayPal, for example, invariably produces ads for subprime credit cards; similarly, Patreon users can now borrow against their (expected) future earnings. Spotify has reinvented pay-to-play for artists and labels; eBay has leaned hard on promoted listings, with extra fees, in order for vendor offerings to show up in search results. Amazon has increasingly ‘gated’ third-party offerings in categories and brands in which not only their own ‘store brand’ products, but those of large brands with which they have struck external deals, compete. A growing number of consumer products have essentially been prevented from being resold on Amazon or eBay by the threat of spurious, but expensive, anti-counterfeiting lawsuits by major brands, thus buoying new sales by effectively eliminating resale value.

27+

28+There are several key reasons for this. One is simply that as the initial burst of siloed value being accessed, revalued, and bought and sold subsides, the number of transactions plateaus and e-commerce platform revenue with it. The traditional model of venture capital funding for platform businesses, however, demands an exponential growth in profits; the exploitation of customers and vendors becomes irresistible in order to maintain these profit trajectories. Another reason is that as e-commerce platforms accrued large userbases of both buyers and sellers, they began to act like other online platform businesses—distorting marketplaces and shaping user behavior to maximize retention and profit, rather than offering a straightforward service.

29+

30+Platforms exploit user data because they can. Their ownership of your data is baked into the client–server architecture on which their businesses run, and the system cannot correct itself. Chris Dixon, in his prescient [essay](https://onezero.medium.com/why-decentralization-matters-5e3f79f7638e) about the future of decentralized commercial protocols, presents an S-curve whereby a platform business transitions between serving its users in order to grow and achieve market dominance, and eventually exploiting those users once it has achieved that dominance. In particular, early-stage e-commerce platforms do anything they can to benefit vendors willing to sell on their platform. Vendor presence is vital to attracting customers, but once those customers have been captured, the vendors become the [competition](https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its-own-sellers-to-launch-competing-products-11587650015?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=1). Customer eyeballs and dollars are a finite resource, and platforms carefully calculate the potential profit to be made from showing customers one product or another. The lack of platform-agnostic reputation systems also aids vendor capture by platforms. Rather than optimize for a system in which any buyer or seller with good external credibility (measured by, for example, credit scores or relevant business licenses) can use their platforms as a commercial intermediary, eBay and Amazon use seniority and internal transaction records to determine vendor permissions. Since sui generis internal reputation scores can’t be taken to other platforms, these policies create a sunk cost of effort and reputation which traps vendors within specific marketplaces, without an easy exit.

31+

32+Market consolidation and bureaucratic pressures for legibility also work against maintaining a square deal with vendors and users. The midpoint on Dixon’s S-curve, when exploitation of vendors begins to occur, can also be seen as the point where a customer base is solid enough to be marketed to advertisers and major brands who can pay for favorable search placement. Such large, legible deals are easier to negotiate, easier for individual executives to take credit for, and are useful in meeting arbitrary investor benchmarks and buoying quarterly revenue statistics; but they privilege larger brands with larger ad budgets over ordinary sellers in a niche. Another major downside of large, centralized e-commerce platforms is that, like any large bureaucracy, they have PR and regulatory concerns that provide an attack surface for regulators, activists, litigious brands, and monopolists seeking to crush competition—almost invariably at the expense of vendors and customers.

33+

34+Even more subtle and worrying effects come when e-commerce platforms realize that the actual products being shown do not have equal chances of being purchased, therefore delivering revenue to the platform itself. This applies even when the products being compared have nothing in common: apples to oranges; cat food to hiking boots. Accuracy of internal search engine results, and a comprehensive spread of offerings, are regularly sacrificed to the aim of placing a ‘sticky,’ lowest-common-denominator product in front of the customer. I recently ordered vegetable seeds on Amazon; after a few searches for different kinds of seeds, I started having to wade through ‘premium placement’ ads for farmer-themed romance novels before I could view, and choose from, the actual seeds on offer. This deprecation of niche products is ongoing and makes the interface of such platforms less and less navigable. It’s also worth mentioning that, frequently, such deprecation has very little to do with durable consumer interest or a free-market determination of product value. Rather, they come from a ‘thumb on the scale’ of large advertising campaigns that seek to convert a wide range of consumer curiosity into sales for a particular product at a particular time.

35+

36+The manufacturing of consumer desire in this way feels creepy. It’s frustrating to have your tastes dictated to you by whoever has the biggest ad spend. It also spells the end of small business on the Internet—you can spend years mastering knowledge of a profitable niche, but if Amazon profiles your customers and decides they’re more likely to spend their money on the latest Pixar DVD, your listings will be shoved below the fold. Pixar paid for placement and you didn’t; the Pixar ad placement deal made a splash in the quarterly report, your fees didn’t. In cultural terms, this threatens to create a winner-take-all situation that will prevent new and niche artists and thinkers from gaining attention at the expense of explicitly placed, ‘premium’ content.

37+

38+Again, this is all accelerated by the way that ad sales function; platforms like broadly popular content and products because the larger number of customers searching for and purchasing them creates more granular data and increased opportunities for micro-targeting ads. This incentive leads to the increasing invisibility of long-tail, niche content or products whose appeal has less to do with lowest-common-denominator addictive virality, whether it’s the repair manual for your ‘85 Toyota or a copy of Plato’s _Republic_. It also accelerates the stampede toward a ‘sharing’ and ‘renting’ economy; when ad impressions are a sizable part of company revenue, forcing customers to return to ad-infested platforms to continue renting objects or content, rather than making one-time purchases, is a no-brainer.

39+

40+There’s a nightmare scenario here, a kind of hybrid, zombie brainchild of Jean Baudrillard’s concerns about the simulation of common meaning and Peter Thiel’s arguments about the stealthy hollowing-out of industrial capacity. In this nightmare future, financial and legal regulation strangle the viability of anything like a real industry, and we’re left with a handful of incumbent platforms which have concluded that the smartest move is to just sell vaporware ‘content,’ collectible bobbleheads, and sugar water. The supposed niche of any platform business is academic at this level; Amazon, Spotify, and Patreon are simply machines for converting user attention into the highest-margin purchases possible. The ‘high-velocity trash economy’ (h/t Pierre Rochard) increasingly shows itself as a network of funnels by which insider prognostications about government and central bank policy are turned into profits, with the illusion of productive activity serving only as window dressing. This deforming process extends all the way down to the vagaries of the consumer economy. If there is no financial reason for available consumer offerings to be anything we actually need, they can and will be deprecated and displaced; useful goods and services will be sidelined by literal trash that has the ‘financial’ logic of maintaining an unbroken, upward metric by virtue of direct parasitism upon the human brainstem.

41+

42+The implications are obvious: if we can’t make markets obey a representation of factual reality, we won’t be able to build stuff we need in the factual world. The damage which has been done by our replacement of infrastructural capacity with nebulous thematic concerns that happen to feed our dopamine receptors is becoming rapidly apparent to anyone paying attention. If our search results for ‘hammer’ algorithmically default to pro wrestling merchandise, that changes our real, physical lives. Our ability to go out and build things with a hammer is diminished, and so is, implicitly, the importance placed on that act of building by the culture that surrounds us. The physical world of technology, no less than the informational, is a slippery pile of patches and detours. When JPL scientists reestablished contact with an early satellite after decades of inactivity, they relied on vintage computer parts from eBay to communicate with it. In some areas (cars, hand tools, some analog electronics) the present consumer offerings have generally declined, in terms of reliability and user serviceability, from a zenith some twenty or forty years ago. Forty-year-old Toyota trucks often fetch more, in equivalent value, than they did when new, because regulations and planned obsolescence have prevented the ongoing production of trucks that meet the same standards of reliability and fuel economy. The failings of our just-in-time supply chain have likewise been made blatantly obvious by the disruptions of COVID-19. Both argue in the strongest terms against allowing consumer-facing e-commerce to be captured by what are rapidly becoming payola-driven entertainment platforms rather than marketplaces for essential goods, whether car parts, beef jerky, or N95 masks.

43+

44+So what’s the solution? Many prescient observers envision decentralized protocols to safeguard the data of vendors and buyers, and algorithmic representation of their offerings. Any new ‘deal’ between vendors, buyers, and platforms must be rooted in data ownership and neutral code if it is to avoid a repeat of the current paradigm. Personal ownership of browsing, buying, and selling data is necessary so that search results and boosted listings aren’t distorted for each customer in order to ‘nudge’ them into consumptive patterns, and so that value is retained in useful, niche items which don’t lend themselves to dopamine addiction and manipulative marketing campaigns. The hope is that widespread personal control of data would lead to the emergence of protocols and marketplaces which have realistic economic models based on fees; the ‘square deal’ originally promised by ‘Web 2.0’ platforms. Such marketplace businesses wouldn’t be exponential unicorns; they’d be steady, stable infrastructure companies like those that built the foundational technologies of the 20th century and made a secure, middle-class lifestyle possible for millions of people. Data ownership wouldn’t prevent platforms from incorporating advertising, but it would shift the balance of power to an opt-in basis. By reducing the ability to target such ads, it would prevent the lopsided reliance on ad revenue which leads to smaller vendors being neglected. Big companies wouldn’t go away; they’d make their margins by focusing on economies of scale in the real world: logistics, fulfillment, and redundant inventory for commodity goods.

45+

46+We need decentralized, robust reputation systems to combat monopolistic platform lock-in and its attendant abuses, but also so that smaller, more private marketplaces can create their own rules, and still be functional and secure. Right now, reputation data is siloed by the same companies that built large marketplace platforms, which means that anyone who moves outside of their walls loses access to it, and thus loses protection from bad actors. The ability of users to run their own reputation scans, or to pay for a separate layer of reputation data which is marketplace-agnostic, is essential to breaking the hold that large marketplaces currently have on e-commerce. If a local community wanted to trade in homegrown food, for example, they could restrict access, while also making sure that their members didn’t have a previous, external track record of fraud in other markets.

47+

48+Where does Urbit fit into this? We think that the basic infrastructure and alignment of the Urbit system has two major advantages to offer those who will build these new protocols. The first is the simplicity of running one’s personal server of data and locally hosted processes. Any attempt to reimagine privacy-focused e-commerce under current client–server models quickly runs into complexity problems—Web 2.0 platforms require reams of legacy code and armies of SREs to keep them running. The second is the ability to maintain a semi-private but reliable digital identity among different platforms and communities, including commercial ones. Most current conceptions of autonomous marketplaces rightly focus on the potential of cryptocurrency as a decentralized payment system. But wallet and exchange problems, the work-in-progress state of micropayment infrastructure, and price fluctuations among different currencies (crypto or fiat) clearly show the need for a decentralized reputation system which is not simply a crypto wallet address, but is likewise more secure than a PHP forum profile. We think that Urbit ID can provide such a holistic, yet pseudonymous, reputation system without being tied to a particular currency, wallet, or commerce platform.

49+

50+Right now, Urbit is a communication system for communities and individuals. We aim to create spaces where human conversations can take place with a minimum of distractions. We believe that commerce, too, is best achieved in such a space; think of your local hardware store rather than a carnival with barkers at every turn. We also see this as a priority deeply in keeping with the underlying ethos of Urbit. We frequently speak of Urbit as a tool, and reference classic principles of tool design when considering how to expand it. The test of any tool is in its ability to shape the world; if that function isn’t well matched to both the actual world, and the hands and desires of those who will wield it, usability will suffer. Open marketplaces should function as magnifying glasses, to hand buyers and sellers a tool to see the shape of supply and demand, rather than distorting the actual terrain of the marketplace in order to create its own desires. Soon we’ll have BTC integration tied to Urbit ID, and independent security audits of the Urbit system. We want Urbit to become the foundation on which users can build simple, decentralized protocols that enable us to safely and easily buy and sell goods and content that we actually want and need. Urbit is calm computing. Calm commerce follows naturally.

content/blog/precepts-discussion.mdnew file+756

@@ -0,0 +1,756 @@

1++++

2+title = "Precepts: Discussion"

3+date = "2020-03-17"

4+description = "The precepts aren’t arguments. We discuss and justify them here."

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Philip Monk"

8+ship = "~wicdev-wisryt"

9+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/discuss-01.jpg"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+The precepts aren’t arguments. We will discuss and justify them here. We don't expect to convince you this is exactly the right set of precepts, but we hope to convince you that this is a coherent set of precepts that might lead to something very interesting.

15+

16+We will address these in the same categories presented above:

17+

18+- A: General Design. Principles of engineering that apply in a great

19+ many situations. Any piece of code will exhibit at least a few of

20+ these.

21+

22+- B: Specific Design. principles of engineering that apply in a few

23+ specific situations. What these lack in general applicability they

24+ make up in specific guidance.

25+

26+- C: Attitude. Good code is the result of people approaching the act of

27+ engineering with the right attitude.

28+

29+- D: Theory. The eternal tension between theory and practice must not

30+ simply be acknowledged but dealt with.

31+

32+- E: Text Style. Code form matters.

33+

34+- F: Real Software. Not all software matters. Any software which

35+ wouldn't exist on Mars isn't real.

36+

37+

38+

39+### A: General Design

40+

41+These are principles of engineering that apply in a great many

42+situations. Any significant piece of code will exhibit at least a few

43+of these.

44+

45+### Simplicity

46+

47+> A20: One hundred lines of simplicity is better than twenty lines of

48+> complexity.

49+

50+> A21: Prefer mechanical simplicity to mathematical simplicity.

51+

52+At Urbit's root is a strong opinion on what constitutes simplicity. We take a semi-subjective view of simplicity. Specifically, we say that the sort of simplicity that matters is the sort that makes it easy to reason about stuff. We call this "mechanical simplicity".

53+

54+A competing view of simplicity says that it can be measured objectively by metrics such as the number of moving parts, the number of kinds of moving parts, the orthogonality of concepts, or cyclomatic complexity. We believe these are important metrics because they are good approximations of mechanical simplicity, but they don't tell the whole story.

55+

56+In acoustics, we use decibels of sound pressure to measure objective volume of sound. However, the Fletcher-Munson curves (equal-loudness contours) describe how loud sounds are perceived to be relative to their frequency. For example, a 75 dB sound at 4kHz sounds equally loud to a 90 dB sound at 10 kHz, even though the latter is over 20 times the sound pressure.

57+

58+Similarly, some sorts of complexity are much easier for humans to deal with than others. For example, humans are much better at learning languages compared to even simple mathematics. Even those who are "good at math" are objectively much better at languages, in terms of how much complexity they can absorb. Humans are also built to understand some

59+social dynamics and structures, even very complex and nuanced ones, without even consciously knowing the rules to them.

60+

61+Some examples of things that are objectively quite simple but subjectively hard for people to learn:

62+

63+- Pointers. Once you've properly learned them, it becomes hard to

64+ sympathize with your past self that found them difficult, but in

65+ practice these are a stumbling block for many people. Some think

66+ they're a "weed-out" concept, meaning they're just a good litmus test

67+ to see if you're the type of person who can learn how to program.

68+ Even if that's the case, it's still meaningful that they're effective

69+ in that.

70+

71+- Recursion. Same as above. Notably, `while` loops do not evoke the

72+ same reactions in people.

73+

74+- Monads. A little more complicated than the above, but objectively not

75+ that complicated. Certainly much less complicated than the C++

76+ standard library, but for some reason many people fail to learn monads

77+ after giving it an honest attempt, while that's rarely the case for

78+ the C++ standard library.

79+

80+- Math in general. The ideas in mathematics are generally pretty clean

81+ and small, which is why once you've learned a concept, it seems

82+ obvious in retrospect. The C++ standard library doesn't look much

83+ more obvious in retrospect than it does on first glance.

84+

85+- Any language that induces a moment where you exclaim to yourself,

86+ "This is true programming! Everyone should program this way, it's so

87+ obviously better!". People say that often about Lisp, Haskell,

88+ Prolog, and Smalltalk. Nobody ever said that about C, Java,

89+ Javascript, or Python. And yet, which ones are easier to learn?

90+ Which ones are used in real life?

91+

92+I've emphasized learning here, but the same principles apply to using a

93+tool after you've learned it.

94+

95+When evaluating simplicity, presumption should be on the side of "what

96+everybody does when they have a choice" instead of "what's

97+mathematically simpler". Being mathematically simple is a point in your

98+favor, but the burden of proof still falls on you to argue that it will

99+be simpler to learn and use.

100+

101+Adherence to this precept is difficult because you have to decide

102+whether an objectively simpler construction is in fact better. This

103+gives a framework for deciding the question.

104+

105+> A19: Dualities must be faced head-on and analyzed differently at

106+> different layers.

107+

108+A crucial point is that the question of simplicity depends on the facts

109+and circumstances of the case. In deeper layers of the system,

110+mathematical simplicity tends to pay greater dividends. If the features

111+of the base layer are not orthogonal, the interactions between them will

112+only grow more complex as you rise in the stack. If the base layer has

113+many moving parts, the number of moving parts can only increase as you

114+rise in the stack.

115+

116+This isn't the only duality that depends on the layer of the stack.

117+The most important layering of the stack is between "systems" and

118+"applications", where "applications" are those pieces of code on which

119+no other application depends. Many answers that are correct in system

120+code are incorrect in application code, and vice versa. These precepts

121+are an attempt to describe principles that apply at all areas of code,

122+but they're much more important to follow in system code.

123+

124+> A22: The Law of Leaky Abstractions is a lie; abstract airtightly.

125+

126+The Law of Leaky Abstractions says that all non-trivial abstractions are

127+leaky. This is the sort of statement that most engineers will accept

128+immediately and most mathematicians would dismiss out-of-hand. In

129+mathematics, if an abstraction leaks, it's not simply an imperfect

130+abstraction, it's completely wrong and should be thrown away. So they

131+manage to create perfect abstractions. They don't always abstract what

132+you wanted to abstract, but at least they're perfect.

133+

134+If mathematicians can do that, there's no reason programmers shouldn't

135+be able to do it as well. Sure, programmers have to deal with some

136+performance considerations that mathematicians can elide, but that's

137+rarely the reason abstractions leak. They leak most often because the

138+creators are lazy or sloppy. If your abstraction leaks, find a way to

139+either plug the leak or reframe the abstraction to incorporate the

140+"leak" in a coherent way. It's not a leak if it's part of the spec. I

141+call this "turning leaks into decorative fountains".

142+

143+### Conceptual clarity

144+

145+> A6: Represent your data as closely as possible to the essential

146+> structure of the problem.

147+

148+There are times when you need to represent your data in an unnatural

149+format for performance reasons, but this is rare. When possible, keep

150+the structure and location of your data in as natural of a manner as

151+possible. For example, if a function can produce an integer or an

152+error, don't produce a negative number to indicate an error — use an

153+explicit tagged union.

154+

155+An important part of this is to fit your data types to your data

156+skin-tightly. If your data types permit states that you intend to be

157+impossible, this is suboptimal. There are degrees of this (if you need

158+a number between 0 and 1000, a uint32 is probably fine even though it's

159+suboptimal), but it's important to strive for it.

160+

161+As an example, if your program can't respond to requests until it

162+completes an initialization process to fill in some of its state, it's

163+tempting to make nullable all the parts of its state that are filled in

164+during the initialization process, then just check whether they're

165+nullable when you use them. This creates a complex set of representable

166+states of partial initialization, and any bugs in that area will be

167+difficult to track down. A better option is to create a "larval" stage

168+of your program that performs the initialization. If requests come in

169+during this larval stage, queue them up until it's done. When it finishes

170+initialization, it metamorphizes into the full program, where all the

171+fields in its state are not nullable. Then run through its queue of

172+pending requests. This more closely resembles the essential structure

173+of the problem.

174+

175+> A8: When mating different paradigms, build one cleanly on top of the

176+> other.

177+>

178+> A9: Never misuse an abstraction.

179+

180+An abstraction provides a set of tools to solve a problem. Use them in

181+the intended way. If this is awkward, consider that this may be the

182+wrong abstraction to use. If the impedance mismatch is large between the

183+paradigm that your program uses and the paradigm that you're mating it

184+with, consider building an explicit layer whose sole purpose is to

185+convert between the paradigms (see B5).

186+

187+### Correctness

188+

189+> A10: Correctness is more important than performance.

190+>

191+> A12: Correctness is more important than optimality.

192+

193+Sometimes you devise a solution which is fast but slightly incorrect.

194+This is rarely a good idea. Especially at lower layers of the system,

195+incorrectness expands as it bubbles up.

196+

197+Other times, you devise a solution which is correct, but you could

198+probably make it cheaper without sacrificing correctness. Sometimes

199+that's worth doing, other times it's not.

200+

201+Finally, in some cases you find a solution that's "optimal"

202+performance-wise or simplicity-wise, but it doesn't quite handle every

203+situation correctly. Maybe in the real world there are genuine

204+exceptions, and the code is much faster or simpler if you don't handle

205+those exceptions. In these cases, it's more important to handle every

206+case correctly than to "snap" to the nearest elegant formulation.

207+

208+> A11: Be simple and uncompromising in defining what's correct; go crazy

209+> with optimizations.

210+

211+Nock is a great example of this. It contains the character of the

212+virtual machine, but its asymptotics are bad. Add jets to fix the

213+asymptotics.

214+

215+Another example is the ACID nature of Arvo. Arvo is a pure

216+function f(logs) of its event log, so formally Arvo is just a

217+function run against an event log. A naive implementation has

218+very bad asymptotics; processing each new event is O(n) in the

219+number of historical events. Choose the function g(state,log)

220+such that f(logs ++ log) = g(f(logs),log). Then, as long as you

221+keep the state in memory, processing each new event is constant in

222+the number of previous events. This still requires O(n) restart

223+from disk, but you can also periodically (and non-blockingly)

224+write a checkpoint of the state to disk, so that restart from disk

225+is only linear in the number of events since the last checkpoint.

226+

227+This pretty much says it all. Define what's correct in as simple of

228+terms as possible — this will make it easier to implement and reason

229+about. Then don't compromise on it.

230+

231+> A13: If you don't completely understand your code and the semantics of

232+> all the code it depends on, your code is wrong.

233+

234+It's impossible to build correct code on a foundation that you're unsure

235+of. This is different than the problem of building something with

236+strong guarantees on top of something with weak guarantees — for

237+example, delivery guarantees on top of an unreliable transport protocol.

238+In that case, you are sure of the underlying system, it's just that what

239+you're sure of is that you can't rely on it delivering packets in order

240+or at all. So, you formalize what you _are_ sure of, which is that it

241+will eventually get your packets through if you keep sending them

242+forever. And that's something you can build on.

243+

244+This is another reason it's important to have simple and accurate

245+correctness claims. When somebody else relies on your code, they

246+will need to know what exactly you claim to provide. If you're

247+accurate, then they don't have to understand your code, only your

248+guarantees.

249+

250+> A14: Deterministic beats heuristic.

251+

252+Heuristics make it hard to give precise safety guarantees, so you should

253+only use them when you don't guarantee much.

254+

255+> A17: Referential transparency is honesty and stability.

256+

257+A claim of referential transparency is a very strong guarantee, so it's

258+very useful for any code built on top of it. That code doesn't need to

259+know anything about how you produce the value because it can't

260+negatively affect the rest of the system, and it's free to cache

261+indefinitely.

262+

263+> A18: Responsibilities should be clearly separated.

264+

265+A program should be responsible for its own guarantees, though it must

266+rely on other programs to maintain their guarantees. You should avoid

267+guarantees that unduly couple separate programs. Any guarantee that

268+references state in more than one program is suspect.

269+

270+### State management

271+

272+> A1: Data is better than code

273+>

274+> A15: Stateless is better than stateful.

275+>

276+> A16: Explicit state is better than implicit state.

277+

278+Data is better than code, but code is better than state. If you must have state, state that is data is better than state that is code.

279+

280+There are many reasons for this. The most basic one is that humans are better at dealing with nouns than verbs. This is true to such an extent that we subconsciously convert statements of the form "so-and-so does such-and-such" to "so-and-so is a such-and-such-er". It's more challenging to view someone as a composition of their internal motivations such that they'll act in a particular way. It's much easier to see them as simply "friend" or "enemy" or "socialist" or "evil capitalist".

281+

282+Socially, the verb -> noun simplification is often problematic because it doesn't communicate the whole picture as accurately. It's an approximation that fails to capture important nuances. And that's because any nontrivial verb can't be understood in terms of a simple noun.

283+

284+However, the practical implications of this insight are different in code. Socially, people are who they are, so the best we can do is learn to understand them better. In code, though, we have a

285+powerful tool: convert the verbs to actual nouns. We can take advantage of our innate ability to reason about nouns and use that to make code that can more easily be reasoned about.

286+

287+Another way of looking at this is that data is easy to reason about. Code is hard to reason about, because it's much larger. Function types are known as "exponential types" because the number of possible functions between sets of size `m` and `n` is `n^m`. If there's global state of size `s`, this is even worse: `n^(m*s)`. The halting problem says that it's impossible in general to even determine if a piece of code will finish without running it.

288+

289+A final way of seeing this is that it's easier to reason about things that don't change. Data doesn't change, so it's a stable foundation. Pure code changes based on its arguments. Impure code changes based on its arguments and state. Impure code that uses code stored in its state

290+nests this whole complexity within itself.

291+

292+You can't, in general, update code in any way other than replacing it wholesale. This is not true of data, where to upgrade you just need a function from the old data type to the new data type.

293+

294+Sending code over the wire is problematic, because it's either very large or depends directly on what the other person has on their local ship. If you depend on what's on their ship and you're wrong, you may get the wrong result. So you explicitly require certain dependencies, at certain versions, ... this way lies dependency hell. There are ways to tame this, but if you just used data in the first place, those problems wouldn't exist.

295+

296+Of course, we can't always use data, precisely because it's smaller than code. And there are occasionally times when we could use either, but the code is actually easier to reason about than the data. All else equal, data > code > state of data > state of code.

297+

298+A note on laziness: lazily defined data occupies a middle ground. It's harder to reason about than strict data, but you get a lot more guarantees with it. It's probably not worth using as your basic substrate, but it makes some things easy to reason about.

299+

300+### CQRS/pubsub

301+

302+> A2: Everything should be CQRS.

303+>

304+> A3: (Almost) Everything should be pubsub.

305+>

306+> A4: A subscriber shouldn't affect a publisher.

307+>

308+> A5: Communication between nodes should be communication between

309+> independent actors.

310+

311+Fred Brooks pointed out that when you add people to an organization with `n` people, the number of interpersonal connections goes up with `n^2`. This is true of binary interpersonal connections, but if you allow groups of any subset of the people, then the number of total groups goes up with `2^n`.

312+

313+The same is true of entities in a program. A program must speak to many other programs about many things. Occasionally it can treat all others the same, so that the number of things it needs to say is constant in `n`. Sometimes it needs to say something different to each person, making it linear in `n`. Other times, it has a set of things it can speak about, say `m`. Pubsub lets the complexity grow with `m` instead of `n`. This lets the total communications grow with `m * n` instead of `n^2`.

314+

315+It's generally good to have more structure in how you communicate with other entities. If all you have is `send-message`, then you force each entity to define their norms around when messages are to be sent, and how to associate one message with another (eg a request to a response). This also gives the underlying system no visibility into the conversations.

316+

317+In CQRS+pubsub, we get a number of useful guarantees to help us structure our conversations. We know that a command will have no response other than exactly one positive or negative acknowledgment. We know that to request any data, we must have an active subscription, and

318+we know that a subscription may be canceled at any time. We know that a subscriber's failure to process a subscription update can't break the publisher. We know that after the initial subscription update, any subscriber to a path will get the same updates as anyone else on that

319+path.

320+

321+The underlying system can keep track of subscriptions, and can even cancel them automatically in certain circumstances (eg if the subscriber is on another ship and has stopped responding). This is like the nouns and verbs discussion above. Subscriptions are nouns, so we can reason about them better, and so can the underlying system. "Send a message" is a verb, so we have few guarantees about it.

322+

323+From Dijkstra's "Go To Statement Considered Harmful", which may as well have been written about unstructured event passing:

324+

325+> My second remark is that our intellectual powers are rather geared to

326+> master static relations and that our powers to visualize processes

327+> evolving in time are relatively poorly developed. For that reason we

328+> should do (as wise programmers aware of our limitations) our utmost to

329+> shorten the conceptual gap between the static program and the dynamic

330+> process, to make the correspondence between the program (spread out in

331+> text space) and the process (spread out in time) as trivial as

332+> possible.

333+

334+In our case, we make the programs of both the publisher and subscriber simpler by writing in terms of well-known constructs like "subscribe" and "push subscription update". You need to know much less about your counterparty.

335+

336+> A7: A client's representation of data should be as close as possible

337+> to that of the server.

338+

339+This is a natural architecture given pubsub, but it's also worth pursuing in its own right. This blurs the distinction between client and server, which makes the client more full-featured.

340+

341+It reduces communication to syncing, which means offline-mode is just a special case of sync latency, and all the local features are still usable.

342+

343+It also tends to reduce centralization, since you're already used to operating on your own, and you have all the data required to do so. The "server" becomes a commodity, easily moved when desired. Git is a good example of this — central git servers are common, but they're also a commodity, so you're never locked into a particular hosting provider. This is possible because the data structures are exactly the same on the client as on the server.

344+

345+> A23: Some cliches are repeated because they are true; others must be

346+> repeated because they are not.

347+

348+Computer security is an industry built on cliches. An example of the first is "your security is only as strong as your weakest link."

349+

350+An example of the second is "security through obscurity is ineffective". Security through obscurity is in fact the most effective form of security — if nobody cares about you, you will never be hacked. The problem is that you must remain obscure for it to work, and that's hard to explain to people in a precise way. It's effective at protecting precisely when there is nothing worth protecting. So, it's better (for them, their companies, and their users) to tell them a lie.

351+

352+However, it's important for whoever's coming up with the cliches to understand the specifics of how they're untruthful. Some of these very precepts may fall under the category of "literally untrue but more useful than the truth".

353+

354+

355+

356+## B: Specific Design

357+

358+There are some principles that aren't obviously better than the alternatives, but if you use them consistently you avoid a lot of issues. These are all examples of this.

359+

360+> B1: Always ack a dupe; never ack an ack.

361+>

362+> It's okay to ack a nack as long as you never nack a nack.

363+

364+This is a simple rule, and if you follow it you get various guarantees for free. For example, sending a message will always cause up to a constant number of additional messages to be sent by direct or indirect causality (other than application-level code), so you never have to worry about accidentally causing a loop.

365+

366+Additionally, acking an ack can never take you from imperfect to perfect reliability. Urbit isn't big on heuristics for stuff that's visible to userspace (A14), so don't even go down that road.

367+

368+Following this rule greatly reduces the architecture space for networks. This is very helpful in finding a good architecture.

369+

370+> B2: Never construct or deconstruct a duct.

371+

372+A duct is akin to a first-class call stack. Don't deconstruct that for the same reasons you shouldn't read your own call stack. If you read your own call stack, and do different things based on that, it breaks a lot of assumptions we have about messages. For example, we assume that a vane will handle a task the same way regardless if the initial IO event was a keystroke or a timer. Don't break that.

373+

374+Similarly, don't construct these by hand. This would be like inserting other functions into your own call stack and then returning to them. Powerful, yes, but pretty much always a bad idea because it breaks our assumptions.

375+

376+> B3: Route on wire before sign, never sign before wire.

377+

378+When we send a message to another vane or app, we send it on a wire. When we get a response to that message, we should care first about the wire it was sent on.

379+

380+It's tempting to shortcut that and route based on the type of response. Maybe you only call to `%iris` once in your app, so you feel like you can just route directly on that. But it doesn't scale, because that dimension is orthogonal to the true dimension you care about — which request this response corresponds to. This is essentially a violation of A6.

381+

382+> B4: Only go from statically typed to dynamically typed if you must.

383+

384+Consider the set `U` of all possible programs. Then consider "the program you want to write" to be a set `S` of programs that differ only in aspects you don't care about. For example, maybe one takes a little more time and one takes a little more memory, and maybe you don't care about that. This set has a generating "specification" — any program that meets that specification is in the set.

385+

386+A type system or testing suite can guarantee that a program is in another set `T`. Obviously, both `S` and `T` are in `U`. Hopefully the intersection of `S` and `T` is non-empty — that is the set of programs which typecheck and meet your spec.

387+

388+A perfect static type system can guarantee `T` is a subset of `S` — if it typechecks, then it works. Obviously, if you let `T := {}` (ie no program typechecks), then this is vacuously true. So you want `T` to be as large as possible while still being a subset of `S` — as many programs as possible typecheck without them being incorrect. But it can't make `T == S` — there will always be some programs that do the correct thing in practice, but the type checker can't prove that.

389+

390+Dually, a perfect testing suite can guarantee that `S` is a subset of `T` — no correct program fails the tests. This is vacuously true if you have no tests, for then `T = U`. So you want `T` to be as small as possible while still being a superset of `S` — you don't want to reject valid programs if you can help it. But you can't make `T == S` — there will always be some programs that are invalid but pass your typechecks (at least, if your program requires a Turing machine).

391+

392+(It is possible to create a static type system that has `S` subset `T` property described above for a testing suite — see Erlang's Dialyzerand [related work](http://user.it.uu.se/~tobiasl/publications/contracts.pdf).)

393+

394+A dynamic type system tells you neither of these ahead of time. Instead, you end up with type errors at runtime. Errors at runtime must be handled at runtime, when the programmer is not present. Errors at compile time are handled at compile time, when the programmer is present.

395+

396+There's a hybrid, which is "static type checks at run time". In other words, you load the code and run the type checks at run time. This is better than pure dynamic checking because as long as the code compiles, you get the guarantees of a static type system. But the later in the process that the code is compiled, or the more it's changed before compiling, the less guarantee you have that the type checker will pass. If a static type checker gives an error at a time when the programmer is not present (because it's run at runtime), that's worse than a dynamic type system — at least that would give it a chance of executing correctly!

397+

398+> B5: Anything with business logic speaks one paradigm; anything that

399+> translates paradigms has no business logic.

400+

401+Translating between paradigms with significant impedance mismatch is usually convoluted code. The state machines are often hard to see, and it tends to be quite cluttered.

402+

403+You want your business logic to be as clean and short as possible. This way the interesting algorithms are laid bare.

404+

405+> B6: Functionally enforced semantic rules are better security primitives

406+> than memory access restrictions.

407+

408+Memory access restrictions are blunt tools. Blunt tools are nice in simple systems, and if all you have is nails, then a hammer is perfect. But in practice you punch all sorts of holes in these restrictions, because you need more granularity and flexibility.

409+

410+Better to define rules in a more powerful language. This allows you to follow A6 and A8. It also lets you use all the correctness tools, like type systems, that you've developed for the rest of your code.

411+

412+

413+

414+### C: Attitude

415+

416+Good code is the result of people approaching the act of engineering with the right attitude.

417+

418+> C1: Code courageously.

419+

420+If you avoid changing a section of code for fear of awakening the

421+demons therein, you are living in fear. If you stay in the

422+comfortable confines of the small section of the code you wrote or

423+know well, you will never write legendary code. All code was

424+written by humans and can be mastered by humans.

425+

426+It's natural to feel fear of code; however, you must act as though

427+you are able to master and change any part of it. To code

428+courageously is to walk into any abyss, bring light, and make it

429+right.

430+

431+The unix/internet stack is a giant ball of mud. It's so big that when you're standing on it, it looks like a bog, and it's not clear that there is a bottom to it. You know there must be, but it doesn't matter because you learned long ago that the best solution is to not dig too deep. Build a strong structure by spreading out your weight and using strong construction materials. If there's something useful deep in the mud, it's probably not worth diving in to pull it out. That's dangerous and prone to failure, and you know many people who have gotten stuck down there.

432+

433+This is an appropriate reaction to the unix/internet stack. It's also self-perpetuating. The bog is filled — even _composed_ of — countless predecessors who did that same thing. If you ever find yourself on solid ground, protect that with your life. Learn how it works and how to use it well. Then build a strong structure on top of that. Don't let it decompose into a layer of mud.

434+

435+Urbit is small enough that, while there's definitely some construction-related dirt and muck covering it, the solid metallic core is not very deep — not more than waist deep in most places. The feeling of always being in contact with the bottom is very different than flailing about in a bog.

436+

437+This property is worth fighting for. It's the whole reason Urbit was written. New Urbit programmers are instinctively distrustful of anything below them and code defensively and fearfully. They must learn that it's all drastically simpler and more legible than they're used to. It's still hard, but you can actually make progress. To do so, you have to stand up straight, so you can get a firm footing on the ground. Keep your chin up and your shoulders back, and adopt the posture of a conqueror. When something doesn't work right, don't retreat into your shell of safety and control — fix it. The forces of chaos are always lurking, but their victory isn't inevitable. It's all on the line, so code with abandon.

438+

439+> C2: No time for lazy people.

440+

441+If there's clearly a right way to do something and a wrong way, do

442+it the right way. Coding requires incredible discipline. Always

443+follow conventions, and fire anyone who won't. Anything that can

444+be solved by discipline is not a real problem.

445+

446+> "To him who knows to do good and does not do it, to him it is

447+> sin."

448+

449+Preserving the property of solid ground requires perpetual discipline. Once lost, it's often impossible to reacquire. Don't compromise your standards.

450+

451+Call people out when they're being lazy. And when someone calls you out, recognize it and fix it. Sometimes it's just a question on a code review — "why did you do it this way?" Upon reflection, you determine that you did it that way because you couldn't be bothered to do it right. Maybe that was a reasonable choice at the time you were coding so you wouldn't be distracted, but if it's been called out in a code review, now's the time to fix it, not make excuses.

452+

453+> C3: When a smart person makes an obviously stupid suggestion, before

454+> responding take a full 60 seconds to envision how you would implement

455+> it and what the effects would be.

456+

457+Once you've determined that someone understands a situation well, if they earnestly make a suggestion that you haven't thought of, or that you immediately dismissed as impractical, stop and consciously consider it. This is one of the best ways of countering the natural echo chamber

458+of your own mind.

459+

460+This is also one of the best ways to build stuff correctly. Very often, you will be tempted to cut a corner, and someone will point out that it should be done correctly. You should consider why you immediately rejected it. Was it because you were afraid of the relevant piece of code? If so, you should learn more about that code to determine if it's actually a good idea. Did you reject it because you felt it would distract you from working on what you thought was more important?

461+Consider carefully whether this particular piece of technical debt is worth taking on. It's worth 60 seconds of thinking about how you could solve it correctly right now — often it would be quite easy to do correctly and you'd be paying interest on the incorrectness for a long time.

462+

463+

464+

465+### D: Theory

466+

467+The eternal tension between theory and practice must not simply be acknowledged, but dealt with.

468+

469+> D1: Academia is a succubus.

470+

471+The results from academia are useful to take advantage of, but the process of academia is a deadly sin for a project as ambitious as Urbit.

472+

473+Academia usually gets the right answer, but it's slow, and it often cycles through a large number of wrong answers before it gets to the right one. It's also unconcerned with many things that a real project must consider. For example, it's generally more concerned with mathematical simplicity than mechanical simplicity, contradicting A21.

474+

475+> D3: Not being qualified to solve a problem is no reason not to solve it.

476+>

477+> D4: The best way to get the right answer is to try it the wrong way.

478+>

479+> D6: Everyone must regularly alternate between theory and practice.

480+

481+One common failure mode for academia is to get bogged down in optimally solving a particular part of a problem such that it fails to solve the whole problem.

482+

483+There's a sense of "if I don't know how to do it, I must discover the correct answer before I can do it". This will get you the right answer if it terminates, which is the sort of algorithm mathematicians like. Engineers like algorithms that do in fact terminate.

484+

485+The fastest way to build a good system is to build it as well as you know how, then iterate on it. You have to be disciplined about actually iterating over time as you learn about the problem, but often the way to learn more about the problem is to move beyond it and work on adjacent

486+problems. Hindsight is 20/20, so get the problem in your rearview mirror as fast as possible. Then while you're driving somewhere else, you'll see what you should have done. Then turn around and go do it. This only works if you or someone else is willing to go back and fix it

487+(C2).

488+

489+> D2: Never fear math.

490+

491+You can spend years working on a problem that you're able to solve in a few days with the right theoretical grounding. There's no excuse for being ignorant of theory; or rather, being ignorant of theory is an excuse to learn it.

492+

493+Many engineers fear theory the same way they fear a complex piece of code deep in the stack (C1). But they shouldn't, because theory is rarely muddy. The same characteristics that make theory impractical also make it clean and learnable. It's also pretty permanent, so a one-time investment will pay dividends for a long time.

494+

495+Of course, if you look deep down, you may find laziness is what's keeping you from learning theory. If that's the case, you need to decide how much you want to design good software. Because there's no room for laziness (C2).

496+

497+> D5: Practice tells you that things are good or bad; theory tells you why.

498+

499+You can never tell whether a system is good or bad without using it (see discussion on A21). Theory has great explanatory power, but only limited exploratory power. The best it can do is point out areas of the idea maze you haven't explored and suggest correlations between

500+objective properties and your subjective judgment of the quality of the system.

501+

502+However, that explanatory power is indeed powerful, and the exploratory suggestions are often able to break you out of a rut (attractor basin). Respect the tension.

503+

504+

505+

506+### E: Text Style

507+

508+Code form matters. Code that is hard to read is hard to maintain. Code that is inconsistently formatted is hard to read, but consistency isn't the end of the story. Some formats are simply hard to read.

509+

510+Formatting also isn't the end of the story. Naming and commenting conventions are even more important to clarity. The human brain is quite good at taking stuff that's in an unexpected form and interpreting it.

511+

512+This is why the diversity of accents and handwriting rarely causes issues, while the diversity of languages requires specialized translators. For someone used to typing on a QWERTY keyboard, it takes some time to get used to typing on a Dvorak keyboard because you have to rewrite your muscle memory. But it's nothing like how hard it is to learn another language. Russian script is roughly as different from English script as Russian grammar is from English's, but it's drastically easier to learn to read, handwrite, and type Cyrillic than it is to learn Russian grammar.

513+

514+So, uniformity of style is good, but it's not sufficient. The style must be readily readable and writable.

515+

516+### Formatting

517+

518+> E1: No code should extend beyond 80 characters, most within 55.

519+

520+Very wide code is unreadable. Even before you get to the readability threshold, it's useful to keep your code relatively narrow. Too narrow of code, on the other hand, results in too tall of code. What these two have in common is that they make it hard to navigate the code.

521+

522+Code navigability is the ability to find the part of the code you're looking for. This has several inputs:

523+

524+- how far away is what you're looking for?

525+- how many distinct places in the code can you have on screen?

526+- how much code can you have on screen?

527+- how fast can you recognize that you're in the correct place?

528+

529+Some of these are strongly affected by workflows. We can't force a developer to have an effective workflow, but we can support those who do. If your workflow is deficient in one of these areas, consider improving it.

530+

531+One of the primary inputs to code navigability is how much of it you can have on your screen. Code that is too wide limits the number of columns of code. Some people keep only one column on their screen, so they don't see a problem with long lines of code. The most efficient navigation is to already be there (i.e. to only have to move your eyes). If you only have one column of code open, you can only be in one place, which eliminates the best form of navigation.

532+

533+Dually, code that is too narrow limits the number of lines you can have on a screen (this isn't a separate precept simply because we've never had to tell someone to write _wider_ code). This suggests there is some happy medium. This is dependent on the language, but in Hoon we've

534+found that up to 55 columns is a pretty good number for most code. However, there are plenty of legitimate reasons to go a bit longer than that. 70 columns is rare, but not surprising. There is essentially never a reason to extend beyond 80 columns.

535+

536+> E2: Tabs aren't real.

537+

538+Code is a text file, and text files are WYSIWYG. The reader should view the file exactly the same as the author wrote it. This is a low-overhead way of avoiding editor-dependence in code, which is as bad as browser-dependence in javascript. Sure, tabs aren't as big a deal as the hell that front-end devs have to deal with, but there's no reason to give an inch to the forces of platform-dependence.

539+

540+Some argue in favor of "customization". Customization is inconsistency.

541+There can be good reason for inconsistency in some areas, but not in

542+code formatting, which is such an intensely communicative action.

543+

544+> E3: A text file is a series of lines, each ending with a newline

545+

546+ character.

547+

548+There are several competing definitions of text files, but most commonly-used software uses this one. It's simple and consistent.

549+

550+Its disadvantage relative to "a text files is a series of characters, possibly including newlines" is that there are some arrangements of characters that are not valid text files (ie non-empty and not ending in a newline). However, some series of characters were already not valid

551+in a text file — eg those including control characters or other nonrepresentable characters.

552+

553+In return, we get the advantage that we can treat a text file as having a more complex and useful structure — a list of lists of characters, rather than simply a list of characters.

554+

555+These are theoretical concerns — the real answer is that it's the way it's always been done, and deviating from that without a good reason is asking for trouble.

556+

557+### Names and comments

558+

559+> E4: One block comment is better than interleaved comments on every line.

560+

561+Interleaved comments are easy to write because you can just paraphrase the code. This is also why they're generally useless. In the micro, code should always be immediately understandable. In the macro, it's often helpful to give context as to the purpose or constraints of the function. Sometimes it's good to even give the algorithm line-by-line in pseudocode, but mixing the pseudocode with the real code obfuscates both.

562+

563+> E5: Don't name anything you don't have to.

564+

565+> E6: If it's the same thing, give it the same name.

566+

567+It is often said that there are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation and naming things. This is a good aphorism. As often, someone will respond with "There are two hard things in CS: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors". This is a weak

568+joke because off-by-one errors are not hard at all. They're mostly a matter of discipline, and there's a couple of conventions that help. If you're looping on a zero-indexed variable, use `i < num_loops`. If you're looping on a one-indexed variable, use `i <= num_loops`.

569+

570+However, cache invalidation and naming things are genuinely hard because they must be solved ad hoc. There is no one-size-fits-all cache invalidation strategy, and possibly there never will be. Similar for naming. So you must actually comprehend and work within each individual

571+context.

572+

573+You shouldn't solve hard problems if you don't need to, so don't name anything you don't have to. Giving unique names to things is tiring, and it reduces readability. A consistent pattern for naming things makes it easy to keep track of what is what and reduces the number of

574+decisions you must make.

575+

576+Examples:

577+

578+- If the only difference between three things is that they're not the

579+ same, consider naming them `thing-1`, `thing-2`, and `thing-3`.

580+

581+- Use agglutinative morphology. If `a` is to `b` as `c` is to `d`, then

582+ find an affix which describes this distinction (say `-suf`) and rename

583+ them to `a`, `a-suf`, `c`, and `c-suf`.

584+

585+- A corollary of the above is that if one variable represents the "same"

586+ thing with a different type, that type should be the morpheme added.

587+ For example, if `a-set` is a set, then `~(tap in a)` should be called

588+ `a-list`.

589+

590+- Don't abbreviate (E8) — everyone abbreviates differently, and bits are

591+ cheap. If it takes you a long time to type the name, consider (1)

592+ finding a more succinct name (good any time you can do it), (2)

593+ becoming a faster typer, or (3) learning autocomplete tools, such as

594+ snippets.

595+

596+- Especially don't abbreviate or otherwise change the word when adding

597+ affixes. Inflectional morphology is bad in such an ad hoc context as

598+ code.

599+

600+> E7: Humans are good at memorizing.

601+

602+We're really good at memorizing sets of things, like runes. We're also good at inferring structure from patterns. We're bad at memorizing structure in apparently unrelated names, though, and once we see a pattern, we assume it's densely populated.

603+

604+So don't be afraid to use new names for new concepts. If concepts are siblings, they needn't necessarily have a direct connection in their name, but if they're hierarchical, then something should suggest that. This can be syntactic or semantic.

605+

606+

607+

608+### F: Real Software

609+

610+Not all software matters. Or at least, not all software comes within

611+the scope of "Urbit". Urbit cares about "Martian software".

612+

613+> F9: Timeless software is good software.

614+

615+There's different sorts of software. A lot of software is inherently ephemeral, and can really only be run in one place. A SAAS company runs bespoke software on a particular set of servers, and that software has no future. It will never be run on anyone else's servers, and it will eventually stop being run even there. It won't even have any direct descendents. It's a genetic dead end.

616+

617+However, not all software is this way. Urbit is interested in software that can live forever. This is what we call "real" software.

618+

619+This is the most important passage in all that has ever been written

620+about Urbit:

621+

622+> What is Martian code actually like? There are two possibilities.

623+>

624+> One: since Earth code is fifty years old, and Martian code is fifty

625+> million years old, Martian code has been evolving into a big ball of mud

626+> for a million times longer than Earth software. (And two million times

627+> longer than Windows.)

628+>

629+> This hypothesis strikes me as possible, but implausible. Since the _big

630+> ball of mud_ expands indefinitely, Martian code would therefore be so

631+> large and horrible that, despite its underground installed base, the

632+> server room bulged into space like a termite mound, intercepting

633+> low-flying asteroids and stinking up the solar system all the way to

634+> Pluto. Our latest space telescopes would surely have detected this

635+> abominable structure - if not, in fact, collided with it.

636+>

637+> Two: therefore, at some point in Martian history, some abject fsck of a

638+> Martian code-monkey must have said: _fsck_ this entire fscking ball of

639+> mud. For _lo_, its defects cannot be summarized; for they exceed the

640+> global supply of bullet points; for numerous as the fishes in the sea,

641+> like the fishes in the sea they fsck, making more little fscking fishes.

642+> For lo, it is _fscked_, and a big ball of mud. And there is only one thing

643+> to do with it: _obliterate_ the trunk, _fire_ the developers, and hire a

644+> whole new fscking _army_ of Martian code-monkeys to rewrite the _entire

645+> fscking thing_.

646+>

647+> This is such an obvious and essential response to the _big ball of mud_

648+> pattern that, despite the fact that we know nothing about Mars, we can

649+> deduce that it must have happened on Mars. Probably several times.

650+> Probably several hundred. For each of these attempts but the last, of

651+> course, the result was either (a) abject failure, (b) another _big ball

652+> of mud_, or (c) both.

653+>

654+> But the last, by definition, succeeded. This is the crucial inference we

655+> can draw about Mars: since the Martians had 50 million years to try, in

656+> the end they must have succeeded. The result: Martian code, as we know

657+> it today. Not enormous and horrible — _tiny and diamond-perfect_.

658+> Moreover, because it is tiny and diamond-perfect, it is perfectly stable

659+> and never changes or decays. It neither is a _big ball of mud_, nor tends

660+> to become one. It has achieved its final, permanent and excellent state.

661+

662+We don't know that Urbit will achieve this final form, but Urbit is an attempt to make progress in that direction. Any software that isn't a candidate for "tiny and diamond-perfect" is either a prototype or scaffolding.

663+

664+Here's some characteristics of real software:

665+

666+> F1: If it's not deterministic, it isn't real.

667+

668+If you do the same thing twice, your computer should react the same way. This is comforting. This is also what makes it easy to reason about and use effectively. If you're not sure what your computer will do, you'll be afraid of it and act defensively toward it. This inevitably leads to a big ball of mud.

669+

670+Diamonds are extremely hard, and they wear very slowly. A diamond surface will support you every time; a mud surface will shift out from under you exactly when you put weight on it.

671+

672+> F2: If it's centralized, it isn't real.

673+

674+Code that depends on a central authority or has a single point of failure is fundamentally brittle. No authority lasts forever, no company lasts forever, no server lasts forever. Under certain

675+circumstances, bones and the like can be preserved for a long time — but not alive. The remains of buildings sometimes last for thousands of years, but the cities are gone.

676+

677+The only things that last forever in their useful form are big hunks of rock (like the pyramids at Giza) and ideas, through writing and transcription. So, if you depend on the sun existing, this is

678+acceptable. If you depend on a piece of source code to be kept forever, copied and re-copied, you're fine. If you depend on a 20-year-old company existing and being easily accessible, this is brittle.

679+

680+Another way to look at this is to say that anything that wouldn't work on a spaceship is architecturally flawed. Maybe it requires many sequential round-trips to a central server because it doesn't have all the relevant information. See discussion of A7.

681+

682+> F3: If it's owned by someone else, it isn't yours.

683+>

684+> F4: If it's managed by someone else and you can't change who that is, it

685+> isn't yours.

686+>

687+> F5: If it's not yours, it isn't permanent.

688+>

689+> F6: If it's not permanent, it isn't real.

690+

691+Nobody is as aligned with your values as you are. If you don't control the software, then you can't guarantee you'll always have access to it. Whoever does control the software may destroy it, move away, or simply revoke your access to it.

692+

693+Control has some nuance. If it's physically controlled by a company and you can't get your data and the software that makes it useful, you definitely don't have control. If you have physical control of it, you do have control. But if you're hosting the data and software on a commodity cloud server, you still mostly have control of it. Your privacy has been reduced, sure. However, as long as you keep regular backups of the data and software, if the hosting provider disappears you just need to find another host, or host it yourself. Any particular host is likely to disappear, but the situation where _every_ host disappears and you can't even host it yourself is much less likely. Brands are mortal, commodities are not.

694+

695+Some branded hosts allow you to download a zip file of your data. This gives you a little more control over your data, but it's much closer to "no control" than "total control". This is because your online world is data plus code, and without the code that makes it useful, data is only good for scrapbooking. The scrapbook will remind you of the good old days, but you won't be able to live them again.

696+

697+> F16: Sovereignty necessitates understanding.

698+

699+Not everyone cares to understand the software they're using. But if you want to compute sovereignly, you must understand what your computer is doing. If it regularly surprises you, you're not in control of it. You must tame it. The current paradigm is a wild monster which cannot be tamed by mere humans — only megacorporations even attempt to do so, and it's always temporary. So, your software needs to be simple enough that it can be understood.

700+

701+> F10: System modules should be designed to be frozen permanently;

702+> conversely, Urbit consists of that system software which admits of a

703+> Kelvin version.

704+

705+"Kelvin versioning" is a versioning scheme where your current version is a natural number, and new versions count down. Once you hit version 0, no more changes should be necessary.

706+

707+This is the opposite of the usual way of developing software, where there is no defined endpoint. This paradigm suggests that you're building something specific. Most current software builds higher and higher in a vain attempt to reach the heavens, until all available effort is expended just to keep this tower from falling over. Kelvin versioned software cuts away until you reach a strong bedrock. Not every piece of software should have a Kelvin version, but infrastructure should.

708+

709+> F11: The two procedures for achieving timelessness are distillation and

710+> generalization.

711+

712+When building a timeless system, you start by building whatever you need to make it work. Then as you continue on, you may find some of the features are no longer necessary. Often, they're only needed when you're using them for user-facing work, but you've already moved on to building user-facing stuff somewhere else. You don't need the niceties anymore, so you should remove them.

713+

714+Other times, you find that you want something similar to a feature you already have, but not exactly the same. When this happens often enough with the same feature, you may discover what is the essential nature of the feature and what are simply ornaments of the original use of the feature. Then, you can generalize the feature so that each of the desired use cases is well served.

715+

716+> F13: That which cannot be Kelvin-versioned should update fluidly and

717+> automatically.

718+

719+Not everything should be Kelvin versioned. Much user-facing code is in a continual process of discovery, and it must react to changing userbases and their needs. These should update without user interaction. You should be able to turn off your ship for years at a time, then turn it back on. After a few minutes or hours of catching up, you should be ready to go.

720+

721+This means you need upgrade paths to be permanent, and they must not lose information. Anything that stops being able to upgrade is not permanent, since it will succumb to bit rot.

722+

723+> F14: Humans are interactive and temporal; technology is permanent and

724+> exhaustive.

725+

726+This is why the software humans touch directly should not be Kelvin

727+versioned but the infrastructure that makes it work should be.

728+

729+> F7: The way it is isn't always the way it ought to be.

730+

731+You should presume that there's a good reason for why things are done a certain way because what works best tends to win in a market in the long term, but markets are rarely efficient. Markets become more efficient over time, if they become more liquid, and as they become larger. Software is young, the cost of switching technologies is often large, and the space of software paradigms yet to be explored dwarfs those we've exhausted. So don't be surprised if you find ways to improve the situation drastically.

732+

733+> F8: The way it ought to be isn't always the way it is.

734+

735+On the other hand, sometimes the elegant solution just isn't right. The ultimate test of the quality of software is whether it's useful to humans. Humans don't fit nice equations, so the timeless truths of mathematics are often mismatched with human convenience. Never sacrifice real utility for the sake of making the code more elegant.

736+

737+> F12: Standardization is better than perfection.

738+

739+Coordination problems are some of the most difficult. When given a choice between compatibility and improvement, carefully consider whether the problem solved by the improvement is weightier than the problem caused by the incompatibility.

740+

741+> F15: Communities are autonomous.

742+

743+This is both a positive statement and a normative one. Communities are in fact a thing separate from their platform, but sometimes changes in the platform can kill them. That's bad. It's slightly different from freedom of association, since that's a freedom that applies to individuals, not the communities themselves.

744+

745+Communities are the basic building blocks of society. We are each a member of some number of communities, and most power is held by these communities. Some communities coincide with family ties, some with common goals, beliefs, or interests. Some may be freely joined by just showing up — others are nearly impossible to join without having been born into them.

746+

747+Throughout civilization society has had many forms. Governments have ranged from police states to feudal societies to democracies to informal tribes of people. In each of these, the fundamental unit is the community. Humans don't live on their own, and they don't live in one

748+universal society. They are a part of some communities and not of others.

749+

750+Technology shouldn't force us into a single global community. Discoverability isn't an unmitigated good. Most communities should be closed off from each other — that's what makes them a community. This allows them to develop their own ideas and norms. These bleed into

751+other communities and may spread if they provide some benefit.

752+

753+Many technologies today combine us into a single community, or at least a single set of norms. If many communities are hosted by a single entity, there will be pressure from some of those communities toward the entity to pressure other communities to follow certain of their norms.

754+This crosstalk isn't all bad, but there must be an equilibrium. All too often the lines between the communities are so permeable as to be inconsequential. In this case, the communities will converge in a single large community, at the cost of the memetic diversity of the original communities.

755+

756+Technology should mirror human interaction, and humans interact in communities.

content/blog/precepts.mdnew file+341

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1++++

2+title = "Precepts"

3+date = "2020-03-17"

4+description = "Technical maxims that define Urbit's approach to engineering."

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Philip Monk"

8+ship = "~wicdev-wisryt"

9+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/pre-01.jpg"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+Urbit is a principled approach to system design and programming, but it's often not obvious what those principles are. We have many specific terms for the different parts of the project: Arvo is the OS, Hoon is the language, Tlon is the company, Azimuth is the identity system, Ames is the network. But the word most associated with the project is "Urbit", and it's not clear what technically it refers to. It's only a small stretch to say that "Urbit" _is_ this set of principles, and that if anybody follows these principles strictly they will create a system that is isomorphic to the Urbit.

15+

16+Some of these are commonly held among many software projects, and some are not. Some are only debatably better than the alternatives, but Urbit exclusively chooses them.

17+

18+We’ll start with a brief description of many principles, then we’ll go into a long-form justification.

19+

20+

21+

22+### A: General Design

23+

24+1. Data is better than code.

25+

26+ Store data in your state, send data over the wire, dispatch based

27+ on data.

28+

29+2. Everything should be CQRS.

30+

31+3. (Almost) Everything should be pubsub.

32+

33+4. A subscriber shouldn't affect a publisher.

34+

35+5. Communication between nodes should be communication between

36+ independent actors.

37+

38+ Each message should do one complete thing, and there shouldn't

39+ need to be a sequence of coupled messages.

40+

41+6. Represent your data as closely as possible to the essential structure

42+ of the problem.

43+

44+7. A client's representation of data should be as close as possible to

45+ that of the server.

46+

47+ This blurs the distinction between client and server. It allows

48+ offline-mode, reduces communication to syncing, and decentralizes.

49+

50+8. When mating different paradigms, build one cleanly on top of the

51+ other.

52+

53+ Never try to make them work on some of the same primitives. Never

54+ abuse one to make the other work. For example, ducts in

55+ themselves are very general - if you want to do pubsub, that can

56+ easily be built on top of ducts, but don't pretend that pubsub is

57+ a _part_ of the duct system.

58+

59+9. Never misuse an abstraction.

60+

61+ An abstraction provides a certain set of tools; use them and only

62+ them.

63+

64+10. Correctness is more important than performance.

65+

66+11. Be simple and uncompromising in defining what's correct; go crazy

67+ with optimizations.

68+

69+ Nock is a great example of this. It contains the character of the

70+ virtual machine, but its asymptotics are bad. Add jets to fix the

71+ asymptotics.

72+

73+ Another example is the ACID nature of Arvo. Arvo is a pure

74+ function f(logs) of its event log, so formally Arvo is just a

75+ function run against an event log. A naive implementation has

76+ very bad asymptotics; processing each new event is O(n) in the

77+ number of historical events. Choose the function g(state,log)

78+ such that f(logs ++ log) = g(f(logs),log). Then, as long as you

79+ keep the state in memory, processing each new event is constant in

80+ the number of previous events. This still requires O(n) restart

81+ from disk, but you can also periodically (and non-blockingly)

82+ write a checkpoint of the state to disk, so that restart from disk

83+ is only linear in the number of events since the last checkpoint.

84+

85+12. Correctness is more important than optimality.

86+

87+13. If you don't completely understand your code and the semantics of

88+ all the code it depends on, your code is wrong.

89+

90+14. Deterministic beats heuristic.

91+

92+ Heuristics are evil and should only be used where determinism is

93+ infeasible, such as in cache reclamation.

94+

95+15. Stateless is better than stateful.

96+

97+16. Explicit state is better than implicit state.

98+

99+17. Referential transparency is honesty and stability.

100+

101+ Lack of referential transparency and other forms of

102+ disingenuousness are some of the world's big problems. Only

103+ deviate from referential transparency if absolutely necessary.

104+

105+18. Responsibilities should be clearly separated.

106+

107+ This applies from kernel modules through network citizens.

108+

109+19. Dualities must be faced head-on and analyzed differently at

110+ different layers.

111+

112+ Statically typed vs. dynamically typed, imperative vs. functional,

113+ code vs. data, and effectful vs. pure can all be a matter of

114+ perspective, and all relevant perspectives must have coherent

115+ answers.

116+

117+20. One hundred lines of simplicity is better than twenty lines of

118+ complexity.

119+

120+ It's not enough for an abstraction to reduce code duplication; it

121+ must actually make the code simpler.

122+

123+21. Prefer mechanical simplicity to mathematical simplicity.

124+

125+ Often mechanical simplicity and mathematical simplicity go

126+ together.

127+

128+22. The Law of Leaky Abstractions is a lie; abstract airtightly.

129+

130+ If your abstractions are leaking, it's not due to some law of the

131+ universe; you just suck at abstracting. Usually, you didn't

132+ specify the abstraction narrowly enough.

133+

134+23. Some cliches are repeated because they are true; others must be

135+ repeated because they are not.

136+

137+

138+

139+### B: Specific Design

140+

141+1. Always ack a dupe; never ack an ack.

142+

143+ It's okay to ack a nack as long as you never nack a nack.

144+

145+2. Never construct or deconstruct a duct.

146+

147+3. Route on wire before sign, never sign before wire.

148+

149+4. Only go from statically typed to dynamically typed if you must.

150+

151+ Once you go into a dynamically typed world, it's hard to go back.

152+ Statically typed is better than dynamically typed, so if something

153+ can be made static, it should be.

154+

155+ Each timeless data structure is a brick in the foundation of

156+ digital civilization.

157+

158+5. Anything with business logic speaks one paradigm; anything that

159+ translates paradigms has no business logic.

160+

161+6. Functionally enforced semantic rules are better security primitives

162+ than memory access restrictions.

163+

164+ A compiler can use type safety as an effective tool to enforce

165+ some classes of security guarantees.

166+

167+

168+

169+### C: Attitude

170+

171+1. Code courageously.

172+

173+ If you avoid changing a section of code for fear of awakening the

174+ demons therein, you are living in fear. If you stay in the

175+ comfortable confines of the small section of the code you wrote or

176+ know well, you will never write legendary code. All code was

177+ written by humans and can be mastered by humans.

178+

179+ It's natural to feel fear of code; however, you must act as though

180+ you are able to master and change any part of it. To code

181+ courageously is to walk into any abyss, bring light, and make it

182+ right.

183+

184+2. No time for lazy people.

185+

186+ If there's clearly a right way to do something and a wrong way, do

187+ it the right way. Coding requires incredible discipline. Always

188+ follow conventions, and fire anyone who won't. Anything that can

189+ be solved by discipline is not a real problem.

190+

191+ > "To him who knows to do good and does not do it, to him it is

192+ > sin."

193+

194+3. When a smart person makes an obviously stupid suggestion, before

195+ responding take a full 60 seconds to envision how you would implement

196+ it and what the effects would be.

197+

198+

199+

200+### D: Theory

201+

202+1. Academia is a succubus.

203+

204+ Academia has a really high ratio of smart people to useful

205+ products. Academia has many genuinely smart and interesting

206+ ideas, but always remember that pursuing them whole-heartedly will

207+ never result in a useful product.

208+

209+2. Never fear math.

210+

211+ Academia is inefficient, but it's also correct. Those people

212+ wasted a lot of time finding the right answer, but now that

213+ they've done it, you must exploit it. If you don't know the

214+ theory, learn it. No excuse for being "bad at math". Most who

215+ are "bad at math" are simply lazy or fearful. Be strong and of

216+ good courage. If you're truly so bad at math that you cannot

217+ learn it, you should not design systems.

218+

219+3. Not being qualified to solve a problem is no reason not to solve it.

220+

221+ If you don't know how to do it, do it anyway. "We are too young

222+ to realize that certain things are impossible. So, we will do

223+ them anyway."

224+

225+4. The best way to get the right answer is to try it the wrong way.

226+

227+ You cannot design a good system without spending most of your time

228+ in contact with the problem. The bad parts about systems are

229+ rarely obvious in theory, but often in practice.

230+

231+5. Practice tells you that things are good or bad; theory tells you why.

232+

233+ Never use theory to design a good system from scratch; only

234+ practice can tell whether the system is good.

235+

236+6. Everyone must regularly alternate between theory and practice.

237+

238+ There is an eternal wheel of system design. Given a system, use

239+ practice to discover what is bad, missing, or unnecessary. Then,

240+ use theory to fix the bad, add the missing, and remove the

241+ unnecessary. Repeat.

242+

243+

244+

245+### E: Text Style

246+

247+1. No code should extend beyond 80 characters, most within 55.

248+

249+2. Tabs aren't real.

250+

251+3. A text file is a series of lines, each ending with a newline

252+ character.

253+

254+ Corollary: all non-empty text files end with a newline (often

255+ hidden by editors). An empty text file does not end with a

256+ newline.

257+

258+4. One block comment is better than interleaved comments on every line.

259+

260+5. Don't name anything you don't have to.

261+

262+ This includes conventional names for variables of particular

263+ types. For example, the conventional name for a variable of type

264+ `path` is `pax`. You should have a good reason for using any

265+ other name for a `path`.

266+

267+ A more recent convention that follows the same principle is to

268+ give the variable the same name as its type.

269+

270+6. If it's the same thing, give it the same name.

271+

272+7. Humans are good at memorizing.

273+

274+8. Abbreviations aren't worth it.

275+

276+

277+

278+### F: Real Software

279+

280+1. If it's not deterministic, it isn't real.

281+

282+2. If it's centralized, it isn't real.

283+

284+3. If it's owned by someone else, it isn't yours.

285+

286+4. If it's managed by someone else and you can't change who that is, it

287+ isn't yours.

288+

289+5. If it's not yours, it isn't permanent.

290+

291+6. If it's not permanent, it isn't real.

292+

293+7. The way it is isn't always the way it ought to be.

294+

295+ If you can make it the way it ought to be, do so.

296+

297+8. The way it ought to be isn't always the way it is.

298+

299+ Some things can't be made more elegant.

300+

301+ For every ailment under the sun

302+ There is a remedy, or there is none;

303+ If there be one, try to find it;

304+ If there be none, never mind it.

305+

306+9. Timeless software is good software.

307+

308+10. System modules should be designed to be frozen permanently;

309+ conversely, Urbit consists of that system software which admits of a

310+ Kelvin version.

311+

312+11. The two procedures for achieving timelessness are distillation and

313+ generalization.

314+

315+ Every temporary or contingent feature in a system module should

316+ eventually either be removed (distillation) or relaxed into

317+ timelessness (generalization). For an example of the result of

318+ both procedures, consider the abstraction of the core in Nock and

319+ Hoon.

320+

321+12. Standardization is better than perfection.

322+

323+ Kelvin versioning stops when we run out of versions, not when

324+ every defect has been rectified.

325+

326+13. That which cannot be Kelvin-versioned should update fluidly and

327+ automatically.

328+

329+ All incompatible upgrades should provide permanent and automatic

330+ upgrade paths. This is principled permanent backward

331+ compatibility.

332+

333+14. Humans are interactive and temporal; technology is permanent and

334+ exhaustive.

335+

336+15. Communities are autonomous.

337+

338+16. Sovereignty necessitates understanding.

339+

340+ If you don't understand a system you're using, you don't control

341+ it. If nobody understands the system, the system is in control.

content/blog/providers.mdnew file+82

@@ -0,0 +1,82 @@

1++++

2+title = "Providers"

3+date = "2020-08-17"

4+description = "We’ve always assumed that providers would have to come into existence sooner or later. By the look of it, that time is now. Tlon and a few others have provider-like services in the works."

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Galen Wolfe-Pauly"

8+ship = "~ravmel-ropdyl"

9+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/providers.png"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+We look forward to a future where your Urbit is an always-on, always-available service. You should be able to pick up any device and conjure up your whole digital life immediately.

15+

16+Sounds good—but how does this actually come to pass? Urbit has to be technically robust and have a nice interface. Assuming we can deliver both of those things, your Urbit node also has to be safe, secure, and running somewhere with a network connection.

17+

18+Urbit has been getting nicer to use and more stable every day. We use it constantly, both as a company (Tlon) and for the broader Urbit community. From what we can tell, people are using Urbit to start communities of their own here and there. The problem is: to use our platform, you’ve got to run it yourself. This limits our audience _a lot_. Setting up a VPS and running an Urbit OS node is pretty easy if you’re comfortable in the command line, which makes it completely impossible for most people.

19+

20+We hear from people regularly who want to be able to sign up for Urbit like it was any cloud service. What they want is what we’ve been calling a _provider_: a service to provide easy onboarding and hosting. Given a good provider, we’d be pretty close to our long-term vision: Urbit would feel like a ubiquitous, easily accessible service.

21+

22+We’ve always assumed that providers would have to come into existence sooner or later. By the look of it, that time is now. Tlon and a few others have provider-like services in the works. We’ll talk about the specifics of what Tlon is planning to do in a future post. In this one, we’ll talk about what a provider is, why anyone would start one, and give a few examples of what they might look like.

23+

24+## What is a provider?

25+

26+A provider is anyone (company, DAO, a group of friends) that provides easy onboarding and hosting.

27+

28+From a user perspective, signing up with a provider should be as simple as picking a planet and hosting plan, paying, and getting connected to a running Urbit OS node. This should be able to be done entirely in a browser or a standalone app and feel more or less like signing up for a conventional service.

29+

30+From a technical perspective, this means a provider needs to create an Ethereum wallet for the user (client-side, of course), deliver an Urbit ID to it, and boot an Urbit OS node for them. And, at some point in the process, collect payment.

31+

32+As a user, your provider is somewhere between your ISP and your WordPress host. Your provider both runs the star that sponsors your planet (and provides peer discovery) as well as potentially providing both access to communities and even provider-specific software. We don’t really expect providers to be terribly generic—quite the opposite. Providers are likely to differentiate themselves on price, available software, and available communities. We’ll get into some examples later.

33+

34+The utility that a provider offers involves quite a lot of trust on behalf of the user. While the provider never actually holds the keys to your Urbit ID, they do run your node and, in turn, can access its contents. Unlike giant cloud services, your data isn’t in an easily searchable database. Inspecting your data should be something explicitly protected by a good provider ToS.

35+

36+If a strongly worded ToS isn’t enough for you, you can always host yourself. And, given the way Urbit works, downloading your Urbit from a provider and running it elsewhere should be both really simple and something a provider will _always_ let you do. It’s perfectly fine to run Urbit in your closet—which means that providers are really competing on ease of use and price.

37+

38+Let’s move on and talk a bit about why starting a provider makes sense to begin with.

39+

40+## Why would anyone start a provider?

41+

42+Our aim is to make Urbit OS so obviously nice to use that it’s well worth paying for. Today, a planet goes for about $10–$20 and, once you buy one, you’ve got to figure out how to really put it to use. Which takes some work.

43+

44+Any large holder of address space should immediately see the opportunity here: the more useful Urbit is, the more value can be captured by starting a provider. Providers make it possible to actually capture the value in address space, both by selling it and by operating nodes.

45+

46+Let’s say the base cost of running an Urbit OS node, in a hosted environment, is $10 / node / month. If you can sell hosting for $200 / year, you’re making back the ‘cost’ of the planet when someone signs up. Given that it’s more desirable to buy a planet when you know the star is online and you can put it to good use, this seems like a pretty good proposition: both for the provider and the customer.

47+

48+Starting a provider doesn’t _have_ to be done by address-space holders. You could start a provider with no address space of your own by custodying the address space of others. Then, you could take a cut of the address space sales and all of the hosting revenue. With a market of people looking to use Urbit, the crux of success with this approach is simply whether you can compete on user experience.

49+

50+Providers are, in a way, like the miners of Urbit. They’re incentivized to run fleets of very specific VMs for profit. The profit motive, in Urbit’s case, is just a bit more conventional than a bitcoin miner. An Urbit provider is just offering a service in exchange for money.

51+

52+## What are some examples of providers?

53+

54+If you think of a provider simply as a business, its most basic incentive is to attract as many customers as possible. You can do that by competing on price or performance, or by competing on aesthetics and community—there are lots of ways that providers can compete.

55+

56+As a roughly similar ecosystem, the world of webhosting is a great comparison. There are lots of small webhosts that all have very specific services: Dreamhost, MediaTemple, prgmr.com, and Linode all come to mind. Then there are the more generic, large-scale, performance-oriented options: AWS, GCP, Azure. It’s not quite time for an AWS-scale Urbit provider, but perhaps the AWS of Urbit will start as something much smaller.

57+

58+Let’s walk through a few examples to get a feel for what’s possible:

59+

60+Communities -

61+

62+A provider could easily curate community content like news, events, and discussion that it only delivers to its customers. Think of it as a bit like the days of sharing a server among friends—only in this case it could be hundreds or thousands of people who form a collective to run infrastructure and share information.

63+

64+Custom software -

65+

66+There are so many ways that providers can offer custom software. Urbit isn’t ready for third party software distribution. When it is, subscribers to a specific provider could get unique modules and applications synced directly to their Urbit nodes along with their membership.

67+

68+Aside from Urbit-specific software, providers could provide custom software services to their subscribers. A straightforward example of this could come in the form of Bitcoin or Ethereum nodes for processing transactions. Sign up with a provider and get the ability to send transactions to the chain quickly and reliably.

69+

70+Security -

71+

72+Let’s say our base cost of $10 / month / planet from above is correct (it’s probably high, but it’s a simple number). Would someone pay $100 / month for a planet hosted in a bunker or in the pylon of an abandoned oil rig? Maybe.

73+

74+## What about Tlon?

75+

76+Before there can be an ecosystem of providers, there has to be _one_ provider. While we’ve heard of a few other people working on things, we expect Tlon to be the first to try to really get into the provider business in earnest.

77+

78+I’ll save the details of what we’re going to do for a future post. Launching Tlon as a separate business will be the beginning of the separation of Tlon and Urbit. I’m really quite excited about it. Tlon is only able to consider becoming a business of its own because Urbit is mature enough that we can actually do it.

79+

80+For now, I’ll just say that Tlon will pick the low-hanging fruit first. Our goal is to make onboarding a group into Urbit incredibly simple. We want people to be able to go from email invite to running Urbit in a few minutes without ever knowing anything about Ethereum, Unix, or what a private key is.

81+

82+Once we’ve laid the groundwork with something that _just works_, we plan to open-source some of our components. Scaling up Urbit isn’t going to be easy. We hope that others will help us, and will help explore what’s possible in supporting Urbit users in the future.

content/blog/pseudonymous-reputation.mdnew file+64

@@ -0,0 +1,64 @@

1++++

2+title = "Building Your DAO with Pseudonymous Reputation on Urbit"

3+date = "2022-07-19"

4+description = "Using Urbit ID’s pseudonymous reputation model, DAO participants know Urbit ID holders’ past behavior before relying on them, and without sacrificing anonymity."

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Anthony Arroyo"

8+ship = "~poldec-tonteg"

9+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/blog/2022.7.14..19.19.05-image.jpg"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+_This is cross-posted from [The Combine DAO Blog](https://blog.the-combine.org). If you'd like to comment, join the public [Urbit group](https://urbit.org/groups/~famreb-todmec/the-combine-public)._

15+

16+[The Combine DAO](https://blog.the-combine.org/introduction-to-the-combine-dao) is a DAO built on Urbit to invest in promising projects on the network. While building the DAO, we did a survey of the existing identity solutions and found our solution close to home: Urbit ID provided the best balance of trust and anonymity due to the Urbit networks’ pseudonymous reputation. In this post, we’ll discuss the challenges facing DAOs and discuss why Urbit ID presents advantages over current approaches like token gated DAOs.

17+

18+## Trust, Anonymity and Pseudonymous Reputation

19+

20+Anonymity is a core feature of most DAOs. It’s great in theory. No one wants to trust that the humans operating Robinhood will execute trades how and when they say they will (much less know their names.) We’d all prefer if a smart contract handled it for them.

21+

22+The problem is that trust and anonymity don’t mix, and trust is essential to the practical operation of any organization. This is why existing DAOs take shortcuts to establish trust hierarchies—things like delegating multi-sigs to small groups of trusted leaders, or trusted leaders establishing authority via exclusive Discord channels.

23+

24+Put simply, if there’s no human to trust, there’s no human to hold accountable. Lack of accountability is a major hurdle for any organization.

25+

26+We were aware of this fundamental flaw when building Combine DAO on Urbit, and we’ve found a solution in Urbit ID. Urbit ID is the decentralized identity system at the core of the Urbit project. Urbit IDs are the “decentralized IDs” that [DAO builders yearn](https://thmueller.medium.com/decentralized-identity-3-ways-to-build-trust-in-your-dao-4871491903c8) for. They’re endowed with what we call pseudonymous reputations that unlock the ability to run DAOs in ways that more closely resemble successful IRL organizations, while maintaining the automation that makes them so attractive.

27+

28+## What is Urbit ID?

29+

30+Why is your Urbit ID so different from every other online identity you’ve ever had? The substantive answer is simple: it’s a lot more like your IRL identity. It’s permanent and owned by you. And because it’s the same throughout the Urbit network, it can accrue a reputation.

31+

32+You’ve probably seen Urbit IDs like `~ravmel-ropdyl` or `~mogmet-tadnem` in Twitter profiles. Each is a unique NFT that can be transferred and sold like any other cryptographic asset. Your Urbit ID is your username, network address and crypto wallet all in one.

33+

34+Like wallet addresses, Urbit IDs are anonymous. Like Discord, Twitter, or Notion accounts, they are also pseudonymous. Pseudonymity is the kind of anonymity you find in most online communities: a common username that people recognize even if it’s not your “real” name.

35+

36+Your Urbit ID is to your urbit ship what your deed is to your house or your keys to your car. It encrypts all of your ship’s communications and provides access to your online communities, which in this instance are DAOs.

37+

38+Using Urbit ID’s pseudonymous reputation model, DAO participants know Urbit ID holders’ past behavior before relying on them, and without sacrificing anonymity. Why do reputations stick to Urbit IDs? Because, like your physical person, every action you take with your Urbit ID affects your reputation. Urbit maximalists often ask “How high of a ransom would you pay if your Urbit ID were ‘kidnapped?’” That’s because the reputation of your Urbit ID is the result of years of labor. Imagine every social account you’ve ever had in one immutable chain tied to one immutable pseudonym.

39+

40+Thus, unlike an anonymous wallet address, Twitter handles or Discord accounts, there are high incentives for keeping your Urbit ID’s reputation squeaky clean.

41+

42+## Urbit ID for DAOs

43+

44+Many DAOs gate their membership on the ownership of a cryptographic asset like an ERC-721 or an ERC-20 token. Token gating is used to create a flat, anonymous membership. This was initially seen as a good thing. “One member, one voice.” All decisions made anonymously via multi-sigs and voting apps secured via smart contract.

45+

46+Token gating also adds utility to NFTs; it unlocks access to perks like special releases or events apart from the core asset. To get into the Milady Rave you need to buy a Milady NFT. It doesn’t matter who you are, what you’ve done, or how capable you are of participating in the community’s goals, if you buy a Milady, you’re in. You have the same rights and privileges as everyone else.

47+

48+In reality, many DAOs move inexorably back towards a more conventional model of “human trust” simply because organization requires it. That’s why DAO builders have long sought “decentralized IDs” for members. “One member, one voice” doesn’t work for complex, efficient decision making; it risks chaos and endless discussion. It creates the need for offchain governance executed by smaller groups, which is cumbersome, requires a patchwork of Web2 apps (i.e. Google and Notion), and undermines the “trustless” nature of the DAO.

49+

50+To return to a prior example, imagine Robinhood was a DAO of its members. If it was run like DAOs today—e.g. those not built on Urbit—a group of Robinhood “elites” make and execute trade decisions via private Discord channels. DAO members vote to approve, but participation is low. Some DAOs even cold-call members to garner participation. Not only is participation low, it’s also low quality: banter about the issues of the day.

51+

52+Urbit ID mitigates membership participation issues by adding permanent, pseudonymous reputations to the mix. As in: Who are you letting into your DAO? And whose DAO are you joining?

53+

54+As a leader of an organization, you want high quality members. You want to avoid Dumb Money: people passively investing in your DAO because it’s cool, but without the ability to add value. You also want to avoid oversubscription/underparticipation: a dropoff in engagement from most members as they become interested in newer, shinier things.

55+

56+When it came time to recruit members for Combine DAO, we didn’t have to leave Urbit. We only considered those with strong pseudonymous reputations on the network, many of whom were anonymous outside of Urbit. Some of the Urbit IDs in Combine DAO like `~bitmep-faswyn` have been on the network for years. Some like `~timluc-miptev` have created valuable groups and built companies on Urbit. Selection blindness was both unneeded and unnecessary—members were selected not in spite of “who” they were on Urbit, but because of it.

57+

58+Pseudonymous reputations also allow prospective DAO members to better evaluate leaders. Urbit ID reputations subsume the need for patchworks of authority. You know exactly “who” `~mogmet-tadnem` is. You don’t need to google his Twitter handle and figure out, oh maybe he’s also the guy behind this or that DAO or NFT release. Leaders benefit from the past and are held accountable for future actions.

59+

60+Now, the organizing forces behind Combine DAO are `~poldec-tonteg` and `~wolref-podlex`. In this case, their real world identities are known to many, but they needn’t be: their actions on the network speak for themselves. `~poldec-tonteg` is the former CPO of Tlon and `~wolref-podlex` is the Executive Director of the Urbit Foundation. Prospective members of Combine DAO know who they are aligning themselves with.

61+

62+To sum it up, Urbit ID is a solution for the reputational problems faced by DAOs in their current form. While good in theory, the trustless nature of DAOs leads to practical issues around organization, leadership, membership, voting, and participation. This is why DAO builders need ways to give their membership durable reputations that can travel with the members as they participate.

63+

64+Urbit offers just such cryptographic identities with portable reputations in the form of Urbit IDs. We put pseudonymous reputations to the test in building Combine DAO, and discovered they enhanced leadership formation and membership curation, eliminating some of the organizational problems that DAOs struggle with today.

content/blog/rollups.mdnew file+222

@@ -0,0 +1,222 @@

1++++

2+title = "The Gang Solves the Gas Crisis"

3+date = "2021-05-13"

4+description = "How we're making Urbit ID affordable again"

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Jonathan Paprocki"

8+ship = "~datnut-pollen"

9+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/gas.jpeg"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+Anybody who has used Ethereum smart contracts recently is aware that it has

15+gotten _expensive_. There are a large quantity of

16+complicated and clever techniques each with their own trade-offs

17+that are collectively referred to as "layer 2 solutions" (see [further

18+resources](#resources) for more information about these). This is in contrast to

19+the base computational layer of Ethereum called "layer 1", which is what constitutes most Ethereum usage and where [Urbit ID](/docs/glossary/azimuth)’s smart contracts currently exist.

20+

21+Tlon has always covered gas costs for Urbit ID up to a set limit, and this was easy a couple of years ago when the cost of transactions required to get a [planet](/docs/glossary/planet) up and running came out to less than a dollar. Unfortunately the ongoing Ethereum gas crisis, along with the rising price of Ethereum itself, has made this impossible. We’ve seen gas costs to set up a planet as high as several hundred US dollars at time of writing!

22+

23+In response to the gas crisis, Tlon has spent the last several months developing

24+a simple, in-house layer 2 solution which we anticipate will reduce typical gas costs by 65x or more.

25+

26+This post is primarily a short non-technical explainer of the end-user experience of our solution aimed at planet and [star](/docs/glossary/star) owners and those in the market for one, as well as a status update on where we're at in development. At [the end](#technical) we give some minimal technical details and resources to help you dig deeper should you wish.

27+This is also primarily aimed at those who currently self-host or plan to self-host their

28+urbit. For anybody utilizing a hosted service, this matter will all be handled

29+by your provider. There is a [separate section](#stars) addressed specifically at star owners, and another [section](#rollers) for those who wish to set up their urbit to accept and submit layer 2 transactions. We’d like to emphasize that this system is 100% opt-in—if you are satisfied with the current experience of Urbit ID, then nothing changes for you whatsoever.

30+

31+Perhaps the most pressing question held by anybody reading this is—when will

32+it be ready? It's not reasonable to give a timeline on difficult engineering

33+work, but rest assured that completing this upgrade is a top priority. Much

34+of the back-end is approaching completion, and we are confident in a release before the end of Q3 and hopefully much sooner.

35+

36+### Naive rollups

37+

38+Our layer 2 solution, designed primarily by Tlon lead engineer `~wicdev-wisryt`,

39+is known as "naive rollups" and we will be using this term interchangeably with

40+"layer 2"—though it is important to note that there are many layer 2 solutions

41+utilized by projects other than Urbit. As we're avoiding technicality here, we’re focusing primarily on the advantages and disadvantages of utilizing our layer 2 solution, and how that affects the management of your [ship](/docs/glossary/ship).

42+

43+Very briefly, a rollup is a way to combine many transactions into one, and we

44+are building infrastructure so that any Urbit ship may be utilized as a "roller". A

45+roller will collect layer 2 Urbit ID transactions, confirm their validity, and

46+post them to the Ethereum blockchain. More detail is given [at the end](#technical). Anybody may set up a

47+ship to [act as a roller](#rollers). Tlon will be launching our own publicly accessible roller, but as Urbit is a decentralized network, by no means will we have a monopoly.

48+

49+#### Pros and cons

50+

51+The primary advantage to using naive rollups is that the gas cost for Urbit

52+ID-related actions will be dramatically reduced. It will be reduced sufficiently that we expect that a few transactions per ship per week (plenty for ordinary usage) submitted to Tlon's roller will not cost the end user anything. There are no gas costs associated with submitting a layer 2 transaction to a roller, and Tlon will bear the gas cost of posting the results to the blockchain. That means that the cost you see for a planet on a market that utilizes Tlon's roller ought to be

53+the final cost.

54+

55+There are a few trade-offs for this, but none of them really sacrifice the core

56+value propositions of Urbit ID.

57+

58+The most substantial one is that ships on layer 2 are essentially completely isolated

59+from the rest of the Ethereum ecosystem. They can no longer interact with smart

60+contracts designed to work with Urbit ID or non-fungible tokens (which are how Urbit IDs are represented) in general. It is also not possible to write new Ethereum smart contracts that work with layer 2 ships.

61+

62+Compounding that factor, the journey to layer 2 is one-way only—at

63+least for now. There are theoretical ways a ship may be moved back to layer 1, but they do not yet exist, and we cannot promise that such a thing will be available in a timely manner. Anybody moving a ship to layer 2, or buying a ship on layer 2, should assume that they will

64+remain on layer 2 for the foreseeable future. We do not expect this to be

65+permanent, but it is perhaps the most significant drawback for the time being.

66+

67+Another one is that transactions may no longer be "instant". Effectively, this

68+was already the case on layer 1—unless you paid a lot of gas, you could wait

69+hours or even days for your transaction to clear. But the way we are saving on

70+gas is essentially by "bundling" or "rolling up" many transactions into one, and

71+submitting them as a single transaction. The more transactions in the rollup,

72+the better the savings. This bundling is not the only factor at play here

73+though—costs are reduced other ways, but this is a technical detail

74+[discussed later in this post](#technical). It is possible to use layer 2 to submit single

75+transactions (and this will still save on gas costs!), so utilization of layer 2

76+should not incur any delay over layer 1 when utilized in this fashion.

77+

78+Tlon has not finalized the details on how our roller will work, but it will

79+probably involve waiting until a sufficient backlog of transactions have been

80+submitted to make it economical to bundle them up, or just submitting every set

81+time period, whichever arrives first. We do not see this as a big issue—we

82+view Urbit ID as "digital land", and a few hours to acquire land, or waiting for

83+your new personal computer to be delivered, is still lightning fast in

84+comparison to the real world. We also have ideas on methods that will allow you to get on the network before the transfer has been confirmed, but that is outside of the scope of this article.

85+

86+Our layer 2 preserves the main value proposition of Urbit ID, which is that your ship

87+belongs to you forever, and that this is assured by very strong cryptographic methods and

88+game-theoretic arguments comparable to the ones that exist on layer 1. We

89+consider this principle to be uncompromisable, and maintaining ultimate

90+sovereignty over your ship was totally central in choosing our solution.

91+We summarize the new security model [below](#technical), and `~wicdev-wisryt`

92+goes into greater detail in the [resources](#resources).

93+

94+### Changes to User Experience

95+

96+The primary way one manages their Urbit ID, namely performing tasks such as

97+transferring ships, setting networking keys, or setting

98+[proxies](/docs/glossary/proxies), is with a web interface called

99+[Bridge](/docs/glossary/bridge) found at

100+[bridge.urbit.org](https://bridge.urbit.org). If you already own a planet,

101+you've probably used Bridge before - perhaps only a single time.

102+

103+Bridge will be getting a facelift to enable easy interfacing with layer 2,

104+including loud warnings about what is being gained and lost by doing so. From

105+here you will be able to transfer your ship to layer 2, and once there,

106+perform all the usual actions you can on layer 1.

107+

108+The main difference for layer 2 transactions on Bridge will be the additional

109+choice of a roller to submit transactions to. Tlon's will be free for ordinary, non-time-sensitive usage.

110+You could use your own ship for a fast single transaction for a little more gas. We expect that planet markets and stars may wish to set up their own rollers as well.

111+

112+Every planet has a sponsor star, which distributes [OTA

113+updates](/docs/glossary/ota-updates) to their sponsored planets and assists with peer discovery. Both layer 1 and layer 2 planets will be able to be

114+sponsored by either layer 1 or layer 2 stars, meaning that nothing will change

115+in terms of how sponsorship works.

116+

117+When you buy a ship, any reputable seller will inform you whether or not it is

118+on layer 1 or layer 2. Anyone running an urbit will be able to verify this information, and we expect for tools to exist to make this information publicly available (see [this grant](https://grants.urbit.org/bounties/1101665172-network-explorer-data-pipeline-http-api)).

119+

120+And that's it! If you'd like to know how things will be changing for

121+[stars](#stars), what goes into [setting up a roller](#rollers), and additional

122+[technical details](#technical), read on.

123+

124+### Changes to stars {% #stars %}

125+

126+Both planets and stars will be able to move to layer 2.

127+[Galaxies](/docs/glossary/galaxy) must remain on layer 1 for technical

128+reasons, and [moons](/docs/glossary/moon) and

129+[comets](/docs/glossary/comet) never interacted with Ethereum anyways, so

130+they are completely out of the picture.

131+

132+Stars will be able to remain on layer 1 with no action required. For star owners

133+that wish to take advantage of the cheaper gas costs, there are two possible

134+modes: ownership of the star on layer 2, or setting the spawn proxy to layer 2

135+with ownership remaining on layer 1.

136+

137+The first mode—a star which is owned on layer 2—has the same advantages and

138+disadvantages as a layer 2 planet. Planets spawned by a layer 2 star will also

139+necessarily be on layer 2 - there is no way to spawn a layer 1 planet from a

140+layer 2 star, though any planets which were spawned on layer 1 before the

141+star migrated to layer 2 will remain on layer 1.

142+

143+The second mode—ownership on layer 1, with spawn proxy on layer 2—is only slightly more complicated. Such a star will change its networking keys, transfer

144+between wallets, and set its management proxy all on layer 1, with the

145+corresponding higher gas cost. However, it will be able to spawn planets on

146+layer 2—and _only_ on layer 2—with the corresponding layer 2 tradeoffs. Like

147+moving ownership to layer 2, this will be a one-way journey for now. Planets

148+spawned before moving the spawn proxy to layer 2 will remain on layer 1, but

149+from then on, all planets spawned by that star will live on layer 2. Finally, stars in this second mode may transition to the first mode, but not vice versa.

150+

151+### Creating a roller {% #rollers %}

152+

153+

154+

155+Rollers are urbit nodes which users submit transactions to to be "rolled up"

156+into a bundle to be submitted to the Ethereum blockchain. The business logic for

157+a roller runs on the urbit node itself. Thus, anybody with an urbit ship may set

158+it up to act as a roller. While the details of how rollers work are still being

159+hammered out, one should expect that one can either set transactions to be

160+submitted at regular intervals, once a sufficient number of transactions have

161+been received (as more transactions means greater savings), manually, or some

162+combination of the above.

163+

164+Tlon plans to release documentation on how to set up your own roller concurrently with

165+the release of our layer 2 solution.

166+

167+Malicious rollers could potentially exist, but the worst they ought to be able

168+to do is simply not submit your transaction. The security factors for rollers

169+are briefly addressed [below](#technical), and elaborated upon in the

170+[resources](#resources), but you can expect full technical documentation on

171+these factors to be included in the roller documentation.

172+

173+### Changes to Azimuth

174+

175+[Azimuth](/docs/glossary/azimuth) is the set of Ethereum smart contracts

176+governing Urbit ID. They will require a few changes to accommodate the new

177+system. Some of this has been implicit above, but to be clear, we will only be

178+making a couple minor alterations:

179+

180+- Once a star's spawn proxy is set to the layer 2 address, it can't be switched

181+ back, and they can no longer spawn layer 1 planets.

182+- Galaxies and their proxies cannot be deposited to layer 2.

183+ Some other minor details are yet to be worked out, but again, nothing will change for those who wish to remain on layer 1.

184+

185+### Technical details {% #technical %}

186+

187+What's really going on behind the scenes here? Briefly, only the data of the Urbit ID transactions will be posted on-chain, while computation and state storage will now happen on your ship.

188+

189+In layer 1, the [Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)](https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/evm/) guarantees the validity of state transitions, while for layer 2 transactions, each Urbit node guarantees the validity of the state transitions.

190+

191+Changes to the state of Urbit ID on layer 1 works as follows:

192+

193+1. A transaction is posted to the Ethereum blockchain.

194+2. The EVM calculates the resulting state transition and checks its validity, then updates the state.

195+3. Your urbit downloads the new state from an Ethereum node.

196+4. Your urbit makes the final decision on whether the new state is valid.

197+

198+In practice, the fourth step is never used in layer 1. The primary change to our

199+security model is that we are cutting out step 2 and beefing up step 4. Your

200+ship will now perform validation of the transactions posted to the Ethereum

201+blockchain, rather than the EVM.

202+

203+Since [Urbit OS](/docs/glossary/arvo) is deterministic, and Hoon has some nice formal

204+properties, it turns out to be a great language for writing smart contracts. Thus we are effectively swapping the Ethereum smart contract with a “Hoon smart contract” run locally on your ship.

205+

206+#### Further Resources {% #resources %}

207+

208+We want to keep this post brief and non-technical, so that's all we'll say about

209+it for now. To find out more, you have a few directions to go on. We held a

210+[Developer Call](/events/2021-03-04-developer-call-scaling-azimuth) where

211+`~wicdev-wisryt` outlines the design in much more technical detail, and also

212+explains why we decided to utilize our own design rather than other known layer

213+2 solutions such as [Optimistic

214+rollups](https://docs.ethhub.io/ethereum-roadmap/layer-2-scaling/optimistic_rollups/),

215+[ZK-rollups](https://docs.ethhub.io/ethereum-roadmap/layer-2-scaling/zk-rollups/),

216+etc, or other blockchains. He also plans to do a more technical walkthrough video sometime before release. For those who would rather read, see

217+`~wicdev-wisryt`'s [RFC: Naive rollup for cheaper Urbit ID

218+transactions](https://groups.google.com/a/urbit.org/g/dev/c/p6rP_WsxLS0/m/hQBX0modAwAJ)

219+post on the `urbit-dev` mailing list. Lastly, the primary working branch on

220+Github for the Urbit side of naive rollups is

221+[here](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/tree/philip/naive), though it is not the

222+only place code is accumulating.

content/blog/security-and-continuity.mdnew file+60

@@ -0,0 +1,60 @@

1++++

2+title = "Security and Continuity"

3+description = "An update on our primary infrastructure milestones for 2020."

4+date = "2020-11-30"

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Galen Wolfe-Pauly"

8+ship = "~ravmel-ropdyl"

9+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/land4.jpg"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+## Security and Continuity

15+

16+In 2018, when we launched the Urbit ID contracts (also called ‘Azimuth’), we committed to yearly infrastructure goals for 2019 and 2020. This wasn’t an informal commitment — it’s part of the contracts that were published to the blockchain, which you can read [here](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/urbit/azimuth/edf68b8da04806dd5b95994daf14cf1e7e226829/proposals/0xcb1f81e42b5e75f000f94fc71a3ea70cab4bfc6f236b91e717f1b9516e5596b5.txt). At the end of each year, we ratify our accomplishment of these goals with a galaxy vote.

17+

18+Since the year is coming close to an end, and this year’s vote is on the horizon, it’s time for an update on our progress.

19+

20+For this year, we committed to completing two things: passing a third-party security audit of our networking protocol (Ames) and getting Urbit OS (both Arvo and the interpreter) to the point where we can reasonably expect the Urbit network to continue without any hard forks (which we call ‘breaches’). A world with no network breaches is one where the network should be able to run indefinitely without any interruption. We also call this ‘continuity’.

21+

22+We’ve been steadily making progress on these two fronts, and I’m happy to report both are nearly complete. We’ll walk through some of the details here and then follow up in another post soon to report on how the final work turned out.

23+

24+## Ames Audit

25+

26+Urbit OS is an ‘overlay OS’: it runs on top of (pretty much) any flavor of Unix. Each Urbit OS node communicates with other nodes over UDP using Ames, the Urbit-specific networking protocol.

27+

28+There are two things worth worrying about when it comes to Urbit OS security: someone breaking into Urbit from the machine it’s running on, and someone compromising the network protocol itself. As to the first, there are probably ways that we can harden the OS sandbox, but if the machine it’s running on is secure we can feel reasonably safe. Since there’s lots of prior art on how to secure a Unix machine, we can leave hardening the runtime for later and simply encourage everyone to secure the boxes they run their Urbit nodes on.

29+

30+Assuming each node on the network can run on a locked-down machine, it’s really important that the protocol for communicating between these nodes is secure. Also, since Ames uses other Urbit nodes for peer discovery, we want to make sure no ‘relay node’ can inspect data not meant for them.

31+

32+The question “Is Ames secure?” is too vague for an auditor, of course. The audit was scoped to determine that the following three criteria are met:

33+

34+- No one can impersonate another ship on the network

35+- No one (including relays) can intercept and decrypt messages not meant for them

36+- Ames messages don’t leak keys that could endanger the sender’s data

37+

38+Our goal with this scope is to focus exclusively on the design and implementation of Ames itself. Basically, the crypto should be correct and there should be no flaws in either the protocol design or its implementation. Our interpreter can still be hardened against other potential attacks, which is work we’ll undertake in the future. We asked our auditors to flag all of these potential issues, so we know what needs to be addressed in the future.

39+

40+The good thing about an audit scoped in this way is that we can trust the protocol to authenticate people and shuttle packets back and forth safely. We’ve always been reasonably confident about Ames, but having an external stamp of approval will be great.

41+

42+As of the end of November 2020, the audit is very nearly complete, and we’ve handled all the important issues that were brought up. We’ll post the results and talk about our mitigation strategies in a future writeup.

43+

44+## Continuity

45+

46+Urbit is designed to last a long time. What’s the use of a personal computer if it’s gonna disappear along with all the data you put in it? Ideally, you can put your Urbit on a USB stick, forget about it for ten years and have it work again when you plug it in. It’ll need to update for a while, but once our work on continuity is complete, your urbit should be able to upgrade itself through ten years of updates, all over the air.

47+

48+While Urbit is designed to upgrade seamlessly over the network we have occasionally run into issues that have caused us to reboot the entire network. Most of the time this is when some incompatibility between the interpreter and the kernel means we have to force everyone to do a hard reset to ensure compatibility between the two. Our current work on continuity addresses this. Soon, your urbit will tell you when your interpreter needs to be upgraded. At first this won’t be that different from an application notifying you to download an update. Eventually, we think we can make this a lot smoother.

49+

50+A network reboot isn’t the only way that we can break continuity. Urbit is a general-purpose computer — which means you’re free to attempt to destroy it. If, for any reason, you do manage to screw the system up we want you to be able to get your data out and effectively reset continuity on a single node. We built the affordance for that a while ago, but before the end of the year we’ll also distribute tooling to migrate userspace data between hard resets.

51+

52+The combination of version negotiation and data migration should afford us the ability to run the network indefinitely into the future. Unfortunately, to get this change in, we’ll need to reset the network. We’re optimistic that this will be the last time we ever do it. And, given our data migration tooling, this breach won’t involve losing data.

53+

54+## Status + conclusion

55+

56+We have been working with auditors since this summer and should have a report ready to publish in the next few weeks. Both version negotiation and data migration are in testing and are ready to be deployed.

57+

58+Our goal is to have all of this work complete by `~2020.12.10`. This means we should be able to start a galaxy vote right around that time. Galaxy votes (as specified in the contracts) run for a month, which should have this whole process ending on `~2021.1.10`.

59+

60+It's going to be an exciting couple of weeks!

content/blog/security-audit.mdnew file+153

@@ -0,0 +1,153 @@

1++++

2+title = "Ames Security Audit and the Future of the Protocol"

3+description = "Ames’ design has unparalleled potential to deter, mitigate, and recover from attacks, since every packet is authenticated and encrypted and backed by a stable, decentralized PKI."

4+date = "2020-12-17"

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Ted Blackman + Anthony Arroyo"

8+ship = "~rovnys-ricfer + ~poldec-tonteg"

9+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/20201218-audit.png"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+The security firm Leviathan has now finished their initial audit of the security of Urbit's Ames network protocol. In addition to their review of Ames, we also asked them to identify any other issues in order to help guide further development.

15+

16+I'm pleased to report they confirmed the cryptographic soundness of the protocol, namely that "a ship must have possession of their own valid Urbit key in order to authenticate as that ship and to send valid Ames messages. Additionally, no other ship except the two communicating may be able to decrypt or modify messages during transport."

17+

18+This means Ames uses cryptography in a mathematically sound manner that protects your privacy, keeps your secrets secret, and ensures nobody else will be able to impersonate you on the network. Since this was an architectural audit, it’s possible there are still vulnerabilities in the runtime implementation. Until the runtime has been hardened, Tlon continues to recommend against storing valuables in your ship.

19+

20+Aside from a couple of minor issues that have already been resolved, there are three general classes of problem highlighted in their report that future work will need to address:

21+

22+- Forward secrecy

23+- Protection against denial of service attacks

24+- Enforcement of social boundaries

25+

26+Ames’ design allows for versioning of the protocol, which means that the proposed changes below can be deployed as over-the-air updates as they become more pressing concerns. This feature gives us confidence that we can address future security issues as they arise.

27+

28+We will need to improve all of these over the next couple of years, as independent lines of work. As the network grows: better forward secrecy will decrease the damage from a key getting compromised; resistance against denial of service attacks will make the Urbit network resilient to increasingly determined saboteurs; and stricter enforcement of social boundaries will let Urbit’s social networks remain safe and friendly despite potentially increasingly large numbers of bad actors and increasingly complex app ecosystems.

29+

30+## Forward Secrecy

31+

32+A protocol is said to have forward secrecy if compromising a key used in a recent message doesn’t also compromise all previous messages. Similarly, a protocol is said to have backward secrecy -- also called future secrecy -- if compromising a key used in a previous message fails to compromise all future messages. Ames has some degree of both, but more would be better, to decrease the damage an attacker could inflict by compromising a key.

33+

34+As it stands, an Urbit user can change their Ames keys whenever they want, by conducting an Ethereum transaction to update the Ames public key listed in the Azimuth contract, which implements Urbit’s PKI on Ethereum. Compromise of one Ames private key does not compromise earlier or later keys, so this has both forward and backward secrecy. The main drawback is that Ethereum transactions can be expensive, so key rotation is likely to be infrequent, and an attacker might be able to gain access to a long stretch of time by compromising a single key.

35+

36+Various key rotation “ratchet” schemes could be added to Ames to establish varying degrees of forward and backward secrecy, and other kinds of cryptographic protections beyond basic soundness, such as break-in recovery.

37+

38+Right now, changing a key through Azimuth is a manual process. It could be automated, possibly as one of a suite of services that an Urbit Provider will offer. Unfortunately, each key rotation costs the user money, so automating rotation could get prohibitively expensive.

39+Existing protocols, such as the Signal app's encrypted messaging protocol, the Noise protocol framework, and the Wireguard VPN protocol, use ephemeral Diffie-Hellman key exchange and KDF chaining to achieve forward and backward secrecy and self-healing.

40+

41+Ames could be upgraded to use one of these existing ratchet algorithms, or we might create an Urbit-specific variant optimized for the Urbit network. This is work that should be done, but fortunately it will not require any novel research or drastic changes to Ames’s architecture.

42+

43+While Urbit’s cryptographic protections don’t yet match those of Signal or a few other privacy-focused apps, Ames is cryptographically sound, and since Urbit updates itself over-the-air and is backed by a stable, decentralized PKI, I’m confident that the level of sophistication of Urbit’s cryptography has the potential to be world-class with just a bit more work.

44+

45+## Denial of Service

46+

47+A denial of service (DoS) attack against an Urbit ship is an attempt to overwhelm it remotely by sending it network data in such a way as to interfere with the ship’s ability to communicate with other ships or process other events -- usually by hogging its resources (computational power, memory, or bandwidth) until normal operation slows down or ceases entirely. Since the promise of Urbit is that everyone can run their own server, that server needs to be able to defend itself against DoS attacks. This is in fact one of the main impediments to running your own server in the modern world.

48+

49+Right now, Urbit has no protection. Soon, it will need to at least be able to resist a simple attack carried out by an individual. Eventually, it should be able to resist a determined Distributed Denial of Service (“DDoS”) attack, which is more difficult.

50+

51+There are two categories of DoS attacks in Urbit: authenticated and unauthenticated. An authenticated attack requires access to a ship's private key to construct valid Ames packets intended to overwhelm a target. All authenticated attacks will be handled primarily through enforcement of social boundaries, as discussed in the next section.

52+

53+An unauthenticated DoS attack constructs packets that eventually fail to authenticate and decrypt but still overwhelm the target by causing it to waste resources (CPU, memory, disk, bandwidth) in such a way that it can't keep up with legitimate communications.

54+

55+An unauthenticated DoS attack relies on the lack of Sybil resistance of IP networks: it's possible to generate new IP addresses rapidly, and a determined attacker might also be able to spoof its sender IP address. This is best considered an IP-layer attack that must be handled mostly at the IP layer itself, by maintaining state about which IP addresses can be trusted and which can't, determined empirically and heuristically by the Urbit runtime. The best any higher-level protocol, such as Ames or TCP, can do is make it as cheap as possible for a DoS target to reject a bad packet.

56+

57+The overall strategy that Ames can take, as a protocol layering over the IP protocol, is to add an authentication procedure to each packet that can quickly identify bad packets, which an implementation will then use to mark that IP address as suspect and to refrain from adding the sender IP to a list of known-good IPs.

58+

59+Currently, Ames handles this by attempting to decrypt a message and rejecting the message on failure. This may be a more costly solution than other methods, such as attaching a signature or a MAC to each message. The way to mitigate unauthenticated attacks is to make bad packets fail faster by augmenting each packet with a signature or MAC to each packet, since those are faster to validate than encryption.

60+

61+So far, we have identified three approaches that could be taken here. Of these three, Leviathan recommended the end-to-end HMAC solution, since that would not impose additional CPU requirements on packet-relay nodes, such as stars.

62+

63+- Sign each packet, and any relay or final recipient could validate the signature

64+- Wrap each packet in an HMAC, validated by the final receiver

65+- Wrap each packet in a HMAC for each hop in a relay chain; each relay would validate and strip the previous HMAC and add a new one for the next hop

66+

67+Any of these solutions would be attempts to increase the rate at which the network could discard invalid packets, with different tradeoffs. I'll back up a bit to provide some context, and then I'll compare the approaches.

68+

69+In any DoS solution, a planet will want to block or throttle IPs that have been sending it packets that fail to authenticate and decrypt. Ideally, a star will help protect planets for whom it’s relaying, too. Many different arrangements among galaxy, star, and planet are imaginable here, from an open policy to a policy wherein each packet has to come from a known-good IP. This sort of paranoid, closed-off arrangement might still not be enough to withstand a determined DDoS, but it's difficult for me to imagine doing better than that without launching Urbit-specific ISPs. Ames packets are cryptographically authenticated, so an Urbit ISP would actually be feasible.

70+

71+This brings us back to the three possible ways of mitigating DoS from within the Ames protocol. They all involve adding a piece of authenticating information to each packet that can be verified more quickly than waiting for the cyphertext to fail to decrypt — Ames's symmetric encryption is authenticated, so it's not a cryptographic soundness issue, but the performance impact of trying to decrypt could be significant enough to make it hard to prevent a DoS.

72+

73+As-is, an Ames packet is basically `[protocol-version checksum sndr rcvr (nullable origin) cyphertext]` (visit [this PR](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/pull/4051#issue-530369627) for a full specification). Let’s walk through the construction of the packet and how it can be upgraded to offer different DOS mitigations.

74+

75+### DoS Mitigation Approach 1: Signature

76+

77+The first approach to DoS protection would be to add a signature to the packet. The signature would cover everything except the checksum and the origin, since those need to be swapped out by relays. The signature would probably obviate the need for the (20-bit) checksum, although we could also leave it in there if we can't figure out what else to do with those header bits.

78+

79+#### Advantages of a signature over other approaches

80+

81+- It can be validated by anyone on the network. Relays would not need to modify it. This might also give it symmetry with the upcoming remote scry protocol, which might also sign every packet. I'm not quite sure this is an important property, actually, but it might theoretically make launching an Urbit ISP or internet backbone easier one day.

82+- It would be signed directly by the key listed on Ethereum, not something that might get ratcheted at some point for better forward secrecy — this could eventually lower the rate at which intermediate validators need their key caches invalidated, although this is a bit of a theoretical concern.

83+

84+#### Disadvantages of a signature over other approaches

85+

86+- Generating and validating a signature is significantly slower than generating and validating an HMAC.

87+- An ECDSA signature is 64 bytes, which is ~6% of a packet payload. As far as I can tell, it can't be compressed.

88+- Since the signature could be validated by anyone, it doesn't attest to a specific communication channel, so it might not help as much with IP filtering.

89+

90+### DoS Mitigation Approach 2: End-to-End HMAC

91+

92+The second approach would be to use an HMAC instead of a signature, validated by the eventual receiver. This HMAC would also cover everything except the mug and origin. I'm calling this the "end-to-end HMAC" design. An HMAC requires a shared secret, for which we could use the same symmetric key that Ames uses.

93+

94+#### Advantages of end-to-end HMAC

95+

96+- It's simple in some sense; relays don't need to do anything cryptographic.

97+- HMACs are much faster to create and validate than signatures.

98+- HMACs, since they're hashes, can be truncated arbitrarily and still maintain some security — to find hash collisions, you'd still have to guess what packet||shared-secret would hash to; it would just be a smaller search space. Since Ames's encryption already guarantees authentication and we'd just be using this as a performance optimization, I suspect we could get away with using one that's significantly smaller than a signature — I'm not sure how small, but if 4 bytes would be enough in practice, that would take up less than 0.5% of the space in a packet.

99+

100+#### Disadvantages of end-to-end HMAC

101+

102+- Only the recipient can validate. This means the authentication couldn't be used by relays to discard invalid packets. The recipient could provide back-pressure out-of-band to a relay to ask the relay to discard packets from an IP with an invalid HMAC, but this is indirect and might need to filter backward through multiple relays to work properly.

103+

104+### DoS Mitigation Approach 3: Point-to-Point HMAC

105+

106+The third approach, which is what I would build unless convinced otherwise, is what I'm calling "point-to-point HMAC". This design would include a different HMAC for each hop in a relay chain, instead of (or maybe in addition to) including one end-to-end HMAC.

107+

108+We have a couple different options for how to construct the shared secret for each hop. I would intuitively construct it using a Diffie-Hellman of my private signing key and your public signing key — the "networking keys" on Ethereum include a currently unused signing key in addition to the encryption key that Ames uses. This way even if we add more forward secrecy to Ames, changing the symmetric key used for encryption, relays wouldn't have to have their caches invalidated as often; the state required to perform relaying wouldn't be as tied to the state required to receive a message.

109+

110+#### Advantages of point-to-point HMAC

111+

112+- A star could perform some validation on every packet it's asked to relay. This makes it more difficult for an attacker to route a ton of packets to a planet through a star, or even through many relays. Signatures also have this property, but they're slower to verify. This approach and the signature approach, but not the end-to-end HMACs, force an attacker to use an (at least partially) authenticated attack in order to use a relay as a way to get to a planet.

113+- A planet could quickly validate that a relayed packet actually came from its star, not an attacker who's managed to spoof the star's IP address.

114+

115+#### Disadvantages of point-to-point HMAC

116+

117+- Not everyone on the network can validate a packet, unlike a signature.

118+- Each relay needs to validate and strip off the previous HMAC and create a new one before sending it. This should be quite fast, since an HMAC is just a hash, but it's still some CPU, and potentially creates an imbalance where an attacker could induce the relay to spend more CPU in validation than the attacker spent in constructing the packets.

119+- By itself, it doesn't validate the cyphertext in an end-to-end way. I suspect we might want to include both a per-route HMAC and an end-to-end one, especially if we use truncated HMACs — although per-route might be enough on its own, since if the receiver fails to validate a bunch of packets whose HMACs were validated by the relay, the receiver can ask the relay to block that whole Urbit address regardless of IP, so it shouldn't be possible to sustain that kind of attack for long.

120+

121+#### An Aside About Cryptographic Performance

122+

123+I'm not sure exactly how much faster HMAC is. According to DJB (https://ed25519.cr.yp.to/ed25519-20110705.pdf), an ECDSA signature can be created in around 30 microseconds and verified in around 100 microseconds. This source (https://www.jacksondunstan.com/articles/3206) suggests about 21 microseconds for HMAC-SHA256, so about a 1.5x improvement in generation speed and 5x in validation speed. We should verify these numbers for ourselves before making a decision.

124+

125+### DoS Protection Strategy and Timeline

126+

127+Tlon is not currently pursuing adding any of the extra cryptographic authentication on Ames packets described above. Since this is ultimately a performance issue, there are other more pressing performance issues that we could improve upon before decryption will become the limiting factor in how many packets can be processed by a ship. We will revisit this authentication performance question once some of the low-hanging fruit has been done, perhaps roughly a year from now.

128+

129+Since the audit, we’ve already improved the Ames packet format to allow faster parsing, faster validation of basic fields, and faster relaying; in the future, increases in performance of Nock execution and inter-process communication between Urbit's I/O process and Nock worker would allow Urbit to absorb somewhat more punishment before service can be effectively denied.

130+

131+## Enforcement of Social Boundaries

132+

133+While Urbit needs to rely largely on its runtime to mitigate unauthenticated attacks, any attack conducted from an Urbit ship needs to be handled inside Arvo itself, not just by IP filtering in the runtime. Just like in any DoS, an attacker ship might try to induce you to use too much memory, CPU, or disk space in order to sabotage normal operation. An authenticated attack is harder to define than an unauthenticated attack, because it depends on what social relationship the attacker and target have, and it involves valid, authenticated Ames packets; once discovered, though, it’s easier to mitigate, because it can use Urbit’s permanent identity system to enforce social consequences, i.e. stop listening to that Urbit address and possibly encourage others to do so as well.

134+

135+There are a couple of different kinds of authenticated attack: attempts to exploit vulnerabilities in the Nock worker (the interpreter, allocator, and jets) by causing particular Nock code to run, and attempts to induce the target to exhaust various computational resources.

136+

137+Protecting against attempts to break out of the sandbox and hijack or otherwise interfere with the Unix process running Nock will require a process of hardening, fuzzing, and likely further security audits specifically evaluating the security of that boundary. This is largely out of scope of the Ames protocol itself, which was the subject of this audit.

138+

139+This leaves us with the latter case: resource exhaustion attacks. A peer could try to get my ship to use too much RAM, disk, CPU, or bandwidth by sending it valid Ames packets. This represents a social problem: a person on the network is trying to interfere with me. It's what's known in blockchain circles as an "attributable fault": once the attack is detected, it's trivial to determine the identity of the culprit.

140+

141+Once the attacker’s Urbit address is known, Urbit will fall back on the Sybil resistance of its identity system: there are a finite number of identities, each of which costs some money. Because Urbit identities are relatively permanent, they can be blocked permanently. As long as the expected value of an authenticated attack is less than the cost of the identity, the attacks won't happen very much — they'll cost money to sustain, instead of being self-perpetuating.

142+

143+Attacks like this are best thought of as attempts to violate social boundaries. I don't want you using up too many of my resources; that's a social boundary, and an attempt to force my ship to spend its resources on your behalf constitutes a violation of this boundary. The strategy for mitigating these attacks is to impose social and, indirectly, economic consequences on the perpetrators. The main social consequence is other ships refusing to communicate with you anymore.

144+

145+Some of this mitigation will take place in the Arvo kernel, and some will need to be application-specific. To protect the system from attackers, the kernel needs to be able to free space (Urbit is a single-level store, so there's no distinction between disk and RAM from Arvo's perspective) taken up by unfinished messages sent by peers. This can be done by allowing an application to ask Ames to delete partially received messages from a peer, generally replacing the received packets with an intent to nack (negative acknowledgment) to indicate that the transaction the peer wanted me to perform has been rejected.

146+

147+Applications should also be able to set resource usage policies that the Arvo kernel will enforce. For example, a chat application should configure Ames to reject any chat messages larger than, say, two hundred kilobytes. A file-sharing application would need a much larger per-message limit (ideally no per-message limit), but it might need to place a cap on its bandwidth usage to make sure lower-latency communications aren't swamped by a large file transfer. This kernel/application interface starts to resemble a permissioning or capabilities system, and it could be built as part of the crucial larger project of providing for configurable application permissions.

148+

149+To close the loop on enforcing social boundaries, reputation information should be shared across ships. This will likely be done by building one or more applications that share statistics and block operations. Some forms of reputation are likely to be globally shared, whereas others are likely to be multipolar, i.e. some people like you and some don’t. Generally, the lower the layer of the attack, the more global the reputation effect will be; the higher the layer, the more multipolar. An attempt to spam the network with millions of malicious packets will cause most people not to want to talk to you; sending me a movie I found mediocre is probably not even information worth sharing with anyone else.

150+

151+## Conclusion

152+

153+Ames’ design has unparalleled potential to deter, mitigate, and recover from attacks, since every packet is authenticated and encrypted and backed by a stable, decentralized PKI. It feels good to have our design for encryption and authentication be confirmed by a third party as cryptographically sound, and we know more or less what we need to build to reach the full security potential of the platform, including the steps outlined here.

content/blog/simple-durable-yours.mdnew file+48

@@ -0,0 +1,48 @@

1++++

2+title = "Simple, Durable, Yours"

3+date = "2019-10-16"

4+description = "We built Urbit from scratch to be a system that’s simple, durable, and yours. Everything that computing today is not — but should be."

5+extra = { }

6++++

7+

8+We live in a world dense with digital services. We see the world through them, we depend on them completely, and they’re not going away. They’re only becoming more ubiquitous.

9+

10+But computers are a mess.

11+

12+

13+

14+We spend all our time switching between services, juggling logins and different interfaces. And once we’re logged in, the services we use harvest our data, spy on us, and often shut down with little warning.

15+

16+If computers are going to be a part of our lives for generations to come, we need a sound foundation for them. We need a _system_, not a grab bag of apps and services. Urbit is that system.

17+

18+

19+

20+We built Urbit from scratch to be a system that’s simple, durable, and yours. Everything that computing today is not — but should be.

21+

22+What do we mean by simple, durable, and yours? Let’s walk through it one by one.

23+

24+<br /><br />

25+

26+## Simple

27+

28+Urbit is designed to be incredibly simple for ordinary users. Your data, applications, and connections all live in a single, unified operating system that belongs to you. Your Urbit requires no system administration and gets all its updates over the air. For developers, Urbit is incredibly compact and efficient. It’s about 50K lines of code — smaller than your average webapp. The entire OS can be understood by a single person and is designed to make building decentralized apps straightforward.

29+

30+<br /><br />

31+

32+## Durable

33+

34+Your Urbit is designed to be durable: both to store your data across generations and to be resilient against crashes. You can't really trust a computer that could disappear or become obsolete. We’ve become accustomed to this distrust, but it’s not the way things should be. Your Urbit is meant to be a permanent digital home. At its foundation, Urbit is designed a bit like a blockchain — making reliability and permanence a priority for the individual.

35+

36+<br /><br />

37+

38+## Yours

39+

40+Finally, your Urbit belongs to you in every possible way. You own it with a private key, control it completely, and can inspect its source code. We want your Urbit to be your digital home. A home you don’t own is just a hotel room.

41+

42+

43+

44+Urbit began as a sketch, driven from a basic intuition that a better platform could be built. Today, Urbit is two components: Urbit ID, an identity system that’s already live on Ethereum; and Urbit OS, a decentralized network and OS stack that’s young but working well.

45+

46+Over time we’ve quietly evolved Urbit into a carefully engineered, compact system. Urbit isn’t done — but it’s well on its way. The network has been live since 2013 and the interface is coming along nicely. You can own a piece of Urbit today if you can find an invite from a friend, or by buying an Urbit ID. We’re ready for people to begin homesteading this new territory we created with new communities and new software.

47+

48+We think it’s possible to leave today’s technology behind and build something better. Something more humane, calm, and collectively owned. Our vision of the future isn’t one where technology intrudes in every corner of our lives. It’s one where technology is mostly invisible.

content/blog/smart-home-of-the-future.mdnew file+60

@@ -0,0 +1,60 @@

1++++

2+title = "The Smart Home of the Future"

3+date = "2022-08-04"

4+description = "Homes are getting smarter. A smart home is no longer just a collection of smart devices but a superorganism of data-collecting objects. These people and devices who use and inhabit these homes form a complex socio-technical system. What is the future of the smart home and how will Urbit fit into it?"

5+[extra]

6+author = ""

7+ship = "~pilwyc-fastec"

8+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/blog/484f30d6e2d5aa86840a662a8b57bdd5.jpg"

9++++

10+

11+

12+

13+During the last couple months I’ve worked on learning what makes smart homes tick for Urbit users through a [grant by the Urbit Foundation](https://urbit.org/grants/communal-computing). What I’ve found (and [published in the final whitepaper](https://pilwyc-fastec-public.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Communal-Computing-for-Urbit-whitepaper.pdf)) is that people have a complicated relationship with the technologies in their homes while the number of devices are continuously increasing.

14+

15+It is further complexified by the fact that for every additional person in the household there is an expanding total number of interactions because of connections individuals form as groups. For example, I may generate one type of data sitting in a room by myself listening to music and a very different set of data sitting with my whole household watching a video together (while also browsing our own personal devices).

16+

17+The relationships you have with everyone that lives and visits your home (even the people that are not supposed to be there) are how we start to define our identity inside those spaces.

18+

19+During the study, I also learned about some important distinctions of Urbit's identity and (current lack of) digital reputation compared to other computing platforms.

20+

21+[Lunar Urbit and the Internet of Things](https://urbit.org/blog/iot) brings up key questions about the perfect paradigm for computing in the Urbit smart home. In that post [~datnut-pollen](https://urbit.org/ids/~datnut-pollen) articulates a problem with smart home devices:

22+

23+

24+> The Internet of Things is much maligned by technologists as a privacy, security, and maintenance nightmare. These products usually depend on phoning home to perform their service, which is inevitably a funnel by which personal data is harvested, an attack surface for hackers to gain access to your home network, and a single point of failure which may render the device useless, all in one!

25+

26+There are a range of needs and preferences regarding a person’s identity, the data they create in the home, and how data would be used. About half of the people thought of themselves as a singular online identity and had fewer concerns with sharing their data with 3rd parties. The other half of people that saw themselves segmented into different identities (e.g. home vs. work vs. online) were concerned with all of the data being sent to 3rd parties from their smart home.

27+

28+This is likely because people’s identities are split based on the relationships they have in their lives. This is related to how they consider what is a violation of privacy based on how their information is used. A framework in the practice of privacy is [Contextual Integrity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contextual_integrity) first proposed by Helen Nissenbaum in [Privacy In Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life](https://www.amazon.com/Privacy-Context-Technology-Policy-Integrity/dp/0804752370). It outlines a model that is based on norms and expectations by people of how they control the flow of their data rather than a false dichotomy of private vs. public. Mismatches between where a person expects their data to go and where it actually goes causes privacy violations. For more ways this is linked to the Urbit privacy models see the [white paper](https://pilwyc-fastec-public.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Communal-Computing-for-Urbit-whitepaper.pdf).

29+

30+Through these interviews I also found that Urbit’s identity doesn’t, by default, include strong reputational considerations for people. It started in an early conversation I had with [~wolref-podlex](https://urbit.org/ids/~wolref-podlex) about how communal computing would make sense in the Urbit world of strong identity and was confirmed through the discussions we had. The only information that shows up in Urbit communities today are your ID and sigil. Your reputation is then built in every human’s head based on the interactions they have with you through the community. This is a departure from what many technology platforms do today by encoding reputation in stars, likes, and other reputational markers.

31+

32+Lack of reputation legibility is valuable because “snapping to” a set of reputations doesn’t account for all of the different identities that form through the relationships you have. This is especially true for households where there are multiple people or multiple generations. It isn’t so much that they need to be illegible but that having anything other than a human decide what is appropriate will lead to incorrect assessments.

33+

34+In a recent post [Soulbinding Like a State](https://subconscious.substack.com/p/soulbinding-like-a-state), Gordon Brander makes some important points on how the requirement to be legible with identity systems is hazardous for people, especially at the scale of the internet. Client-server models that have proliferated with smart home technologies require that identities need to be legible to the 3rd party services. This is because we are mistaking the need for access with evaluations of those people. Confusing those creates circumstances that will overconstrain the possibilities of a people with the needs of the system.

35+

36+An Urbit smart home could deliver a more realistic identity model, communal experiences, and match the expectations of privacy by letting people relate as humans rather than identities or accounts. It doesn’t stop with only people physically in the household. Households can be joined across space and time. Think about those households intermediated by technology like a shared photo stream that shows up in two different household’s picture frames.

37+

38+For Urbit to be a better part of the home it needs to continue to focus on access through its peer-to-peer network rather than creating complex schemes for the person’s reputation. The reputation within a household is through the interpretations of those that are there in the household. There are many different relational identities like being a parent, a spouse, part of a parent-teacher association, table-top gaming group, and a backyard BBQ crew which is all part of your identity. The norms of how people deal with each other in the home will evolve over time including what should be shared within that context. Who is allowed in a room or not is something set by the expectations of norms that are negotiated between people. This includes photos that should be shown (or not) on the shared picture frame.

39+

40+[Stewart Brand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Brand)’s book [How Buildings Learn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Buildings_Learn) points to how building are in a constant state of flux:

41+

42+> A building is not something you finish. A building is something you start.

43+

44+We should assume that when we add technologies to the household with connected devices this isn’t any different. How we build these devices to respect the privacy, identity, and relationships of people will be key.

45+

46+The next step is to take this work forward and show how the Urbit platform could be used for smart home control. Due to the way the most smart home devices are built today we won’t be able to completely stop the sharing of data in the home with 3rd parties but we can somewhat obfuscate a person’s identity behind their Urbit identity that the device maker won’t understand. In my next [grant proposal](https://pilwyc-fastec-public.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Communal-Computing-for-Urbit-whitepaper.pdf#page=11&zoom=100,96,96) we will be looking to build a prototype of Gall app to control the most commonly used smart home device: the smart light bulb.

47+

48+The future of Urbit in the smart home will depend on its ability to integrate with many different device manufacturers. As these devices are installed, upgraded, and generally maintained they need to persist the identities of people in the home and configuration over time whereas most today require a relogin. The people in the home should maintain control over the systems automatically and perpetually rather than having to keep reasserting it through password resets. When they decide to leave the home they should be able to easily transfer that ownership to the next occupant like they would a set of keys.

49+

50+Another quote by Stewart Brand on buildings:

51+

52+> All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong.

53+

54+Our guesses as to what the people in a smart home of the future needs will be incorrect. What we can do is start to build around the doctrine of Urbit focused on personal data ownership, simplified identity, and leaving reputation to humans.

55+

56+The future of computing in the home will be one that is ubiquitous, contextual, and communal. Urbit needs to embrace the strong identity it already has without forcing legible reputational systems that are meant to be all-encompassing. The ownership over data and what happens to an Urbit ship will be a huge benefit when considering the growing distrust in 3rd party, client-server architectures. Urbit has a real opportunity to provide the home of the future with a platform for computing that let’s people be themselves and feel their home’s data, like their home, is really theirs.

57+

58+–

59+

60+*[~pilwyc-fastec](https://urbit.org/ids/~pilwyc-fastec) is a smart home pragmatist and Urbit enthusiast. While he enjoys the chaos of children using smart home devices he wishes it didn’t wreck his music recommendations so much. He can be found in the [Communal Computing for Urbit community](https://pilwyc-fastec.tlon.network/apps/landscape/~landscape/ship/~pilwyc-fastec/communal-computing-for-urbit/resource/chat/ship/~pilwyc-fastec/discussion-7484) if you want to get in touch.*

content/blog/stable-arvo.mdnew file+93

@@ -0,0 +1,93 @@

1++++

2+title = "Stable Arvo"

3+date = "2019-11-19"

4+description = "This year we set out to get Arvo to a point that we can credibly call ‘stable.' "

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Anthony Arroyo"

8+ship = "~poldec-tonteg"

9+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/stable-arvo.png"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+### A contract by which Arvo evolves

15+

16+We want your Urbit to last forever. We want an ordinary Urbit user to never worry about their Urbit breaking, going away or failing unexpectedly. We don’t just want this — we think this is one of the most incredible things Urbit can actually deliver.

17+

18+In order to get closer to an Urbit that can last forever, we set for ourselves the goal of getting Arvo (the kernel of what we’ve been calling ‘Urbit OS’) to a point that we can credibly call ‘stable’ by the end of 2019.

19+

20+But what do we mean exactly by ‘stable’? For something meant to last far into the future, stability really means _resilience_. Arvo has to both run and upgrade itself without ever breaking or falling into an unrecoverable state.

21+

22+Getting Arvo to this point doesn’t quite achieve the user-level goal we’re hoping to achieve. But if you’re comfortable doing a bit of system administration, Arvo itself should need almost no maintenance.

23+

24+To achieve stability in practice Arvo needs three things:

25+

26+- The Arvo network (Ames) has to be stable

27+- Arvo can’t easily fall into an unrecoverable state

28+- Arvo has to have a clear and formalized upgrade mechanic

29+

30+All of these are actively being worked on, and are mostly near completion. Let’s walk through them one by one.

31+

32+### A new Ames

33+

34+To ensure that Arvo can upgrade itself forever, it needs a network to deliver the updates. Toward this end we’ve put a lot of work into making Ames, the Urbit networking protocol, as reliable as possible.

35+

36+Ames is a big part of what makes Urbit Urbit. It guarantees exactly once message delivery, it’s encrypted and authenticated. The original Ames design is pretty good. But it’s also incredibly difficult to maintain and had a few really painful edge case bugs. When the network has fallen over in the past, it has been far too hard to debug the original Ames code.

37+

38+We managed to update this original Ames code to use Ethereum as the source of truth for keys and key updates. We also made significant changes by introducing a new version of Jael, our kernel module for managing keys and signing inside of Urbit. While this change was significant, Ames still had some pretty nasty occasional bugs related to subscriptions and subscription updates. In order to get Ames to be truly reliable, it needed a rewrite.

39+

40+We’ve been working on that rewrite, codenamed Alef, for a few months now. Alef doesn’t aim to add any new functionality — it’s simply a drop-in replacement that’s cleaner and more reliable. We currently have Alef running on a testnet and sending packets with an industry-standard congestion control algorithm. There’s still some work to do, but it’s coming along nicely. Some early tests even show it to be faster, which is great.

41+

42+We expect to switch to Alef in a continuity breach (network reset) during this quarter. This will be a huge step toward resilience. A networking protocol we can trust to deliver updates is essential for a computer that will last a long time.

43+

44+### Recoverability

45+

46+Another barrier to stability with existing Urbit is that a ship can, under specific conditions, fall into a terminal state. If part of your ship’s state relies on event in the future and this event crashes, then that part of the state can become unrecoverable. Consider, for example, an event that is set to be triggered by a timer. If this timer crashes, that event will never happen. This is a huge problem.

47+

48+In order to understand the difficulties with error handling and how we’re dealing with it, we have to understand the Arvo operating system. Arvo is responsible for coordinating messages being sent from the outside world (Unix in our case) and messages sent from one vane, or kernel module, to another. Both Arvo and the vanes are explicit state machines, meaning that they must specify every possible state and the transitions between them. These properties make it possible for the system to be fully updated (we’ll discuss such upgrades below).

49+

50+This architecture means that errors have to be considered not simply as an exception, but as a possible state in the explicit state machine. In practice, we have to account for both deterministic errors like semantically invalid formulas and non-deterministic errors like running out of memory or a plug getting pulled.

51+

52+Deterministic errors are currently handled within the virtual interpreter, Mock, and result in a “bail: exit.” They can be handled “within” Arvo and are never written to the event log. The real difficulty lies with non-deterministic errors, specifically ones can potentially cause other events.

53+

54+An obvious case of causally-connected events is a timer; any code that sets a timer eventually suspends itself, waiting to be awoken. And yet, if the subsequent timer event were to crash, the state machine awaiting it would remain suspended, expecting a transition that can and will not

55+occur.

56+

57+We believe that we have a general scheme that accounts for both classes of error. We’ve formalized this and will use it going forward to avoid falling into inconsistent states.

58+

59+Our solution to this problem is simple: if Arvo or one of its vanes crashes while processing an event, the fact of the failed event itself becomes a new event. The runtime injects an error notification in the event log, named, as is befitting of a failed event: %crud.

60+

61+In the case of a failed timer event, the error notification is routed back to the code that set the timer and communicates the following: you were expecting to be woken up, but, when you were, you crashed. The code in question could then consider the logical operation of which the timer was a part to have failed, or perhaps it could try again. In any case, it must not crash when handling the error notification, and it must not continue to expect to be woken up.

62+

63+This quarter, building on previous work, we’ve built on the %crud pattern and mapped the protocols between the vanes and between arvo and vere. This allows us to make sure that %cruds are all handled (so as to avoid the crash discussed above) and, in future iterations of the vanes, know what conditions need to be accommodated to avoid introducing regressions.

64+

65+By adopting this pattern and virtualizing userspace, we can make completely sure that code running in the kernel or an app can’t cause your ship to get into an inconsistent state.

66+

67+### Telescoping Kelvins

68+

69+Finally, in order for a ship to reliably receive and apply upgrades, we need to formalize and enforce a versioning scheme inside the system.

70+

71+Most software simply increases its version number on each release. Nock (our VM spec) and Hoon, on the other hand, uses kelvin versioning. Kelvin versioning doesn’t infinitely increase version numbers. Instead, we decrease the version number on each significant change in the hope that our software will eventually not need to change at all. Infrastructure, if it’s going to be truly reliable, should eventually reach absolute zero.

72+

73+Nock is already nearly frozen at 4K. A change to Nock is a major event.

74+

75+At the level of the kernel (including Arvo proper, Zuse, and the Vanes), we’ve never fully followed a kelvin versioning scheme. The bottom of the stack always had to freeze first. But now the system is starting to stabilize such that we need a path toward a ‘cool’ system all the way up in the vanes. Versioning the kernel is a different challenge than the VM or language since the vanes interoperate with one another.

76+

77+We have a formalized scheme for how we think kelvin versioning should work at the Arvo level in process now. This year we’ll start tagging each version of the kernel with an appropriate kelvin. This scheme means not only applying a version tag to each kernel, but also making sure there are transition functions written between versions. Additionally, it will include a versioning mechanism for the interface between the kernel and the runtime.

78+

79+Let’s dive into the details, but just a bit:

80+

81+The mechanism for the kernel is pretty simple. In short, we’ll enforce that everything above a particular layer must ‘cool’ (or upgrade, by shedding a version number) when something underneath drops a version number. This ensures that the system can’t fall into an incorrect state due to simple incompatibility. For example, if Hoon changes, all of the Arvo kernel must similarly drop a kelvin to ensure compatibility.

82+

83+The versioning scheme between the runtime and Arvo is similarly straightforward. We’ll build in an affordance for notifying the user if we need them to manually upgrade the interpreter. This ensures that API changes between interpreter and kernel can always be non-breaking. Someday interpreter changes can be done over the air (like your browser downloading its own upgrades), but we’re not there yet.

84+

85+What’s important about these two things is that they let us take continuity seriously. "Continuity" or "permanence" is arguably Urbit's killer feature: you start your ship, it just works, forever. Back it up on a USB drive, throw it in a drawer for forty years, and upon reconnecting to the network in 2059 (and pulling down all the updates you've missed) you're back in the game.

86+

87+With the recent 0.9.0 release we’ve gotten to the point where we can make almost all our upgrades over the air. Even the language is now upgradeable over the wire.

88+

89+But — in order for that scene in 2059 to actually work, these upgrade mechanisms have to be in place. As your ship upgrades itself, the system needs a way to ensure that each upgrade gets applied in a compatible way. Right now we’re careful about deploying over the air updates such that they don’t break, but that’s obviously not sustainable.

90+

91+Once this versioning scheme gets released later this year, there’s nothing technically preventing you from starting a late-2019 Urbit in 2039. We hope you’ll use it a lot in the interim — but this is an essential feature for a decentralized system that claims to upgrade itself. We’re really excited to get it implemented.

92+

93+These three areas of work are all due to complete later this quarter. This gets us something that’s much more resilient than what we’ve ever had before. Given a stable system, we can actually start to put some serious weight on it.

content/blog/state-of-urbit.mdnew file+95

@@ -0,0 +1,95 @@

1++++

2+title = "State of Urbit"

3+date = "2021-08-24"

4+description = "A year in review"

5+[extra]

6+author = "Galen Wolfe-Pauly"

7+ship = "~ravmel-ropdyl"

8+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/cities-6.jpg"

9++++

10+

11+

12+

13+In the past year, as Urbit has become more reliable and easier to use, we find that we&#39;re spending almost all of our time on the network. We&#39;ve disappeared into the system we&#39;ve been building, and it&#39;s a pleasure to be on Urbit. There&#39;s nowhere else we&#39;d rather be.

14+

15+If you&#39;re on the network with us you can see the system being built and getting better in real time. Bug fixes and new features appear on your ship constantly. The community is actively planning the future of the system _using the system itself_. At Tlon, we have the unparalleled pleasure of working on the system, _on the system_. This feels great, but for those of you who aren&#39;t on the network, it can look as if we&#39;ve disappeared.

16+

17+Right now, Urbit is not for my non-technical friends. But everyone can tell that mainstream apps are getting worse and most feel a desire for change. We want Urbit to be as easy to use as a conventional service. Or, at least as easy to use as Signal. And we&#39;re getting pretty close to that.

18+

19+In this post I&#39;ll cover the progress we&#39;ve made since releasing OS 1 so those who aren&#39;t on the network can get a sense of what we&#39;ve been up to and where we&#39;re going. We&#39;ve built a great communication tool called Landscape, we are improving Urbit&#39;s ease of onboarding, and we&#39;re launching an entire software distribution system. We have a lot of work on our plate.

20+

21+Okay, let&#39;s talk about where we currently stand and where we&#39;re heading.

22+

23+**Arc**

24+

25+Let&#39;s start at the top: we&#39;re working to build a new network and operating system for everyday cloud computing. We think everyone deserves to control and shape the tools they use to communicate and collaborate.

26+

27+Or, to put it another way: the apps and services we have today are confusing, annoying, and overly complicated. The only way out is to start at the foundation by building a new software stack. Once we have a cloud computing stack that an individual can own and completely control, the old hope that computers can be tools of freedom will return. We haven&#39;t forgotten the original vision of software as a fun, free, flexible everyday tool.

28+

29+This is a hilariously ambitious thing to try to do, we know. This is what makes it fun. So far, we just try to move step-by-step without overhyping what we&#39;re doing. Building a new platform for networked computing is both a technical and social problem. The technology has to work exceptionally well and the community has to care for it and move it forward.

30+

31+Our first step was simply to build a prototype, then to refine it into something that could plausibly work. Then, most recently, take that plausible prototype and build a user experience we liked enough to depend on it from day-to-day.

32+

33+In the last eighteen months we&#39;ve done exactly that. We depend on Urbit day-to-day and have shipped a tool that has become a home for numerous cultures and communities who are invested in moving the system forward. We first called that tool OS 1 but now it&#39;s known as Landscape.

34+

35+First, let&#39;s talk about the general arc of OS 1 → Landscape, both the successes and challenges. Then we&#39;ll talk about our next step, which is to create an independent and community supported software ecosystem.

36+

37+**OS 1 → Landscape**

38+

39+The tools we use shape the way we think. So how could we build better tools with old broken ones? We needed to cut our reliance on old tools that couldn&#39;t care less about how people actually work and live. The only thing they maximized was distraction and dependence. We needed something that was fundamentally private, durable, and flexible. Above all, we needed something that actually belonged to us.

40+

41+Building Urbit involves a lot of communication and collaboration. In order to move Urbit forward we knew that we needed a place to converse and connect, and we knew that place had to be on Urbit itself. We didn&#39;t need a Slack or a Discord or a Google Drive or a Reddit. We needed all of those things, in one place, that actually belonged to us.

42+

43+We experimented, built things, threw them away, and then eventually built and [launched OS 1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71ViyftPkGk).

44+

45+OS 1, now Landscape, is a simple tool for bringing groups together to communicate and stay connected. When a real physical community goes online they immediately become fragmented between various apps. Perhaps a Slack channel coupled with some Notion notebooks and a Telegram channel works for some people. It&#39;s easy to imagine other permutations, and you probably are already in at least two or three. These duct-taped stacks are not only ugly and confusing, but your day to day computing is spread thin and remains in the control of companies—not you.

46+

47+Urbit is a decentralized network but Landscape is for re-centralizing your communication. Users can form groups which share a set of channels; each channel can be either a chat, a notebook or a collection of links. This means groups can communicate flexibly, exactly how they want. And since Landscape is built on Urbit, each group is private and peer to peer; data is only shared between people in the group; each community on Landscape is completely independent. Communities own their data and last as long as they need to.

48+

49+This combination of a flexible unified interface on a decentralized platform you can trust feels really good.

50+

51+When OS 1 was first released, it was slow, buggy, and frustrating—but we loved it and wanted it to be better. We spent the next nine months making sweeping changes to take it from releasable prototype to pretty-nice first version. We rewrote the frontend completely, massively improved the performance of Urbit OS itself, and overhauled the interface. It was an enormous collective effort.

52+

53+By the end of 2020 we had renamed OS 1 to Landscape and the user experience was far better. We [announced our hosting service](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3qKe_WZr50) and onboarded close friends to help us test the system. I [wrote a little](<[https://tlon.io/news/landscape-now/](https://tlon.io/news/landscape-now/)>) about using Landscape from day-to-day around that time.

54+

55+Landscape wasn&#39;t just a useful tool for us, but it was something that other communities were starting to use in earnest. It seemed like Landscape could be a great place for people to grow new private communities, so long as we could onboard new users effectively. Hosting is a huge piece of the puzzle, since we need non-technical people to be able to use this wonderful platform as easily as its mainstream competitors.

56+

57+At this point (early this year), we encountered some pretty serious hurdles.

58+

59+To use Urbit, you need an Urbit ID. Each one of these is an NFT (something that no one cared about when we first launched Urbit ID). The basic idea is that an ID should cost something so that they aren&#39;t used abusively. But, in late 2020 the combination of a crypto bull market and congestion on the Ethereum network caused the transaction fee for buying an Urbit ID to increase from ~$1-2 to ~$100. An Urbit ID should cost _something_, but \&gt;$100 is too much of a barrier for entry. We knew that this could happen and started researching solutions late last year, ultimately deciding to [implement a solution ourselves](https://urbit.org/blog/rollups/).

60+

61+The tough part about having an identity verified on the blockchain is that you become vulnerable to unpredictable volatility. We saw a period of painfully high prices, followed by a dip, followed by another stretch of extremely high prices. We opted to continue releasing Landscape updates and moving the system forward despite the fact that it became prohibitively expensive to onboard people. Luckily, our solution to this problem should go live this summer, and will reduce the cost of onboarding about 60x. The best part is that it is a permanent solution so we&#39;ll never have to face this problem again.

62+

63+The other challenge to scaling the onboarding process is hosting.

64+

65+We have a functional hosting structure but we want it to be fully automated and featured. We&#39;ve been able to onboard friends and enthusiasts which has taught us a lot about how the system should work. But hosting has to be easy for anyone to join and get online quickly. Without an automated invite flow and it&#39;s not ready for prime time.

66+

67+We&#39;ve made great progress on this front. We are currently testing improvements internally and aim to have a final version ready simultaneously with lower planet fees. Then, at long last, we can comfortably invite friends to get on the network without ever leaving the browser.

68+

69+It&#39;s worth mentioning that hosting is very much a Tlon Corporation project. Urbit is a platform owned, maintained, and developed by the people that use it (along with the nascent Urbit Foundation). Tlon, while also contributing to the Urbit project, ultimately wants to produce applications and services on Urbit. Hosting is one of those projects. Hosting makes Urbit easy, approachable, and usable without the compromises involved in using a conventional service. Since we&#39;ll be one of many Urbit-related providers, Tlon won&#39;t be the only host. There are already a few others (like [UrbitHost](https://urbithost.com/)) getting off the ground, which is fantastic.

70+

71+**Landscape → Grid**

72+

73+As the world has become more physically distributed we rely on our digital tools to keep our communities connected. The rise of DAOs, collectives, squads, and alternative community governance structures underscores the importance of tools like Landscape that communities can actually own and control.

74+

75+Our first goal was to find out if we could build something really good on top of Urbit. We did that. And we&#39;re continuing to lower the barrier to entry. We&#39;ve also got an Urbit &#39;messenger&#39; iOS app in the works that&#39;s really nice.

76+

77+Landscape is great, but in the long run Urbit is meant to be a platform for anyone to build on top of. Urbit is a computer, not just a single communications app like Landscape. The whole point of Urbit is to make it easy for an individual to run their own general-purpose computer in the cloud. Your Urbit isn&#39;t just meant to run Landscape it&#39;s meant to run any sort of application. And that&#39;s where we&#39;re going next.

78+

79+Grid is a holistic interface for interacting with your Urbit node. Landscape, as it&#39;s known today, will become one of many apps that can be launched. Perhaps most importantly, Grid will have peer-to-peer software distribution over the network. This means you can, as a developer, build something, let a friend sync it over the network, and never have to run a dedicated distribution server. Or, as an everyday user, you can run software on your private Urbit node without the developer ever being involved.

80+

81+Urbit isn&#39;t an OS in the traditional sense—it&#39;s an &#39;overlay&#39; OS. It has to run on top of something else. But Urbit _is_ an OS in the sense that it&#39;s general-purpose. And our goal in building interfaces for Urbit is to deliver that feeling of openness and flexibility to the user. Grid is a major step toward that goal.

82+

83+Not only should a community own their communication tools, they should be able to run and host their own cloud software. They shouldn&#39;t need to rely on providers to store their data, run the application, and determine how their digital life will function.

84+

85+Grid will surely go through the same process that Landscape did. It&#39;ll start as a working first version that will inspire us to refine and make it better. But, unlike Landscape, Grid opens up an entirely new frontier for what can be done on Urbit.

86+

87+We&#39;re putting together our first conference on Oct 15-17th to inaugurate Urbit as an integrated platform and distribution system for new applications. [Tickets for Assembly 2021 are already available](https://checkout.eventcreate.com/assembly2021/select-buy). Tlon is going to Austin!

88+

89+**Closing**

90+

91+Urbit is a deeply optimistic project. Although the digital world seems more broken than ever, we&#39;re confident that something else is possible. We have already created software that people use everyday. We want everyone to have the experience that we do, and we want that experience to continue to get better. Beautiful, reliable infrastructure that communities can build on will have a significant impact on the world. The end game of connected computers doesn&#39;t have to be dystopian.

92+

93+For those of you who aren&#39;t directly involved with the project, I hope this gives you a snapshot of where we are. If we were on an Antarctic expedition the postcard would read something like &#39;Team is well-fed, healthy and motivated. Making great progress.&#39;

94+

95+With that, I&#39;ll get back to work.

content/blog/the-100-year-computer.mdnew file+30

@@ -0,0 +1,30 @@

1++++

2+title = "The 100-Year Computer"

3+date = "2019-05-13"

4+description = 'One way to think about Urbit: as a "100-year computer."'

5+aliases = [

6+ "/posts/essays/the-100-year-computer/",

7+ "/posts/the-100-year-computer"

8+]

9+

10+[extra]

11+author = "Galen Wolfe-Pauly"

12+ship = "~ravmel-ropdyl"

13+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/100-year-computer-1.png"

14++++

15+

16+

17+

18+Around the Tlon office, we’re always looking for more concise ways to describe what we do. We kicked around ‘personal server’ for a long time. It’s pretty close. ‘Personal cloud computer’ did okay for a while, but it’s a little confusing.

19+

20+One way to think about Urbit is as a 100-year computer.

21+

22+A 100-year computer has to be durable, reliable and permanent. It has to never lose data or fail in unpredictable ways. It has to be continuous, meaning it should never need to be updated by the user. If I put it in a closet for 10 years and take it out, it should work again without any intervention.

23+

24+And, perhaps most importantly, it should be easy and enjoyable to use. Both for a casual user and for a technical person. If it’s not enjoyable to use, and doesn’t actually _get used_, it’s never going to survive for 100 years.

25+

26+In theory we could all be using Apple I’s today, but they’re a bit cumbersome. In large part that’s because they don’t update themselves. Those magnetic tapes don’t strike me as particularly durable either.

27+

28+Imagine that a computer was something you kept forever. It would comfortably store your entire life: your writing, photos, blood tests, even your genome. Your computer would never show you ads, interrupt you against your wishes, or send your data to someone else without your permission.

29+

30+Imagine a computer that was extremely valuable to you, that you’d pay thousands of dollars to recover, but you used _less_ than the one you do today.

main/blog/dao.md → content/blog/the-dao-as-a-lesson-in-decentralized-governance.mdrenamed+123−131

@@ -1,32 +1,30 @@

1−---

2−date: ~2016.6.24

3−type: post

4−title: The DAO as a lesson in decentralized governance

5−author: Curtis Yarvin

6−preview: The DAO as a lesson in decentralized governance

7−layout: urbit,post

8−comments: true

9−navmode: navbar

10−navdpad: false

11−navselect: blog

12−navpath: /

13−navhome: /

14−navclass: urbit

15−---

16−<br /><br />

1++++

2+title = "The DAO as a Lesson in Decentralized Governance"

3+date = "2016-06-23"

4+description = "What's the right lesson for the decentralization community to learn from the collapse of the DAO?"

5+aliases = [

6+ "/posts/essays/the-dao-as-a-lesson-in-decentralized-governance",

7+ "/posts/the-dao-as-a-lesson-in-decentralized-governance",

8+ "/blog/dao"

9+]

10+

11+[extra]

12+author = "Curtis Yarvin"

13+ship = "~sorreg-namtyv"

14++++

15+

1716What's the right lesson for the decentralization community to

1817learn from the collapse of the DAO?

1918

2019Perhaps the simplest lesson is that even decentralized networks

21−need governments, and have governments. Every network is a

22−state. Every state has a government.

20+need governments, and have governments. Every network is a

21+state. Every state has a government.

2322

2423## Decentralization theater considered harmful

2524

26−In Dijkstra's terms: *decentralization theater [considered

27−harmful](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful)*.

25+In Dijkstra's terms: decentralization theater [considered harmful](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful).

2826

29−*Decentralization theater* means any system that produces not

27+_Decentralization theater_ means any system that produces not

3028decentralization, but the appearance of decentralization.

3129[Security

3230theater](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_theater) is the enemy of real security; decentralization

@@ -38,142 +36,142 @@ A network without decentralization theater is one that admits:

3836- any new state is born at war with full emergency powers.

3937- limiting and/or eliminating governance is a slow, hard task.

4038

41−TLDR: true decentralization isn't just a technical problem. It's

42−also a political problem, and not an easy one. Believing you've

39+TLDR: true decentralization isn't just a technical problem. It's

40+also a political problem, and not an easy one. Believing you've

4341solved it, before actually solving it, is not a way to solve it.

4442

4543## Decentralization and legitimacy

4644

4745Steve Randy Waldman is not alone in pointing out that [a

4846blockchain is a

49−parliament](http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6581.html). It's

47+parliament](http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6581.html). It's

5048just the technical reality that a majority of miners in a

5149proof-of-work blockchain, or stakeholders under proof of stake,

5250have the mathematical power to govern the network absolutely.

5351

5452But this power does not give them the legitimate authority to do

55−whatever they want. Mathematically, the Ethereum miners can

56−easily roll back the DAO. Do they have the *right* to roll back

57−the DAO? As we write, this question is one much debated.

53+whatever they want. Mathematically, the Ethereum miners can

54+easily roll back the DAO. Do they have the _right_ to roll back

55+the DAO? As we write, this question is one much debated.

5856

59−We have an easy answer: no. The most basic principle of law is

60−that *pacta sunt servanda*, agreements must be respected. A good

57+We have an easy answer: no. The most basic principle of law is

58+that _pacta sunt servanda_, agreements must be respected. A good

6159clue is that before the DAO hack, everyone swore great oaths to

62−"the steadfast iron will of immutable code." Methinks the lady

63−did protest too much. But these oaths make rolling back the DAO

60+"the steadfast iron will of immutable code." Methinks the lady

61+did protest too much. But these oaths make rolling back the DAO

6462blatantly illegitimate.

6563

6664From a governance perspective, the line of lawlessness isn't the

67−line between soft and hard forks. It's any fork which makes an

68−exception for a specific address. Ethereum has already done this

69−by freezing the DAO contract. At this point, it might as well be

65+line between soft and hard forks. It's any fork which makes an

66+exception for a specific address. Ethereum has already done this

67+by freezing the DAO contract. At this point, it might as well be

7068hanged for an ox, and go through with the full rollback.

7169

7270## Illegitimacy and belligerency

7371

7472Within the ethos of Ethereum (we are obviously not qualified to

75−comment on "real" law), a rollback is a *lawless act*. This does

76−not make it a wrongful act. It simply cannot be judged as an act

77−of law. Rather, it is an act of war.

73+comment on "real" law), a rollback is a _lawless act_. This does

74+not make it a wrongful act. It simply cannot be judged as an act

75+of law. Rather, it is an act of war.

7876

79−And judged as an act of war, a DAO rollback is *exactly right*.

80−Ethereum is not dealing with a "participant." It is dealing with

81−a pirate, a thief, *hostis humani generis*.

77+And judged as an act of war, a DAO rollback is _exactly right_.

78+Ethereum is not dealing with a "participant." It is dealing with

79+a pirate, a thief, _hostis humani generis_.

8280

8381As a state at war with an external enemy, the Ethereum network

84−shouldn't just zero the DAO hacker's booty. It must do all it

85−can to destroy her. If possible, it must dox and report her.

82+shouldn't just zero the DAO hacker's booty. It must do all it

83+can to destroy her. If possible, it must dox and report her.

8684The right place for this fool is the supermax, not the Riviera.

8785

88−But does Ethereum really want to be at war? And if Ethereum is

86+But does Ethereum really want to be at war? And if Ethereum is

8987at war -- and this certainly isn't the only pirate in the sea --

90−how does it become decentralized? If Ethereum is at war, where

88+how does it become decentralized? If Ethereum is at war, where

9189there is no law, how can it achieve its goal of creating a world

9290where code is law?

9391

94−But we really shouldn't panic. It is actually possible to go

92+But we really shouldn't panic. It is actually possible to go

9593from wartime government to peacetime government, from absolute

96−martial law to absolute rule of law. It is just nontrivial.

94+martial law to absolute rule of law. It is just nontrivial.

9795It's a political engineering problem that can't be ignored.

9896If it has to be solved, it should be solved properly.

9997

10098What really doesn't work is to declare martial law, execute all

10199traitors, terrorists and enemies of the state, then declare that

102−elections will proceed as scheduled next week. If the goal is

100+elections will proceed as scheduled next week. If the goal is

103101the decentralized rule of code as law, a rollback takes an

104−enormous step backward. Reversing this setback isn't trivial.

102+enormous step backward. Reversing this setback isn't trivial.

105103

106−Should Ethereum actually go to war? Or should it just let the

107−hacker win? Clearly, from a pure blockchain perspective, the

104+Should Ethereum actually go to war? Or should it just let the

105+hacker win? Clearly, from a pure blockchain perspective, the

108106only correct thing to do is let the DAO burn -- as a painful

109−warning to all future contract authors and participants.

107+warning to all future contract authors and participants.

110108

111109At present, it seems that Ethereum's leadership has chosen war.

112−Certainly, neither choice is obviously imprudent. Ethereum is a

113−winner and probably has a bright future either way. But who

110+Certainly, neither choice is obviously imprudent. Ethereum is a

111+winner and probably has a bright future either way. But who

114112chooses war needs a plan to win that war, and return to peace.

115113

116114## Sovereignty is conserved

117115

118116For a government to even have the power to consider wartime

119−measures, a government has to exist in the first place.

117+measures, a government has to exist in the first place.

120118

121119Again, we can't remind ourselves too often that a blockchain just

122−puts absolute authority in the hands of the miners. We just

120+puts absolute authority in the hands of the miners. We just

123121think of this power in terms of the law it's supposed to enforce.

124122But the two are different -- at least in wartime.

125123

126−Why is it so hard to eliminate unaccountable power? Who watches

127−the watchmen? The German legal scholar [Carl

124+Why is it so hard to eliminate unaccountable power? Who watches

125+the watchmen? The German legal scholar [Carl

128126Schmitt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Schmitt) defined the

129127problem well when he wrote: "the sovereign is who decides the

130128exception."

131129

132130In the American regime, the Supreme Court is sovereign by

133−Schmitt's definition. We have a complex system of laws, which

131+Schmitt's definition. We have a complex system of laws, which

134132are not formal code but in some ways aspire to be; above it, we

135133have a judiciary system that can decide arbitrary exceptions to

136−those laws. Pure rule of law, Schmitt tells us, is always and

137−everywhere an illusion. We can and should strive to approach

134+those laws. Pure rule of law, Schmitt tells us, is always and

135+everywhere an illusion. We can and should strive to approach

138136this limit, but it's an infinity that we can't actually reach.

139137

140138Schmitt's exception principle can be rephrased as "sovereignty is

141−conserved." There is always someone who answers to nobody. We

139+conserved." There is always someone who answers to nobody. We

142140cannot eliminate government; the best we can do is tame it.

143141

144142One way to think of the problem of reducing exceptional force to

145143zero is to compare it to a simple unstable equilibrium, like a

146−pencil standing on its point. The pencil on its point needs

147−almost no force to stay upright. But the farther it deviates

144+pencil standing on its point. The pencil on its point needs

145+almost no force to stay upright. But the farther it deviates

148146from this orderly, self-sustaining equilibrium, the more energy

149147must be applied to return it to vertical.

150148

151149Vitalik seems to have grasped more or less Schmitt's point:

152−"*Intent is fundamentally complex*... we believe that we value

153−things like 'fairness', but it’s hard to define what fairness

154−even means."

150+"_Intent is fundamentally complex_... we believe that we value

151+things like 'fairness', but it's hard to define what fairness

152+even means."

155153

156154If we could define fairness, we would have a rule to which there

157−were no exceptions. We would need no judges, or governments, or

158−even soldiers. We would need no sovereignty. But since we can't

155+were no exceptions. We would need no judges, or governments, or

156+even soldiers. We would need no sovereignty. But since we can't

159157define fairness -- yet need to enforce some clear vision of

160158fairness -- sovereignty remains conserved.

161159

162160## Bitcoin, a blockchain at peace

163161

164162Bitcoin has done an excellent job of freezing the war power of

165−its own "parliament." Ironically, mining power in Bitcoin is

163+its own "parliament." Ironically, mining power in Bitcoin is

166164quite centralized -- a small number of Chinese mining-pool

167165managers, who have every opportunity to collude, could roll back

168−anything. But they never have and they probably never will.

166+anything. But they never have and they probably never will.

169167

170168Even if a single pool controlled 51% of Bitcoin mining power,

171169they'd have no incentive to break the rules -- quite the

172−converse. We equate physical decentralization with limited

170+converse. We equate physical decentralization with limited

173171governance, perhaps because we think of the physical difficulty

174172of coordination as the main protection against arbitrary power.

175173

176−Bitcoin shows that this isn't true. As far as we can tell,

174+Bitcoin shows that this isn't true. As far as we can tell,

177175Bitcoin would keep working fine if there was only one miner.

178176This uni-miner would have still have no incentive to corrupt the

179177network -- though another party, such as a real government, might

@@ -181,41 +179,41 @@ have an incentive to coerce the miner.

181179

182180The important success of Bitcoin is the collective acceptance --

183181mathematically false, but politically true -- that rollbacks in

184−Bitcoin are inconceivable. Bitcoin has governance problems, but

182+Bitcoin are inconceivable. Bitcoin has governance problems, but

185183they're confined to relatively unimportant questions, like the

186−blocksize debate. "Decentralization" may not be quite the word,

187−but somehow Bitcoin has achieved limited government. The pencil

188−is standing on its point. For now.

184+blocksize debate. "Decentralization" may not be quite the word,

185+but somehow Bitcoin has achieved limited government. The pencil

186+is standing on its point. For now.

189187

190188## Ethereum's dilemma

191189

192−A rollback creates a scary precedent. It's a sort of military

193−coup. Just as the miners have the power to rule any blockchain,

194−the military has the power to rule any country. Do they want it?

195−The first coup makes the next coup much easier. Same with the

190+A rollback creates a scary precedent. It's a sort of military

191+coup. Just as the miners have the power to rule any blockchain,

192+the military has the power to rule any country. Do they want it?

193+The first coup makes the next coup much easier. Same with the

196194first rollback.

197195

198196In retrospect, the great mistake here was that Ethereum didn't

199197know it needed a government, and did its best to pretend it

200−didn't have one. After a rollback, Ethereum doesn't just have a

201−government. It has a military dictatorship.

198+didn't have one. After a rollback, Ethereum doesn't just have a

199+government. It has a military dictatorship.

202200

203−Ethereum and Bitcoin are qualitatively different. Bitcoin has a

204−simple UI metaphor: cash. Everyone knows how cash works. A

205−smart contract has its own UI metaphor: law. But as we see,

201+Ethereum and Bitcoin are qualitatively different. Bitcoin has a

202+simple UI metaphor: cash. Everyone knows how cash works. A

203+smart contract has its own UI metaphor: law. But as we see,

206204mechanically administered law, law without judges, is a very

207205different thing from ordinary human law.

208206

209207What the DAO shows is that Ethereum just wasn't ready to be

210−decentralized. It was not ready to allow a $150 million contract

211−with no supervision or appeals process. The problem was not

208+decentralized. It was not ready to allow a $150 million contract

209+with no supervision or appeals process. The problem was not

212210Ethereum's code per se -- although Solidity doesn't seem terribly

213211well designed for preventing these pitfalls -- but the human

214212understanding of its capabilities and limits.

215213

216−A rollback acknowledges this. It acknowledges that Ethereum

217−wasn't ready for complete self-government, and *someone* needed

218−to have stopped the DAO from trading. It's not quite clear what

214+A rollback acknowledges this. It acknowledges that Ethereum

215+wasn't ready for complete self-government, and _someone_ needed

216+to have stopped the DAO from trading. It's not quite clear what

219217the principle behind the rollback was.

220218

221219Perhaps the best kind of DAO rollback would be a rollback which

@@ -223,13 +221,13 @@ understood this error fully, and acknowledged that -- for the

223221moment -- Ethereum needs a sovereign government, with the power

224222to restrict and/or steward contracts.

225223

226−Contracts are not payments. They are infinitely more complex.

227−They will keep blowing up. Ethereum is full of buggy contracts,

228−scammy contracts, ponzis and casinos, etc. A governed Ethereum,

224+Contracts are not payments. They are infinitely more complex.

225+They will keep blowing up. Ethereum is full of buggy contracts,

226+scammy contracts, ponzis and casinos, etc. A governed Ethereum,

229227in the present state of the technology, might well choose to vet

230−all contracts centrally *before* they started trading.

228+all contracts centrally _before_ they started trading.

231229

232−Would this be a permanent feature? Certainly not -- it would be

230+Would this be a permanent feature? Certainly not -- it would be

233231a way for the community to collectively define a good contract.

234232Once we know what a responsible, well-tested, non-scammy Ethereum

235233contract looks like, it's much easier to return to the principle

@@ -241,95 +239,89 @@ are able to make this decision rationally, and get it right.

241239This work simply hasn't been done.

242240

243241Perhaps the worst-case scenario is one in which Ethereum approves

244−the hard fork, on the "just this once" principle. To save the

245−country, we need a military coup. But don't panic! "After

242+the hard fork, on the "just this once" principle. To save the

243+country, we need a military coup. But don't panic! "After

246244executing all traitors and enemies of the people, the generals

247245will immediately restore democracy and the rule of law."

248246

249247The "just this once" fork takes us back to decentralization

250−theater, where Ethereum pretends not to have a government. But

251−now, this pretense is even more threadbare. The next hack, which

248+theater, where Ethereum pretends not to have a government. But

249+now, this pretense is even more threadbare. The next hack, which

252250will certainly happen, will produce yet another coup -- or at

253−least a food fight over whether to have a coup. This is the path

251+least a food fight over whether to have a coup. This is the path

254252to a "digital banana republic," where the tattered illusion of

255253law barely conceals the real law of nature.

256254

257255The bottom line is that if a rollback happens once, we can expect

258−it to happen again. This time, the rollback can be treated as an

259−act of war, and no process is necessary. Next time, there needs

256+it to happen again. This time, the rollback can be treated as an

257+act of war, and no process is necessary. Next time, there needs

260258to be a process -- or the dream of code as law will drift further

261259away.

262260

263261Having a central government isn't inconsistent with the ultimate

264−objective of eliminating central government. Certainly, before

265−Ethereum was released, its developers were its government. Every

262+objective of eliminating central government. Certainly, before

263+Ethereum was released, its developers were its government. Every

266264government is born in a state of chaos and war.

267265

268266The mistake is just in thinking something as complex as Ethereum

269−can jump directly to decentralization in a single step. The

270−pencil is not standing on its point, or anywhere close. Before

267+can jump directly to decentralization in a single step. The

268+pencil is not standing on its point, or anywhere close. Before

271269anyone can think about letting go, someone needs to actually lift

272−it. To reach law, first enforce peace.

270+it. To reach law, first enforce peace.

273271

274272## Constitutional structure

275273

276274One of the governance problems of blockchains, related to the

277275fundamental error of decentralization theater, is the failure to

278276build deliberative institutions on top of the "parliament of

279−miners." Voting by proof of work is great, especially if the

277+miners." Voting by proof of work is great, especially if the

280278majority is well above 51%, and can demonstrate its strength

281−without an actual hashing race. It's a good way to finalize

282−decisions. But not a good way to make them.

279+without an actual hashing race. It's a good way to finalize

280+decisions. But not a good way to make them.

283281

284282But blockchain governance would be considerably improved if the

285283miners actually had a formal way to delegate their power to a

286−structured institution that represented them. Both Bitcoin and

284+structured institution that represented them. Both Bitcoin and

287285Ethereum have foundations and/or core teams, but authority in

288286these institutions isn't tied in any way to actual mining power.

289287Informal politics fills this void with personality cults and

290288eloquent blogposts, all hoping to create collective agreement

291−among the actual voting miners.

289+among the actual voting miners.

292290

293291History shows this is not a great way to run a railroad.

294292Misalignment between a fundamental power, like the miners, and a

295293group purporting to represent them, like the foundations, is

296294inherently dangerous.

297295

298−What's the alternative? An actual constitution. Perhaps the

296+What's the alternative? An actual constitution. Perhaps the

299297first smart contract that Ethereum needs is not the DAO, not even

300298well-engineered, high-quality smart contracts like Augur and

301−Maker, but just its own equivalent of 1789. If Ethereum needs a

302−government, it must govern itself. It certainly has all the

299+Maker, but just its own equivalent of 1789. If Ethereum needs a

300+government, it must govern itself. It certainly has all the

303301technical tools it needs!

304302

305−Or, of course, it could just let the hackers win. This is the

306−easiest path. And in the end, it may still be the best. War,

303+Or, of course, it could just let the hackers win. This is the

304+easiest path. And in the end, it may still be the best. War,

307305who needs it?

308306

309307## A quick Urbit plug

310308

311309Technically, Urbit needs governance much more than Ethereum.

312310Decentralization remains our goal -- but it's a long-term goal.

313−Decentralization theater has never even been a temptation. It's

314−just technically impossible.

311+Decentralization theater has never even been a temptation. It's

312+just technically impossible.

315313

316314For example, until the Urbit OS and language (Arvo and Hoon) are

317315frozen and perfect -- which, unlike Nock, will take a while --

318316Urbit is still "evergreen" -- it still needs automatic hotpatches

319−from the network.

317+from the network.

320318

321319Whatever institution signs these updates is, by any standard, an

322−absolute government. It's as if the Ethereum Foundation could

320+absolute government. It's as if the Ethereum Foundation could

323321push a hardfork of all clients by signing the new code on the

324−blockchain. Getting out of this situation is a long-term goal --

325−where "long term" means years. Decentralization is hard.

322+blockchain. Getting out of this situation is a long-term goal --

323+where "long term" means years. Decentralization is hard.

326324

327325Read our [interim

328−constitution](http://urbit.org/posts/constitution) and our

329−[beliefs and principles](http://urbit.org/posts/principles).

330−

331−<br /><br />

332−

333−<div>

334− Subscribe to our newsletter: <email dataPath="/submit" submit="Get updates" />

335−</div>

326+constitution](http://urbit.org/essays/interim-constitution) and our

327+[beliefs and principles](http://urbit.org//essays/beliefs-and-principles).

content/blog/the-missing-middle.mdnew file+50

@@ -0,0 +1,50 @@

1++++

2+title = "The Missing Middle"

3+date = "2020-05-25"

4+description = "Urbit stars can facilitate a flexible continuum of community norms."

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Nicholas Simmons"

8+ship = "~simfur-ritwed"

9+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/missing-middle.png"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+The promise of social technology is that we can discover more friends; _specifically, people more similar to us_ than we previously had access to. The means by which we do so, the methods of collaboration, the quality of connected experiences; these factors matter, but they are marginal considerations compared to the basic offering of an expanded choice of connections.

15+

16+The wilder-eyed, utopian end of early computing drew greatly from this promise; such unprecedented connection could bring about world peace, intellectual serendipity, higher consciousness. We didn’t get world peace, but we did get a genuine revolution in collaborative information-sharing and rapid communication. That ability to refactor our social preferences gave birth to an uncountable universe of online communities and subcultures that would be unimaginable to anyone who didn’t see it happen.

17+

18+We didn’t get a million friends either. Dunbar’s number, which posits an upper bound of ~150 trusted relationships per person, put the lie to dreams of a ‘global community.’ Better social tools give us more choice in who to fill those slots with, but not the ability to expand the personal spheres where we actually spend most of our time and forge most of our familiarity and trust with others.

19+

20+We know this, and the social networks know it. To combat a slump in user activity, Facebook jettisoned promises of boundless discovery and started promoting Groups. The success of Discord and Slack happened precisely because they promised tools for gated communities, not open commons.

21+

22+One of those early promises came true in spades, though: while we still live in Dunbar communities, we’ve sped up the sorting process. We can find people like us at astonishing speed, and the diversity of options for what ‘people like us’ means has expanded exponentially. The ‘Big Sort’ of modern society is rapid, unprecedented, and utterly reliant on social technology. The problem is that for all of our freedom to find each other and make mutual agreements, the underlying technologies used for all of this sorting and trusting don’t actually reflect the diversity of expectations, norms, or approaches we might want to try. One major reason for this status quo is the underlying structure of the client-server Internet. Unlike in the physical world, where cities, religious groups, and professional associations both own real assets and collectively determine rules and norms, there is no median level of civic compromise on the Internet; just massive technical providers and platform companies, and dispossessed Dunbar communities and individuals unable to determine such rules and norms for themselves.

23+

24+Both internal norms (‘how do we act’) and external perceptions (‘who are we?’) get yanked around by the dictates of platform owners, routing infrastructure providers, and the societal consensus that governs both, at levels far above our Dunbar phyles. Privacy is contradicted by the need to surveil internal activity in order to target ads. The current model of social connection technology sets the bar for self-determination so high as to prevent it from adapting to external circumstances. The technical realities of the situation are due to client-server technology and its institutional history. The social aspect is a holdover from the 20th-century media paradigm of mass consensus cultures.

25+

26+The ‘long 20th century’ of mass institutions and broad consensus realities is over. Contrary to impressions, it was not the inevitable or final result of moral and civil progress. Rather, it arose from pragmatic external incentives of mass advertising and great-power ideological rivalries.

27+

28+The assumption that we must inevitably play by the same rules of discourse, given the autonomy granted by wealth, technology, and knowledge, is rapidly degrading. This status quo is a leftover from a time when mass education prepared workers for mass jobs, where mass communication hammered the same messages over the factory loudspeaker and advertised the same small number of products over the few television channels available. Yet we still assume that the shape and function of the tools and spaces for dialogue we inherited from that era are immutable and inevitable; this outdated belief cuts us off from new methods of choice and collaboration.

29+

30+Without the external political and economic pressures which created our mass culture, inclusion in or acceptance by it becomes just another sinecure for sale, the outcome of a zero-sum auction to benefit from and utilize for further gain, the power accumulated by the legacy institutions safeguarding it. The ‘objective’ model has become a straightjacket on human ingenuity and community self-determination. The fact that it is ‘supposed to exist’ means that it is the ultimate prize. Inclusion in the mainstream Discourse grants scalable exploitation of any idea and prestige to its proponents. But it is a booby prize. No serious and nuanced idea, no dedicated community can withstand its flattening effects or the ways that it commercializes and cargo-cults its subject into an artificial shape. The resulting conversations are lackluster in form as well as subject.

31+

32+The stiffer the Discourse is; the less input it deems useful, the more fragile it becomes. The inside becomes a stultifying garden party of outdated, anodyne official narratives; the outside a stew of paranoid, enraged rump factions shut out of any path to respectability or good-faith engagement with their perspective.

33+

34+The same dynamic wreaks havoc inside Dunbar groups as well; when there are fewer gradations of acceptable difference, internal schisms take on a stark tinge of zero-sum loyalty versus betrayal, rather than consensual drift. Savvy users, knowing the stakes, migrate quickly, leaving behind wastelands of the obstinate and clueless, who are in turn preyed upon by grifters and demagogues. Only when external events force a ‘tectonic shift’ in official understanding do these standards change. The problem is that the usual result of a ‘tectonic shift’ is a sudden, destructive earthquake. If networked culture is going to survive dramatic events out in the real world, we’re going to need a middle structural layer that allows norms and agreements to shift and negotiate based on observed reality and the wishes of ordinary participants.

35+

36+This omission of a ‘middle layer’ of technical governance directly informs our vision for the Urbit network. In an Urbit-based world, we envision stars will be consensus hubs. There are 256 Urbit galaxies, each able to spawn 255 stars for a total of 65,280 potential stars. Each star, in turn, can spawn 65,535 planets—far above the Dunbar number of an intimate community, but also far below the ratios of authoritarian control under which current platform regimes operate. Stars and galaxies perform the essential routing and peer discovery functions of the Urbit network; planets represent distinct individual identities.

37+

38+Although every star is spawned by a particular galaxy, it can move to any other galaxy which agrees to host it. Similarly, planets may migrate between stars. Many imagine the extreme ramifications of such a system, projecting a Darwinian competition of starkly diverse political models encoded in governance. When we think about the future of Urbit, though, we don’t see a chaotic universe of iconoclastic outposts. We don’t doubt there will be diversity among stars (driven by the wishes of their owners and resident planet users/customers), but the real value is in the antifragility allowed by far more subtle gradations of difference in rules and structures decided upon by stars. Each star will have much, but not all, in common with its immediate neighbors, across a constellation which contains a great overall diversity of norms. Changes in policy or alignment will resemble ripples across a pond more than a buildup of tectonic force against a brittle fault.

39+

40+Stars are Schelling points for such gradations precisely because they are discrete cogs in the overall technical infrastructure of Urbit. Technical responsibility and any bounds of ownership will always mark such points. Their designation in the case of Urbit or any other system is necessarily somewhat arbitrary. Our vision is orders of magnitude less centralized than the status quo, but not devolved so far towards the individual that community formation demands massive amounts of _individual_ technical knowledge and maintenance tasks. There will always be a need for routing infrastructure, ergo power (the power to set community norms and external relations) will always accrue to the points of control over that infrastructure.

41+

42+Urbit simplifies much of this infrastructure but, just as importantly, it makes those technical locations, and the conditions of ownership and control, explicit. It allows for them to be owned and controlled by anyone who purchases them, rather than controlled by network-level overlords and unelected government regulators. Stars are somewhere between ISPs and consumer hosting platforms (like Geocities an eon ago, or Wordpress today); independent enough to set their own policies, but generally subject to the realities of running a profitable business. The decisions made by service providers inevitably have a great influence on the norms of any network, and Urbit is no different. The advantage of the Urbit model is that there are far more stars than ISPs, they are easier to run, they are fungible properties with clear ownership, and they are not burdened with technical and regulatory debt which ties them to the status quo. These qualities allow them to be purchased and maintained by a far wider range of people than might be able to control an ISP today; the massive decentralization of routing infrastructure also seems a likely antidote to the current state of regulatory overreach and centralized snooping which ISPs are subject to.

43+

44+The Internet gave us an unprecedented flowering of diverse cultures; it gave communities the option to pursue a vast number of paths and goals. And we _should_ have the ability, granted by wealth, free time, and communications technology, to arrange the rules of our collaboration as we wish. The structural design of the Urbit network is an effort to provide that power, encoded in a digital asset with private keys that can be held both by individuals and (via multisig arrangements) by groups. The lower price and complexity of stars compared to current ISPs also makes a lot more room for innovation in business models; star owners can make their own judgments about how to prioritize commercial revenue versus cooperative ownership, anonymity versus identity, short-term versus long-term contracts.

45+

46+We see stars as an opportunity to incubate community hubs, to plant a flag in the wilderness, declare values and alignments, and see who shows up. This process can be varied; some stars might advertise widely, others might quietly and slowly invite other communities on board. That’s the point. There’s a nice juxtaposition between first mover-effect and overall availability here; early adopters will have an opportunity to shape discourse, but the supply is not so constrained that they’ll capture all of it. Early adopters will likely have an immense and permanent value of voice, infrastructural ownership, and ongoing revenue over their shorter-term speculative one.

47+

48+The diversity and non-discoverability of Urbit are already showing themselves: we hear whisperings of insular communities that we not only _don’t_ know about but by our express intentions _can’t_ know about unless they make themselves known.

49+

50+Regardless of whether we or anyone else know about them, star owners already possess legible chunks of the ‘missing middle’’—large enough to affect the map of the Urbit universe, small enough to allow a wide array of voices—in a way that the ownership models of the current Internet can’t come anywhere close to providing. Not every neighborhood poker club needs an Urbit star. But the institution-founders, tastemakers, and social connectors of today and tomorrow, those who want to build opera houses on the digital prairie, should consider the advantages of building on a star.

content/blog/the-shape-of-dao-governance-to-come.mdnew file+103

@@ -0,0 +1,103 @@

1++++

2+title = "The Shape of DAO Governance to Come"

3+date = "2022-08-17"

4+description = "When building the Combine DAO, we conducted a survey of DAO governance and tooling and came to the conclusion that the many theoretical approaches to the problem of governance were tied to the implementation details of the DAO stack. Since we were building everything on Urbit—as opposed to through the typical combination of Solidity contracts, Web2 tools and Snapshot—we realized that we’d have to do some rethinking. A new approach for a new stack."

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Anthony Arroyo"

8+ship = "~poldec-tonteg"

9+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/blog/2022.7.29..17.14.22-image.jpg"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+On Urbit, the risk of a governance attack is reduced because the Combine DAO’s founding team was selected based on their on-Urbit track records. All participants had skin in the game. This allowed us to focus on workaday consensus building, which forms the bulk of any organization’s activities. We use Holium’s Ballot app, which integrates with all aspects of Urbit OS and gives complete flexibility for automating the execution of a winning proposal via [Custom Actions](https://docs.holium.com/ballot/custom-actions/intro).

15+

16+Let’s walk through the thought process that led us to adopt an Urbit-centric approach to DAO governance.

17+

18+## Reputation’s Effect on DAO Governance

19+

20+In our last blog, we discussed how Urbit’s pseudonymous reputation model frees DAOs from the constraints of “trustless” systems. Urbit IDs also mitigate the inflexibility that plagues DAO governance. Here’s what we mean.

21+

22+One of the primary objectives of DAO governance systems is to prevent governance attacks. A governance attack occurs when one or more actors changes the internal processes to benefit themselves, for example transfering the entire treasury to himself.

23+

24+The risk of governance attacks means DAO governance is either 1) very rigid or 2) vulnerable. The vast majority of DAOs, Moloch for example, opt for the former. Thus the rules around upgrading smart contracts are constrained. Once systems are in place, they can’t be changed. On-chain activity is limited. Voting procedures are either distilled or taken off-chain (and usually onto Web2.) This leaves DAOs inflexible.

25+

26+Here’s an example of said inflexibility gone wrong. In March of this year, the DAO that runs the Ethereum Name Service [held a vote](https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/03/07/ens-and-the-limitations-of-dao-governance/) to oust its director Brantly Millegan. Brantly had recently been canceled for 2016 tweets dug up by an anonymous DAO member, fired from his role as director of operations at ENS’ non-DAO corporate parent True Names Limited. ENS iself, however, was governed by a typical 1 share: 1 vote system (plus delegates). Unsurprisingly, Millegan owned or controlled a large block of votes, and was able to overcome the ouster vote 1.6 million tokens to 1.4 million, with holders of roughly one third of the tokens abstaining or not participating.

27+

28+Now, this is indeed a DAO working as it should, a democratic decision unswayed by the influence of insiders or elites. At the same time, the natural functioning of the DAO was derailed by mass distraction. Instead of focusing on ENS, for nearly a year the DAO’s function was to address a controversy raised by an anonymous member who, if we’re being honest, most likely intended to disrupt its active functioning from the start.

29+

30+We arrive back again at the inflexibility inherent to anonymity—if just anyone can buy a token, bad actors will buy them. Yet currently most DAOs intentionally eschew reputation. The incentives for good behaviors are thus only economic.

31+

32+[Pseudonymous reputation](https://urbit.org/blog/pseudonymous-reputation) changes this calculus, adding incentives beyond money for both security and participation. This means when built on Urbit, DAOs are less susceptible to governance attacks, and more flexible. Having a baseline of trust allows DAOs to experiment with different governance tools and structures.

33+

34+In order to understand how DAOs are more free to experiment on Urbit and what they can experiment with, it’s first important to understand the history of DAO governance, why it developed the way they did, and where it’s at currently.

35+

36+

37+## A Little DAO Governance History Lesson

38+

39+The first DAO, The DAO, was also the most disastrous. A recursive calls flaw in the governance code led to the only hack-related hard fork in Ethereum History.

40+

41+Recursive call weaknesses in DAO code are somewhat like endlessly automated micro-pyramid schemes. An attacker can call a transaction, mark its benefit, then initiate another transaction before the original transaction is completed, over and over until the block limit is reached. Bernie Madoff paid off old investments with new investments while marking fake gains, took out fees, then reinvested before the prior investments could be properly marked. Both schemes work when automated governance fails.

42+

43+While The DAO’s shoddy governance was its downfall, it was Ethereum’s good governance that saved ETH. Ethereum leadership proposed a hard fork and 97% of holders voted in favor. The transaction was undone. Money returned. Ethereum Classic was born.

44+

45+While The DAO failed, its happy ending paved the way for the DAO boom of today. DAO creators learned the security lesson: there hasn’t been a major DAO hack since 2016. They built better governance—a combination of visionary leadership, trustless voting, and vigorous participation—that steered the ETH ship to calmer waters.

46+

47+

48+## Birth of the Ragequit

49+

50+Moloch DAO was born in the shadow of The DAO fiasco; its governance was expressly designed in response to it. Unlike The DAO, Moloch is a charity; it exists only to give money away to Ethereum infrastructure projects. Its on-chain governance is extremely_ _simple. Members can do only one of two things.

51+

52+The first thing is submitting and voting on proposals for new members. Votes are majority rule with one vote per Moloch share. Only an existing member can propose a new member, so prospective members must convince an existing one to nominate them.

53+

54+New member proposals double as funding proposals, a clever wrinkle which demonstrates just how much can be done on-chain with a single function. Every proposal must include a fundable ETH infrastructure project and a fundee to execute it. If approved, Moloch accepts the fundee as a new member and grants them a number of Moloch shares exchangeable 1:1 for ETH.

55+

56+

57+

58+How the fundee exchanges the shares for ETH brings us to the second thing Moloch members can do: ragequitting.

59+

60+Ragequitting is a smart contract function that allows members to rescind their shares—and thus their membership—during a seven day waiting period between approval of new members and disbursement of their funds. Its primary purpose is to allow members to opt out of the DAO if they don’t like a new member or proposal. If they ragequit, they automatically receive ETH equal to their shares.

61+

62+Ragequitting thus provides a major safeguard against the kinds of attack that took down The DAO. Members can simply ragequit en masse to invalidate any harmful action, thereby looting their own DAO and stopping bad actors in their tracks. Ragequitting is Moloch’s “ultimate safety net for malicious attacks.”

63+

64+Like member voting, ragequitting also has a dual purpose. In order to receive their funding, new fundees must ragequit, discharging their shares, receiving ETH, and thereby immediately becoming non-members. Thus, the only time someone becomes a permanent member is if they are granted more shares than they ragequit, which usually happens for non-fundee members, i.e. philanthropic members, not fundees.

65+

66+This is all to say that Moloch, a very successful DAO, has reduced its governance to the simplest imaginable framework. Members can take one of two actions—that’s it. While it makes for a functional secure on-chain charity, the ragequit process isn’t exactly dynamic governance. It’s too low-res for the vast majority of organizations.

67+

68+## Ouroboros

69+

70+In a way, ragequitting uses pyramid scheme logic to its advantage. The only thing members can do is add other members or quit; and it’s through these cyclical actions that the DAO gains members, disburses funds, and maintains security. But it also opens up new problems. For example, what happens if a disgruntled member intentionally votes yes on a harmful proposal, only to ragequit their shares just after the proposal passes? You might call it a murder suicide problem.

71+

72+DAOs supposedly solve the Principal Agent Dilemma; an ancient problem faced by all resource-distributing organizations where an agent’s self-interest inevitably runs counter to principles’ assets. The most common example is a non-shareholding manager of a company (agent) versus its shareholders (principal). The manager is in charge of spending shareholders’ money, but doesn’t suffer the financial consequences from her decisions. Theoretically, DAO principles and DAO agents are indistinguishable—everyone is both investor and employee—which solves the dilemma.

73+

74+But anonymous shareholders often act badly, or they don’t act at all. Even the [DAOs with the highest participation](https://www.businessofbusiness.com/articles/ranking-daos-we-computed-their-net-community-score-to-see-how-they-stack-up/) top out around 75%, and that’s rare. A DAO with low voter participation can become either paralyzed, if a quorum is required, or oligarchical if one isn’t. On-chain voting requires high gas fees and time spend, prohibitively high when it comes to the many technical decisions that need to be made. This is why every successful DAO has naturally developed sets of working groups who make decisions off-chain with the blessing of the body politic. The vast majority of these “governance forums” use a patchwork of Web2 apps.

75+

76+For the bigger decisions, avoiding high gas fees and low participation can mean voting with literal Discord emojis, then having small groups of trusted “delegates” enter on-chain decisions via multi-sigs. This is both sloppy and defeats the purpose of the DAO.

77+

78+More serious solutions make up the primary class L2 products. “Dynamic governance” adds granularity to voting systems, allowing for more complex on-chain voting with different rights for different member classes. “Holographic consensus” gamifies participation by appending a prediction market to every vote. Some are even trying “[Meta Governance](https://indexcoop.com/blog/early-2022-survey-of-metagovernance)”—DAOs governing DAOs. L2 decisions are even further analyzed by deep risk analyzers like Gauntlet that stress test decisions via simulated protocols before they’re executed on-chain.

79+

80+The simple solution is conducting votes using decentralized apps that verify shareholder status. Snapshot is an IPFS voting app that holds votes off-chain, weighing and verifying member votes by reading members’ wallets. It’s a quick and secure way to stage off-chain votes, but it’s still pretty limited. Snapshot is called that because all it really does is take a picture of the result of a vote. All the activity resulting from said vote must still be manually undertaken by DAO operators.

81+

82+Traditional DAOs suffer from what we like to call the Self-Enforcement Problem. Smart contracts enforce themselves, a stark difference from traditional corporations where bylaws and operating rules are met by employees using the best tools for the job. With DAOs, the bylaws and the tools that enforce them are one and the same. This adds up to yet another layer on inflexibility: traditional orgs can adopt new tools for old problems, DAOs cannot.

83+

84+

85+## The Right Tool for the Job

86+

87+This all brings us finally back to Urbit. In the Urbit OS using Urbit IDs, DAOs can integrate every governance solution discussed above without touching Web2. Tailor DAO governance to your own precise needs. Download someone else’s voting app, or spin up your own. Using Urbit blurs the boundaries between on-chain and off-chain actions, eliminating the need for ad hoc fixes then fixes to fix those fixes. It all occurs in one landscape, and can pivot with new information

88+

89+One Urbit app is called Ballot. Ballot most closely resembles Snapshot. It’s like a decentralized version of Snapshot that works without the need for Discord—everything is on the Urbit OS—that can also be modified to execute custom off-chain actions after a vote is held.

90+

91+

92+

93+Ballot allows for this sort of dynamic governance enhancement, or what we call Custom Actions. In a way, Custom Actions make the dream of smart contracts a reality: instead of being constrained to ragequitting or not ragequitting, you can create automated granular responses to Ballot votes. In other words, smart contracts that are actually smart. One action could be “tweet something” or “ping someone” once a vote is recorded in Ballot. You can write any if-then you want on the outcomes of a vote. For example, instead of relegating membership to simplistic on-chain democracy, a la ragequitting, Ballot has a function for inviting or kicking members via Urbit native logic. Imagine if Snapshot could both conduct a Moloch-style membership vote, and then automatically add or kick the member depending on the result. That’s Ballot.

94+

95+What about the small technical decisions, like the ones that took down The DAO, like booting someone from a chat or paying a contractor through treasury? All of those actions are programmatic, irreversible, and immutable on Urbit, eliminating concerns about gas fees and participation.

96+

97+If Ballot doesn’t suit your DAO’s needs, it’s easy to use Urbit’s primitives to write a custom voting application. Since Urbit has ring signature support built in, you can build a simple, anonymous voting app in just 15 minutes, following [this tutorial](https://developers.urbit.org/guides/quickstart/voting-guide). The combination of cryptographic identity and an append-only event log means that you are free to experiment with different tools to support whatever governance process your DAO adheres to.

98+

99+The Combine DAO uses Ballot for voting on proposals as it integrates cleanly with Urbit ID and provides flexibility for setting different quora for votes and Custom Actions to automate outcomes. There is thus no need to distinguish between the tool used for a “real vote” such as deploying Stars in exchange for tokens and the tool used for a “fun vote” like choosing a date for a meetup.This flexibility and interoperability is a hallmark to the burgeoning supply of [applications](https://urbit.org/ecosystem?type=applications) being built for Urbit.

100+

101+—

102+

103+*Anthony Arroyo is the Director of [The Combine DAO](https://blog.the-combine.org/introduction-to-the-combine-dao)*

content/blog/the-state-of-landscape.mdnew file+78

@@ -0,0 +1,78 @@

1++++

2+title = "The State of Landscape"

3+date = "2019-05-15"

4+description = "An update on the state of Landscape and the Urbit network."

5+aliases = [

6+ "/posts/essays/the-state-of-landscape",

7+ "/posts/the-state-of-landscape"

8+]

9+

10+[extra]

11+author = "Galen Wolfe-Pauly"

12+ship = "~ravmel-ropdyl"

13+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/the-state-of-landscape-1.png"

14++++

15+

16+

17+

18+The TL;DR is: if you’re really excited about living on Mars, Landscape is fun to try out. Come join `~dopzod/urbit-help`, experiment with creating your own chats and collections (did anyone find that easter egg, yet?), and see what you can do with the thing.

19+

20+Landscape today is for the intrepid adventurer. So is much of the system. If you want to read about what we’re doing to make it more welcoming, [check out the 2019 roadmap](/posts/essays/2019-5-roadmap/).

21+

22+## The Broad View

23+

24+We thought a lot last year about how to avoid the pitfalls of modern social networks. The services we all use today each feel like _one place_. It’s as if everyone on MEGANET is living together in the same city.

25+

26+In the real world, cities have their own cultures. So we thought: there must be some way to build more granular communities online. Living in a single world-city is kind of a bummer, honestly.

27+

28+Landscape was our first experiment in this direction. It’s a ruthlessly simple interface for chat and discussion that runs on top of Arvo. You can connect to Landscape in a browser or in an app on your iOS device. All communication is pseudonymous and authenticated (as with everything in Arvo) with your Azimuth point.

29+

30+Over the past few months, we’ve been running small experiments, experimenting with ways to support our own work and finding the limits of what we can do on the network. Originally, we built Landscape out of our desire to get away from using MEGACORP communication tools in our daily work. We thought: if we’re trying to build a whole new network and society, we had better go live there first.

31+

32+Landscape is an experiment — it’s supposed to be fun, above all, and a good way to help focus our efforts on maturing the platform.

33+

34+Anyway, let’s show off some of the specifics, and give an update on this experiment so far.

35+

36+## A Quick Tour

37+

38+Landscape is pretty simple. It lets you subscribe to chats, in the spirit of IRC, and ‘collections’, which are effectively forums or blogs with comments. You can also direct message with other running ‘ships’ or Arvo nodes.

39+

40+For the most part, this happens through a web interface that you can access at `https://ship.arvo.network` or via `localhost:80`.

41+

42+There’s also an iOS app, [available in the app store](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/landscape-urbit/id1393148862), that you link to your ship the same way you log in through a browser.

43+

44+## Landscape: The Bad Parts

45+

46+What’s keeping us from asking others to use this thing more aggressively? Let’s walk through the reasons (while keeping in mind, they’re all [things we’re working on](/posts/essays/2019-5-roadmap/)):

47+

48+### 1 - Arvo has rough spots

49+

50+They have gotten a lot better, but there are still a few things that can crash your Arvo ship. This, of course, has nothing to do with your Azimuth point, which is completely separate and, as far as we know, secure.

51+

52+The first (and most severe) is a bug in our event persistence that occurs very rarely. Basically, there are conditions under which you can cause events not to be properly written to disk and corrupt your event log. It’s pretty unlikely, but it’s unacceptable for a real product since it basically causes you to have to wait out the current network era.

53+

54+The second is that Ames (our network protocol) has occasional connectivity problems. Originally, we thought we had found this issue as being related to [a timer bug](https://github.com/urbit/arvo/pull/1072). It may be, but the networking is in the process of a major overhaul — so we’ve implemented a few bandaids to make the situation workable. `|bonk` sometimes needs to be used to reset connections between peers, and `:ethmanage` sometimes need to be used to re-synchronize with the blockchain. It’s an ugly fix, but it usually works.

55+

56+Relatedly, we have occasionally been seeing errors caused by the Arvo network being slow to register keys from the blockchain. If you’re a newly registered Azimuth point, and your keys were just put on-chain, it can take some time for that change to propagate. This can result in a confusing situation for new ships.

57+

58+### 2 - There’s no ‘individual continuity breach’

59+

60+One great thing about the Arvo network is that it’s more like a giant single computer than a network. When you talk to another ship, use remote files or sync data it’s almost the same as working with local data.

61+

62+The main thing underlying this is _sequence numbers_. Your Arvo ship keeps track of every message it has exchanged with every other ship, and it never breaks that sequence. If our ships are talking, and we’re on packet `83910` but you reset and try to start again at `0` my ship just thinks you’ve lost your mind and won’t talk to you anymore.

63+

64+We’d like individual resets to work, and we’re [working on it](https://github.com/urbit/arvo/pull/1169). But, for the time being, if you have any fatal error on your ship, it means you’ve got to sit this era out.

65+

66+This is another unacceptable bug for anything we truly rely on.

67+

68+### 3 - There are no push notifications, yet

69+

70+What’s one thing that a chat application needs to do? Notify you of new messages. What does Landscape notify you about? Well, at the moment, basically nothing.

71+

72+We implemented and tested a push notifications server for iOS, which is slated for release in the next few months (it depends on things in our `cc-release` branch). We’d also love to work on having your ship connect to your email provider and send you alerts over email. We’re thinking about how to do that.

73+

74+## What We’ve Learned and What We’re Doing

75+

76+Many of us spend all day on Landscape, use it from our phones, and find it really fun. The bugs above bite less than you might think and, in many cases, the experience is quite nice. It’s a passive, distraction-free way to interact with others around the office.

77+

78+We operate one public channel, `~dopzod/urbit-help` for answering any of your questions about the system. And, from time to time, we have been creating topic-centric channels and announcing them publicly. This has been a lot of fun. Come join us if you’re feeling brave.

content/blog/the-understanding-urbit-podcast.mdnew file+22

@@ -0,0 +1,22 @@

1++++

2+title = "The Understanding Urbit Podcast"

3+date = "2020-04-02"

4+description = "An interview-based podcast series about the Urbit project, as told by those working on it."

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Arthur Falls"

8+ship = "~satsyt-sogleb"

9+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/uu-podcast.png"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+At the end of January, the team at Tlon invited me to spend some time at their San Francisco office and to create a podcast series about Urbit. The idea was to produce an interview-based series about the project told in the words of those working on it. In this modest goal, I think we were very successful. Beyond a transactional description, however, we captured a range of perspectives of the flaws in our current computing landscape and visions for how Urbit will alter it.

15+

16+Over the course of seven episodes, the interviews explore subjects ranging from the philosophy of technology to the performance optimization of Nock execution. Most are non-technical, but even the technical ones will be understandable and entertaining to a non-technical audience. That latter fact is the result of just how much fun the Tlon team is to be around.

17+

18+The series can be found on iTunes, Spotify, and most other streaming platforms.

19+

20+<iframe style="border: none" src="//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/13669184/height/90/theme/custom/thumbnail/yes/direction/backward/render-playlist/no/custom-color/000000/" height="90" width="100%" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen oallowfullscreen msallowfullscreen></iframe>

21+

22+We begin our journey with Urbit veteran Galen Wolfe-Pauly, who introduces the project and its design principles while reflecting on the collective Stockholm syndrome we suffer in the grasp of existing computing models. We learn a bit about Galen’s background in architecture, and the importance of invisible technology.

main/posts/address-space.md → content/blog/the-urbit-address-space.mdrenamed+110−116

@@ -1,39 +1,39 @@

1−---

2−sort: 3

3−type: post

4−title: The Urbit address space

5−author: Galen Wolfe-Pauly + Curtis Yarvin

6−image: http://media.urbit.org/site/blog-3.jpg

7−preview: An overview of Urbit's cryptographic address space.

8−layout: urbit,post

9−footer: true

10−navmode: navbar

11−navdpad: false

12−navselect: posts

13−navpath: /

14−navhome: /

15−navclass: urbit

16−---

1++++

2+title = "The Urbit Address Space"

3+date = "2016-05-15"

4+description = "An overview of Urbit's cryptographic address space."

5+aliases = [

6+ "/posts/essays/the-urbit-address-space",

7+ "/posts/the-urbit-address-space"

8+]

9+

10+[extra]

11+author = "Galen Wolfe-Pauly + Curtis Yarvin"

12+ship = "~ravmel-ropdyl + ~sorreg-namtyv"

13+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/the-urbit-address-space.jpg"

14++++

15+

16+

1717

1818## Basics

1919

20−Urbit contains a lot of new technology. As an ordinary user, all you

21−need to understand is Urbit's identity model. If you're in a hurry,

20+Urbit contains a lot of new technology. As an ordinary user, all you

21+need to understand is Urbit's identity model. If you're in a hurry,

2222just read these simplified basics.

2323

24−An Urbit identity, or "ship," is a string like `~firbyr-napbes`. It

24+An Urbit identity, or "ship," is a string like `~firbyr-napbes`. It

2525means nothing, but it's easy to remember and say out loud.

2626`~firbyr-napbes` is actually just a 32-bit number, like an IP address,

2727that we turn into a human-memorable string.

2828

2929Technically, a ship is a secure digital identity that you own and

30−control with a cryptographic key, like a Bitcoin wallet. As in

31−Bitcoin, the supply of ships is mathematically limited. This keeps

30+control with a cryptographic key, like a Bitcoin wallet. As in

31+Bitcoin, the supply of ships is mathematically limited. This keeps

3232the network friendly, by making spam and abuse expensive.

3333

3434A ship name is just a number; smaller numbers make shorter names.

35−Shorter names are easier to remember, so they're more valuable. So

36−ships are classified by the number of bits in their name. (A ship

35+Shorter names are easier to remember, so they're more valuable. So

36+ships are classified by the number of bits in their name. (A ship

3737name is just a scrambled base-256 representation of the number.)

3838

3939A 32-bit ship (like `~firbyr-napbes`) is called a "planet." A 16-bit

@@ -42,48 +42,48 @@ ship (like `~pollev)` is a "star." An 8-bit ship (like `~mun`) is a

4242Stars and galaxies are network infrastructure.

4343

4444Each planet or star is launched by its "parent," the star or galaxy

45−whose number is its bottom half. So the planet `~firbyr-napbes`,

45+whose number is its bottom half. So the planet `~firbyr-napbes`,

4646`0xdead.beef` or `3.735.928.559`, is the child of `~pollev`, `0xbeef`

47−or `48.879`, whose parent is `~mun`, `0xef`, `239`. The parent of

47+or `48.879`, whose parent is `~mun`, `0xef`, `239`. The parent of

4848`~mun` and all galaxies is `~zod`, `0`.

4949

50−If Bitcoin is money, Urbit is land. Much as all real-estate titles in

50+If Bitcoin is money, Urbit is land. Much as all real-estate titles in

5151England trace back to William the Conqueror, all certificates in Urbit

5252trace back to `~zod`.

5353

54−But this universe is worthless unless dispersed. It's already quite

55−well fragmented. And as it grows distributed, it grows decentralized.

54+But this universe is worthless unless dispersed. It's already quite

55+well fragmented. And as it grows distributed, it grows decentralized.

5656The endpoint is a virtual city of 4 billion (`2^32`) citizens, all

57−owners of their own independent digital identities. The stars and

57+owners of their own independent digital identities. The stars and

5858galaxies continue as a federated governance and service network.

5959

6060This city is a social network, a peer-to-peer packet network, and a

61−public-key infrastructure (PKI). In the social layer, your ship is

62−your name. In the packet layer, your ship is your network address.

63−In the PKI, your ship is your cryptographic identity. Perhaps more

61+public-key infrastructure (PKI). In the social layer, your ship is

62+your name. In the packet layer, your ship is your network address.

63+In the PKI, your ship is your cryptographic identity. Perhaps more

6464intuitively, a ship is a sort of pronounceable phone number.

6565

66−And once Urbit is built, no one owns the city. No one can control it.

66+And once Urbit is built, no one owns the city. No one can control it.

6767It does need governance; but it governs itself as a digital republic.

6868

6969## Details

7070

71−As an Urbit user, these basics are all you need to know. As a

72−developer, a few more details might interest you. (An even more

73−comprehensive treatment is in the [whitepaper](http://media.urbit.org/whitepaper.pdf)).

71+As an Urbit user, these basics are all you need to know. As a

72+developer, a few more details might interest you. (An even more

73+comprehensive treatment is in the [whitepaper](https://media.urbit.org/whitepaper.pdf)).

7474

7575### Design goals

7676

7777An identity system has three goals: a name wants to be secure,

78−human-meaningful, and decentralized. A principle called "Zooko’s

78+human-meaningful, and decentralized. A principle called "Zooko's

7979triangle" says that a practical identity system can achieve any two of

8080these goals.

8181

8282The art of OS design is the art of using strategic tradeoffs to almost

83−solve unsolvable problems. Urbit's goals are to be secure,

84−human-*memorable*, and *eventually* decentralized. We sacrifice

83+solve unsolvable problems. Urbit's goals are to be secure,

84+human-_memorable_, and _eventually_ decentralized. We sacrifice

8585meaning (Urbit is not competing with the DNS), and postpone

86−decentralization. These tradeoffs buy us a simple system that can

86+decentralization. These tradeoffs buy us a simple system that can

8787actually be built.

8888

8989### Comparison to existing identity layers

@@ -97,43 +97,43 @@ addresses (like `126.78.92.112`), domain names (like

9797`@galenwp`).

9898

9999Urbit (or more precisely, its Ames protocol) squeezes all three layers

100−into one. At the network level, Urbit is a P2P overlay network; your

101−ship is your network address. It's also the name of your server.

102−Finally, it's your secure digital pseudonym. And we map your ship

100+into one. At the network level, Urbit is a P2P overlay network; your

101+ship is your network address. It's also the name of your server.

102+Finally, it's your secure digital pseudonym. And we map your ship

103103name into the DNS, at `ship.urbit.org`.

104104

105105(One way to use Urbit is as an identity for the Internet, which

106−doesn't have a standard system of secure authentication. Urbit has a

106+doesn't have a standard system of secure authentication. Urbit has a

107107single-signon API which lets any Web server accept Urbit logins, like

108108a normal social login -- but not captive to any central mainframe.)

109109

110110### Cryptographic ownership

111111

112−You own an Urbit ship cryptographically, like a Bitcoin wallet. But

112+You own an Urbit ship cryptographically, like a Bitcoin wallet. But

113113Urbit doesn't use a blockchain or mining.

114114

115115You transfer a ship by signing a new public key with the old private

116−key, then broadcasting the signature. Any urbit that receives this

116+key, then broadcasting the signature. Any urbit that receives this

117117new certificate will no longer trust the old key.

118118

119−Urbit is digital land, not digital money. A currency needs to support

120−high-frequency, zero-friction transfers. Real estate transfers are

119+Urbit is digital land, not digital money. A currency needs to support

120+high-frequency, zero-friction transfers. Real estate transfers are

121121low frequency and high friction, so the "double spend" problem (which

122122mining solves) is much less pressing.

123123

124−Don't expect urbits to be tradeable on cryptocurrency exchanges. A

124+Don't expect urbits to be tradeable on cryptocurrency exchanges. A

125125trade adds at least one signature to the ship's certificate, or two if

126−the parties don't trust each other and an intermediary is needed. A

126+the parties don't trust each other and an intermediary is needed. A

127127bulky certificate isn't free, since it slows down new connections.

128128

129−This isn't a serious problem if urbits are treated like land. But it

130−prevents Urbit from being a competent currency. This is a feature,

131−not a bug. Urbit has no need to compete with Bitcoin or Ethereum,

129+This isn't a serious problem if urbits are treated like land. But it

130+prevents Urbit from being a competent currency. This is a feature,

131+not a bug. Urbit has no need to compete with Bitcoin or Ethereum,

132132and every reason not to.

133133

134134## Moons and comets

135135

136−In the general case, a ship is actually a 128-bit number. A full

136+In the general case, a ship is actually a 128-bit number. A full

137137table of ship classes:

138138

139139```

@@ -145,161 +145,155 @@ table of ship classes:

145145```

146146

147147Moons are for clients and connected devices: a laptop, a phone, a

148−digital thermostat. A moon is not independent; its parent planet has

149−to sign its key updates. (We don't want rogue clients floating

148+digital thermostat. A moon is not independent; its parent planet has

149+to sign its key updates. (We don't want rogue clients floating

150150randomly around the universe.)

151151

152−A comet's address is the hash of its initial public key. Anyone can

153−launch a comet. Nothing stops you from using a comet as your

152+A comet's address is the hash of its initial public key. Anyone can

153+launch a comet. Nothing stops you from using a comet as your

154154identity, except that the name is a mouthful and everyone will assume

155155you're a bot.

156156

157157### Scarcity, reputation, friendliness and trust

158158

159159A crucial difference between Urbit and other networks is that planets

160−are scarce. Even when the network is fully populated, there are only

161−4 billion. Early in Urbit's life, most stars and galaxies are not yet

162−operating, so far fewer are available. No one will ever be able to

160+are scarce. Even when the network is fully populated, there are only

161+4 billion. Early in Urbit's life, most stars and galaxies are not yet

162+operating, so far fewer are available. No one will ever be able to

163163get planets trivially and for free.

164164

165−Urbit is a *friendly network*: a network on which you can assume that

166−a stranger is nice until proven nasty. Friendliness is a direct

167−consequence of scarce, individually owned identities. We're not

165+Urbit is a _friendly network_: a network on which you can assume that

166+a stranger is nice until proven nasty. Friendliness is a direct

167+consequence of scarce, individually owned identities. We're not

168168changing human nature, just creating the right economic incentives.

169169

170170Most forms of network abuse are "Sybil attacks": they rely on an

171−infinite supply of fresh identities. Scarcity makes reputation work.

171+infinite supply of fresh identities. Scarcity makes reputation work.

172172Spam is a business; if the cost of a new planet exceeds the amount of

173173money you can make by spamming from that planet until its reputation

174174is trashed, there will be no spam.

175175

176176Shady stars and galaxies that sell blocks of planets to spammers will

177177also develop reputations as "bad neighborhoods," damaging the value of

178−the whole block. Abuse at any level is designed to be

178+the whole block. Abuse at any level is designed to be

179179counterproductive and economically self-terminating.

180180

181181Urbit has no reputation system at all at the moment, simply because

182−we're so small that friendliness is automatic. The clear and rigorous

182+we're so small that friendliness is automatic. The clear and rigorous

183183structure of the address space is not a reputation system; it is a

184184platform on which any number of such systems can and should be built.

185185But we can't build one until we need one.

186186

187187### Initial allocation and rationale

188188

189−In cryptocurrency terms, Urbit is "100% premined." Why? Three

189+In cryptocurrency terms, Urbit is "100% premined." Why? Three

190190reasons.

191191

192−One, Urbit doesn't need mining. Two, Urbit is a much more ambitious

193−software project than Bitcoin or even Ethereum. To fund its own

192+One, Urbit doesn't need mining. Two, Urbit is a much more ambitious

193+software project than Bitcoin or even Ethereum. To fund its own

194194development, the project needs to capture the potential value of its

195195own real estate.

196196

197197Three, most theories of property agree that anyone whoever creates or

198−discovers new property starts out by owning it. Because galaxies are

199−premined, Urbit starts as a centralized system. But it has two strong

198+discovers new property starts out by owning it. Because galaxies are

199+premined, Urbit starts as a centralized system. But it has two strong

200200motivations to decentralize.

201201

202−One, the more decentralized Urbit is, the more Urbit is worth. Two,

202+One, the more decentralized Urbit is, the more Urbit is worth. Two,

203203the only way for Urbit to fund its own development is to homestead its

204204own real estate.

205205

206206Urbit was created by Curtis Yarvin, who has distributed the 256

207207galaxies as follows (allocation as of June 1, 2016):

208208

209−95, to the [Tlon Corporation](../company). 50, to urbit.org, the future

210−community foundation. 40, to Tlon employees and their family members

209+95, to the [Tlon Corporation](/blog/company). 50, to urbit.org, the future

210+community foundation. 40, to Tlon employees and their family members

211211(24 to Curtis, who started in 2002; 16 to everyone else, who started

212−in 2014). 34, to outside investors in Tlon. 37, to 33 other

212+in 2014). 34, to outside investors in Tlon. 37, to 33 other

213213individuals, who donated to the project, contributed code or services,

214214won a contest, or were just in the right place at the right time.

215215

216216What's critical is that the whole system is unlikely to collapse back

217−into a single landlord. This is why we've intentionally scattered

217+into a single landlord. This is why we've intentionally scattered

218218Urbit's ownership across a diverse set of entities.

219219

220220Furthermore, we've defined informal conventions designed to motivate a

221221healthy ownership structure by punishing violators with reputation

222−cost. Address blocks should only split, never merge; galaxies and

222+cost. Address blocks should only split, never merge; galaxies and

223223stars should be owned by different parties; galaxies should be owned

224−by true individuals, not corporations. Urbit does not live up to

224+by true individuals, not corporations. Urbit does not live up to

225225these ideals at present, but must always progress toward them.

226226

227227### Federated services, adoption and escape

228228

229−Urbit is a peer-to-peer network. Urbits that live behind a firewall

229+Urbit is a peer-to-peer network. Urbits that live behind a firewall

230230or on a home network need "supernodes" to help them route packets.

231−The supernode is the parent. So a parent's work isn't done once it's

231+The supernode is the parent. So a parent's work isn't done once it's

232232launched all its children.

233233

234−There's no way to enforce this responsibility. So a star or planet

235−can be *adopted* by a new parent of the same class, letting it escape

236−from a bad default parent. If your parent stops serving you, and no

234+There's no way to enforce this responsibility. So a star or planet

235+can be _adopted_ by a new parent of the same class, letting it escape

236+from a bad default parent. If your parent stops serving you, and no

237237other parent is willing to adopt you, you're probably a bad actor.

238238

239−Supernode routing is just one example of why you need a parent. A

240−mature Urbit will naturally develop all kinds of other *federated

241−services* -- from technical standardization and update approval, to

242−certificate update broadcast, to reputation and friend lookup. All

243−these services are delivered by cooperating stars and galaxies. Bad

239+Supernode routing is just one example of why you need a parent. A

240+mature Urbit will naturally develop all kinds of other _federated

241+services_ -- from technical standardization and update approval, to

242+certificate update broadcast, to reputation and friend lookup. All

243+these services are delivered by cooperating stars and galaxies. Bad

244244actors at this level should be rare.

245245

246246Especially when Urbit is young, the level of trust that a child places

247−in its parent is high. The trust implied by automatic kernel updates

248−is almost infinite. You can disable updates, but that's nowhere near

249−practical yet. (Ideally we will be able to freeze the Arvo kernel,

247+in its parent is high. The trust implied by automatic kernel updates

248+is almost infinite. You can disable updates, but that's nowhere near

249+practical yet. (Ideally we will be able to freeze the Arvo kernel,

250250like Nock, and turn off kernel updates; but this will take years at

251251least.)

252252

253253### Code is law: seeing like a pattern language of great cities

254254

255−Constitutional innovation is dangerous. Our vision of digital

255+Constitutional innovation is dangerous. Our vision of digital

256256governance isn't ours, but is synthesized as best we can from the work

257257of four great 20th-century thinkers: the legal scholar Lawrence

258258Lessig, the political scientist James C. Scott, the urbanist Jane

259259Jacobs and the architect Christopher Alexander.

260260

261261All decentralized computation systems rely to some extent on Lessig's

262−principle: "code is law." Where law uses human interpretation to

263−determine an outcome, code uses mathematics. It is code, not law,

262+principle: "code is law." Where law uses human interpretation to

263+determine an outcome, code uses mathematics. It is code, not law,

264264that decides who owns a Bitcoin wallet.

265265

266−But all these systems, including Bitcoin, need governance. They need

267−as little as possible, but not none. In the digital world as in the

268−real world, *laissez-faire* is always necessary, never sufficient.

266+But all these systems, including Bitcoin, need governance. They need

267+as little as possible, but not none. In the digital world as in the

268+real world, _laissez-faire_ is always necessary, never sufficient.

269269Governance is a human universal.

270270

271−That's why we call Urbit a "virtual city." And as a city, it can't be

272−a corporate gated community. It might start as that, but it has to

271+That's why we call Urbit a "virtual city." And as a city, it can't be

272+a corporate gated community. It might start as that, but it has to

273273grow up into a true city-state: a self-governing digital republic.

274274This pattern is not just blind clinging to Anglo-American tradition;

275275like every prudent constitution, it fits the actual virtues and vices

276276of its target population.

277277

278278Urbit's galactic hierarchy resembles the natural patterns we find in

279−many existing human political systems. As Alexander wrote:

279+many existing human political systems. As Alexander wrote:

280280

281281> Wherever possible, work toward the evolution of independent regions

282−in the world, each with its own natural and geographic boundaries;

283−each with its own economy; each one autonomous and self-governing;

284−each with a seat in a world government, without the intervening power

285−of larger states or countries.

282+> in the world, each with its own natural and geographic boundaries;

283+> each with its own economy; each one autonomous and self-governing;

284+> each with a seat in a world government, without the intervening power

285+> of larger states or countries.

286286

287287We adapt Alexander's vision to a digital republic as the pattern that

288−*authority is proportional to property*. This pattern already has a

289−name in the cryptocurrency community, which calls it *proof of stake*.

288+_authority is proportional to property_. This pattern already has a

289+name in the cryptocurrency community, which calls it _proof of stake_.

290290Urbit's launch hierarchy is a sort of built-in proof of stake.

291291

292292Another governance pattern, a political cliche but no less valuable

293−for it, is the system of checks and balances. The address space of

293+for it, is the system of checks and balances. The address space of

294294Urbit is covered by three independent tiers, galaxies, stars and

295−planets; which should govern? The obvious design is a three-chambered

295+planets; which should govern? The obvious design is a three-chambered

296296legislature balanced against itself.

297297

298298For more on Urbit's governance design, see our [beliefs and

299−principles]() and our [interim constitution]().

300−

301−<br /><br />

302−

303−<div>

304− Subscribe to our newsletter: <email dataPath="/submit" submit="Get updates" />

305−</div>

299+principles](/posts/principles/) and our [interim constitution](/posts/constitution/).

content/blog/tools-of-our-own.mdnew file+66

@@ -0,0 +1,66 @@

1++++

2+title = "Tools of Our Own"

3+date = "2020-05-12"

4+description = "What is a digital environment? What does it mean to shape your own digital environment?"

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Matilde Park"

8+ship = "~haddef-sigwen"

9+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/tools-of-our-own-1.png"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+> People need only not to obtain things, they need above all the freedom to make things among which they can live, or give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them to use in caring for and about others.

15+>

16+> **Ivan Illich, *Tools for Conviviality***

17+

18+One of the recent ways we've come to describe the mission of the Urbit project is to give communities [the power to shape, or evolve, their digital environments](https://urbit.org/blog/urbit-is-for-communities/). Of course, like many of our definitions, it requires some background to really contextualize the claim. When I describe this particular statement to people, they often ask, "What does that _mean_, though? What is a digital environment, and why would I need Urbit to do it?"

19+

20+After all, we think of our slate of tools as our entire toolbox. This makes sense for physical tools. And for a lot of people in the real world (at least, I think), their tools remain physical notebooks and paper. I, however, left those tools behind ages ago, and found myself in a world that used my habits, my memory, to loosely organize a wide array of online tools, that were themselves shaped according to the values of their creators.

21+

22+The [Rube Goldberg machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg_machine) made out of aligning these tools in increasingly virtuosic, but also increasingly restrained and mechanical ways, felt like constructing an exoskeleton out of prefab parts. The person in my social group closest to constructing the full range of human movement became a legend. But let's be honest: none of us came even close.

23+

24+And it's nobody's distinct fault that the experience of aligning all these disparate services into a workflow is a skill in itself. It's a collective restriction that comes from the systems beneath.

25+

26+

27+

28+### Systems as masters

29+

30+> If you don't understand a system you're using, you don't control it. If nobody understands the system, the system is in control.

31+>

32+> **Philip Monk, [Precepts](https://urbit.org/blog/precepts/)**

33+

34+If you asked any of the creators of the social tools we use today what their mission was, it would seem neutral, a public good. To "bring the world closer," to "make a more open and connected world," to "easily see what's happening in the world." Ignore the fact that the net effects of their products are far more mixed than their mission suggests: for many users, the tools themselves come second to the power the tools have in capturing their social graph.

35+

36+We just want to be where our friends are, to see who knows whom, to see a new friend vouched for by our common connections.

37+

38+Why is the social graph even a consideration when choosing a tool? Why do I have to know who has accounts where, how they choose to assemble their digital body, so that I can see that it exists?

39+

40+For a tool like a microblog—a bunch of entries in a database with metadata, usually threaded—the attachment of the social graph capture becomes not only an underlying appeal to us when choosing to use it, but also to the tool’s creators when trying to justify its existence.

41+

42+In this example, you could say that every social Internet product is trying to make up for its missing ability to connect coherent identities underneath. The battle becomes a matter between the stagnant empire of who owns the graph versus the various attempts to create a secure identity primitive as a layer of the Internet.

43+

44+But this is crazy: for decades, an aspect of the Internet stack that necessitated the creation of platforms—the ability to talk to other computers directly and to, privately, opt in, organize an array of devices as belonging to an identity—has driven not only the financial incentives of every product, but the use case for every person in the equation. A practically unrelated problem emerged that was too hard to wrangle and solve, and so it became the master.

45+

46+And for productivity tools—for the personal activities we do every day—the same problem ultimately applies. Either you wrangle more and more single-use "products" into a framework, wrangling combinatorial explosion, or you punt the problem to the user's brain, remembering the relation between tools.

47+

48+This is why hybrid products are born _and_ why massive enterprises are shifting toward subscription models for office software. With the [clearnet](<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearnet_(networking)>), using our own computers for everyday tasks that extend outside themselves is not easy. It's way easier to sign into an enterprise's server farm for your persistent data storage and manipulation. In 2020, the prefab parts for the exoskeleton only come in "left arm, right leg" pairs, or you can just give up and plug straight into SkyNet.

49+

50+

51+

52+### The collective body

53+

54+> “Autonomy” means that we make the **worlds that we are** grow.

55+>

56+> **Tiqqun, *The Cybernetic Hypothesis*

57+

58+So why does this matter for us? Me and you and everyone we know? We put up with the cost all the time. But the limitations of our tools—on the vulnerable side of a power dynamic that, unbeknownst to everyone involved, functions as a catalyzed and increasingly accelerated system bringing out the worst in all of us—range from the everyday annoyances to a pervasive alienation, an information malaise.

59+

60+You have to ask yourself, "Why are we doing this again?"

61+

62+These days I find myself away from broadcast tools and more in the insular channels of my friend groups. What I want from technology is to share life with my friends; to be given the opportunity, and the power, to share that life, and all it includes… showing them care, or sharing the bits of knowledge that seem important to us as a group.

63+

64+To reinforce the fulfilment of collective potential in whatever direction our groups take off in. Some of my friends watch stuff together; some of my friends remark on goings-on; some of my friends research together; all communicate entirely differently. Not all of them belong on "IRC, but for gamers," or "IRC, but for highly productive and extremely important teams." And yet, that's where we are.

65+

66+Forget the prefab parts: a proper exoskeleton for our collective body evaporates; and we face the sunlight in whatever direction we choose. The ability to extend our shared spaces collectively, with each of our groups of friends and collaborators, using our own computers: that's Urbit.

content/blog/toward-a-frozen-operating-system.mdnew file+260

@@ -0,0 +1,260 @@

1++++

2+title = "Toward a Frozen Operating System"

3+date = "2017-05-09"

4+description = "Is it possible to freeze an entire OS?"

5+aliases = [

6+ "/posts/essays/toward-a-frozen-operating-system",

7+ "/posts/toward-a-frozen-operating-system",

8+ "/blog/2017.5-frozen/"

9+]

10+

11+[extra]

12+author = "Curtis Yarvin + Galen Wolfe-Pauly"

13+ship = "~sorreg-namtyv + ~ravmel-ropdyl"

14++++

15+

16+Is it possible to freeze an entire OS, so that its codebase never changes and

17+never has to change? Is the proposition even meaningful? Is it practical?

18+And if so, why would we want a frozen OS?

19+

20+Think about it intuitively. There's a reason we call an OS a "platform." It's

21+a piece of permanent infrastructure. Paul Graham wrote a

22+[great essay](http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html) about the

23+"hundred-year language," but the language is only one part of any complete

24+platform. And in infrastructure terms, a hundred years isn't that long.

25+

26+Why not think of structures that have lasted _thousands_ of years? An aqueduct,

27+a pyramid, a Parthenon? Why set our sights lower? Why isn't it time to aim for

28+perfect and timeless code? If not now, when?

29+

30+## Scope of the problem

31+

32+More prosaically, a frozen OS just means your OS never changes. A frozen OS

33+never gets any updates. Not because it can't update itself, just because it

34+doesn't need to.

35+

36+Is this even a meaningful concept? A frozen OS? First we'll have to decide

37+what "OS" even means. Certainly, if "OS" means "the code that your hardware

38+boots into," hardware always changes and so will the OS.

39+

40+A broader, more useful definition: the "OS" is _an opaque model of a persistent

41+general-purpose computer_. This definition allows for arbitrary levels of

42+virtualization. Linux on a droplet is an OS. A browser is an OS, because it's

43+persistent (sorta) and opaque. But `node.js` is not an OS, because it's not

44+opaque: it exports Linux system calls.

45+

46+Within this opaque model, we have to decide what's "system" and "user" software.

47+It clearly makes no sense to freeze userspace. Let's use the

48+[trusted codebase](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_computing_base): code

49+is system software, if compromising it would compromise the whole system.

50+

51+## Infinite maturity

52+

53+It's important to remember that just because a system is designed to achieve

54+frozenness, doesn't mean it's useless until it's frozen. It doesn't even mean

55+it's immature. It just means that in the very long term, the system's maturity

56+goals are infinite.

57+

58+Systems designed to diverge infinitely (with normal X.X.X semantic versioning),

59+even those designed to converge infinitely (as with

60+[Knuth versioning](http://www.tex.ac.uk/FAQ-TeXfuture.html)), also achieve

61+maturity, often great maturity, without being quite frozen.

62+

63+For example, C is a very mature language. C has long since mastered backward

64+compatibility. We can be sure that any C program which compiles on today's

65+correct C compilers will compile on any future correct C compiler.

66+

67+But, since C is not frozen, we can't be sure that today's C compilers will

68+compile any future C program. So C has not yet achieved perfect _forward_

69+compatibility. By definition, a frozen system is compatible both forward and

70+backward. So C is mature, but it could still get more mature.

71+

72+The point of a frozen OS is to shoot for _infinite_ maturity. Obviously a

73+frozen platform is compatible forever in both directions.

74+

75+Infinite maturity does exist in the real world. But only in a few simple file

76+formats and protocols — IP, JSON, XML. And not all this maturity is the result

77+of perfection. Some is just the accident of a missing update mechanism.

78+

79+But IP, JSON, XML... this is how stable, how taken for granted, system software

80+should be. And can be. Certainly, any JSON parser today will parse any JSON

81+document made in the future.

82+

83+The dream of absolute zero is an OS whose core components are so simple, so

84+boring, and so mechanically straightforward that we can imagine them becoming

85+finished and never changing. We need to freeze not just a format or a protocol,

86+but a language, a kernel, a standard library. To succeed, we need to flush out

87+each quirk, complexity, and creeping feature, until the system is so boring and

88+obvious that no one even wants to change it.

89+

90+## Kelvin versioning

91+

92+"Kelvin versioning" is one way to track a project designed to be frozen.

93+

94+In Kelvin versioning, a version is an integer in degrees Kelvin. Absolute zero

95+is frozen — no further updates are possible. If your Kelvin versions don't

96+track your actual progress, you run out of integers. This danger is a concrete

97+incentive for the project to track its own progress accurately.

98+

99+(Kelvin versioning isn't useful only at lifecycle scale. It can be used for any

100+development process with an irreversible end — as build numbers for a release,

101+for example.)

102+

103+## The palm-tree dependency model

104+

105+A whole OS can't have a single Kelvin number. It has to consist of multiple

106+components which depend on each other. What's the right dependency model for

107+the parts of a frozen OS?

108+

109+One way to think about dependencies across a whole OS is the "palm-tree model."

110+Fundamentally, there are two kinds of components in a system: "exclusive"

111+components (where we have to choose one version of the code), and "inclusive"

112+ones (where different users can see different versions).

113+

114+The exclusive components are the trunk of the palm tree: a stack of layers, each

115+of which has one active copy. For instance, you are only running one kernel at

116+a time. Different apps cannot use different versions of the kernel.

117+

118+The inclusive components are the fronds, branching out in any direction they

119+want. Not only can two apps use different versions of the same library, in

120+many situations _one_ app needs to be able to use two different versions of the

121+same library.

122+

123+## The palm trunk: telescoping Kelvins

124+

125+Any subsystem that serves as any kind of platform is exclusive, since anything

126+that runs on top of the platform has to choose one version of the platform to

127+run on. Since layers are good, this creates a natural stack which can get quite

128+tall — and include components which are technically in userspace.

129+

130+The right way for this trunk to approach absolute zero is to "telescope" its

131+Kelvin versions. The rules of telescoping are simple:

132+

133+1. If tool B sits on platform A, either both A and B must be at absolute zero,

134+ or B must be warmer than A.

135+

136+2. Whenever the temperature of A (the platform) declines, the temperature of B

137+ (the tool) must also decline.

138+

139+3. B must state the version of A it was developed against. A, when loading B,

140+ must state its own current version, and the warmest version of itself with which

141+ it's backward-compatible.

142+

143+Of course, if B itself is a platform on which some higher-level tool C depends,

144+it must follow the same constraints recursively.

145+

146+The important effect of obeying rule 2: in a tall trunk, it's sufficient to

147+state your dependency on the platform directly below you. Suppose C sits on B,

148+which sits on A and exports features of A. C can state only the version of B

149+it's written against, because when A chills, B must also chill.

150+

151+If A could chill without B chilling, we could modify C to use new features of A.

152+Then our new C would silently fail to work on an A-B stack which had not

153+received the A update.

154+

155+## The palm fronds: total flexibility

156+

157+The goal of the trunk is to get to the fronds. In the fronds, no one should

158+ever worry about dependency conflicts. And nothing is ever frozen, or has to be

159+frozen.

160+

161+The right way to solve dependencies in userspace is: within an organization, use

162+a monorepo and link relative to its head. Between organizations, use pinned

163+version numbers that are as immutable as possible. Avoid programming

164+environments that create exclusion problems in userspace — for instance, that

165+compel a single process to choose one version of a library when a diamond

166+dependency exists.

167+

168+There is almost never any good reason to automatically update dependencies with

169+fresh versions of foreign code. In the case of a security update, the

170+maintainer of an app which depends on a patched library needs to catch the

171+patch and propagate the update in a new version of the app. An app shouldn't be

172+security-critical to begin with, and propagating updates is a basic function of

173+a modern OS. Also, if the app is security-critical, it could have its own bugs,

174+so it needs a maintainer and an update pathway anyway.

175+

176+## Urbit: status and prospects

177+

178+Yes, we do believe it's possible to write a freezable OS. In fact, we wrote

179+one. And it works. It's not yet frozen (except at the bottom layer), but it's

180+getting there.

181+

182+Urbit, a clean-slate functional OS, has been under development since 2002. It

183+took a decade (as a one-man project) just to build a prototype of a freezable OS.

184+The result in 2017 (now with a small company) is a telescoping Kelvin stack of

185+layers from VM to UI.

186+

187+At the bottom (the VM Nock), this stack is slightly warmer than liquid helium

188+(5K). It's easy for Nock to get this cold, because it's defined in a page of

189+axioms that gzips to 340 bytes. We are in no hurry to declare zero, but any

190+change at this point would be both very unlikely and very difficult to

191+implement.

192+

193+Urbit's typed functional language, Hoon, which compiles itself to Nock, is

194+closing in on liquid krypton at 143K. Hoon is defined in about 5,000 lines of

195+Hoon, or 10,000 if you count the deep standard library. Nock will never need to

196+change; Hoon is perfectly serviceable but has some well-known rough spots.

197+

198+Above Hoon, the stack rapidly gets much warmer. Arvo is an event-driven

199+microkernel that's 1,000 lines of Hoon. Above this are another 5,000 lines of

200+system library, then 12,000 lines of Arvo modules: a peer-to-peer network, a

201+PKI and private ledger, a revision-control system, an HTTP gateway, a functional

202+build system, and an application sandbox. A trivial working system needs

203+another 5,000 lines for basic chat and shell apps.

204+

205+We haven't had meaningful Kelvin numbers for the Arvo layer, but this release

206+will change that. About a third of Arvo has been or will be rewritten in the

207+last year; we'll assign Kelvins once this code (which now compiles) is tested

208+into existence, largely based on how close the last compiling draft was to the

209+first working draft. But you'll certainly be able to cook eggs on it.

210+

211+(Once again, not being frozen doesn't mean not working. Until all these layers

212+are finished, we'll be updating them over the air. To be exact, Urbit

213+distributes its own updates through subscriptions in its own revision-control

214+system.)

215+

216+The actual status of Urbit is that in 2017, we hope to make our last

217+discontinuous update — meaning that instead of your Urbit node updating itself

218+silently, you destroy and recreate it. Urbit works today, but it isn't really

219+alive until today's Urbit data lives forever.

220+

221+Even committing to continuity is a significant step toward the frozen OS,

222+because we're committing to never making another change that the present

223+platform can't install. Fortunately, the only layer that has to stay frozen for

224+this is Nock.

225+

226+## The style of convergent system software

227+

228+We're obviously in no position to declare victory at any layer above Nock, but

229+aiming at absolute zero creates a system design style we think works very well —

230+even if we never get to zero.

231+

232+Deep, onion-like layering is essential. A thin layer has no room to grow. A

233+good example of this principle is the difference between Urbit and Lisp

234+machines. Both Nock and Lisp are very simple axiomatic definitions of

235+computing. But practical Lisp systems expand by extending the model, whereas

236+Urbit layers over a frozen axiom system.

237+

238+Software that expands by extension is inevitable. But we need to be able to

239+kick it up to userspace. System software should be concerned with the

240+fundamental problems of computing, which don't change. The few cases in which

241+they do change — like crypto algorithms — are special cases, easily

242+encapsulated. And even these changes can be expected to slow down in the long

243+term.

244+

245+Perhaps the best example of the convergent style in existing, mature system

246+software is the relational database. The genius of the relational model is that

247+it's designed to never grow hair. Even SQL, with its COBOL-era syntax, is

248+essentially invulnerable to any significant non-cosmetic improvement.

249+

250+The lesson: when we see a system that seems to want to expand indefinitely, we

251+can and should look for a layer division within this system, separating an inner

252+layer that tends to converge from an outer layer that naturally diverges.

253+Layering is what distinguishes true system software from the giant balls of mud

254+that all deep codebases want to become.

255+

256+Are all balls of mud, or at least all the muddy parts of an OS, susceptible to

257+this transformation? We think so. But we'll see.

258+

259+As usual, comments are on fora. Check out

260+[this thread](https://urbit.org/fora/posts/~2017.5.12..20.30.11..0050~/).

content/blog/toward-a-new-clay.mdnew file+1012

@@ -0,0 +1,1012 @@

1++++

2+title = "Toward a New %clay"

3+date = "2016-07-13"

4+description = "Urbit's revision-control system, %clay, is itself due for a (medium-sized) revision!"

5+aliases = [

6+ "/posts/essays/toward-a-new-clay",

7+ "/posts/toward-a-new-clay",

8+ "/blog/clay"

9+]

10+

11+[extra]

12+author = "Curtis Yarvin"

13+ship = "~sorreg-namtyv"

14++++

15+

16+TLDR: (a) Urbit's revision-control system, `%clay`, is itself due

17+for a (medium-sized) revision! (b) this time, you yourself can

18+really help! (c) please don't give away the buried spoiler!

19+

20+This explanation does not (or at least should not) require you to

21+know anything about Urbit.

22+

23+### But %clay is already pretty cool

24+

25+Of course, nothing in Urbit is allowed to be _lame_. `%clay` is

26+actually quite cool. It does need some work. But first, let's

27+talk about what it is and why it's cool.

28+

29+`%clay` is the Arvo vane (Urbit kernel module) for revision

30+control. It's an authenticated, human-memorable global immutable

31+namespace which is also a typed revision-control system. It's

32+also very good at subscription and synchronization. Urbit

33+currently uses `%clay` to distribute live hotpatches; we

34+transparently upgrade the whole network with one checkin.

35+

36+### Compared to other revision-control systems

37+

38+`%clay` is clearly a vanilla DVCS in the modern `git` style. Of

39+deployed DVCS these days, `%clay` is probably closest in spirit

40+to `bzr` or maybe `fossil`.

41+

42+Obviously, as a part of a larger whole, you would expect any

43+Urbit RCS to be brutally spartan. `%clay` is. It's even more

44+spartan than `bzr`.

45+

46+(In fact, it's really too spartan to fully use at the moment. We

47+ourselves still use `%clay` mainly as a distribution system, and

48+do all internal development on GitHub. This is because the

49+present `%clay` lacks a few little conveniences, like commit

50+messages. See upgrades, below.)

51+

52+There are lots of normal DVCS things in `%clay`. But there are

53+also cool and unusual ones. Let's take a brief tour of the

54+high-level system, then describe what we think should change

55+about it.

56+

57+### Anatomy of a DVCS

58+

59+A DVCS is a historical state graph. A point in this graph is a

60+snapshot of some tree-structured system, like a filesystem.

61+

62+These snapshots, including recursive internal nodes, are stored in

63+a content-addressable store. Pointers in this store are used to

64+construct a revision graph, whose edges are edit and/or merge

65+actions. Some sort of namespace attaches meaningful names to

66+current revisions in this graph.

67+

68+There are six big questions in the design of a DVCS:

69+

70+- how are snapshots named?

71+- what is the data structure within a snapshot?

72+- how does it map to the Unix filesystem?

73+- how is the system queried?

74+- how is the revision graph defined?

75+- how does the content-addressable store work?

76+

77+## Anatomy of %clay

78+

79+A good way to summarize `%clay` (at present) is that its answers

80+to the first four questions are interesting, and its answers to

81+the last two are boring. We'll talk about all six, though.

82+

83+### Global namespace: [ship desk case]

84+

85+The permanent global name of a `%clay` snapshot is a `++beak`. A beak

86+is a triple: `[ship desk case]`.

87+

88+The `++ship` is an Urbit ship. A ship is a network address, a

89+human-memorable name and a cryptographic identity. The address

90+width is variable; shorter addresses are more desirable. Most

91+users have 32-bit addresses, which we map to four-syllable

92+synthetic names like `~sorreg-namtyv`.

93+

94+The `++desk` is a 4-letter word meaning "branch."

95+

96+The `++case` is a version, one of three kinds: a version sequence

97+number, a named label, or a date.

98+

99+In the Urbit path syntax, the beak is the first three segments of

100+the path: `/ship/desk/case/my/cat/picture`.

101+

102+In most cases, a path parser has a default ship, desk and case,

103+each of which can be replaced by `=`. So `/=home=/my/cat/picture`

104+is the data at `/my/cat/picture` on your own ship, in the `%home`

105+desk, right now. Immutability doesn't have to be inconvenient.

106+

107+`%clay` has no concept of a mutable name or a magic `HEAD`. Use

108+the current date. If you're referring to remote data and you're

109+worried about clock skew, subtract a second or three, or be

110+prepared to block. (Or keep your clock unskewed, which shouldn't

111+be _that_ hard.) It's not like mutable-name schemes work any

112+better than this anyway.

113+

114+(Immutability is central to `%clay`. `git` merely adopted the

115+reflog. `%clay` was born in it, molded by it...)

116+

117+`%clay` is objective; each Urbit node hosts only one ship, but

118+treats domestic and foreign data (almost) the same way. If you

119+ask your `%clay` repository for someone else's data, it will

120+block the request until it gets the data, which it then caches.

121+At present, we always fulfill requests from the origin ship,

122+though in future we could certainly use it as a tracker.

123+

124+If `%clay` discards cached data, it keeps a hash, so that your

125+urbit can't violate the local illusion of immutability. We

126+can't, of course, prevent anyone else's ship from sending

127+conflicting claims in different directions. But we can prevent

128+programs on our own ship from hearing about them, meaning that we

129+retain local referential transparency.

130+

131+### Local structure: dome, arch, leaf and mark

132+

133+A `%clay` snapshot is called a `++dome`. A dome is the `%clay`

134+equivalent of a tree-structured filesystem.

135+

136+Each node in this tree is one uniform structure, an `++arch`,

137+which is both file and directory. A `++leaf` or data value in

138+this arch is a typed document.

139+

140+A logical document type is called a `++mark`. A mark is a

141+symbolic pointer to a Hoon source file, in the same dome, for an

142+engine that can validate, compare, and/or convert

143+documents of that mark.

144+

145+Let's go over arches and marks a little more closely...

146+

147+#### An arch is a uniform filesystem node

148+

149+Most filesystems and RCS have modal nodes. For instance, a git

150+data node can be a blob or a tree. `%clay` (and the Urbit

151+namespace in general) has one kind of node, an `arch`:

152+

153+```

154+ ++ arch (pair (unit leaf) (map knot arch))

155+ ++ leaf (pair mark noun)

156+```

157+

158+An arch has an optional typed-data leaf, and optional named

159+children. In Unix terms, it's a file, a directory, or both. It

160+can't be neither: an empty arch, with no data and no children, is

161+auto-pruned. As in `git` (but not in Unix), the hierarchy is a

162+pure function of its leaves. Paths exist only because of the

163+data they point to.

164+

165+The `++knot` names in an arch path are also a little special.

166+They're typed, in a sense; any knot can be parsed invertibly into

167+a typed atom. The atom is an arbitrary unsigned integer. Its

168+type (an `++aura` if you know Hoon) defines the semantics and

169+presentation of the atom: for instance, a symbol, a decimal,

170+a date, etc.

171+

172+Ultimately a filesystem is a database, and a path is a primary

173+key. It's very useful to be able to store simple data in this

174+key, in a standard and unambiguous way.

175+

176+Why uniform nodes? One, they map nicely to information trees

177+where a subtree may need some custom collective presentation,

178+not an automatically generated Apache style directory listing.

179+Two, non-uniform nodes introduce a whole pointless category of

180+node type conflicts -- for which life is far too short.

181+

182+#### A mark is an executable document type

183+

184+A mark is "like an executable MIME type." It's best defined as a

185+symbolic mapping from a filesystem to a schema engine.

186+

187+If you have a MIME type `text/html`, you need to watch the

188+Internets to track what the W3C thinks HTML is. If you have an

189+Urbit mark `%html`, you can functionally construct (using our

190+insanely powerful functional build vane `%ford`) a core which

191+can validate or normalize HTML, apply patch and diff logic, and

192+translate to and from other marks. `%ford` can even reason about

193+translation paths and construct multistep conversions.

194+

195+(Urbit does not actually have this super-smart `%html` mark right

196+now. But it probably should, huh. And this page was composed in

197+Markdown and translated to HTML by `%ford`.)

198+

199+Where does the source code of a mark live? Within the same dome

200+as the data it describes. `%html` files are described by the

201+Hoon source at `/===/mar/html`, which perhaps gets mapped into

202+your Unix filesystem at `$ship/home/mar/html.hoon`.

203+

204+This Hoon file is not self-contained. It has dependencies. The

205+`%html` mark may depend on various structures and libraries

206+elsewhere in Urbit. But the source code for all them is within

207+this dome.

208+

209+One constraint this puts on domes is that _all domes are

210+descendants of the base system dome_. Domes are versions of one

211+reality, not fragments of that reality. You can't create a new

212+empty dome -- you'd have no mark source, and be unable to install

213+any validated files.

214+

215+Enforcing the rule that all domes are congruent (if only in that

216+they all contain the base system files) costs us nothing in the

217+implementation, does not inconvenience the user, and ensures that

218+weird collisions between non-parallel things don't happen.

219+

220+### Unix mapping and mounting

221+

222+Every DVCS is its own filesystem in a sense. But every DVCS

223+works by mapping and mounting itself, in some sense, to Unix.

224+

225+#### Mapping arches to Unix

226+

227+How do we map arches into Unix? The arch structure maps 1:1 to

228+the Unix directory tree. When the arch has a leaf, we derive a

229+dot extension from the file's mark.

230+

231+So, supposing we have a leaf `foo` which is an HTML document

232+(mark `%html`), with two children `bar` and `moo`, also HTML

233+documents, in Unix we'll see:

234+

235+```

236+foo.html

237+foo/bar.html

238+foo/moo.html

239+```

240+

241+This maps invertibly back into `%clay`, and it looks perfectly

242+unremarkable from the Unix side. File completion sometimes gets

243+a little annoying.

244+

245+It would be if nice every possible Unix tree, even every

246+plausible Unix tree, mapped cleanly and completely to a `%clay`

247+dome. There are always horrid exceptions, even in common use --

248+like extensionless Makefiles. The trivial solution is that if

249+`%clay` finds a file mysterious, it won't track it.

250+

251+One often unquestioned assumption in new system software is that

252+compatibility with old content is important. It's nice, but not

253+that important. Most content in a new system is new content.

254+The important compatibility direction is export, not import. So

255+the new system should subset, not superset, the ancient formats.

256+

257+### Mounting desks to Unix

258+

259+If a `%clay` desk is _mounted_, it has a two-way live sync to

260+the Unix directory of the same name within the pier.

261+

262+When files in a mount directory change, `%clay` notices it

263+through `libuv` filesystem watching (ultimately `inotify()` or

264+`FSEvents`), computes diffs, and automatically commits them to

265+the desk. And if `%clay` creates a new version for its own

266+urbity reasons, it will revise the Unix files.

267+

268+Keeping all mounted files in the same Unix subdirectory makes it

269+easy to move the whole pier in a tarfile. Edits applied while

270+the `urbit` process isn't running will be detected and applied

271+the next time it starts.

272+

273+In conventional DVCS terms, `%clay` has a 1:1 static mapping from

274+branches to working directories. Why?

275+

276+Why not? Do we need that "what branches are checked out in what

277+directories" piece of state? Why force the user to worry about

278+which branches are mounted to which directories? Why not just

279+mount them under their own names? Is there some crippling global

280+shortage of disk space for source files? Our planet is running

281+out of inodes? Wut?

282+

283+### Queries, subscriptions and synchronization

284+

285+There are two ways to get data out of `%clay`: dereference the Urbit

286+namespace, or send a request/subscription. Sync is in userspace.

287+

288+#### Dereferencing the namespace

289+

290+`%clay` is just part of the full Urbit namespace. The full namespace

291+has a two-character prefix which expresses what vane to query

292+(always `%c` for `%clay`). The suffix is a mode flag; `%x` for

293+data, `%y` for a list of children, `%z` for the whole arch

294+subtree, `%w` for the version number. (Each vane has its own

295+modes.)

296+

297+For example, the full path to my cat picture is

298+

299+```

300+/cx/~sorreg-namtyv/home/[now]/my/cat/picture

301+```

302+

303+(where `now` is the current date).

304+

305+If the data model is `++image` (hypothetical -- we don't really

306+do image processing in Urbit right now), the normal way to load

307+this data in a Hoon program is

308+

309+```

310+.^(image /cx/~sorreg-namtyv/home/[now]/my/cat/picture)

311+```

312+

313+This produces a statically typed value (which works by

314+dynamically checking `image` against the actual type of the

315+value, but this comparison caches well).

316+

317+Internally, an Urbit namespace request produces a `++cage`, which

318+has a mark, a `++span` (language-level type), and an actual noun.

319+The product is doubly optional, `(unit (unit cage))`; this is `~`

320+if we don't know the value of this name at present but might

321+learn it in future, `[~ ~]` if we know we'll never know it, or

322+`[~ ~ value]` if we know it now.

323+

324+In high-level shell programming (`:dojo`), we can make apparently

325+"blocking" requests to `%clay`. What actually happens: when `%clay`

326+produces `~`, we stop trying to compute this expression and wait

327+on one or more blocking requests. When we are unblocked, we

328+recompute again from scratch; the intermediate computation is not

329+saved at all.

330+

331+Urbit doesn't like to block. It likes to save coherent data

332+structures, not incomplete computation contexts. When Urbit

333+pretends to block for you, this is a courtesy service. You

334+can return the courtesy of not expecting miracles from it.

335+When in doubt, send an actual request.

336+

337+### Requests and subscriptions

338+

339+A true request (local or remote) has access to the same

340+namespace, but can (a) read across case (revision) ranges,

341+and (b) filter by subtree.

342+

343+If the revision range in a request stretches into the future, the

344+request becomes a subscription. Urbit messaging always regards a

345+single response as a special case of a subscription.

346+

347+Generally, the response stream created by a request starts with

348+all the data the server has available right now; updates will

349+follow when they become available; the subscription will be

350+closed when the request range is complete.

351+

352+#### Userspace synchronization

353+

354+Synchronization per se is done in userspace. In `%clay`, sync just

355+means an application (typically the `%kiln` module in the system

356+app `:hood`) subscribes to a remote desk, and saves its change

357+stream locally. So sync is really an emergent feature of `%clay`.

358+

359+### Revision graph

360+

361+`%clay`'s revision graph is completely uninteresting at present.

362+Some changes are proposed below, however.

363+

364+As in any DVCS, a dome is the child of one parent dome (an edit)

365+or more parents (a merge). Often the parent of any revision is

366+the previous version in the sequence, but it can be anything.

367+

368+### Storage model

369+

370+`%clay`'s storage model is completely uninteresting. It's also a

371+little funky and I want to change it, so I'll be super vague.

372+

373+A `++lobe`, a 128-bit atom, is the Merkle hash of a `blob`, which

374+is essentially a leaf. All blobs are stored in a hash table

375+(`(map lobe blob)`), and reference each other through lobes.

376+

377+At present we don't GC this space at all, because we don't

378+actually delete any roots.

379+

380+A `blob` may be `%direct`, meaning it's defined as the data

381+itself, or `%delta`, defined as a change against another blob.

382+This is motivated by the desire not to store a full snapshot

383+on every file change. But it may be misguided (see changes #0

384+and #1 below).

385+

386+We cache the full arch tree (`++ankh`) of the latest state in

387+each desk. For current queries, this mitigates a lot of the

388+opportunities for slowness that this data model creates. But the

389+disparity between the speed of the current version and the

390+speed previous version is an undesirable glitch in the API.

391+

392+## Our motivation for change

393+

394+We actually have _three_ motivations for change...

395+

396+### We need to develop on %clay

397+

398+At present, we're still using `git` as a development platform.

399+`%clay` is certainly used, but just for its strength --

400+deployment. This is starving Urbit of essential experience and

401+basically keeping it lame. So, change is necessary.

402+

403+### Change must come from the community

404+

405+"Why?" you ask? "Why must change come from the community?" Well,

406+one, duh. Change always comes from the community.

407+

408+But two, a great force for change has departed. Philip Monk,

409+late maintainer of `%clay` (`~wictuc-folrex` in the old era,

410+`~wicdev-wisryt` in the new), is tired of types and typing. He

411+spent September roaming with the bison in Montana, and is now

412+literally on his way to Patagonia. On the one hand, Phil still

413+exists and is not at all unwilling to answer questions, even dumb

414+questions. On the other hand, _Patagonia_.

415+

416+So %clay needs a new owner, or owners. At this point, we think

417+the community might be indoctrinated enough to take a stab.

418+

419+Alas, `%clay` already has a pretty checkered ownership history.

420+Long ago I built a `%clay` that was really the only serious

421+design failure in Arvo. Then Jared Hance, a brilliant summer

422+intern, took my broken `%clay` and reformed it into a minimal `git`

423+in about a week. Then Philip modified Jared's `%clay` to be a

424+_typed_ revision-control system, which is a pretty cool thing.

425+

426+But... in none of these transitions did `%clay` actually get

427+_rewritten_ per se. While it's a reasonably good vane, it

428+does contain one or two historical decisions.

429+

430+We know a lot more about Arvo than we used to, and I think we can

431+revisit many of these decisions. The point of this post is to

432+start a `%clay` design discussion that will evolve into actual

433+collective action.

434+

435+### Pioneers may find it worth their time

436+

437+We're planning a rewards program for contributions to `%clay`.

438+It'll simply involve setting a time period and a pool of real

439+estate, and allocating the pool by judged contribution.

440+

441+This is an experimental program. We'll say more about it later.

442+It may not even happen. It may happen very differently. When in

443+doubt, don't talk about Fight Club.

444+

445+## Some openings for change

446+

447+Change, of course, must come from the community. No one can

448+dictate change from the top down. We _know_ this. But...

449+

450+This list of suggested changes for the next `%clay` is not in any

451+sort of order: priority, structure, difficulty, etc. Let's talk

452+about the changes first; make actual plans second. The numbers

453+here are just for convenience.

454+

455+_All changes in this program will happen on the next-generation

456+(`cc-release`) branch._

457+

458+### Change #0: state reform

459+

460+As mentioned above, the storage model in `%clay`, as the code is

461+at present, feels a little funky to me. There's nothing terribly

462+awful about it, but it doesn't feel quite right and its scaling

463+properties are very questionable.

464+

465+Briefly, `%clay` today actually derives the hierarchy from its

466+leaves -- rather than _logically_ so deriving it. Only leaves

467+are in the object store. This is just weird, and you can feel

468+`%clay` trying to be something other than what it is. (I blame

469+Jared, though it's actually my fault.)

470+

471+To store a dome snapshot (`++yaki`), the present code keeps a

472+`(map path blob)` at the root of the dome. This is enough to

473+reconstruct the `++arch` structures the namespace exports.

474+However, all kinds of basic arch operations, like basically `ls`,

475+become `O(n)` in the number of leaves in the dome. This is

476+obviously not quite right.

477+

478+I believe the storage structure should be (removing everything

479+that isn't needed to serve the namespace):

480+

481+```

482+ ++ clay (pair safe (map term desk))

483+ ++ desk (pair numb (map numb root))

484+ ++ dome (pair date root)

485+ ++ leaf (pair mark noun)

486+ ++ lobe @uvH :: 128-bit base32

487+ ++ numb @ud :: decimal version number

488+ ++ root (pair (unit leaf) (map knot lobe))

489+ ++ safe (map lobe root)

490+```

491+

492+Here a `++root` is the universal node, with children addressed by

493+hash, but logically representing the abstract `++arch`.

494+

495+Users of hierarchical filesystems basically expect performance

496+qualities that match the filesystem structure. A huge directory

497+in one place shouldn't affect search speeds somewhere else. And

498+of course, `ls` can't be O(n) in the size of the filesystem.

499+

500+### Change #1: store edges, cache snapshots

501+

502+The current `%clay` is snapshot-oriented, like `git`. The actual

503+changes are discarded. I think this is a bad choice.

504+

505+`%clay` is not a research project, and has no idea of going as

506+far as `darcs` in the "set-of-patches" direction. However, at

507+present we actually throw away the patch (`++nori`).

508+

509+I think the right DVCS design for `%clay` is a snapshot-oriented

510+system which also keeps the patches. The revision graph has the

511+same general shape as in the old `git` style. But rather than

512+just deriving the diffs from the snapshots, we can also derive

513+the snapshots from the diffs. When in doubt, we save space by

514+dropping the snapshot, not the diff.

515+

516+For an RCS which is also a general-purpose typed filesystem, it's

517+clear that considering edges (deltas, diffs, changes, etc) as the

518+primary state is optimal. You can use diff functions to derive

519+deltas from snapshots, but in many data models this will always

520+risk losing information from the original action. When in

521+doubt, save what the user did.

522+

523+This is even more true for operations on the tree structure, not

524+on individual leaves. Consider the heuristic energy that `git` has

525+to go through to figure out when `mv` has been used -- even when

526+`git mv` has been used! (According to the `git` faq, this is

527+because the lowest common denominator remains Linus' style of

528+working with emailed patches.)

529+

530+Edges probably don't even need to be deduplicated. They also can

531+contain metadata such as commit messages (which `%clay` has no

532+place for at present).

533+

534+Once edges are recognized as unreclaimed primary state, snapshots

535+can always be derived from the edges. So we can reclaim memory

536+being used for snapshots.

537+

538+It's also straightforward to have a kind of edge which is a list

539+of edges, letting us collapse feature branches trivially.

540+

541+Finally, I think references in edges should wherever possible

542+indirect through the namespace, rather than directly to the

543+content address. The user has strictly more information if you

544+say you merged `/~sorreg-namtyv/base/987/`, than if all you have

545+is the hash that this reference refers to.

546+

547+### Change #2: unconfuse merge and rebase

548+

549+The dispute between merge and rebase has all the bad smells of

550+a historical wart. But here I'm just not sure what's right.

551+

552+The user has one _intent_ whether merging or rebasing, which is

553+to combine changes on one desk into another. The _algorithm_

554+used to construct this change, whether operational transformation

555+(rebasing) or a 3-way diff (merging) has one goal: use all

556+available information to model the authors' editing intent as

557+realistically as possible. If we save edges, we should use

558+edges.

559+

560+Whether to define the resulting change graph with the typical

561+structure of a merge, or the typical structure of a rebase,

562+strikes me as quite arbitrary, and well into the land of "pick

563+one and force everyone to stick with it." But this call demands

564+a real expert on RCS workflow, which I'm not.

565+

566+Since `%clay` is a humble part of a larger system and needs to

567+keep its weight down, "do it both ways because people have

568+different preferences" is not usually the right answer.

569+

570+### Change #3: comment jihad

571+

572+`%clay` needs to be brought up to the documentation standards of

573+`%jael`. This means (a) the formatting matches; (b) the comments

574+are at the same level of quality and ubiquity.

575+

576+The basic commenting standards are: (a) every core (class) needs

577+a block comment explanation; (b) every gate (function) needs a

578+line comment; (c) every face (variable) needs a line comment.

579+

580+This is obviously not just a clerical task. To write these

581+comments, you need to actually understand the code. This is a

582+nontrivial but extremely rewarding task, even if the code you're

583+commenting will get replaced.

584+

585+Also, the _symbols_ in `%clay` must be brought up to `%jael`

586+quality. There is still far too much four-letterism here.

587+

588+NB: `%clay` is about 3000 lines of pretty clean Hoon, which is

589+certainly not at all undocumented. We're not exactly looking at

590+a Matterhorn of reverse engineering here.

591+

592+### Change #4: knot to coin internal paths

593+

594+One feature of Urbit paths, briefly mentioned above, is that a

595+path segment or `++knot` (which is just a `@tas` text string, an

596+ASCII symbol as an atom) must be within the range of the

597+invertible noun printer, `++co`.

598+

599+`++co` maps a described data value, a `++coin`, to an ASCII

600+string which is a valid URL segment and Unix filename. Its

601+friend `++so` inverts the function, perfectly.

602+

603+Almost every knot is the simplest kind of `coin`, a `dime.` A

604+dime is a single atom with a rendering type (`aura` if you know

605+Hoon). Auras include `@tas` for symbolic text, `@ud` for

606+unsigned decimal, `@p` for Urbit ship, etc. `++co` can also

607+print arbitrary cells, though less prettily.

608+

609+This feature is cool because it lets us stuff data into names in

610+a precise and predictable way. Usually the names in a namespace

611+are human-meaningful and human-originated, and are therefore

612+symbolic, but there are exceptions. For example, blogposts may

613+want to be named by date.

614+

615+However, it is slightly retarded for the fundamental state of our

616+arches to store the _rendered_ string (`++knot`), not the source

617+data (`++coin`). It leads to all kinds of inefficiencies where

618+we're doing way more parsing than we want to. (Parsing also

619+should be jet-propelled, but is not.) It also makes it way too

620+easy to sneak in bad data and make it `%clay`'s problem.

621+

622+So, logically, we'd be shifting from

623+

624+```

625+ ++ arch (pair (unit (pair mark noun)) (map knot arch))

626+```

627+

628+```

629+ ++ arch (pair (unit (pair mark noun)) (map coin arch))

630+```

631+

632+Also, a vanilla `++map` might not be quite the right data

633+structure at this point -- we probably want a custom sorted tree,

634+which separates auras and imposes a custom order on each. This

635+would let us serve simple range queries quite efficiently, so

636+long as they match the standard aura order (eg, alphabetical

637+order for symbols).

638+

639+### Change #5: dome semantics by reference

640+

641+While the principle that a dome contains its own mark source is

642+elegant, it's a pain in the ass to implement properly. `%clay`

643+certainly does not do it justice at present.

644+

645+The complexity is in checking every change to see whether it

646+includes a change to the mark source (which is very unlikely),

647+or a dependency of the mark source (slightly less unlikely).

648+And if so, do we have to update all the leaves in the dome?

649+This is also very unlikely. And yet, it happens.

650+

651+Instead, we could simply designate, by beak (ship, desk, and

652+case) a dome which contains the canonical mark source. This

653+would rarely change -- you could upgrade a desk to a new mark

654+dome, but it would be a manual operation and probably a rare one.

655+

656+The common case would just be that everyone uses the current

657+version of the `%base` desk when a desk is created, and never

658+changes it. In practice, this means not every two-byte edit

659+needs to get involved in detecting and/or applying schema

660+evolution, a welcome simplification.

661+

662+### Change #6: mark containers

663+

664+Marks in present `%clay` are atomic and symbolic (like `%html`).

665+Since they're also used for network protocols, and the proper

666+design is one mark per message structure, the mark namespace gets

667+overloaded fast.

668+

669+So we added an app hierarchy within the mark namespace, using hep

670+`-` as a divider. The `:talk` app expects messages with the mark

671+`talk-message`, whose sources is in `/===/mar/talk/message`.

672+

673+This helps, but it doesn't solve another two problems: trivial

674+nouns and containers.

675+

676+It's retarded to have to add a source file to send a `@ud` or a

677+`*`. An aura (see above under `coin`) should be a trivial mark.

678+

679+Also, we need to be able to construct standard containers of

680+marks: lists, maps, sets, and tuples (or, as a database person

681+would say, "rows").

682+

683+### Change #7: meta-marks

684+

685+Another kind of complex mark that needs to exist: conflict,

686+difference, and invalid marks.

687+

688+Conflict data and difference data are two types of noun that are

689+generated in normal RCS operation. If we have the concept of an

690+`%html` noun, we also need the concept of an invertible change

691+from one `%html` file to another; a merge conflict between two

692+`%html` files; and even a conflict between two marks.

693+

694+There are two kinds of changes to a dome: manual and automatic.

695+Manual changes are initiated by the user and should crash, unless

696+manually overridden. Automatic changes should not crash, ever,

697+and should not lose data. If they create problems, which they

698+shouldn't, these problems will need to be cleaned up manually.

699+

700+This is a complex space to navigate, but it requires a conflicted

701+merge to be able to resolve to a valid dome containing conflict

702+leaves, not crash. The present `%clay` goes halfway there and

703+resolves to a scratch desk, but we can go farther: the whole `git`

704+dumpster-fire of "merge state" deserves destruction. One change

705+is a merge that produces conflicts, the next is an edit that

706+resolves them.

707+

708+Similarly, all sorts of errors can produce invalid leaves. One

709+particularly rare case which is nonetheless important is schema

710+evolution: what happens to files in a mark, when the mark source

711+code changes. They all need to be re-normalized. And this

712+operation can fail, producing an invalid value. (We don't do any

713+of this now, BTW, although `%ford` has the dependency mechanism to

714+make it possible.) Again, in some cases this should crash the

715+update to the mark source; in other cases, there is no local way

716+to handle the crash.

717+

718+So there must be a way to preserve invalid nouns that can be

719+repaired by repair tools that expect invalid content, while not

720+actually marking them as valid so that innocent code is deluded

721+into using the bad content.

722+

723+The bottom line: a mark needs to be split into two models:

724+`++mark`, the original symbolic mark with its source engine, and

725+something like `++logo`, the meta-mark or mark container. The

726+mark is the building block; the logo is the building.

727+

728+### Change #8: filesystem hierarchy standard

729+

730+While all filesystems remain forks of one ur-filesystem, the

731+standard tends to enforce itself. But not define itself.

732+

733+I've always hated the current `/mar` for marks, for instance. I

734+prefer `/mac`. But others hate this. And so on. Also, by

735+necessity, our nascent "FHS" is heavily biased toward system

736+data, away from user data. This is retarded.

737+

738+Please focus all bikeshedding energy on this problem! Better to

739+bikeshed about what color to paint the bikeshed, then what shape

740+the bike gears should be.

741+

742+### Change #9: security and access control

743+

744+Oh, yeah, that! They always say not to design security in at the

745+last minute. Unfortunately, this is exactly what we did. There

746+is no security at all in present `%clay`. (There is also no push

747+operation in `%clay`, so it's not as mad as you think -- anyone

748+can read anything, no one can write anything, which is fine in a

749+young network where there are no secrets.)

750+

751+Fortunately, we don't have anything super fancy planned in this

752+area, just basic access-control lists. These obviously need to

753+be designed along with the filesystem-hierarchy standard (see

754+elsewhere).

755+

756+Is it even possible to do ACLs properly in `%clay`? At this

757+point, yes. There is an event-oriented security model in Arvo,

758+though it isn't really hooked up to anything at the moment.

759+There is also a privilege badge system in `%jael`. The

760+combination of these two features is quite sufficient for a

761+decent ACL model.

762+

763+The idea of event-based security is that every event passed to

764+`%clay` has a security `++mask`. The mask tells us:

765+

766+- the set of ships that has _contaminated_ this event

767+- the set of ships that has _endorsed_ this event

768+- the set of ships that this event may be _released_ to.

769+

770+To simplify this system a little and maybe explain it, the

771+security question in any event is: (a) who has _caused_ this

772+event? (b) who may receive its _effects_? (These sets never

773+include your urbit itself, of course, only neighbors.)

774+

775+For example, if we're doing something because ship X sent us a

776+packet, and we're going to leak the results of this something

777+back in a response to ship X, once `%clay` knows what our ship

778+thinks of its neighbor X, we should have a good picture of what

779+effects this event should be allowed to cause. If `%jael` knows

780+that X is our friend, `%clay` can know that X can see our cat

781+picture.

782+

783+Causality is separated out into contamination (data from ship X

784+got into the event) and endorsement (ship X signed the whole

785+event). (This may be overdesign.) All these sets can be defined

786+as the empty set (eg, releasing to the empty set means no output)

787+or the universal set (input from the universal set could be from

788+anyone, ie, is unauthenticated).

789+

790+### Change #10: stop using mark-extended paths

791+

792+When you read a leaf from a `%clay` dome, `%clay` is happy to

793+perform any necessary mark conversions (the actual work is done

794+by the `%ford` build vane). You can also just ask for the leaf

795+in whatever mark `%clay` has it.

796+

797+It's confusing to think of this mark extension as part of the

798+path. You shouldn't say `+cat /===/app/talk/hoon`. You should say

799+`+cat /===/app/talk`, or maybe `+cat %hoon /===/app/talk`.

800+

801+A mark-extended namespace may be added to `%ford`, to compensate.

802+But type-converting reads are the rare case, not the common case.

803+

804+### Change #11: real queries and indexes

805+

806+A filesystem should postpone being a database until it can no

807+longer do so. So, please don't think about this problem yet.

808+I'm joking, of course!

809+

810+### Change #12: meta-query

811+

812+Make it possible to query the list of desks in a ship :-)

813+

814+### Change #13: completely redesign Unix mounting

815+

816+This is actually a series of changes, described below. But

817+broadly...

818+

819+One of Urbit's experiments is live two-way synchronization

820+between the Unix filesystem and the revision-control store.

821+Dropbox style, as it were. I think this experiment is basically

822+a failure. It may be right for cat pictures, but I don't think

823+it's right for Urbit.

824+

825+The fundamental problem is that there are all sorts of weird,

826+flaky ways applications use a mutable filesystem. It's not at

827+all unusual for an editor to change a file by deleting the old

828+file, then writing the new one in its place.

829+

830+You really don't want this to produce a delete change. A simple

831+cooldown timer for the sync helps a lot with this, but causes

832+other weirdnesses. In theory, a sync can even cause another

833+change to the same version of the same desk. And so on.

834+

835+The thing we fear is just too funky to work (there is some

836+strange "reflux bug" still affecting it) is any sort of _two-way_

837+synchronization between Unix and Urbit.

838+

839+And what I think puts this feature into the deadpool, or at least

840+cold storage, is that there's no useful workflow that actually

841+uses it -- at least, when editing Urbit code.

842+

843+It's actually really nice to have files on a disk that nothing

844+will automatically modify. If you're using `git` and `%clay` in

845+parallel, it's nice to mount your `git` working directory. The

846+original Urbit workflow was to work out of a mounted directory,

847+but the two-way updates were just too weird and scary, so now we

848+tend to edit elsewhere and copy in -- which is lame.

849+

850+### Change #14: figure out what to do with FUSE

851+

852+We actually have two forms of filesystem access to `%clay`: read-only

853+FUSE (in a somewhat experimental state), and filesystem watching

854+(using `inotify()` and `FSEvents` under a `libuv` wrapper).

855+

856+The FUSE interface is a good one, though it needs more work.

857+Moreover, it exports the whole Urbit namespace to Unix, not just

858+`%clay`. For reading Urbit data, FUSE is basically ideal.

859+

860+The obvious impulse is to make a read-write FUSE. But I don't

861+think FUSE should be used for recording changes to an RCS, even

862+though the FUSE API sends you changes as events.

863+

864+There are three reasons for this. One, the actual filesystem

865+writes that Unix apps make are typically of low quality and

866+confusing. Some crack-brained editor will find it completely

867+normal and unremarkable to modify a byte in a file, by deleting

868+the file and rewriting it from scratch. You can use a cooldown

869+timer to wait for this nonsense to converge, but leaving data in

870+heuristic limbo seems like a very bad idea in FUSE-land.

871+

872+The second is that people derive a lot of comfort from seeing

873+actual files on an actual disk. The idea that your datas are

874+stuck in Urbit is slightly terrifying as a user experience.

875+We claim to be reliable. It's actually hard to imagine datas that

876+couldn't be recovered from either snapshot or log. But how can

877+you possibly believe us on this?

878+

879+So I think it's correct to lean all the weight of reading data

880+from Urbit on FUSE, and use filesystem watching for writing.

881+Heuristic timeouts are fine in filesystem watching, because at

882+least the data got written when the disk says it got written.

883+And at least it's on the disk.

884+

885+Also, FUSE is a daemon by definition, which forces us to think a

886+little harder about how to run the Urbit process as a daemon.

887+But this is a separate discussion.

888+

889+### Change #15: one-way, nonced working desk

890+

891+A one-way mount is a much less crazy thing. It works the same

892+way our two-way mount works today, but with only one writer: the

893+user, via Unix.

894+

895+Since a mount is one-way, it needs to have an absolute write lock

896+on the desk it's writing to. We cannot have a `%home` desk which

897+we are also editing with filesystem watching.

898+

899+Instead, we have a temporary and anonymous state that's connected

900+itself with your `%home` desk. Desk names have to be valid

901+symbols, but we can use `hep`, `-`. A reasonable choice is to

902+pick a random 32-bit name for each mount instance -- so the desk

903+name is not `%home`, but `%home-bosdut-sigder`. (Randomizing

904+instead of always using a fixed suffix, say, `%home-work`,

905+just makes all kinds of screwups less likely.)

906+

907+You create a mount simply by mkdiring the desk name in your pier.

908+Just the base name, Urbit will come up with the `%bosdut-sigder`

909+part and put it in a `.desk` file at the desk root. To forget

910+the mount, just delete this file. This avoids the ugly confusion

911+between unmounting a mount, and deleting all the data in it.

912+

913+(Urbit will keep a set of the mount desks it's used and

914+forgotten, not reuse them, and block all requests into them. By

915+blocking, we can delete without losing referential transparency.

916+Yes, Virginia, Urbit can forget!)

917+

918+Note that the auto-reload behavior of applications is extremely

919+useful when testing. When testing, you can either switch the

920+active application desk from `%home` to `%home-bosdut-sigder`,

921+or activate autosync from the latter to the former.

922+

923+### Change #16: commands as metafiles

924+

925+A new idea I'd like to play with is that, since the basic model

926+of the mount process is to read Unix files and suck their

927+contents into Urbit, you should be able to control a mounted

928+`%clay` desk through Unix filesystem operations alone.

929+

930+No Urbit command-line access, not even any `urb/` HTTP control

931+channels, should be required for the user to generate `%clay` data

932+through filesystem mount, or to set up the mount.

933+

934+An RCS experience that works entirely through Unix tools, in

935+which the only connection between content creation tools and

936+revision-control tools is shared access to the filesystem itself,

937+is essential if your RCS has something so repulsive as a daemon.

938+Otherwise, you're basically, like, reinventing Perforce.

939+

940+More concretely, the Urbit experience today requires `:hood`

941+pokes (Urbit shell commands, basically) for all nontrivial RCS

942+operations, from mounting to merging. Again, there are lots of

943+situations in which you can write into a mounted filesystem (the

944+protocol for Unix communication could be easily adapted to

945+communicate with a browser-based editor, for instance), but you

946+don't want the user to have to bother with an Urbit shell.

947+

948+Even commands like mounting and merging are easily communicated,

949+through filesystem writes that any Unix tool (including many

950+macro editors).

951+

952+This is very easy for a filesystem watcher. One such protocol:

953+if you want to send the daemon a command relative to some

954+directory, write a `.ur-command` metafile in that directory. The

955+daemon accepts the command by deleting it.

956+

957+The user experience is that you configure your mounts by simply

958+making the directories and configuring dotfiles in them. Unlike

959+in the present system, Urbit will never modify your datas

960+silently in the background.

961+

962+Here's what this looks like:

963+

964+Suppose you want to edit some data in the `%home` desk. Your

965+data is in `/=home=/mar/talk`. You also want a read-only view

966+of `/=home=/arvo`.

967+

968+From Unix, you do something like this:

969+

970+```

971+ $ cd $pier

972+ $ mkdir -p home/mar/talk

973+ $ touch home/mar/talk/.edit

974+ $ mkdir home/arvo

975+ $ touch home/arvo/.read

976+```

977+

978+Want to commit your changes? That means merging the working

979+desk, `%home-bosdut-sigder`, into the `%home`. Put a commit message

980+into `home/.commit` and it'll happen. If there's an error, it

981+will appear as `.error`.

982+

983+The mount has a .version file which simply contains the change

984+number (of the working desk) which any edits are relative to. If

985+the urbit daemon is running and watching, edits will be absorbed

986+quickly (probably after a heuristic timeout), and the version

987+incremented. But we always are confident that the edits are

988+against the latest version, or at least we can use this as a

989+sanity check. All kinds of insane things can happen to get a

990+filesystem out of consistency.

991+

992+This design obviously needs a little fleshing out, but I'm quite

993+confident it's a convenient and reliable way to drive `%clay`

994+from Unix.

995+

996+## In conclusion

997+

998+There's obviously a lot of fun here! There are two things you

999+can do right now.

1000+

1001+One, talk about `%clay` on [this forum

1002+thread](http://urbit.org/~~/fora/posts/~2016.10.25..17.37.47..6937~/) or

1003+on [:talk](http://urbit.org/stream). Both hosted on Urbit

1004+itself!

1005+

1006+Two, poke around the

1007+[code](https://github.com/urbit/arvo/blob/cc-release/arvo/clay.hoon).

1008+Make sure you're on the development branch (`cc-release`).

1009+

1010+Phasing in this work will be a fun and interesting challenge.

1011+(My suspicion is that the right first task is the Unix mount.)

1012+Let's talk...

content/blog/urbit-and-bitcoin.mdnew file+21

@@ -0,0 +1,21 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit and Bitcoin"

3+description = "A sound money deserves a sound computer."

4+date = "2019-10-16"

5+tags = ["bitcoin"]

6+[extra]

7+author = "Christian Langalis"

8+ship = "~pindet-timmut"

9++++

10+

11+Sound money deserves a sound computer.

12+

13+Urbit imagines a new model for an OS that – among other changes – includes money as a native service. Developers within the Urbit ecosystem will be able to securely use money in their applications as easily as they might use file systems or networking protocols. Creating a new sound currency, however is not our goal; Bitcoin has already done that.

14+

15+Running a Bitcoin node is very much like running a single purpose personal server (one that hosts the Bitcoin blockchain and verifies transactions). Urbit is designed to be the _final_ personal server, so this week we launched several grants to incorporate Bitcoin into our development cycle. The first of these are directed towards interacting with Bitcoin nodes directly from Urbit.

16+

17+Bitcoin and Urbit are complementary systems. Sound digital money requires sound computing to be used safely and effectively. Urbit’s OS is strictly-typed and entirely functional, and as a result, it’s orders of magnitude more secure than the Unix ecosystem when fully implemented.

18+

19+Urbit and Bitcoin converge along the realization that the Virtual is subsuming the Real. In other words, the locus of control over your life is no longer embodied in the physical, but the digital. For example, what worries you more: a pickpocket or a sim-swapper? The bogeymen of today don’t target our physical selves; they target our private keys, our searches, and our data. The client-server computing paradigm is falling in upon itself, and cannot protect us in this new reality. Without peer-to-peer tools like Urbit and Bitcoin, our property and lives lie vulnerable to control by platforms.

20+

21+To integrate Bitcoin with Urbit, 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 sharing 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).

content/blog/urbit-and-the-blockchain.mdnew file+272

@@ -0,0 +1,272 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit and the Blockchain Wars"

3+date = "2017-09-24"

4+description = "A bit about the 'idea maze' of choosing to bootstrap from Ethereum."

5+aliases = [

6+ "/posts/essays/urbit-and-the-blockchain",

7+ "/posts/urbit-and-the-blockchain",

8+ "/blog/2017.9-critique/"

9+]

10+

11+[extra]

12+author = "Curtis Yarvin"

13+ship = "~sorreg-namtyv"

14+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/urbit-and-the-blockchain-1.jpg"

15++++

16+

17+

18+

19+One core principle of the Urbit network is that _Urbit doesn't take sides_.

20+This is true in all kinds of conflicts -- and especially blockchain wars.

21+

22+We're [moving the Urbit PKI onto Ethereum](https://urbit.org/blog/2017.9.20-bootstrapping-urbit-from-ethereum/)

23+not because we like Ethereum, but because it's the most practical thing for

24+Urbit right now. This is not a moral or aesthetic choice.

25+

26+Some have objected to this decision. Some of these objections are excellent.

27+The rest are understandable.

28+

29+Let's review our decision, responding to objections along the way. Not everyone

30+has to agree on everything. No one should stay confused. And we welcome

31+further comment.

32+

33+## Urbit is not endorsing or supporting Ethereum

34+

35+There are many technical criticisms of Ethereum. We agree with many of these

36+criticisms -- even most. But still more important: Bitcoin is the strongest

37+chain. If Bitcoin could directly enforce Urbit's PKI rules, we'd use Bitcoin,

38+for this reason alone. (That said, Ethereum may be less exposed to Chinese

39+politics.)

40+

41+We chose ETH because it is the strongest _computational_ chain. It is certainly

42+stronger than the way we're storing the Urbit land registry now: GitHub, plus

43+internal records.

44+

45+Urbit is not endorsing Ethereum. Urbit is not creating any appreciable monetary

46+demand for Ethereum. Urbit is not even locked in to Ethereum: with a fully

47+self-governing constitution, the Urbit galaxies can decide to migrate to another

48+consensus engine, or no consensus engine, or even our own consensus engine, any

49+time we like.

50+

51+And even if the whole Ethereum network unexpectedly implodes, and stops

52+generating meaningful new blocks, we (or more generally: the set of active

53+Urbit galaxies) cannot abandon the social power to manually hard-fork the

54+network. Ultimately, the Ethereum contract is just a hardcoded address in a

55+piece of Urbit source code.

56+

57+Let's address each of these points at a little more length.

58+

59+## On moving to a blockchain

60+

61+The first point to remember: our choice wasn't between Ethereum and nothing. It

62+wasn't between a blockchain and nothing. It was a choice between 21st-century

63+tools and 20th-century tools.

64+

65+The current Urbit land registry is divided into parts stored in various places:

66+GitHub commits, database records held by Tlon Corporation, and insecure keys on

67+a test network. This might have been fine, for us, in 2015. In 2017, it's

68+borderline unacceptable.

69+

70+## On choosing a chain

71+

72+Our first decision point: whether the public chain enforces the rules of Urbit,

73+or just logs raw data that anyone can interpret.

74+

75+The simplest procedure, with the strongest blockchain, would be just to encode

76+each Urbit event as raw (OP_RETURN) data on the Bitcoin blockchain. Or we could

77+use another simple layer on top of Bitcoin; classic "colored coins," for

78+instance.

79+

80+The resemblance between Urbit land-registry titles and colored coins is one we

81+noticed a long time ago, of course. For a long time it wasn't that relevant,

82+because colored coins remained largely theoretical.

83+

84+The larger problem is just that a non-computational blockchain can't enforce the

85+specific rules of the Urbit land registry (like the right of a star to create

86+specific planets).

87+

88+You can put arbitrary data into a blockchain and enforce it off-chain. This

89+strikes us as unsatisfactory, though. For instance, you have to define the

90+semantics of erroneous or malformed operations. If this is not done perfectly,

91+it's a short road to major weirdness. Also, your interpretation tools are a

92+special-purpose one-off not shared with anyone.

93+

94+There are other second-order "virtualchains" (Blockstack is one example), which

95+build computation layers on top of arbitrary chains. These tools are interesting

96+and cool. They are also quite young. As is Urbit, so we need all the maturity

97+we can get.

98+

99+Also, our use case, as a land registry, is quite simple -- we don't have any

100+desire to pay (in complexity) for power we don't use. A two-layer solution

101+just seems to leave more room for bad weirdness.

102+

103+## As normal Urbit state?

104+

105+The original design was for Urbit to host its own primary copy of the PKI state,

106+not mirror some external master.

107+

108+As more people start believing in Urbit, this makes us extremely nervous. Being

109+the single source of truth implies a strong commitment to security and

110+continuity. Urbit needs to get there, but it isn't there yet.

111+

112+Trust in the security, continuity, and general maturity of Urbit needs to

113+develop gradually. An Urbit that isn't ready to store crypto-assets can still

114+be a great product. But it can't be a great product if its supposedly valuable

115+keys are in fact insecure, yet needed to operate on the network.

116+

117+In short: we can't follow this original plan. It has the same chicken-egg

118+problem we discussed [last time](https://urbit.org/blog/2017.9.20-bootstrapping-urbit-from-ethereum/).

119+

120+## An Urbit consensus engine?

121+

122+Urbit is itself a deterministic computer. Building a consensus computer within

123+Urbit, which is actually a general-purpose OS, is an attractive long-term

124+possibility.

125+

126+But Urbit lacks the principal feature of Ethereum: deterministic performance.

127+In both Ethereum and Urbit, the semantics of a computation are precisely

128+defined. In Ethereum, the computation's cost is also precisely defined.

129+

130+This would be quite hard to do in Urbit. We traded deterministic performance

131+off for semantic simplicity. Designing a consensus computer without a

132+performance definition is a research problem.

133+

134+We have solved a number of research problems here at Urbit. Could we build an

135+Urbit blockchain? This problem doesn't seem utterly intractable. For instance,

136+we could leverage the semi-trusted hierarchy in some direction resembling proof

137+of stake.

138+

139+One thing is certain, though: research problems don't solve themselves

140+overnight. If you have any ideas on this one, give us a holler.

141+

142+In any case, if Urbit got its own consensus engine, it's obvious that we'd

143+simply copy the state of the Urbit PKI on Ethereum, and shut it down. Or we

144+could migrate to another computational blockchain which works better than

145+Ethereum.

146+

147+## An existing computational blockchain

148+

149+So we need an existing, mature, computational blockchain. There are only two

150+major candidates: ETH and ETC (Ethereum Classic).

151+

152+It's no secret that we prefer the governance model of ETC. It's also no secret

153+that the whole Ethereum system, especially Solidity, isn't exactly put together

154+in the way we would do it.

155+

156+But an optimal governance model is just one virtue among many others we need to

157+consider. ETH's network capitalization is 25x that of ETC. Its hashrate is 15x.

158+Its tooling support -- in software, hardware, vaulting, exchanging, etc -- is

159+considerably stronger.

160+

161+ETC's governance model is Bitcoin's: code is law. For the network, this is

162+better. But we are considering threats to Urbit, not threats to the rest of

163+Ethereum.

164+

165+ETH has embraced discretionary human governance. It's quite plausible that this

166+will lead to total political collapse. But the human political structure of ETH

167+seems reasonably strong at the moment. It's relatively difficult to imagine

168+successful, near-term "proof of Vitalik" attacks via Ethereum on Urbit. Political

169+conflict tends to develop over longer periods of time, giving us room to migrate.

170+

171+Ultimately we decided that the minority power of ETC outweighs the governance

172+issues with ETH. This is of course how imperfect standards win. Betamax had

173+better resolution than VHS.

174+

175+## One reminder

176+

177+For Bitcoin maximalists in particular (some of our best friends are Bitcoin

178+maximalists), it's important to note that (besides the gas price of

179+transactions) putting Urbit on Ethereum _does not create any net monetary demand

180+for Ethereum_.

181+

182+Yes, you will get an Urbit ship through an Ethereum transaction. However, no

183+value stays in ether. If you want to buy a ship with bitcoin, you are just

184+going through a conversion layer. These conversion layers work pretty well

185+these days. If you have a religious objection to handling altcoins, have a

186+friend help.

187+

188+Bitcoin maximalists understand that all monetary energy should concentrate in a

189+single currency. But land isn't money. And the technical details of the

190+implementation of the Urbit registry -- whether `OP_RETURN`, Ethereum, or GitHub

191+-- have no effect on Bitcoin supply and demand.

192+

193+## Another reminder

194+

195+Ethereum is not using Urbit. Urbit is using Ethereum. We know every cool

196+alternative band that gets signed to a major label says this, but we mean it.

197+

198+Urbit, as a land registry, is almost a textbook example of very weak, boring use

199+of a computational blockchain. We're not expecting a lot out of Ethereum.

200+Ethereum does not feel like a system whose technical envelope should be pushed.

201+We have no intention of pushing it.

202+

203+Moreover, the ability to vote formally in an Ethereum constitution will allow us

204+to migrate in a cohesive way to _any other formalization of the Urbit PKI_.

205+This could be another Ethereum contract. Or another blockchain.

206+

207+This "clean escape" implies that Ethereum is still operating normally, or at

208+least normally enough to conduct a galaxy vote. What could happen to Ethereum?

209+The blockchain could stop generating new blocks; it could fork; it could be

210+filtered by some kind of collective attacker; it could even start accepting invalid transactions. What seems implausible is destruction of all copies of the whole chain.

211+

212+When Ethereum ceases to be functional or trustworthy for any reason, a "dirty

213+escape" becomes necessary. The galaxy operators need to identify the last point

214+in the Ethereum chain at which the Urbit constitution remains valid, copy that

215+data to the new primary record, and resume from there.

216+

217+But unlike other blockchains that have wrestled with human-centric governance,

218+Urbit still has a formal procedure for making this decision. With the Ethereum

219+chain compromised, we no longer have an automated system that implements the

220+rules. The rules remain, though. Humans have spent thousands of years

221+following non-automated rules.

222+

223+Basically, we're just using ETH as a self-validating ownership record. So long

224+as the chain isn't destroyed and owners retain their secrets, Urbit retains the

225+power to migrate to any record that works better.

226+

227+## And one literally constructive criticism

228+

229+One excellent criticism (credited to `@sorpaas`) is that just having the Urbit

230+galaxies mirror the state of Urbit's Ethereum constitution is insufficient.

231+This design gives Urbit nodes a choice: either mirror the whole Ethereum

232+blockchain (which is ginormous and certainly not shrinking), or don't validate

233+the Urbit PKI at all.

234+

235+In Urbit, if your parent galaxy is sending you fraudulent reports about the

236+blockchain (any blockchain), you have a very serious problem which goes way

237+past blockchains. It's time to switch galaxies.

238+

239+The trust relationship between an urbit and its parent is like the trust

240+relationship between you and a gas station. For all you know, what's coming

241+out of the hose could be Welch's grape juice. But why have you never, ever worried about cheap surplus vegetable products destroying your engine?

242+

243+ExxonMobil has no business motivation to ruin its customers' engines. If it

244+did, it would just destroy its business, and gain… what? If you don't have an

245+attack motivation, you don't have a threat model. If you don't have a threat

246+model, you don't have a threat. This is why we don't tend to worry about

247+"parent attacks" in Urbit.

248+

249+But that said: there's no reason not to make Urbit's cryptographic structure as

250+strong as possible. If you don't want to trust your gas station -- you

251+shouldn't have to. We don't need to eliminate reliance on trust. We do prefer

252+to _minimize_ it.

253+

254+Therefore, the Urbit Ethereum mirror needs to track all the Ethereum

255+transactions that touch the Urbit constitution, and propagate these raw

256+transactions into Urbit. Urbit nodes can check the transactions and their

257+signatures themselves, without relying on Ethereum. Then, anyone in Urbit can

258+validate the Urbit PKI without an Ethereum node.

259+

260+(We don't anticipate running a node _in_ Urbit, eg an EVM in Hoon -- for now,

261+galaxies will just RPC to a local Unix node.)

262+

263+## And in closing

264+

265+We appreciate everyone's feedback and hope no one remains confused.

266+

267+We're happy to address any remaining concerns -- and happier still if someone

268+finds a mistake on our end. If you have a good counterargument, now is better

269+than later!

270+

271+Fora thread for discussion is here:

272+[urbit.org/fora/posts/~2017.9.25..20.34.38..8e27~](https://urbit.org/fora/posts/~2017.9.25..20.34.38..8e27~).

content/blog/urbit-creator-daos.mdnew file+74

@@ -0,0 +1,74 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit + Creator DAOs with Justin Murphy"

3+date = "2022-10-05"

4+description = "Creator DAOs are blank slates, new foundational cryptographic patterns just beginning to take shape. Justin Murphy thinks Urbit is the most obvious place to start building one."

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Isaac Simpson"

8+ship = "~mogmet-tadnem"

9+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/blog/creatordao-3.jpg"

10++++

11+

12+

13+<div style="font-size:13px; text-align: center; color: #999">Photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@nathynmasters

14+">Nathyn Masters</a></div>

15+

16+# Other Life: Proto Creator DAO

17+

18+Justin Murphy runs a creator network. As a thinker, writer, and podcaster, he works to grow value within this network in order to stay independent. No ads. No branded content. Just varying degrees of membership, with members enjoying private channels and cohort-based courses all under the header “Philosophy and technology for the ungovernable.”

19+

20+Murphy’s “personal media company,” called Other Life, is composed of a newsletter, podcast, Youtube channel. It also extends to Urbit; [Other Life](https://urbit.org/groups/~hatryx-lastud/other-life) is one of the largest groups on the network. Followers and friends of Other Life create and share their own work within the network, aided by a catalog of courses. Murphy’s next logical step is building what we’re calling a Creator DAO: all the same stuff, but instead of a la carte memberships you secure your spot via ERC-20 tokens. In exchange, you get access to all levels of his community and content and attain the rights and responsibilities inherent to any DAO member.

21+

22+

23+

24+Since Creator DAOs are blank slates, primordial cryptographic objects just beginning to take shape, Murphy thinks Urbit is the most obvious place to start building one. Urbit lets creators spin up flexible DAOs to find, manage, keep members engaged in entirely new ways.

25+

26+

27+# Democratized Publishing

28+

29+In contrast to centralized programs like Discord, Urbit offers creators far more flexibility in interacting with their fanbases. Say, for example, you want to set up a trustless contribution program for guest writers. The Urbit app [Straw](https://urbit.org/applications/~pocwet/straw) supports group curation with voting on proposed articles. To increase guest engagement and expand participation while also maintaining quality control, Murphy can use Straw to initiate votes on his own pieces or potential guest pieces, which automates publication to the clear web when a vote passes.

30+

31+“Imagine I want to publish to the [Studio](https://urbit.org/applications/~tirrel/studio) newsletter, and when I go to click publish it first gets sent as a proposal to Straw, and it only actually gets published if a majority of the group agree that it passes the quality bar. As Straw develops, you can imagine that if the proposal is passed, two things happen. One: the post in the Urbit notebook gets sent to the email newsletter through Studio. Two: money is transferred.”

32+

33+Indeed, future functionality will enable automated payments after publication.

34+

35+

36+<div style="font-size:13px; text-align: center; color: #999;">The Straw App</div>

37+

38+“I’ll offer bounties, making a list of topics that I want people in the group to write about,” says Murphy. “They can publish permissionlessly to the group blog, through Studio and anyone in the group could potentially publish on any set of topics, kind of replicating a multi-author magazine.”

39+

40+Straw opens up a whole new way to decide what—and who—creators publish next. We’re the last to advocate art-by-democracy, but the potential is huge.

41+

42+# Decentralized Kicking and Adding

43+

44+Urbit also offers a novel solution with regards to vetting group members and weeding out bad ones. As Murphy points out, Holium’s Urbit app Ballot—which works like a decentralized [Snapshot](https://snapshot.org/#/) for Urbit Groups—allows creators to decentralize the expulsion process. A shift which many who run creator networks would much prefer.

45+

46+> If someone makes a proposal in [Ballot](https://urbit.org/applications/~lomder-librun/ballot), and maybe the owner gets to decide the threshold where if a certain amount of people want to kick someone out, they're kicked. It's actually a really annoying burden, in some ways, to know who to kick out. How bad does someone have to bet? You can have all the rules and regulations you want and try to be as objective as possible, but ultimately the owners and the admins have to use their judgment to decide. I would frankly much rather not have that responsibility. I would love for it to be hardwired such that only a super majority, or something like that, could do it. You can imagine that as a custom action on Ballot.

47+

48+One can imagine this custom action with a combination of Ballot and the [Forms](/applications/~donpub-datdux/forms) app. Since the form data is all on Urbit, it would be a simple matter for an app like Ballot to automatically access that information. With a few forms to vote on membership, this would make adding members equally simple, automated, and trustless as kicking them.

49+

50+“I think the Forms App is cool. You can use it on certain channels where if you want to get in, you fill out a form, then it's evaluated by Ballot. So the content of a form submission gets plugged into a proposal. People vote on the information supplied in the form and if the vote is approved, then the person gets added to the channel or group.”

51+

52+# An Owned Space

53+

54+These use cases help with DAO flexibility, usability, and decentralized automation. But another important reason to build a DAO on Urbit is that you’re building your network on P2P “real estate.” On Urbit, both creators and their communities own the address space and every action taken in it—it can’t be canceled or deleted or made inoperable, a far cry from other platforms where you can be suspended for arbitrary Terms of Service violations.

55+

56+“The main positive is you and your community getting to own the real estate that you operate on,” says Murphy. No other app, even dapps like Agora or Snapshot, allows for a genuinely P2P offchain operating environment. Your Urbit ID is self-owned and portable, and you build your community P2P. Your creations are yours and you can continue building them without corporate middlemen ripping your canvas out from under you, or changing your tools or access without notice.

57+

58+

59+<div style="font-size:13px; text-align: center; color: #999">~hatryx-lastud/other-life</div>

60+

61+Furthermore, the more work you put into building your Creator DAO on Urbit, the more valuable the Urbit address space becomes. When you use Facebook, you’re relegated to the role of a content serf. The more you produce, the more Facebook grows in value. On Urbit, the more your produce, the more Urbit grows in value—and you are an owner of Urbit.

62+

63+

64+<div style="font-size:13px; text-align: center; color: #999">Murphy already offers his members access to the Other Life urbit group.</div>

65+

66+Finally, Murphy cites Urbit’s durability.

67+

68+> The second most important Urbit trait after ownership is durability. The creator economy tools change all the time. Every time you try to move your people from one new app to another app, you lose a lot, right? You want to be an influencer, you want to be an important thinker and speaker. All of a sudden, you’ve got to be on Clubhouse! This means telling the people on your newsletter, telling your Patreon subscribers, telling the people on your podcast, hey, download this cool new app called Clubhouse and find me there. It's going to be awesome. It's so cringe and corny and only a small number of them will even make it over there. Then all of a sudden, no one's on Clubhouse and no one wants to use Clubhouse anymore. This is a major problem for people navigating the creator economy. I think one of the big selling points of Urbit is—this is the one place that I’ll always be. I (will have) been working on my Urbit for over 10 years. This thing is going to be the nuclear bunker of the internet.

69+

70+Creator DAOs are perhaps the smallest, most nimble type of DAO—a creator, his followers, and the content they share between them. For that reason, they’ve been underplayed as archetypal DAOs. But their small size and flexibility may make them the perfect candidate to realize the possibilities of immensely improved DAO experiences.

71+

72+—

73+

74+*Isaac Simpson is a Los Angeles based writer and the founder of the marketing agency [WILL](https://willtheagency.com/). You can read his work on his substack [The Carousel](https://thecarousel.substack.com/).*

content/blog/urbit-for-creators.mdnew file+47

@@ -0,0 +1,47 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit Is for Creators"

3+date = "2021-12-09"

4+description = "Urbit is for creators who are ready to wake up from this bad dream."

5+[extra]

6+author = "Noah Kumin"

7+ship = "~librex-dozryc"

8+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/romi%20creators%20blog.jpeg"

9++++

10+

11+

12+

13+It’s no secret that there are huge problems with the way content is distributed on the internet today. Even five years ago these issues hadn’t quite hit the mainstream: the ability of platforms to capriciously alter their terms of service, the corrosive effects of algorithms designed to siphon off as much of our attention as possible, the uncanny effects of a world where tech companies arbitrate truth with behind-the-scenes moderation policies. Although they’re now discussed pretty openly, the horrid effects of this system actually tend to be _understated._ “If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer, you’re the product” has become a truism. And yet, as _You Are Not a Gadget_ author Jaron Lanier puts it, it’s not quite specific enough to say that _you_ are the product. Rather, “it’s the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behavior and perception that is the product.”

14+

15+This product is selling very well, and it has seeped its way fully into the world of content creation, or what might once have been called the arts. Although it’s not so widely publicized, [Tik Tok basically runs the popular music industry at this point](https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2021/09/for-better-or-worse-tiktok-is-driving-the-music-industry). Meanwhile, platforms like Spotify or YouTube filter what we see by deprecating the “long tails” of content. That is, if you’re searching for a tune on Spotify, it brings Spotify more profit, on average, to design a search feature that will automatically bring you to the most popular songs, even if you were really looking for less popular ones. The same goes for books, which are now purchased mostly according to the algorithm, and not according to what a person might stumble upon in a bookshop. (The upshot: expect more [cookbooks from Snoop Dogg](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/18/books/book-sales-publishing-pandemic-coronavirus.html), and fewer titles from authors who are not already celebrities.) Products such as Tik Tok, Spotify, YouTube, and Amazon like for you to think that they’re mere distributors of content. But actually they’re _producers_, and they’re producing the smarmy, anodyne style that has homogenized the globe.

16+

17+Urbit is for creators who are ready to wake up from this bad dream.

18+

19+The vibe of today’s internet applications—manipulative, erratic, overcomplicated, overbearing, and highly detrimental to society—is in contrast to the mechanics of the creator economy itself, which can actually be blissfully simple. In 2008 Kevin Kelley made famous the concept of “[1000 true fans](https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/).” That is, to make a living as a creator, you only need 1,000 fans who are interested enough to buy whatever you produce. Even $6.00 or $7.00 a month from such true fans is a boon for a creator—assuming not too much of that cash gets taken away by middlemen, and that fans can discover work from outside the corporate monoculture in the first place.

20+

21+In a limited sense, this 1,000 true fans model is already working. Creators with fanbases of the size Kelly imagined are able to use Patreon or YouTube or what-have-you to monetize their content. But the problem is, those platforms are not really peer-to-peer. Your fans aren’t your own: they belong to the platform. And with the big tech platforms running the show, we end up with the problems described above.

22+

23+To those of us who are interested in seeing a thriving culture of artists, musicians, podcasters and writers which is human-centered via a p2p network, rather than being brokered, managed, and manipulated, by the most venal and tasteless of data collectors and profiteers, it likely seems like the world of the arts has gone bottom-up. Urbit is for any creators who are ready to put it back on its feet again.

24+

25+Urbit is a peer-to-peer network designed to serve as simple, durable neutral infrastructure for whoever wants to build something on it. Like everything else on Urbit, creator content goes directly to the people it’s supposed to go to. No middlemen, no MEGACORP data mining, no capricious terms of service, no obscure algorithms determining what gets seen and what doesn’t. This is the zero-to-one shift that makes Urbit the natural destination for creators who want to both _own_ their work and share it.

26+

27+Urbit has already seen several communities get excited about the ways Urbit could help them fulfill their goals. Here are just a few examples:

28+

29+[HOLDERSLAND](https://twitter.com/holdersland), founded by Haleek Maul, a musician, music label owner, and NFT creator based in Barbados. Maul recently [sold](https://urbit.holders.land) a set of customized Urbit NFT artwork, which came bundled with actual Urbit IDs.

30+

31+[Other Life](https://www.otherlife.co), a community of philosophers and creators founded by the entrepreneurial Justin Murphy.

32+

33+[The Stack](https://orbisledger.news/), an entertaining and informative podcast with a decidedly Urbit flavor, hosted by Josh and Andy.

34+

35+[door.link](https://www.door.link), a vibey and idiosyncratic music collective.

36+

37+[Wet Brain](https://www.patreon.com/wetbrain), a numinous, post-everything New York podcast, hosted by Honor and Walt.

38+

39+Internet Weirdness Task Force, which has no legacy internet site to link to, so you’ll just have to get on Urbit to scope it out.

40+

41+Over the last ten years, we’ve already had a taste of what blockchains can do: they’re great so far for distributing a financial ledger so that payments are no longer centralized. But for online communities to go truly peer-to-peer and escape the grip of corporations, they’re going to need something like Urbit. As HOLDERSLAND founder Haleek Maul [puts it](https://urbit.org/blog/haleek-maul-interview) in a recent Q&A, decentralized technologies like blockchain or Urbit “allow . . . new financial relationships and funding structures to emerge. Rather than have a few people contribute $20k, you can have hundreds of people contribute $100.” In such a system, recording artists no longer need to hunt for a deal from sharky impresarios; their communities can comprise both the talent _and_ the executives. They no longer need to pay fealty to streaming services; they can sell their wares peer-to-peer, with the old-fashioned connoisseurship of a cool record shop, except that this record shop is available to anyone across the globe.

42+

43+Urbit makes this dream a real possibility. In an Urbit future, utilizing your own personalized payments system, which could take either fiat or crypto, should be as easy as sending or receiving money on apps like Venmo or Cash App is today. If _anyone_ can make a direct peer-to-peer payment to anyone else on the network, if _anyone_ can send a piece of writing or audio or video clip in a peer-to-peer way to anyone else on the network, then you’ve truly laid the groundwork for autonomous organizations of creators.

44+

45+Beyond that, Urbit is one of the very few platforms looking, with seriousness and deep technical consideration, into the distant future. Whereas no one can say whether a mainstream platform like Facebook or Twitter will even _exist_ in ten years (think just how much writing will disappear if those servers do shut down), Urbit is built with maximum durability in mind: one way to think of your urbit computer is as a [100-year computer](https://urbit.org/blog/the-100-year-computer). Whereas most software today is designed to break quickly and be replaced quickly, due to the instability of all of modern computing’s complex interlocking parts, Urbit was built as an overlay operating system, so that it can work no matter what’s running underneath, and thus serve as a resilient, permanent home for your digital world.

46+

47+Computers can still be used as magical tools for creative individuals, instead of as attention-draining machines—if that is indeed the future we want. For creators, the solution to the ever-growing problems of the internet is not in the hands of any national government, or some new application that mimics the architecture of old applications, or through some impracticable system of reduced screen time. The solution to these problems is, and always has been, to build a whole new system that works _for_ the people instead of against them. That’s what Urbit is here to do.

content/blog/urbit-for-normies.mdnew file+175

@@ -0,0 +1,175 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit for Normies"

3+date = "2020-02-11"

4+description = "A layperson’s guide to the coming new internet."

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Erik Newton"

8+ship = "~patnes-rigtyn"

9+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/normies-2.png"

10++++

11+

12+Urbit is a challenging project to fully describe because, rather than a single product, it’s an entire system. Often when I talk about one of the individual elements of the system, someone will tell me that another company is already building that — and they’re usually right. What sets Urbit apart is that we’re building all these elements at once to work together seamlessly.

13+

14+For that reason, this overview is long. I wanted to explain, at a very high level, as much of the system as possible, to share an image of the entire forest rather than spending too much time on any of the trees.

15+

16+My own path to Urbit was not predictable, so it turns out I’m a useful ambassador to describe what the heck we’re doing to my fellow normies.

17+

18+I refer to myself as a normie because I’m a lawyer by training, not the typical code-savvy early Urbit adopter. I ran a law firm and, after retiring, founded a podcast and magazine about relationship dynamics. During that time I came to believe that humanity was in desperate need of better ways to relate. I didn’t know how, but I knew that my podcast about romance wasn’t going to move the needle. I began to look for a bigger project. I wanted something I truly could invest myself in; something that could have a real impact on this problem.

19+

20+That’s when a friend introduced me to Urbit. Saying it was the most credible project he’d seen in years, he described it as “an open-source decentralized internet project,” and that it “would give control of computing back to regular people.” That sparked my interest, but I didn’t totally understand it. After looking over the website and watching a couple of obscure descriptive videos on YouTube my response was threefold:

21+

22+1. **This is huge** — if it actually works, it’s the future.

23+2. **This is real** — It’s got working code, dozens of engineers, and a very unorthodox solution.

24+3. **I don’t truly understand this** — I can’t read the code, and I can barely comprehend the paradigm shift.

25+

26+So of course I asked for an intro.

27+

28+Fast forward: I ended up becoming COO at Tlon, the primary developer of Urbit. Urbit is exactly the sort of project I was looking for — one that represents an important promise for humanity. But, boy, did I have to fake my way through the technical elements of my new job those first few months.

29+

30+What I eventually came to realize is that if Urbit is only accessible to programmers, it’s dead on arrival. In order to be useful, Urbit has to be understandable by the non-technical user. Like me. And maybe like you.

31+

32+I understand as well as anyone how complicated Urbit can appear. But, fundamentally, Urbit is quite simple and it promises a critical upgrade to human interaction. That might sound like hyperbole but it’s the reason I work here. This is my attempt to explain to fellow normies the scope and scale of this world-changing project called Urbit.

33+

34+## What is Urbit?

35+

36+Let’s take this one step at a time and start with the most basic definition:

37+

38+Urbit is a peer-to-peer internet being built from scratch to be more private, secure, and durable than the current internet.

39+

40+At its most basic level, an Urbit is:

41+

42+1. A super-private computer, combined with

43+2. an ID, which is

44+3. connected peer-to-peer with other Urbit computers.

45+

46+Taking that a half-step deeper, each Urbit user gets a permanent identity, which allows them to access their personal computer in the cloud, and then talk to directly with other Urbit computers (i.e. other people) on the network, all without using an intermediary.

47+

48+When I say “computer” I’m not talking about a physical device, but rather the software that computes. Urbit is a virtual computer, not a hardware device. Today that means you can access your Urbit computer from anywhere, on just about any device with a web browser. Eventually you won’t even need the web browser.

49+

50+By “intermediary” I’m talking about all those centralized servers that we use every day to do our computing. Servers owned by Google, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Slack, Amazon, Nest, Apple, and so on. All of these companies and products keep close tabs on our activity and use that information to sell us things and influence our opinions. Everything we do online is watched and recorded.

51+

52+Urbit will fundamentally change that — more about the privacy implications later.

53+

54+

55+

56+## What it looks like

57+

58+Another way of explaining Urbit is to describe how it feels and looks. Visually, Urbit belongs to a genre often called “calm computing.” Urbit is designed to be simple, basic, and non-addictive. You won’t find any flashy-blinky lights here; no zany colors; no wacky branding. Just calm, functional, purpose-built tools for people to connect and work together. (One of my favorite examples of calm computing is the [light phone](https://www.thelightphone.com/).)

59+

60+Today Urbit’s interface looks like a tab in your web browser that has some limited functionality (chat, a weather app, a notebook, link sharing). Soon, you won’t even need the web browser — you’ll be able to access or run Urbit directly in its own window. Inside will be a super clean interface with all the functionality you might want from your computer, in one place and with one login (think document creation, email, social media access, accounting) — but it will run on your virtual Urbit computer, so it will be safe from corporate prying and data leaks, available on any device, and all inside one simple interface.

61+

62+## What it’s for

63+

64+Fundamentally, Urbit is neutral open-source infrastructure, so it can be for many things. From our highest level perspective Urbit is computing for real communities and normal people, not for corporations. To make that real, Urbit focuses on delivering a computing experience that is secure, private, durable, and calm.

65+

66+For me, Urbit’s core purpose is to give us all back our privacy and our autonomy. It’s time for humanity to control its tools rather than the other way around.

67+

68+## Key elements

69+

70+One potential barrier to understanding Urbit is that we’re building out multiple layers of this new internet simultaneously, and each has its own explanations and value propositions. Remember, what sets Urbit apart is that we’re building of all these elements at once to work together as a system.

71+

72+I’ll try to explain the most important of these without straying too deep into the technical weeds.

73+

74+1. **A peer-to-peer network**

75+

76+ Peer-to-peer networking is a really big deal. On the current internet, essentially all of our communications and activities go through centralized servers owned by corporations (Facebook, Google, etc.) — and those corporations can’t help but use all that information to make money. They’re capitalists, after all, and so we get constant privacy violations and interfaces built for maximum dopamine addiction.

77+

78+ In an Urbit world, all those communications go directly between users (i.e. peer-to-peer) with nobody in the middle. That means there’s no data capture by any megacorp, less intrusion into your life online, and communications go back to the semi-private one-to-one or small group format that is most comfortable for humans. It’s more like real life.

79+

80+2. **Your own server**

81+

82+ Servers are complicated. Too complicated. Have you ever tried to use a command line? Exactly. It’s a terrible way to work, and that’s just a hint at how complex servers are to operate. To hide that complexity, we let corporations run our servers for us — they can afford teams of engineers. The problem is that today most of our computing is handled by these corporate servers — and that means we’re giving up control because of complexity.

83+

84+ As an example, every time you use Siri, your message is sent to Apple’s servers, where it is processed, and the response is sent back to you (which is admittedly amazing). Unfortunately that’s why it never works if you’re offline, and it’s also why Apple knows what you’re saying to Siri. And this applies to all the apps we use: The actual computing happens on corporate servers. The problem is that we consumers aren’t in control and, again, the corporate entities watch, record, and gate-keep all of our activity.

85+

86+ Fundamentally, Urbit is a super simple server. That means Urbit can run those computations and hold all that data for you, eliminating the need for a corporate intermediary.

87+

88+3. **Permanent, personal ownership of your digital identity and all your data**

89+

90+ Urbit IDs are permanently ownable — and that ownership is backed by cryptography, not some corporate database. Once you take possession of your Urbit ID, no central authority can ever take it away from you. Sure, if you start spamming people on the network, word could get around and you might get blocked by other users, but none of them can prevent you from using your ID or accessing your Urbit computer. Compare that to the current internet where Facebook owns your Facebook profile, Google owns your Gmail account, Twitter owns your Twitter handle, etc. At any time and for any reason, those services can arbitrarily shut off your access, and you have little to no recourse — all that data, all those followers, and all that reputation is wiped out instantly. Your Urbit, on the other hand — both the identity, and all the data inside your Urbit computer — is yours permanently, so long as you know your secret key.

91+

92+ A secure decentralized identity system like the one we’ve built leads to some very interesting use cases that are otherwise insurmountable. For example: decentralized Uber, decentralized delivery services, and a solid solution to the problem of fake reviews. To build any of these services, the problem of permanent identity needs to be solved first, and we’ve done that as part of our overall system. I’ll spend more time on use cases below.

93+

94+ It’s worth noting that this problem has never been solved before. All of our communication channels on the internet today rely on someone else to authenticate our identity. Urbit is — to my knowledge — the first practical application of a decentralized ID system that actually works.

95+

96+4. **An incentive for good behavior**

97+

98+ On the Urbit network, identities are finite, and they accrue reputation. Compare that to the current internet where identity is infinite (anyone can create as many email addresses or social media profiles as they want, essentially for free) and so spam, scams, and DoS attacks (“denial-of-service”: when many disposable identities ‘attack’ a server at the same time) are rampant. On the Urbit network, there are just over 4 billion total IDs (2^32^ to be exact). Scarcity creates value. That scarcity, combined with reputation accrual, means there's an incentive for good behavior.

99+

100+ You might think 4 billion IDs sounds like too few given how many humans we have on the planet. I won’t go into the technical details here, but if we ever get to the point where that’s a problem (which would be a great problem to have), we’ve outlined several solutions that allow everyone alive to get on the network. We don’t intend to lock anyone out.

101+

102+5. **Tools anyone can learn and use**

103+

104+ Urbit is a system that anyone with patience can understand completely from top to bottom, from the integers of byte code to the complete OS and everything in between. Urbit in its entirety is just over 50,000 lines of code. That is tiny. Compare that to Linux (the open-source OS that most modern computing is built upon), which is tens of millions of lines of code, and you start to see how important this is for efficiency. Apple’s and Windows’ codebases are similarly massive. In our current computing system, nobody can understand the entire thing completely, and that means there are innumerable security holes. With Urbit, while it may demand something of you, any reasonably intelligent developer can grasp the whole thing. We’ve worked very hard to keep our system simple at each level. That makes it more efficient, more durable, and much more secure.

105+

106+6. **Lessons from the last half century**

107+

108+ Bear with me — this is where some jargon kicks in. In many ways, Urbit is an attempt to apply lessons learned from the failures of 20th century computer development. From an engineer’s perspective, Urbit solves a series of problems that we end users rarely notice, but which cause extraordinary amounts of complexity and waste. The list of applied lessons is long, but rather than bullet them all, I’ll explain the one that surprised me the most.

109+

110+ Urbit is deterministic. That is, a given sequence of inputs always produces the same output. When I first heard that, I thought, “Wait, isn’t that what all operating systems do? Give you the same result every time?” Weirdly, the answer is no. Normal operating systems don’t work this way. Normal modern operating systems actually get varying results when they compute things. This is a deep problem that causes programmers countless hours of frustration. The most common implication of this that you’ve probably experienced is having to reboot your computer — either because it’s locked up, or because it simply won’t do something that it was totally doing a second ago. What’s annoying to a regular user, though, is absolutely crazy-making to developers.

111+

112+ This determinism makes programming on an Urbit immensely more efficient than other environments.

113+

114+ Urbit applies this and a whole list of other lessons from the past half-century of systems software to increase reliability and security in everything from file storage to networking to user-facing apps. All this adds up to more security and reliability and less service-lock-in with Urbit than with our current systems.

115+

116+7. **Private, human-sized, and efficient**

117+

118+ Because Urbit isn’t centralized or owned by any one company, there’s no incentive for it to dominate your life. Your Urbit isn’t designed to spy on you, get you addicted to clicking its buttons, manipulate your emotions to gain attention, or nudge you to buy something. Your Urbit is a simple, customizable, permanent place for you to do all your computer-based tasks with your friends in absolute privacy.

119+

120+ This is so much the case, in fact, that it presents a bit of a problem for Tlon. We don’t know how many people use Urbit every day, who they talk to, or what they’re doing. While we think this is how things should be, it puts us in a bind when a VC wants to know about our user base; we can only make educated guesses. That said, we think this is the right problem to have.

121+

122+ What all this adds up to is that the Urbit network is immensely more resource efficient, secure, easier to customize, and smaller in size than any other computing system in the world. If you care about data security, privacy, durability, or even just elegance, Urbit has the best design going.

123+

124+

125+

126+

127+## How it compares

128+

129+A final way to understand Urbit is to make comparisons between Urbit and current products we use today. This is limited, because ultimately Urbit will grow in directions we can’t predict, but comparisons are a useful starting place.

130+

131+Again, on the current internet, we all access megacorp software using our web browsers and app interfaces. This means that we each exist as a line in a megacorp database, and those megacorps use that data to make money, which results in rampant privacy violations and addictive interfaces. Urbit is the alternative to all that: it’s decentralized, private, and secure. And it’s yours.

132+

133+Let’s get to some real-world examples.

134+

135+## Urbit vs. Reddit

136+

137+Imagine you’d like to discuss a certain research topic with a group of friends. Say, Canadian small cap equities or the best cookie recipes. You’ll need a chat interface for live discussion, a notebook to record concepts, and a way to share links for discussion. You can do this in the default web if you want: use Reddit for the links (but make sure it’s a private group), use Google Docs for the notebook (but make sure everyone has Gmail), and use iMessage for the chat (but everyone needs a Mac). And don’t forget, each service has their own login and security holes, and they’re all mining your data.

138+

139+The alternative is spin up a group on Urbit. All of that functionality is available today in one clean, simple interface. It’s private, you own the data, there’s only one login, and you can even learn to build apps for your group.

140+

141+## Urbit vs. Facebook, Twitter, etc.

142+

143+Or let’s say you want to share pictures with your friends, post micro-messages to the world, write a blog, or share a podcast. There’s simply no reason you should use some centralized company (one that then owns your content) to broadcast any of those things. Instead, send it out from your Urbit. You’ll own the content, you’ll control the data, no company will spy on you, and nobody can ever take your ID from you. With Urbit we all finally own the tools, and that means we own the data by default.

144+

145+## Urbit vs. Nest

146+

147+Imagine, as I do, that you want a connected video camera in your house, but don’t want the Nest corporation (which is now owned by Google) to be able to spy on you. Or perhaps you just don’t want to have to sign up for yet another duplicative service in order to use the camera you just bought. If any of that is the case, you can run your camera through your Urbit instead. The video feed will never leave your control, because it no longer has to live on Nest’s servers. Your camera will talk over a secure channel only to your Urbit. Your Urbit is the server.

148+

149+You can apply this same concept to smart speakers, a Ring doorbell, connected baby monitor, smart fridge, or any of the innumerable connected devices that give someone else access to your personal life. Why should anyone else have access to that information?

150+

151+## Urbit vs. Google Docs

152+

153+Imagine you want to write a screenplay with a small group of friends, but you don’t want Google mining the content of your shared doc for advertising keywords, and you won’t want to use multiple services for chat, document sharing, email, etc. In that case, simply create an Urbit group with your friends and write together using Urbit’s writing tools. Your content will stay completely private to the team until you decide to release it to the world, and you’ll communicate using one simple interface. Even better, the archive of your multimodal work lives in one place, so looking back at your process doesn’t require reconstructing it from dozens of different apps. And everything is stored on your respective Urbit computers, not Google’s servers.

154+

155+## Urbit for your protected health information

156+

157+Imagine, as is already becoming the case, that it becomes highly valuable to have your genome sequenced in order to make good healthcare decisions. In that scenario, most of us would want our health care providers to be able to make precise assessments of parts of our genome, but we wouldn’t want insurance companies or other third parties to have access without our permission. In the current paradigm, once you share the information, it’s out there and can be leaked or sold. So much so that we all sort of assume that leaks are the default. In the Urbit paradigm, that information lives on your Urbit computer and nowhere else, and any software necessary to process it can be run on your Urbit as well. In other words, there’s never any need to share the raw data with anyone; instead, you can download a small program, run it on your Urbit, and share the final analyses only without ever exposing your data.

158+

159+Some of these cases are, admittedly, a bit speculative since we haven’t built all the functionality yet. But it’s coming, and quite soon.

160+

161+For now, if you like the way this sounds you can [get yourself an Urbit ID](https://urbit.org/getting-started/#id) and start learning about how to safely store cryptographic keys (it’s really not that hard, and we give you suggestions). If you’re feeling technical or adventurous, you can try booting our beta OS interface to see what it looks like. It’s fussy, but it exists. Soon it will be less fussy. You can check out our [roadmap](https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/roadmap/) if you’d like to know when.

162+

163+## Why we need Urbit

164+

165+We humans haven’t evolved enough to manage the firehose of information that modern technology blasts us with. There’s too much news, too many connections, too many opinions, and more agendas out there than any of us can mindfully comprehend. We’re designed for much smaller communities, one-to-one connections, and slower idea assimilation than our modern infrastructure allows. The pace of change is increasing, and we don’t know how to manage it.

166+

167+We’re scared, and to manage that fear we’re becoming more insular, more entrenched. Layer on top of all that the incentives that big business and big politics have to manipulate our emotions, and we’re headed in a very dangerous direction.

168+

169+We can’t turn back the technological clock; humanity can only ever press onward. This is where Urbit comes in. Urbit is a forward-looking solution to this particular set of problems around human-scale computing and personal autonomy. Urbit provides a means by which groups can live peacefully in parallel.

170+

171+Urbit is a computing environment that allows humans to do everything they want on computers, but in communities of their choosing, in a way that feels direct and natural, and in a way that allows true personal freedom. Urbit is calm, secure, and private in its most fundamental architecture. No spying corporations. No manipulative politicians.

172+

173+And that is what we need. Humans need a way to at once take advantage of our vast technological advances but not be dominated by them. Urbit is an open-source tool that we all own, that anyone can understand down to its roots, that’s fully under its user’s control. It is human-scale computing for human-scale communities. Simple, durable, yours.

174+

175+For me, this first iteration of Urbit is more than enough, and it’s exactly the sort of peaceful future I want to work towards.

content/blog/urbit-grants-and-mid-2019-gifts.mdnew file+49

@@ -0,0 +1,49 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit Grants and mid-2019 Gifts"

3+date = "2019-06-09"

4+description = "Announcing an upcoming Urbit grants program and star gifts for Mid-2019."

5+aliases = [

6+ "/posts/essays/urbit-grants-and-mid-2019-gifts",

7+ "/posts/urbit-grants-and-mid-2019-gifts"

8+]

9+

10+[taxonomies]

11+grant_type = [ "Gift" ]

12+grant_category = [ ]

13+

14+[extra]

15+author = "Galen Wolfe-Pauly + Alex Matzner"

16+ship = "~ravmel-ropdyl + ~mignyt-mogseb"

17+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/urbit-grants-and-mid-2019-gifts-1.jpg"

18++++

19+

20+

21+

22+We are excited to announce the first developer star gifts of 2019. It’s been far too long since we last awarded our contributors. We got so busy working on things ourselves that we let this program languish — but we’ve got plans to make it much more organized going forward. More on that after the important part.

23+

24+That is, our winners from the past nine months:

25+

26+**Gold: 8 stars**

27+

28+- Ben `~mirfet-hocbyt` [@bencalder](https://github.com/bencalder)

29+- Max `~ladres-forfex` [@max19](https://github.com/max19)

30+

31+**Ben** discovered the bug in our @p rendering algorithm, nicknamed “the @pocalypse” around the office, and led to a few nights of lost sleep. It was a fantastic find, which was then resolved by **Max** with one of the greatest GitHub comments of all time: “[curious if this works](https://github.com/urbit/arvo/issues/1105#issuecomment-472585937).”

32+

33+**Bronze: 1 star**

34+

35+- Pyry `~dinleb-rambep` [@pkova](https://github.com/pkova)

36+- John `~dirwex-dosrev` [@jfranklin9000](https://github.com/jfranklin9000)

37+- Assaf `~rophex-hashes` [@asssaf](https://github.com/asssaf)

38+

39+**Pyry** has been a [regular contributor](https://github.com/urbit/bridge/pulls?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=author%3Apkova) to Bridge over the past few months, **John** has been consistently picking up changes [all](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/pulls?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=author%3Ajfranklin9000) [over](https://github.com/urbit/arvo/pulls?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=author%3Ajfranklin9000) [the place](https://github.com/urbit/docs/pulls?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=author%3Ajfranklin9000), and **Assaf** found a [security issue](https://github.com/urbit/urbit-key-generation/issues/55) with our hierarchical wallet.

40+

41+Thanks to all of you for helping bring Urbit to life. We don’t make it nearly easy enough to contribute, but all of you clawed your way in and made the system better. Thank you!

42+

43+## Coming soon: Our new grant program

44+

45+As always, we much prefer to talk about working code as opposed to unfinished work – however:

46+

47+Making the process of rewarding contributors is something we’ve thought a lot about over the past few months. We’ve come up with a system that we like, and are hoping to put it up later this summer. It’s probably not perfect, but it’s a step in the right direction. We’ll be able to properly engage in a grant proposal process, post bounties as well as reward people directly with prizes.

48+

49+Please [subscribe to our newsletter](http://eepurl.com/b7x7hj) to make sure you receive future announcements.

content/blog/urbit-is-for-communities.mdnew file+92

@@ -0,0 +1,92 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit is for Communities"

3+date = "2020-03-22"

4+description = "Urbit is for giving communities the tools to shape their own environments; for us all to feel a sense of life and self-directedness in the digital world."

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Galen Wolfe-Pauly"

8+ship = "~ravmel-ropdyl"

9+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/urbit-is-for-communities.jpg"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+## Generated, not fabricated

15+

16+What is it that makes high trust communities take shape?

17+

18+When I think of the places in the physical world where people seem to feel the most at home, they’re places that have evolved over long periods of time and are owned by the communities that inhabit them. Communes in rural California, Rome, rural Japan, and villages in Indonesia all come to mind.

19+

20+These are places that aren’t designed in one go. They’re the product of lots of different contributors working in loose collaboration, often over long periods of time.

21+

22+Places that grow under the care of the people who live in them seem, somehow, to become much more alive and engaged. The strength of connection in these communities is palpable. You can feel the difference.

23+

24+There’s nothing even remotely like this in the digital world. The digital world is totally fabricated, stamped out, and controlled.

25+

26+It’s not just the surveillance, lack of privacy, or interfaces optimized for addiction — those are all downstream from the root problem: our software can’t evolve with us. It’s designed and controlled by the people that make it. We don’t participate in shaping it directly at all.

27+

28+And since our software can’t evolve with us, our connection to it remains thin. The digital world of today is low-trust by design. We live in a digital world controlled by other people. Nothing about it belongs to us.

29+

30+It’d be great if we felt a deep appreciation for and connection to our digital communities the same way we do in the physical world. Digital communities should feel alive and engaged with their surroundings. They should feel as vibrant as a city on a summer night, cozy like a family dinner in an old ranch house.

31+

32+We don’t often talk about it explicitly, but this is what Urbit is for. Urbit is for giving communities the tools to evolve their own environments; for us all to feel a sense of life and self-directedness in the digital world.

33+

34+It’s not any single specific technical feature of Urbit that makes it well-suited for communities to homestead and develop. It’s the combination of the technology under the hood and the interfaces we build on top. Let’s talk about both.

35+

36+## Technically capable

37+

38+I love [this tweet](https://twitter.com/devonzuegel/status/1221804267083718656) about becoming a ‘digital prepper’. It feels like it has already happened to me, too. I’ve seen enough centralized services shut down and disappear (often with my data) that I’m reluctant to try new ones. No matter how friendly and cozy their branding.

39+

40+I find myself vetting every new app or service to figure out whether they have the potential to survive far into the future. The giant services I’ve become dependent on all seem somewhat worrisome. How long can these free services possibly stick around? Certainly not forever.

41+

42+The incentives in the current structure are totally misaligned. Let’s walk through them:

43+

44+I want to keep my data forever, but most companies are beholden to growth. If they can’t produce that growth and die, my data either disappears or becomes unusable without their software.

45+I don’t want my data to be sold or for anyone to spy on me, but ad-funded companies have to engage in these practices to stay alive.

46+I don’t want a piece of software to go away if a company dies, but apps and services require maintenance that’s complicated and expensive to do. Without the company around, their software is useless.

47+

48+The simple fact is, I let companies run my software because it’s too much work for me to run it myself. Most people can’t be their own sysadmin — and those that can have other things to do.

49+

50+This is more or less the entire technical value proposition of Urbit: to build a system that’s simple enough that it requires almost no maintenance. Our approach to building software makes all of the above problems easily solvable.

51+

52+Perhaps more importantly, we have a direct incentive to solve these problems. Tlon funds Urbit’s development by selling addresses and providing hosting. And the only reason anyone pays us for these things is because we make Urbit as directly useful for you as possible.

53+

54+That means we have to solve the problems inherent to the legacy internet. There can’t be any sense of suspicion or uncertainty in our new system. Your Urbit has to be something you can really trust and attach to. This is why your Urbit lets you run or write whatever code you like, and why we’re focused on making sure the data you put into your Urbit lasts forever: it won’t disappear when some company dies.

55+

56+But even with a system that fixes all of these issues by default, it only matters if the system is usable and understandable. What we really want is a digital world that’s generated by the communities that inhabit it — which means it has to be generated by people with no technical knowledge.

57+

58+## Communities are built by people

59+

60+In the physical world, you can arrange the furniture in your house, or go to Ikea, or build your own furniture, or figure out how to build a house from scratch. By taking your preferred approach to design, you contribute to the shape of your city. The world around us is a wonderfully loose collaboration between the more technically oriented architects and planners, and the everyday homeowners and residents.

61+

62+The digital world is, of course, nothing like this. Even software developers are stuck with the current system. None of our existing apps or services can connect to one another, so whether you’re a user or a developer, you’re faced with the daunting task of replacing everything all at once if you want a better system. But nobody can do that.

63+

64+Urbit provides an experience with less distance between ordinary use and total customization. To start, we’ve created Ikea-like, Lego-like and woodshop-like levels of usability. What we’ve built isn’t nearly as complex as the physical world, of course, but it’s a start.

65+

66+For most people, customizing your Urbit should be a matter of picking from an available suite of modules. Not unlike going to Ikea. For some people, recombining interfaces and data sources within Ubit should feel like playing with Legos. And for others, who want to dive in and write code, it’s the same as going into a shop full of high-quality tools.

67+

68+We’re not quite to this level of sophistication, but we’re on the path. Let’s talk about where we are and where we’re going.

69+

70+## OS 1

71+

72+Our rough attempt to satisfy this goal is hovering on the horizon. We call it OS 1.

73+

74+In OS 1, you bring a group of people together to share a set of channels. A channel can be a chat, a notebook, or a collection of links. We built an interface for doing this, but you could just as well build your own. Inside OS1, data and interface aren’t stuck together like they are with apps in the default web. Nor are the people you’re connected with locked into any given Urbit app. App, data, and social graph are always separate in Urbit; they’re modular and always under your control.

75+

76+OS 1 is designed to make it easy to start a group. Everyone in the group runs their own instance — so everything is only shared with the people you’re connecting with. Light customization of this experience is easy for an ordinary user.

77+

78+If you want to go deeper, anyone can build a new protocol for storing data and transferring it around Urbit without too much difficulty, but you do have to write some code. If you really want to dive all the way in, you can modify the system all the way through to the kernel.

79+

80+Currently, our Ikea experience is pretty limited, there are only a few Legos to play with, and the shop is still quite rudimentary — but it’s a good start and, for the first time, it exists as one complete system.

81+

82+The system is ripe for experimentation, customization, and exploration. It’s ready for earnest homesteading. Come build.

83+

84+## → N

85+

86+OS 1 is really just the beginning. There are so many more modules and means of communicating and collaborating to add. There is so much we can do to make the system more customizable.

87+

88+But OS 1 actually passes the bar of being both usable and futureproof. Urbit is something you can put energy into, in earnest, even as a digital prepper. It’s both safe enough and customizable enough that high trust communities can begin to take root. Urbit isn’t ready for you to build Rome — but it is ready for you to start a commune, salon, or reading group.

89+

90+The point, in the long term, is to let the technology fade into the background. We want people not to be ruled by their software, but the opposite: for our software to grow to suit us. Our hope is for Urbit to be as invisible, calm, and reliable as possible — and for people to be at the center, in control.

91+

92+If you want to explore this new world with us, let us know. We’re going to give away a limited number of hosted OS 1 communities.

content/blog/urbithost-interview.mdnew file+116

@@ -0,0 +1,116 @@

1++++

2+title = "An Interview with UrbitHost"

3+date = "2021-08-19"

4+description = "Interview with the founder of UrbitHost ~lavlyn-litmeg"

5+[extra]

6+author = "Matt"

7+ship = "~tirwyd-sarmes"

8+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/nasa-star-cluster.jpg"

9++++

10+

11+

12+

13+**An Interview with UrbitHost**

14+

15+Urbit has been making great strides to become accessible to those who are non-technical. Port enables a user to launch their Urbit ID from their personal computer without any knowledge of the command line. However, you only have access while you are running Port, which means you can&#39;t do things like check your DMs while on the move.

16+

17+Hosting your Urbit means that your Urbit is always on and available. All that is required to access the network is visiting a URL and logging in.That means you can access Urbit from your phone, laptop, or any device with a browser.

18+

19+The downside is that running your own server can be a complex and difficult process. Third-party hosting allows an expert to do that work for you. The hosting provider gets paid, and you get 24/7 access to your ship.

20+

21+[UrbitHost](https://urbithost.com) is one of the latest [hosting providers](https://subject.network/planet-sales/) to enter the market. As of now, it is one of the fastest and easiest ways onto the network. You pay the fee, and you get sent a link that you use to access Landscape. It&#39;s that easy.

22+

23+At least, it&#39;s that easy for the end user. For the guy running the operations, ~lavlyn-litmeg, it can be quite a complex operation. I sat down with him to find out about what it&#39;s like being a commercial developer on Urbit. We also talked about technology, the developer ecosystem, and the future of Urbit.

24+

25+If you want to get in touch you can reach him at ~lavlyn-litmeg, the ~sardys/uh group, or [urbithost.com](https://urbithost.com).

26+

27+---

28+

29+**Tell us a bit about yourself and your history with Urbit?**

30+

31+I&#39;m a software engineer who is currently working at one of the larger crypto currency companies. My history with Urbit goes back quite a long time. I saw one of those early demos by Curtis where he had two dojos running, sending messages back and forth, and I thought it looked interesting. Since then, I often checked in on the project, but I stayed at the sidelines because it felt not quite ready; there were constant breaches and so on. What kept me close by was that I believed in the vision of Urbit.

32+

33+I think the open internet only has a future if people retain control of their digital identities, which means that, in addition to a cryptographic identity, they need to be able to keep control over their data. This not only includes their social graph, but they also must be able to run computations on that data. Urbit checks all those boxes. The people behind Urbit and all the other contributors have been steadily marching towards these goals with incredible stamina. I&#39;m inspired by that. And, since the release of OS1, Urbit is very much usable, and I find myself spending more and more time on it instead of other corners of the internet.

34+

35+**Why did you decide to work on hosting rather than another Urbit project? If you weren&#39;t working on UrbitHost what would you be working on within the Urbit ecosystem?**

36+

37+I want my non-tech friends to be able to join Urbit. Most people I know can&#39;t be bothered with executing a blockchain transaction, many feel uncomfortable installing an app they don&#39;t understand, and almost all would shy away from the command line. For the vast majority of people, getting onto Urbit must be as easy as signing up for Gmail or Twitter, otherwise they won&#39;t come.

38+

39+I thought about how I could contribute to Urbit and decided that now is a good time to build a hosting provider. It&#39;s still early, but a non-technical person can actually spend time on the network and be productive. I think we are just now seeing a shift where we need community builders as much as we need engineers working on the internals of Urbit. It is important that those community builders have no barrier to entry for themselves or their communities.

40+

41+That is why ease of access has been my goal from the beginning. I wanted the site to be fully automated, meaning someone could sign up and be on Urbit within minutes. It was also important to me that users be able to choose their own Urbit ID. As far as I know, there was no offering like that yet, so I decided to build it—but I know that others are working on this too.

42+

43+If I was working on something else, it would be Urbit apps. We&#39;re waiting for the new release for it to be easier to distribute and access apps; there are a few tools I would really like to see. But other than that, I would like to spend more time community building.

44+

45+**Can you tell us about how you&#39;re implementing UrbitHost? You beat Tlon to the punch of having immediate hosted access to the Urbit network -- what&#39;re you doing differently? How will your implementation change when programmatic access becomes available via Khan (the new vane to replace Herb)?**

46+

47+UrbitHost runs on Kubernetes, which is a tool to orchestrate containers. What that means, concretely, is that each ship runs inside a Docker container, and Kubernetes makes sure that each container is running and has enough resources. For example, if a server goes down, Kubernetes will automatically move the ships that were on that server to a new server that is available. No data is lost and there should be very little down-time.

48+

49+People think Kubernetes should only be used for services that can be scaled horizontally, meaning there are multiple instances running of the same services. Scaling like this is obviously not an option for Urbit, because a ship must only run as a single instance. But in the last few years, Kubernetes has added many features to run single and stable instances of a container, for example a database. UrbitHost is making use of these features—permanent volumes, stateful sets, and so on—to provide a high-availability hosting for Urbit. It also scales well. I surmise, we could host thousands of ships, we would only have to add compute nodes.

50+

51+As for beating Tlon, I&#39;m not sure if it is a fair comparison. UrbitHost, as it is currently, is a minimal viable product. I tried to realize a simple goal: automated hosting. Tlon is hosting many more planets, not to speak of all the stars and galaxies that make up the network. As far as I can tell, Tlon and UrbitHost are doing things quite similarly. For example, I knew that Tlon is also hosting on Kubernetes, which gave me much more confidence that we could do it too.

52+

53+UrbitHost&#39;s programmatic interaction with hosted ships is quite minimal once it is booted. We use airlock to retrieve the access code and do a few more maintenance things, and we are using it for some upcoming features like automatic S3 configuration. But from what I can tell, Khan looks like a really important step forward, because interacting with the hosted ships via airlock is one of the most brittle areas, and I&#39;m looking forward to making it more robust once Khan is out.

54+

55+**What is most needed within the Urbit ecosystem — any particular apps or services? Which projects are you most excited about?**

56+

57+The ability to publish content directly from a planet to the regular internet would be cool. I would really love to see some bigger blogs being hosted on Urbit. The basic idea would be this: everyone can read the blog, but to join the conversation one would have to join Urbit and the group associated with that blog. Of course, a planet could publish other content too, possibly a mix of free and premium content. Either way, it would pull a lot of people into the gravity well of Urbit.

58+

59+Publishing could also be a good value proposition for Urbit hosting providers. If public content is hosted on a ship, then all the profit from new customers who are brought to the provider could somehow be split between the host and content producer. What is nice, though, is that a content producer can take his Urbit-native community anywhere, anytime, without disrupting the community much. The portability of Urbit at every level would really shine here as communities grow.

60+

61+There are incredible projects happening on every front. The Bitcoin integration is very exciting, it is being realized in a truly Urbit-native way and could prove to be a great catalyst for the ecosystem. However, as a hosting provider, the constant lower-level improvements are exciting too.

62+

63+**What will be the effect of two upcoming changes to Urbit:**

64+

65+1. **Built in software distribution and management**

66+2. **Layer 2 and the new &quot;Khan&quot; vane**

67+

68+**For #1, how would you pitch developers on the benefits of building on Urbit?**

69+

70+**With regard to #2, I think there is about to be an explosion of hosting providers. Will this unleash an Eternal September effect or does Urbit&#39;s &quot;walled garden&quot; style of communication make it more resilient? Urbit is not a single silo like Facebook, after all.**

71+

72+I think that once software distribution is as simple and easy as the iOS app store it will be a watershed moment for Urbit. Put bluntly, it will give users something to do on Urbit besides chat. There are several interesting apps out there already, but they are not easy to discover and install.

73+

74+Developers want reach. The most important pitch to developers will be that on Urbit they have access to a substantial audience. I remember developing for the iPhone in the early days. Objective-C was really a tough pill to swallow, but because the platform was interesting and promised to reach a large audience, I kept going with it. I think Urbit is an interesting platform for the various reasons already mentioned. But learning to develop for Urbit is really a time investment—I myself am still a novice Hoon developer —and for it to be worth it, there has to be a clear pay-off. For some, this is making system-level contributions, but for most it will be having that app show up in some centrally visible place and seeing people engage with it. Once this exists, it will be much easier to pitch Urbit to developers.

75+

76+The layer 2 solution which will make spawning planets much cheaper is an important next step, especially for hosting providers. Layer 2 will help us immensely because spawning and keying planets is very expensive right now, and it puts a damper on how much we are actively pursuing growth.

77+

78+If new hosting providers come online, it will not necessarily mean a huge influx of users. In my experience, building a provider is hard and takes time to mature. However, I would love to see fast user growth.

79+

80+I honestly don&#39;t think having our own Urbit Eternal September would be that bad. I would just see it as growing pains. If we enter a time of sustained growth and rapid user onboarding, the fact that some Urbit groups will get overwhelmed with all the new people will be a small price to pay. The current setup, with a few central groups that act like hubs and discovery points—for example, the fantastic Urbit Index—would have to change. People would need to be funneled into their own Urbit universes that might not overlap much with other areas on Urbit. The nice thing is that all this is accounted for in the Urbit infrastructure.

81+

82+If a certain hosting provider ends up bringing thousands upon thousands of users to Urbit, like AOL did back then with Usenet, then it will be the provider&#39;s responsibility to onboard those users sensibly and not just dump them on the existing groups. In other words, providers, in my opinion, also have a community building responsibility. Of course, this does not mean that providers should be overbearing parents, allowing only this or that, but simply that they should have sensible defaults that don&#39;t overwhelm or destroy the network.

83+

84+**What is the role of commercial providers in the open-source ecosystem?**

85+

86+Commercial providers will be incredibly important to make Urbit succeed. I think if Urbit attracts a large number of users, many, if not most, will run their ship via a hosting provider. It is the easiest way to get started.

87+

88+However, using a hosting provider to get onto Urbit might at first seem antithetical to the spirit of the project. If someone is trying to get away from mega-corporations, why would they go right back to another company and give them their data?

89+

90+Well, because it&#39;s a completely different relationship. The relationship between us, the provider, and you, the customer, is transparently straight forward. You are not the product. We have a more traditional provider-customer relationship where we just do the dev ops work. It is in our interest to keep your data private and keep your ship running. We give you an Urbit ID, which you can keep forever, and host your ship as long as you wish. When you want to leave, you can download your pier and Urbit ID and use it with a different provider or on your own computer in minutes. On the other hand, you cannot leave Facebook and run your profile off of your laptop. Basically, we cannot count on customer lock-in, we must provide good and honest service. Again, the portability promise of Urbit is essential here and ensures that we are on an equal footing.

91+

92+**Once the Urbit payment ecosystem gets built out more, would you consider accepting payments over the Urbit network?**

93+

94+Of course. Having an Urbit-native economy would be a key marker of success, and I would love to participate in it. Moreover, we are planning to offer a Bitcoin node to our customers soon.

95+

96+**Are you coming to Assembly 2021?**

97+

98+Yes. At least, I&#39;m planning to! I would love to meet all the people behind Urbit in real life.

99+

100+**I know you are a Christopher Alexander fan, how has he influenced your work?**

101+

102+I&#39;ve been interested in Christopher Alexander for quite a long time. When I realized that many of the people building Urbit are also inspired by him, I understood why much of the Urbit vibe resonated with me. Critics of Urbit either focus on the technical details or on Curtis Yarvin&#39;s writings, sometimes conflating the two. That&#39;s fine and perhaps a valid point to start, but what they don&#39;t understand is that so many other ideas and ideals have since become driving forces behind the project. This is at least what I observe as an outsider.

103+

104+Alexander&#39;s ideas are all about how to build beautiful houses. He wants us to inhabit places that feel life-giving, places that make us more fully human. The same should be asked of the technology we use. So much of the current internet is the equivalent of a fluorescent-lit cubicle, a brutalist government building, or a flashy central square. It might be interesting to travel through these places, but they do not make good homes.

105+

106+To explore what makes a building beautiful, Alexander had to wade into metaphysics, because he wanted to give a much more objective account of how beauty is present in physical artifacts, which led him to treat beauty as a universal. I think to build more meaningful technology we need to do the same. We do not have a good metaphysics of technology, and this is something I&#39;m really interested in.

107+

108+**Give me a brief summary about your personal philosophy of technology. Do all tools fall under the umbrella of &quot;technology&quot;? Or do some tools hit an inflection point where they acquire radically different characteristics (compare a shovel and a computer)? It seems to me that the philosophy of technology often boils down to trying to define what &quot;technology&quot; actually is. What do you make of all this?**

109+

110+Yeah, I definitely think there is an inflection point once technology becomes digital, but I believe there is something all technology has in common. My approach here is classical. Artifacts have to be distinguished from living things because human made things have their origin outside themselves, meaning they are manufactured (in Aristotelian terms, and stated somewhat simplistically, artifacts have an efficient cause outside themselves, whereas biological things have an innate efficient cause). We are often tempted to think of living organisms simply as elaborate self-replicating machines, but that is putting the cart before the horse. We should rather look to the world of living things to be inspired to build our artifacts.

111+

112+The question of inspiration becomes even more pressing when discussing modern technology, and you put your finger on it with the inflection point. There is no tradition to fall back on when we are building digital technologies. Someone like Christopher Alexander, who is working on architecture, has thousands of years of architecture to look at. He can read the past and see what worked and what did not. On the other hand, when we build things like Urbit, we must look for inspiration in other places because there is no corpus of, say, thousands of years of constructing digital social networks where we can simply choose the best parts. So far, we have mostly bad examples, how not to do it. And considering how new the internet is, most of it is still a blank slate. So while I&#39;m definitely interested in the ontology of technology, I think it is an even more pressing question to learn the principles of the living world around us in order to build digital places that feel organic and life-giving.

113+

114+**Thanks for chatting!**

115+

116+See you on the network!

content/blog/using-urbit-in-2023.mdnew file+55

@@ -0,0 +1,55 @@

1++++

2+title = "Using Urbit in 2023"

3+date = "2023-02-06"

4+description = "There are more ways to run Urbit than ever, and more options coming soon."

5+[extra]

6+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/blog/usingurbit-2023.jpg"

7+author = "Josh Lehman"

8+ship = "~wolref-podlex"

9++++

10+

11+

12+

13+Recent years have seen several iterations on ways to run an Urbit node and join the network. [Port](https://github.com/latterbolden/port) and support for running Urbit from Windows were added a couple of years ago and have previously been recommended ways of running Urbit. We no longer recommend these options for the vast majority of users in favor of better options that are now available.

14+

15+Read on to learn about the background underpinning these decisions and your options for joining the network going forward.

16+

17+

18+

19+# Background

20+

21+With the introduction of Landscape in 2020 the demand for being on the network rose substantially from what it had been, yet the only way of running Urbit was through the command line, which was a significant barrier for entry.

22+

23+In 2021 Port and a native Windows binary were both introduced via contributions from the open source community: Port was built via our [grants](https://urbit.org/grants/cross-platform-desktop-urbit-app) [program](https://urbit.org/grants), and the Windows binary was contributed via a [pull request](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/pull/4675). Together, these two projects enabled users to run Urbit locally without requiring command-line knowledge. Port was summarily added as an officially recommended way to run Urbit.

24+

25+Over the course of 2022 it became clear that, while often useful for trying Urbit out, the experience of running Urbit locally via Port was fundamentally limited: Urbit runs best as a server, and laptops provide neither a stable running environment nor consistent web-based access from other devices.

26+

27+Windows presented further challenges, particularly around maintenance: our team of runtime engineers has had their progress stymied by the need to support Windows, which has substantially different requirements from macOS and Linux. It’s ultimately much more important to our team that we make progress on the versions of the runtime that run well in a server environment, which is the best way to use Urbit, than for local installations.

28+

29+Going forward we no longer recommend Port as an officially supported option for joining the network, and have dropped support for the native Windows binary as of version [1.16](https://groups.google.com/a/urbit.org/g/dev/c/3S6A8Qf8Qzg) of the runtime. That said, it’s worth noting that Port *is not deprecated*! It is still actively [maintained here](https://github.com/latterbolden/port) by the same people that have been maintaining it since the beginning.

30+

31+Let’s move on and talk about your options for getting on the network going forward.

32+

33+

34+# Joining the Network Today

35+

36+Over the course of 2022 many companies emerged and built products that will get you on Urbit, and their teams are constantly working to provide you with a great experience.

37+

38+If you’re not comfortable at the command line you should use a [hosting provider](https://urbit.org/getting-started/hosted). Hosting providers run your Urbit for you and take care of any ongoing maintenance required. If you eventually want to transition to running Urbit yourself, they’ll let you pack up your node and run it however you want: whether that’s at a different hosting provider or your own infrastructure. Learn about [recommended hosting providers in our getting started guide.](https://urbit.org/getting-started/hosting-providers)

39+

40+For more technical users the [command line](https://urbit.org/getting-started/cli) is still a reliable option. For casual testing you can boot a planet or comet on your local macOS or Linux-based machine, and for more serious usage you should refer to our [cloud hosting guide](https://urbit.org/getting-started/cloud-hosting) to get set up on a VPS. A newer option for self-hosting is [Native Planet’s](https://nativeplanet.io) suite of [software](https://www.nativeplanet.io/software) for turning a local computer into an Urbit server complete with DNS.

41+

42+

43+# Coming soon

44+

45+New options for joining Urbit are just around the corner.

46+

47+Word has it that [Tlon](https://tlon.io/hosting) will soon allow you to invite your friends to groups directly from within their [suite of applications](https://tlon.io/landscape), with onboarding handled seamlessly through their hosting service.

48+

49+[Holium’s Realm app](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdu4QtFR-Bs), a collaborative desktop computing environment available on macOS (for now), allows users to sign up with an existing Urbit or brand new hosted one — all seamlessly surfaced through Realm’s signup flow. You can sign up for the private alpha [here](https://holium.com).

50+

51+Tirrel’s [Scene](https://planet.one/scene) is a desktop application with built-in hosting, like Realm, that works on macOS, Windows and Linux, and it’s available now. Hosting is powered by their [Planet One](https://planet.one) service.

52+

53+For the self-hosting enthusiasts out there Native Planet has created [purpose-built Urbit home servers](https://www.nativeplanet.io/hardware) that [make self-hosting easy](https://twitter.com/jmrphy/status/1616196970384887808) and look great doing it.

54+

55+Joining Urbit has never been easier, and it’s constantly getting easier. See you on the network!

content/blog/value-of-address-space-pt1.mdnew file+144

@@ -0,0 +1,144 @@

1++++

2+title = "The Value of Urbit Address Space (1 of 3)"

3+date = "2020-04-06"

4+description = "An expansion of our position on Urbit's address space value."

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Erik Newton + Galen Wolfe-Pauly"

8+ship = "~patnes-rigtyn + ~ravmel-ropdyl"

9+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/value-of-address-space-pt1.jpg"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+_This is the first in a series of three posts on Urbit address space. See also [part 2](https://urbit.org/blog/value-of-address-space-pt2/) and [part 3](https://urbit.org/blog/value-of-address-space-pt3/)._

15+

16+## Part One – What/why, a history, and some analogies

17+

18+Does Urbit address space have value?

19+

20+The short — but perhaps not very useful — answer to this question is that yes, the market appears to believe that it does have value. This series of posts digs a bit deeper into why.

21+

22+As developers, we at Tlon tend to focus on building functionality rather than valuation models – possibly to our detriment. When we discuss Urbit address space, it’s typically about the technical elements, or the use cases.

23+

24+Now that people are using Urbit on a daily basis, we want to make sure that Urbit IDs (collectively “Urbit address space”) are well-understood. We thought it would be useful to explain our thinking about value, and to provide some of the building blocks that others can use to create their own valuation models.

25+

26+There’s a lot to discuss, so we’re breaking this discussion into three posts. The first explores what Urbit ID is, shares some history, and provides a few analogies that can help in understanding value on the network. The second looks at scarcity, utility, liquidity, and network effect. The third post explains lockups and availability.

27+

28+For a refresher about what we’re doing, check out our [introductory materials](https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/) or [Urbit for Normies](https://urbit.org/blog/urbit-for-normies/).

29+

30+## Urbit ID basics

31+

32+In order to explore why Urbit IDs have value, we’ll start by explaining the basics of how they function.

33+

34+From one perspective, Urbit ID is simply a means of logging into Urbit OS. From another, Urbit IDs represent a new class of digital asset.

35+

36+From the standpoint of an ordinary Urbit user, Urbit ID is designed to be simple: it’s a login system for a new OS, but with one or two unusual qualities. Under the hood, your Urbit ID is your network address, your username, and a digital asset wallet. Anyone can use your Urbit ID to locate you on the network, and then send you messages (i.e. packets), or digital assets.

37+

38+We say that Urbit IDs represent a new form of digital asset for three reasons.

39+

40+1. Urbit ID is designed such that the user actually _owns_ their name. This means that Urbit IDs are transferable and tradeable. Conventional username and password schemes are merely claims to a bit of data on another party’s server. An Urbit ID, on the other hand, is a piece of cryptographic property on a public key infrastructure.

41+2. Urbit IDs have utility: they’re currently useful in the Urbit ecosystem, but beyond that they’re vastly extensible and they can be used for many more purposes. Owning an Urbit ID is a bit like holding a self-authenticating property title. If Bitcoin is money and smart contracts are law, Urbit ID is land.

42+3. Urbit IDs are scarce in order to discourage spam and abuse.

43+

44+We’ve often said that Urbit IDs have value because they’re useful and scarce. The fact that they’re being traded on platforms independent of Tlon seems to bear this out.

45+

46+## Urbit network structure

47+

48+The network of IDs is structured as a sponsorship tree consisting of 256 galaxies, ~65,000 stars, ~4B planets.

49+

50+Galaxies are the root nodes on the network. They each have a vote on upgrades to the rules that govern the network, they provide packet-routing and peer-discovery services, and they spawn stars. Each galaxy has 256 (2^8^) stars to spawn.

51+

52+Stars similarly provide packet-routing and peer-discovery services, and spawn planets. Each unbooted star contains ~65,000 planets (2^16^).

53+

54+Planets are the individual IDs that most people use on the network. There are a total of ~4B (2^32^) planets all combined. Planets can also each spawn ~4B ‘moons,’ which are Urbit IDs intended to be used for IoT and other devices. Moons are permanently locked to their planets for security and to protect the network from sybil attacks.

55+

56+Stars and planets can leave their sponsors (i.e. the star or galaxy currently providing peer discovery and packet routing) if they wish, and sponsors can choose to stop servicing any given star or planet. This is intended to prevent lock-in and to encourage good behavior from both parties. This mutual accountability is important in a network of finite identities that accrue reputation.

57+

58+Essentially Urbit ID is 2^32^ individual names that are bundled into blocks that are larger and larger in size. You might think of a planet like an individual house, a star like a town or a city, and a galaxy like a county or a state.

59+

60+The Urbit ID registry and its rules are built on a set of smart contracts called [Azimuth](https://github.com/urbit/azimuth). These contracts are registered on the Ethereum blockchain. Galaxies can upgrade the mechanics of Azimuth by majority vote.

61+

62+Today, Urbit ID is live and deployed. Each Urbit ID is represented by an ERC-721 non-fungible token. People buy and sell Urbit IDs every day and the number of transactions has been steadily increasing.

63+

64+So, fundamentally, Urbit ID is just a finite set of names and a system for assigning them. We’ve left out a few technical details here, but if you’re curious you can read our [introductory](https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/urbit-id/) materials or, to go deeper, read the [docs](https://urbit.org/docs/) or the [source](https://github.com/urbit/azimuth).

65+

66+## Why we need a new address space

67+

68+In our view, the short history of the Internet has been a lesson in centralization and consolidation. DNS is a cabal of root servers. IP is essentially controlled by a single entity. All of our naming schemes have been more or less centralized. Certificate-signing is a mess of competing authorities. Search is Google. Hosting is AWS. And don’t even get us started on social networks.

69+

70+Centralization on its own isn’t bad, but it certainly has some negative implications, privacy being the most obvious. Beyond that, the naming schemes we have on the Internet today aren’t _personal;_ they’re not controlled by their users.

71+

72+Simultaneously working against this trend are a variety of decentralized web projects, various digital currencies, and dozens of protocols that are all focused on individual use and distributed ownership. But how do any of those actually surface to the mainstream? How do people identify themselves in this new digital world? Where do they call home? Where’s the Schelling point when they want to connect and work together?

73+

74+Urbit ID is the missing piece. It’s the minimally viable substrate for the digital world that’s been sketched out by Bitcoin, Ethereum, and all of their decentralized kin. From our perspective, the kit of decentralized technologies that exist today is designed for a world that’s only just coming into existence. That new world shouldn’t be owned by any one entity; it should be distributed. We believe that Urbit OS and Urbit ID are the right foundation for interacting in that world.

75+

76+The ownership structure of a new territory has a huge impact on its future shape. While most of Urbit ID remains an uninhabited grid, we see it as most likely to become a varied array of neighborhoods and cities. Not because this is a nice outcome, but because it’s the most economically likely one. More on the concept of neighborhoods below.

77+

78+## History and distribution

79+

80+So how did these ~4B names get initialized and distributed? Urbit address space was created _ex nihilo_ — from nothing but an idea — and then distributed directly to project contributors who helped develop the system.

81+

82+Now that the system is up and running, Urbit address space has steadily become more distributed. This arguably follows the distribution patterns of the Bitcoin UTXO set, and even historical distribution patterns of physical land.

83+

84+Let’s take a look at how this came to be.

85+

86+Urbit was originally an experimental personal project. The original Urbit address space registry was just a text file in the source code at that time. At the very beginning, all of the address space was owned by Curtis — its creator — and it was all pretty much worthless. In the years leading up to 2013, Curtis gave away galaxies to anyone who would help or contribute to the project, and to several people who were simply in the right place at the right time.

87+

88+Once Urbit became a working prototype, in mid 2013, a company (Tlon) got off the ground to help develop Urbit and a number of other developers joined. At this point, Tlon bought half the address space from Curtis for what now looks like an exceptionally good deal. Then Curtis and Tlon each earmarked a significant chunk of address space for infrastructure and community development — we refer to this as the urbit.org address space, and it’s held by Tlon.

89+

90+From 2014-2018 Tlon and Curtis both gave away address space to individual contributors who were helping with the project. In 2016 and 2017, Tlon sold some of its address space in two crowdsales to fund the development of Urbit (which formatted the Urbit address space as a user-facing system). These sales were focused on getting address space into the custody of users with an interest in the technology and developing the network.

91+

92+It was then decided that a public key infrastructure was the most logical way to instantiate ownership of Urbit address space. Thus, after much [consideration](https://urbit.org/blog/urbit-and-the-blockchain/), Urbit ID was deployed to Ethereum in January 2019 under a set of contracts called Azimuth. At this point, there were about 2000 star holders and around 80 galaxy holders. We can’t be sure how many independent holders there are now — the address space is entirely out of our hands — but the distribution has been steadily increasing. Addresses trade regularly on urbit.live and Opensea, and are sold by a few other smaller outlets like planet.market and Urbit Marketplace, all of which are independent of Tlon.

93+

94+## Analogues and the intrinsic value of address space

95+

96+We’ve often said that Urbit address space, particularly stars and galaxies, have intrinsic value that should be understood beyond simply the price of the planets they contain. Another way of putting this is that, because stars and galaxies are infrastructure nodes, they’re uniquely positioned to generate cash flow from activities on the network beyond simply selling their planets.

97+

98+This cash flow won't likely come from passive activity, but from actively working to develop businesses located on stars and galaxies. Let’s dig a bit deeper into these activities through the lens of some analogues to the existing world.

99+

100+### DNS

101+

102+We’ve often compared Urbit ID to the IPv4 and IPv6 systems. In this scheme, galaxies are much like [/8 blocks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks) of IPv4 addresses, while planets are much like individual IP addresses. The difference is that IP addresses are rarely owned by end users, and they’re typically assigned dynamically, so they tend to change. This is why IP addresses can’t be used to accrue reputation for end users or to prevent spam. It’s worth noting that while most of us don’t own our IP addresses; they are currently [traded](https://auctions.ipv4.global/) on the open market. As of the time of this writing, individual addresses are selling for ~$20. /8 blocks are extremely valuable, and none are currently on the market.

103+

104+### ISPs

105+

106+Another analogy that we often use is that of ISPs (Internet service providers). Stars in the Urbit network are the closest approximation here in that they help planets connect to the network. Ultimately, connections on Urbit are peer-to-peer, but stars provide initial connections, distribute software updates, and route packets when peer-to-peer connections don’t yet exist. These services all represent a cost, and we believe they’ll eventually be metered and priced.

107+

108+### CDNs

109+

110+CDNs (content delivery networks) are another useful comparison. Stars are perfectly positioned to play this role in the Urbit ecosystem. Because stars are designed as packet-routing infrastructure, they’re able to easily spin up greater bandwidth to service high-demand content, or to aggregate content. Stars can also act as content curators and providers, or as content filters for those who want a more narrow range of access. On the other end of that spectrum, stars could easily function as something similar to VPNs (virtual private networks) for any type of content.

111+

112+### Software distribution

113+

114+An infrastructure innovation that’s relevant here is that Urbit OS is specifically designed to make over-the-air (OTA) updates to the system — meaning software and updates are distributed automatically with no effort on the part of the end user. By default, planets and stars get their system updates from their sponsors. As the system evolves, we expect stars and galaxies to not only provide core system (kernel) updates, but also to act as software distribution hubs. Stars will distinguish themselves from one another by the quality of their service. Some might focus on speed of distrubtion; others on assesing the quality of the code they distribute. All of this represents effort on behalf of the star, and could act as a profit center for the star operator.

115+

116+### Payments and transactions

117+

118+On top of routing and software distribution, there are likely other worthwhile services for stars and galaxies to provide. A payments-focused star could run Bitcoin, Lightning or Ethereum nodes exclusively for sponsored planets. A trading-focused star could run a 0x relayer and provide an order book for sponsored planets. It’s easy to imagine machine learning or compute services being offered as a service; for example, a star could bolt on a TensorFlow chip and allow its sponsored planets to run computer functions for a fee.

119+

120+### Land

121+

122+We often use land as an analogy to describe Urbit address space. This is not simply because Urbit address space is finite or because IDs act as addresses on the network. It’s because Urbit is designed to be extremely extensible. Once you take possession of your Urbit — whether it’s a galaxy, star, or planet — you have immense flexibility: you can use it as-is out of the box, you can rearrange your environment, or you can go as far as writing code to create new functionality. Urbit address space is meant to be used productively. Urbit is very much territory for homesteaders.

123+

124+We expect that certain groups of Urbit IDs will be more valuable than other groups. There is no unit price for physical land — rather, price depends on location and a host of other factors. Similarly, we expect a range of prices to develop for Urbit IDs. We’ve already seen price variation around specific names and [sigil](https://urbit.org/blog/creating-sigils/) shapes.

125+

126+In the long term, the real value of an infrastructure node (a star or galaxy) is not simply in trading on the unit price of planets, but in developing and improving the real estate.

127+

128+### Dealer-operators

129+

130+Another approach to developing the value of address space that is already emerging is that of the dealer-operator. The most convenient way for an ordinary person to use Urbit is to have a planet hosted in the cloud so they can log in from any device. Because the long-term value of a star or galaxy is in providing services, and because most planets and stars need to be hosted, providers of these services have begun to emerge.

131+

132+These providers sell users a planet, host it for them, and deliver related services through their stars and galaxies. This means that with a couple of clicks an ordinary user could buy a planet, sign up for a hosting/routing bundle, get access to a set of services, and be immediately ready to interact with the community of their choice.

133+

134+There are plenty of other examples that we haven’t even imagined yet. The important thing is that stars will likely distinguish themselves through the services they provide. Since planets and stars can always change sponsors, a large part of the long-term monetization of a star or galaxy lies in the quality of service that a given star operator provides.

135+

136+This independent ecosystem has a secondary benefit of creating a varied tapestry of digital environments on Urbit, since every community and every dealer-operator can customize as they see fit. That variety will make the landscape much more interesting and ripe for exploration than anything we might create with the top-down approach found on centralized services. That variety will also likely cause a range of values for planets depending on their sponsor or “location”.

137+

138+This ecosystem has already begun to emerge. Both Tlon and urbit.live are working on developing services along these lines, and we’ve heard from several other entrepreneurs considering similar offerings. This is emerging not simply because it serves a user need, but because it’s the directional flow of the system. In other words, it’s the simplest way to monetize address space while avoiding the oligarchic, surveillance-based, advertising-oriented systems we’re stuck with today.

139+

140+To summarize, our view is that Urbit address space is valuable because it’s useful and it’s scarce (and it has network effect, but more on that later). What’s more, while the use case has already begun to take shape, it will grow in directions we can’t yet imagine because the system is designed to be extensible — Urbit is a homestead, not a hotel.

141+

142+We’re looking forward to seeing what the world builds with Urbit.

143+

144+In the next post in this series, we’ll explore the issues of scarcity, utility, liquidity, and network effect.

content/blog/value-of-address-space-pt2.mdnew file+141

@@ -0,0 +1,141 @@

1++++

2+title = "The Value of Urbit Address Space (2 of 3)"

3+date = "2020-04-12"

4+description = "Scarcity, utility, liquidity, and network effect."

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Erik Newton + Galen Wolfe-Pauly"

8+ship = "~patnes-rigtyn + ~ravmel-ropdyl"

9+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/value-of-address-space-pt2.jpg"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+_This is the second in a series of three posts on Urbit address space. See also [part 1](https://urbit.org/blog/value-of-address-space-pt1/) and [part 3](https://urbit.org/blog/value-of-address-space-pt3/)._

15+

16+## Measuring value

17+

18+Value and price are distinct concepts that often get conflated. In our view, Urbit address space has value for four fundamental reasons: it’s scarce; it has utility; it has some limited liquidity; and it has network effect. Price, on the other hand, is always a function of supply and demand, and it's not something we – as builders – concern ourselves with very much. Let’s take a look at these fundamentals within the Urbit ecosystem.

19+

20+## Scarcity

21+

22+256 galaxies, ~65,000 stars, ~4B planets.

23+

24+

25+

26+A foundational design principle of the Urbit network is that the address space is limited. This rarity helps qualify Urbit as a [collectible](https://nakamotoinstitute.org/shelling-out/), and thus creates a non-zero acquisition cost for an address. This cost discourages abuses like spam and bot-net attacks. Traditionally, these attacks are made with quasi-unlimited access to IP addresses. The unit economics of acquiring planets for these nefarious purposes is a strong deterrent.

27+

28+There are 256 galaxies on the network. Each galaxy is initialized with ownership of 255 stars. Galaxies act as root nodes for peer discovery and packet routing within the Urbit network, and they are each also entitled to vote on updates to the smart contracts which govern the network. To date, galaxies trade primarily on OTC (over the counter) desks, and rarely appear on the open market.

29+

30+There are 65,280 total stars on the network. In turn, each star is initialized with ownership of 65,535 planets. Stars currently trade on platforms independent of Tlon, such as [urbit.live](https://urbit.live/) and [opensea.io](https://opensea.io/). The current price range can easily be ascertained on those sites, but as of the time of this writing, stars are selling at a price that greatly discounts their planet holdings.

31+

32+One would expect that in an efficient market the relative pricing of stars on one hand, and planets on the other hand would eventually align (so to speak). This may come to pass as the Urbit community increases education about Urbit, and as additional planet sellers and hosting providers enter the space.

33+

34+Finally, there are 4,294,901,760 (or ~2^32^) planets on the network. Planets currently trade largely in a range of $10 to $15. We expect planet prices to fluctuate from provider to provider as described in the previous post, based on the quality of services various providers offer. That said, it's worth noting that the cost to configure addresses for distribution is fairly static and this may act as something of a lower bound.

35+

36+That said, we also anticipate that planet prices will be abstracted away from most purchasers, and will be included in bundled annual packages of hosting and data routing services. For this reason, infrastructure service providers (i.e. hosting providers) will likely be the best positioned parties to capture value from planet distribution.

37+

38+While an increase in the supply of Urbit address space is a technical possibility, it would run counter to the economic incentives of Urbit address space owners. This is why we view a galaxy vote to dilute address space as improbable.

39+

40+Scarcity may be sufficient alone to drive value, but it’s much more impactful when the unit has some underlying purpose, which brings us to utility.

41+

42+## Utility

43+

44+Utility (i.e. what Urbit addresses can be used for) has largely been addressed in the previous installation of this series. Briefly, our view is that stars and galaxies are useful for more than simply selling their subsidiary address space. Their use value encompasses their unique functionality on the network and the business models that functionality represents.

45+

46+As a refresher, this use value falls in five broad categories.

47+

48+1. Authentication technology is broadly useful. All Urbit identities — planets, stars, and galaxies — can be used for authenticating one’s Urbit computer, and for authentication in general. Urbit ID was designed for Urbit-specific authentication, but a lot of general functionality can be built on top of this infrastructure. Urbit ID is simple, extensible, and easy to use, making PGP style claims much more useful than they are today.

49+2. Network infrastructure services represent a potential revenue stream. Stars and galaxies specifically should be understood as providing their owners the opportunity to develop and use network infrastructure. We anticipate that stars and galaxies will eventually charge for infrastructure related services, like hosting and packet routing, and will distinguish themselves on quality and service.

50+3. Stars and galaxies are well positioned to offer additional services. Because of their role as high level network nodes, stars and galaxies are uniquely positioned to offer additional services, including content delivery networks (CDNs), Bitcoin and other blockchain-related nodes, 0x relays, and Tor exit nodes.

51+4. Schelling points have value. Because stars and galaxies hold a certain authority on the network (by dint of their relationship to their subsidiary nodes), they act as [Schelling points](https://nav.al/schelling-point), or default hubs, for various activities that will arise as the network grows. Already various groups and communities are beginning to collect around stars. This gravity has value and will eventually be priced.

52+5. Voting has value. Galaxies exclusively hold a vote on the network. This voting right can be separated from the galaxy itself and transferred, and we anticipate that this will happen eventually. The value of this right has not and may never be priced into the market, though as Urbit adoption grows, the value of a vote may emerge.

53+

54+Utility is only one component of a value calculation. To further develop the inquiry into value, let’s move on to trading factors.

55+

56+## Trading, volume, and liquidity

57+

58+Urbit IDs are individually represented by non-fungible ERC-721 tokens, and can therefore be sold by any platform that supports this token standard. Currently there are three known Urbit-exclusive sales platforms and one generalized ERC-721 platform that list Urbit IDs. Prices for stars and planets are readily available. Volume is low, as no effort has been made to promote the fact of availability, yet the number of [total transactions](https://azimuth.network/stats/events.txt) has increased steadily since the network was launched to Ethereum in 2019, even absent public messaging.

59+

60+

61+

62+

63+

64+Buying non-fungible tokens like Urbit IDs is rather different than trading quasi-fungible tokens like Bitcoin (even setting aside the issue of volume). Each Urbit ID is unique, and so they tend to be purchased by end users for their specific characteristics, rather than generically. As an example, the planet `~parret-barret` sold for about $1,000 at a time when most planets were selling for $10-20, perhaps due to its rhyming name. Planets with circular sigils also often sell for significantly more than other planets — we’re not entirely sure why this is the case.

65+

66+## Planet Sales

67+

68+

69+

70+

71+

72+## Star Sales

73+

74+

75+

76+This ID-specific trading pattern is generally appropriate in our view: Urbit ID isn’t designed to be rapidly traded at high volume. Urbit is more like a house than a fungible good like a currency.

77+

78+For the time being buying and selling of Urbit IDs happens through auctions on specific platforms, and via person-to-person transactions, because each transaction is for a _specific_ Urbit ID. Again, Urbit ID is designed in the spirit of property titles, rather than currencies, so this makes sense.

79+

80+Strictly speaking, liquidity is a measure of the degree to which a given asset will change in value due to a given transaction. In that sense, Urbit address space is likely fairly illiquid. But liquidity can’t be properly understood without volume. As noted above, the volume of transactions on the network has been steadily increasing since inception, and yet the price has remained fairly constant. This seems to indicate a healthy ratio.

81+

82+

83+

84+A further impact on liquidity and volume is that of available supply. At present, the majority of Urbit address space is locked by smart contracts. These lockups began to release at varying linear rates in January 2019. All address space will be completely unlocked and tradeable by January 2025. Eventually as both understanding and demand increase, we anticipate that planets will find an equilibrium price, and stars will be repriced accordingly.

85+

86+We’ll discuss lockups and spawning limits in more detail in the third installment of this series.

87+

88+In our view, this combination of scarcity, utility, and the above trading factors is a useful description of existing market dynamics for Urbit address space. A further description of why Urbit has value lies not just in its trading characteristics, but in the utility of human interaction. This brings us to network effect.

89+

90+## Network effect

91+

92+Much is made of the concept of network effect and its impact on network valuations generally. The concept is fairly straightforward so long as numbers aren’t applied. Broadly speaking, networks are interconnected systems of people or things. Network effects are mechanisms wherein every new user of a given system makes the system more valuable to every other user.

93+

94+Urbit is a network of networks, and it’s designed specifically for communities — for communication and collaboration. The more people who use Urbit, the more communities get started by design. The more communities there are, the more likely outsiders get pulled in to join them, and so the virtuous network effect cycle continues.

95+

96+Digging deeper, Urbit is unusual as a network for the following interrelated reasons:

97+

98+1. Urbit is a platform in the true sense; wherein

99+2. connections are peer-to-peer;

100+3. privacy is high;

101+4. discoverability is low;

102+5. customization and autonomy are nearly limitless; and yet

103+6. the number of possible groups and node connections is essentially unbounded.

104+

105+The upshot is that Urbit can serve as the meta-network for many different kinds of individual networks, each with their own value. Urbit is much more akin to the internet itself than it is to, say, Facebook. Reed’s and Metcalf’s laws therefore apply to Urbit in some very interesting ways.

106+

107+## Network laws

108+

109+Before diving into a discussion of network effect, it's worth noting that although individual tokens and users of those tokens benefit in various ways from a thriving network, the structure of the Urbit network does not grant token holders any rights to profits or losses "generated by the network" as a whole. In fact the very notion is counter to the intent of Urbit's ethos of decentralization. Individuals on the network may profit by their own activities, but there is no central authority profiting off activity in the aggregate; there is no ownership of the network as a whole, and so there are no centralized profits and losses to share. Address space tokens represent one's ownership of their own parcel of land as it were.

110+

111+That said, an entire continent may have aggregate value even though it is distributed. To explore this notion with regards to Urbit, it's worth reviewing the three laws typically cited to express the value of a network as a whole:

112+

113+- Sarnoff’s law states that the value of a network increases proportionally to its size. This is widely understood to understate the value of most modern networks.

114+- Metcalf’s law states that the value of a network is the square of the number of users (n^2).

115+- Reed’s law states that the value of a network increases with the number of groups that can be built on the network. This is expressed as 2^n, where n is the number of groups.

116+

117+Reed’s law captures the notion that groups vastly increase the density of connections on a network and so scale value more quickly.

118+

119+Urbit is a network of networks, and so is best described by Reed’s law.

120+

121+Urbit’s unique approach to groups also helps resolve two other problems which lead to value loss in many networks: Urbit’s design significantly reduces both network pollution (i.e. irrelevant feeds) and network congestion (clogged bandwidth), as individual clusters can easily separate their activity from other networks on the platform.

122+

123+## Urbit is a platform network

124+

125+It’s important to note that Urbit has utility absent the network, as Urbit OS is in fact a Turing-complete virtual computer. Though the system is designed around communities, individuals can use Urbit to create personal documents, archive data, and write code for the system. This is how Urbit’s total network size can be relatively small and still provide value for individual users and clusters. However, Urbit already has users, and for many of these, critical mass — the point at which the network is more valuable than its cost — has already been reached. In addition, as each of these individual clusters writes code for the platform, positive indirect network effects increase (more utility arises from these individual development efforts).

126+

127+This combination of effects makes Urbit significantly more robust than non-platform networks which can’t rely on this intrinsic utility.

128+

129+That said, we do not intend to ever rely simply on this individuated computing utility alone. Urbit is for communities, and Tlon’s primary focus is to increase adoption of the system as a whole, including the network. To this end we’re working steadily to increase functionality of the system, improve messaging, and actively onboard communities.

130+

131+## Network identity

132+

133+Another distinguishing characteristic of Urbit is that identities are pseudonymous but can easily be de-pseudonymized by users at will (though not by outside authorities). This flexibility combined with identity reputation accrual means people can behave in different ways depending on the social context. People can communicate privately, publicly, or in small groups, and they can do it anonymously or otherwise. This natural and extensible approach to social engagement results in personal comfort and drives adoption.

134+

135+## Extensibility

136+

137+Because Urbit is vastly customizable, and because it’s a network platform for other networks, it can and should grow in ways we can’t predict. Each new use case that develops creates a new market, new communities, and new hubs. Each of these contributes to the diversity of the overall ecosystem, making it vastly more interesting and diverse than anything we might create alone. We expect this extensibility to contribute greatly to retention as users are able to build the world they want to inhabit.

138+

139+Urbit is a deeply extensible platform for communities: it’s a network of networks. Users join to be part of communities, then launch communities of their own, further driving growth and engagement in a virtuous cycle.

140+

141+In the next installment of this series, we’ll describe lockups and availability in more detail and will share the data we’ve managed to compile about address space distribution.

content/blog/value-of-address-space-pt3.mdnew file+117

@@ -0,0 +1,117 @@

1++++

2+title = "The Value of Urbit Address Space (3 of 3)"

3+date = "2020-07-09"

4+description = ""

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Erik Newton + Galen Wolfe-Pauly"

8+ship = "~patnes-rigtyn + ~ravmel-ropdyl"

9+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/value-of-address-space-pt3.jpg"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+_This is the third in a series of three posts on Urbit address space. See also [part 1](https://urbit.org/blog/value-of-address-space-pt1/) and [part 2](https://urbit.org/blog/value-of-address-space-pt2/)._

15+

16+It has been some time since we revisited this series of posts, so let’s start with a summary.

17+

18+Our framework for understanding the value of Urbit address space is that it’s useful, it’s rare, it’s easy to exchange, and the more that people use it, the more useful it becomes. Let’s briefly review each concept in a little more detail.

19+

20+First, utility. Urbit address space was designed for logging into Urbit OS, but Urbit ID can be used as an identity primitive for any internet service. That means it’s vastly extensible. Perhaps more importantly, because Urbit IDs at the star and galaxy level represent network infrastructure for the Urbit network, users have already begun to build a range of business models upon them, from hosting providers to community hubs. We explored several of these possibilities in detail in the [first post](https://urbit.org/blog/value-of-address-space-pt1/) in the series, and we also provide a primer on Urbit ID itself.

21+

22+Second, Urbit address space is finite, and that means it’s scarce. This design, which we explained in more detail in the [second post](https://urbit.org/blog/value-of-address-space-pt2/) in the series, was intended to promote good behavior and to limit spam. So far, that has worked. Scarcity is also impacted by availability of supply, which we’ll explore in this post.

23+

24+Third, network effects, also described in the second post in this series, have the potential to build upon themselves quite rapidly within the Urbit ecosystem. Urbit is essentially a network of other networks, each owned and controlled by their individual users. For this reason, Urbit’s network effect is best described by Reed’s law, which argues that the value of a network increases with the number of groups that can be built on the network. In Urbit’s case, this number is essentially bounded only by the amount of data that can be stored in Urbit itself, which today is 2GB. That size is already enough to support vastly more groups than anyone has tried to launch, and we plan to grow beyond that limit in the coming year.

25+

26+Also in Part 2, we explored trading of Urbit address space. We look at the current price of stars and planets as denominated in both BTC, and USD, and we see that the price of Urbit address space has remained fairly constant since its launch on-chain, while volume has been steadily increasing. The market is continually developing, with more ways to buy and sell Urbit address space cropping up.

27+

28+So, to recap: our view is that the value of Urbit address space is a function of its utility, scarcity, network effects, and ease of trade.

29+

30+In this post, we don’t expand that framework, but rather explore two elements that are important to actually using the framework. We’ll explain lockups, since they impact scarcity, and we’ll discuss usage metrics — including why we don’t (and in most cases can’t) track them.

31+

32+## Lockups and spawning limits

33+

34+One way to think about galaxies, stars, and planets is that they’re different-sized buckets of Urbit IDs. A star contains 2^16^ (~65K) planets, a galaxy contains 2^8^ (256) stars and, in turn, 2^24^ planets (16,777,216). Beyond this nesting pattern, there are three further considerations to note: booted versus unbooted addresses, locked versus unlocked addresses, and planet spawning limits.

35+

36+Booted and Unbooted Addresses –

37+

38+A booted address is one that has actually been used to boot Urbit OS. By convention, booted addresses are expected to have some existing reputation outside of their name alone, since they’ve been used on the network. Reputation, good and bad, comes in many forms. Did the address operate any useful infrastructure? Did it get placed on any blacklists for spam or abuse? Did it simply send and receive messages? The ability to programatically track reputation is still in its infancy, but we expect the tooling to develop as Urbit grows.

39+

40+Unbooted addresses, on the other hand, have no reputation. Both booted and unbooted addresses can be transferred between owners, but booted addresses will likely vary widely in price depending on the reputation each of them has acquired, and how they’ve been used.

41+

42+For the purposes of this discussion, we’re primarily referring to unbooted addresses, as they have no reputation, and so are more similar to one another. We anticipate that booted addresses will trade infrequently — and likely via broker or auction, since users will prefer to control the reputation of the ID they’ve developed, rather than transfer that reputation to another.

43+

44+Locked vs. Unlocked Addresses –

45+

46+At present, the majority of Urbit address space is locked by smart contracts. When Urbit address space was first registered on the Ethereum blockchain, this unlocking mechanism was put in place to prevent the network from being flooded with users. A young Urbit network in which all of the address space had been unlocked would be exposed to attacks by bots and spammers. Scarcity, on the other hand, encourages good behavior as it increases the cost to spam.

47+

48+A locked star is held in a contract and can neither be booted nor issue planets. The lockup contracts can be examined on [GitHub](https://github.com/urbit/azimuth).

49+

50+In practice, the only Urbit IDs that are ‘locked’ are stars. A galaxy that is said to be locked is simply a galaxy whose stars are currently held by a lockup contract. A locked galaxy can be transferred (i.e. sold or simply moved to a new key) and booted (importantly, any galaxy—booted or not—can vote), but it can’t issue stars until the lockup contract expires.

51+

52+

53+

54+

55+

56+These lockups all began to release at varying linear rates in January 2019 (specifically on Tue Jan 08 23:34:41 2019 UTC).

57+

58+The various linear unlocking schedules are grouped as follows:

59+

60+- The urbit.org addresses, and early prize winners unlock linearly from 2019-2021.

61+- Tlon, its founders, employees, and most purchasers from Tlon were frozen for a year, and now unlock linearly from 2020-2024.

62+- 2018 private buyers were frozen for a year, and then began to unlock linearly over the course of one or three years, depending on the terms of their respective contracts.

63+- Earlier private buyer addresses—including those in our first two crowdsales—were unlocked right away.

64+

65+As of January 2020, 17,283 stars were unlocked and tradeable. By January 2021, 33,355 will be available. On January 9, 2024, all 65,536 stars will be unlocked and available for trading.

66+

67+Being unlocked does not necessarily mean that a star can spawn all of its planets. For that calculation, we must turn to spawning limits.

68+

69+Spawning Limits –

70+

71+Unlocked stars are further gated by the number of planets they’re able to spawn. Every unlocked star was immediately able to spawn 1024 planets from the moment Urbit went live on the blockchain in January 2019—we wanted everyone to be able to invite some friends to their communities right away. From that date forward, the spawnable amount doubles every year (365 days), maxing out at 65,535 spawnable planets after 6 years.

72+

73+

74+

75+When we layer the spawning limits over the various lockup contracts, we find that all Urbit address space is both unlocked and spawnable by January 9, 2025.

76+

77+## Address space distribution

78+

79+Address space has continued to change hands since we put Urbit on-chain in January 2019. At that time, we had a fairly granular understanding of who owned what. Today we only have precise numbers for the Tlon and urbit.org owned address space. Galaxies change hands quite infrequently, so we know more about that ownership than stars and planets. We know next to nothing about the distribution of planets.

80+

81+We consider the opacity of our understanding about transactions on the network to be a privacy feature rather than a bug. To be specific about the information we can collect here: first, we don’t know anything about users beyond their ETH address, and second, we can’t tell the difference between a transfer of an address, and the re-keying of an address. This means we’re never entirely sure if a transfer has in fact occurred; we only know that the address has changed.

82+

83+The chart below is an estimate (as of January 2020) based on our general understanding of how galaxies are distributed. Much of this is anecdotal, and it’s largely based on the very few transactions we’ve observed within the galaxy table since Urbit went on chain in 2019. This chart should therefore be understood as incomplete, and an estimate only.

84+

85+

86+

87+Address space distribution is best understood in terms of galaxies and stars independently, as they’re distinct assets. The chart above only illustrates galaxy distribution, but describes Tlon’s “naked” galaxy holdings, which are galaxies empty of their stars. These galaxies are empty because the stars they once contained have been distributed, primarily to Tlon contractors, employees, and to certain private buyers.

88+

89+We believe that wide distribution is important to the health of the network and the growth of Urbit as a whole. Our own distribution efforts are focused on disbursing Urbit address space ownership as broadly as possible to those interested in using and developing the network.

90+

91+We intend to further distribute Tlon’s address space over the coming years through private sales, employee compensation, grants, bounties, and gifts. It’s worth noting that the grants and bounties program specifically is set to increase in coming years. We’re very much interested in putting address space in the hands of people interested in helping develop the network; we see grants as the perfect mechanism for doing so.

92+

93+## Usage data and composition

94+

95+Usage data is an obvious missing piece of the puzzle in this discussion. We understand this, and yet we don’t actively capture usage data, for two important reasons: it’s premature, and Urbit is privacy-focused by design.

96+

97+First, it’s too early. Urbit’s current users are a fanbase of pioneers who are willing to put up with the challenges of a young network. This fanbase grows on its own, but Tlon doesn’t actively encourage that growth yet. For the vast majority of potential users, the barriers to entry are still high enough that an invitation would risk losing them permanently. You can think of Urbit today as being a developer alpha.

98+

99+We’re laying the groundwork so that we can, in earnest, invite our friends and communities to a network they will love. That means we’re designing smooth onboarding, an elegant user interface, and increasing the stability of both the system and network. Tlon’s forthcoming hosting services will vastly reduce barriers to entry, and will be our first major push into the public sphere.

100+

101+Second, and perhaps more importantly, capturing data about traction on the network is difficult by design. Due to Urbit's privacy-forward architecture, there’s quite a lot we will never know. Once an Urbit ID is up and running, we don’t know how often it operates, where it’s hosted, or what it’s doing. This makes capturing usage metrics challenging, but we think this is the right problem to have.

102+

103+The Network Explorer –

104+

105+In the next several months we plan to roll out the first iteration of a network explorer that will allow users to visualize the structure and composition of the network as well as some basic activity data. Our first version of the network explorer will include representations of how the various layers of address space fit together, the finiteness of address space, historical uptime for nodes, and the various unlocking schedules.

106+The network explorer will also allow users to zoom in on various nodes to learn more about them and what they offer.

107+Urbit’s privacy-forward design makes collection of data appropriately impossible in many cases. That said, the network explorer should begin to collect all the elements of the value framework we’ve laid out here in one dynamic visualization.

108+

109+Closing –

110+

111+We have long said that Urbit address space had value because it was both useful and scarce. Taking a deeper look, we found that some limited liquidity, and network effect also play an important role in the value framework.

112+

113+All of the factors that make up our framework are, in turn, impacted by availability of supply and by user growth. In the Urbit ecosystem, supply is effectively gated—as described above—in order to prevent flooding of the network.

114+

115+User growth, on the other hand, is something we simply have not yet pursued in earnest. Instead, our development efforts have been focused on enhancing usability and stability of the platform. Our focus on user growth will begin as we roll out hosting. Once that happens, usage metrics will become both more interesting and more relevant.

116+

117+This concludes the final installment of our series on the value of Urbit address space. Though the explanation was long, the framework is quite simple: value in Urbit is derived from its use, scarcity, some liquidity, and network effect. Let us know if you’d like us to dig deeper into any of these elements—we’re always happy to opine about Urbit.

content/blog/what-is-urbit-for.mdnew file+196

@@ -0,0 +1,196 @@

1++++

2+title = "What is Urbit For?"

3+date = "2016-05-10"

4+description = "A vision of the Urbit-powered future."

5+aliases = [

6+ "/posts/essays/what-is-urbit-for",

7+ "/posts/what-is-urbit-for"

8+]

9+

10+[extra]

11+author = "Galen Wolfe-Pauly"

12+ship = "~ravmel-ropdyl"

13+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/what-is-urbit-for.jpg"

14++++

15+

16+

17+

18+Open platforms don't beat closed systems just because they're open.

19+They win because you can do more exciting things with them. We

20+believe we're overdue for new infrastructure not purely on principle:

21+but because we think you can build better products on top.

22+

23+We look forward to a future where your fleet of Urbits run the devices

24+throughout your house, keep your biometric data in sync with the data

25+center and hold your secure medical and financial data. Today Urbit

26+is just a proof of concept — but we see a road from here to there.

27+

28+## Today

29+

30+These are things that work but are under development today. We expect

31+them to improve and stabilize in the coming months.

32+

33+### Making the web programmable

34+

35+The first thing your Urbit can do is act as a transparent layer to

36+your existing services. We'd like urbit to be usable as a self-hosted

37+IFTTT for geeks. Your urbit can hold your keys, store data, run

38+programs and seamlessly connect to your existing services. Plus, with

39+a global revision controlled filesystem it's easy to share API

40+connectors and keep them up to date.

41+

42+With an Urbit running on your machine you can `ls` your Gmail from

43+Unix. Write a short script to poll Twitter on a keyword and deliver

44+the results to your email or into a Slack channel. Send an SMS when

45+an HTTP request doesn't resolve. These are just a few examples. Your

46+Urbit is designed to make data trapped in your existing services feel

47+like an extension of your local programming environment.

48+

49+### Self-hosted publishing and communication

50+

51+Additionally your Urbit is a flexible platform for publishing data to

52+the web and communicating with others. Sort of like a self-hosted

53+Slack, WordPress and Wiki in one. It's more common to use many tools

54+for sharing our content and communicating. Urbit is designed to bring

55+those tools together; giving the individual control over their

56+creative output.

57+

58+Simply write markdown in your favorite editor and have an Urbit sync

59+them to the cloud. Use React components to control your layout and

60+extend our toolset. Host your own discussion channels and comment

61+threads. On a computer you own and control, whose source is 100%

62+open.

63+

64+### Cryptographic identity

65+

66+Your Urbit is your digital identity, cryptographically secured but not

67+controlled by any central authority. The Urbit PKI fills a gap that

68+remains unsolved on the web. We can send encrypted messages, securely

69+exchange digital currency, but how do I know who anyone is?

70+

71+Your Urbit can post public proof to your third party services and its

72+validity is easily auditable. Using Urbit as an identity scheme for

73+new services would be a great decentralized alternative to 'Sign in

74+with [company x]'.

75+

76+## Tomorrow

77+

78+Urbit's crypto isn't tested, the network still gets rebooted from time

79+to time. The next milestone comes when Urbit matures to the point

80+that it's as reliable as its SaaS counterparts.

81+

82+### Lifestreams, finally

83+

84+The combination of great API tools and great publishing tools means we

85+can finally build an integrated interface for today's social networks.

86+The web is full of streams of data. For the user there's not much

87+utility in bouncing from service to service. Instead, it'd be great

88+to have general-purpose tools for consuming and publishing data.

89+Imagine a Medium-quality interface that makes no distinction between

90+Facebook and Twitter; SMS and Skype.

91+

92+### Secret storage, web3

93+

94+Bitcoin and Ethereum are both part of a new era of decentralized

95+infrastructure that's just beginning. For the blockchain to realize

96+its potential individuals need ought to have a way to host their own

97+nodes. At the very least, individuals need a reliable place to keep

98+their secrets. What's more, the blockchain isn't designed for

99+computation. It's great for contracts and currency, but too slow for

100+practical computing.

101+

102+Urbit is a great complement to the blockchain. Your Urbit can safely

103+store your keys, providing an always-available keychain on the

104+network. Even better, your Urbit can hold your blockchain assets and

105+provide an off-chain computation layer. Urbit's computation doesn't

106+provide any kind of distributed consensus, but our computation model

107+is very simple and lends itself well to auditing. This makes it a

108+very blockchain-friendly platform.

109+

110+## Over the horizon

111+

112+If there's one thing we know from the history of personal computers

113+it's that computers are always expanding into more and more of our

114+lives. The more _personal_ our computers get the more they need to

115+reflect our thinking and our relationships. We don't know exactly

116+what this will look like, but we can certainly speculate on the areas

117+that deserve the most attention.

118+

119+### Data permanence and software competition

120+

121+Right now applications and data are practically the same thing.

122+There's no practical way for the user to separate them. Apps come and

123+go, either by falling out of fashion or actually shutting down. In

124+both cases our data becomes orphaned. There's no practical way for us

125+to get it back. The raw data from your LiveJournal is as good as a

126+floppy disk from the 80s. Computers hold the records of our lives.

127+Losing the history of the world to bitrot is a preventable problem.

128+

129+Since each person owns their own Urbit there's no way to separate the

130+user from their data. When you run software on your Urbit you

131+_actually run it_ and your programs manipulate data that _you own_.

132+The individual has permanent access to their data by design. Ensuring

133+its durability is a technical problem, not a license agreement

134+problem.

135+

136+When individuals are running their own software it's no longer

137+possible to lock them in by controlling their data. Instead, software

138+has to actually compete on utility. If one could trivially replace

139+the interface for Evernote with one from another developer for $10

140+wouldn't it be worth it? Even more so with Urbit, since after

141+installing software you're not dependent on the developer staying

142+alive. You're running a local copy. This model puts pressure on

143+applications to interoperate better and become more modular.

144+

145+### Reputation

146+

147+With a working identity system it's possible to build up contextual

148+reputation systems that aren't held hostage by their applications.

149+Just like the marriage of applications and data, reputation is

150+permanently tethered to and jealously guarded by the services we use.

151+

152+For example, today we have karma systems on a per-site basis, like

153+Reddit. Is there any reason that individuals shouldn't have karma

154+scores per-topic? An individual's authority on a certain topic could

155+be verified by other experts while still denied by detractors. It's

156+easy to extend this to services like Yelp. With a strong identity

157+system it's possible for pseudonymous reviews to be counted with real

158+value. We'd no longer need a central authority for deciding on the

159+reputation of a restaurant, but just a way to pseudonymously aggregate

160+individual opinions. There's a broad swath of territory ripe for

161+exploration here.

162+

163+### Privacy

164+

165+With a reliably secure place to store your data on the network,

166+wouldn't you want to store even more personal information yourself?

167+Why is it that we don't store our own medical records, biometric data

168+or financial data? In a world where we have a safe place to keep them

169+we wouldn't require anyone else to keep them for us.

170+

171+Furthermore, we'd be able to share them pseudonymously. One could

172+imagine medical research or census-like polling being done without

173+compromising the privacy of those involved. This also lowers the

174+barrier to entry for fintech and medical software developers. If I

175+can run my own personal health and finance software that can reliably

176+access my own transactions and medical records, what would developers

177+come up with?

178+

179+### IoT

180+

181+What needs a network _and_ computation? Devices. Turning a unix box

182+into a usable platform for hardware isn't something that any

183+individual manufacturer is incentivized to do. For the internet of

184+things to actually work we need a platform for devices to interoperate

185+simply and securely. Urbit is up to the task. Your Urbit isn't just

186+a single instance, it can sign the keys for a whole network of Urbits

187+intended to be used for your devices, sensors, appliances, machines,

188+robots, VR helmet, etc.

189+

190+The future of the individual's computing experience may very likely be

191+among many different devices. Bret Victor's 'Seeing Spaces' is a

192+great exploration of what this future may look like. For the

193+industrial enterprise there's a whole other set of parallel problems:

194+tracking inventory, controlling a vast array of machines, and managing

195+logistics. In both cases we need a decentralized network and

196+computing platform. Urbit is up to the task.

content/blog/why-hoon.mdnew file+274

@@ -0,0 +1,274 @@

1++++

2+title = "Why Hoon?"

3+date = "2019-11-13"

4+description = "The promise of Urbit lies in its reimagination of the digital world using components that are as constrained and limited as possible."

5+

6+[extra]

7+author = "Ted Blackman"

8+ship = "~rovnys-ricfer"

9+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/hoon.png"

10++++

11+

12+

13+

14+### What can Hoon do that other languages can't?

15+

16+The short answer is: implement a purely functional operating system.

17+Try to do this in a principled way in Haskell, and the problems you'll

18+run into will make design decisions in Hoon and Nock make a lot more

19+sense.

20+

21+In particular, the problems Hoon solves that aren't solved by other

22+functional languages are:

23+

24+- Compile and run other code in a typesafe manner at full speed,

25+- Typesafe metaprogramming, and

26+- Hot code reload and online data migration.

27+

28+### What is Hoon good at?

29+

30+Hoon is mostly good at compiling and running other Hoon code. Urbit

31+consists of many layers of bootstrapping. Several of these layers lean

32+heavily on this feature, including the Gall application runner, the Ford

33+build system, the Dojo shell, and the Arvo kernel itself. Even Urbit's

34+chat application lets you run Hoon expressions and share the results

35+with your friends.

36+

37+### Why did we write the OS in Hoon?

38+

39+The chain of reasoning goes something like this:

40+

41+Software complexity leads to monopolies and lack of individual digital

42+sovereignty, in addition to bugs and security vulnerabilities. One of

43+the best ways to reduce software complexity is to restrict oneself to

44+pure mathematical functions — no side effects, no implicit arguments.

45+This makes the system deterministic. So we want a deterministic,

46+functional operating system for individuals to run.

47+

48+This operating system should also be axiomatic; we don't want it to

49+depend on various idiosyncrasies of whatever the current hardware is

50+like. Hardware changes over time, and we want people to be able to pass

51+their computers on to their grandchildren, so we should have a virtual

52+machine that runs this functional operating system.

53+

54+As hardware changes, people need to move their virtual machines to new

55+hosts. This means there needs to be a standard way to serialize and

56+deserialize the VM state at any time. The easiest way to do this is by

57+storing an event log, just like a database, and writing each event to

58+that before emitting effects caused by it. Since we also need state

59+snapshots, every piece of data in the system, including runtime state,

60+needs to be serializable to a standardized format.

61+

62+Because the VM will likely move from host to host many times, it needs

63+to be tractable to actually implement a VM correctly. This means the

64+system specification needs to be simple enough that it's clear whether a

65+VM is in fact correct. The x86_64 instruction set that runs most

66+servers has somewhere between 1300 and 4000 opcodes, depending on how

67+you count. Nock has 12.

68+

69+Since Urbit is an operating system, its main purpose is to load and run

70+programs on behalf of the user. This means the system needs to be

71+really good at hot code reloading, self-hosting, metacircularity, and

72+virtualization.

73+

74+There aren't any other languages out there that are purely functional,

75+purely axiomatic, performant enough for practical personal use,

76+universally serializable, and good at runtime metaprogramming. Nock is

77+Urbit's solution to these design constraints. Some Lisps come close to

78+meeting these criteria — and Nock is very Lisp-like — but no practical

79+Lisp dialects are nearly as pure or axiomatic as Nock.

80+

81+### What is special about Hoon?

82+

83+It's a purely functional systems language. Calling it a functional

84+analog of C is not too far off in several ways. Almost all code

85+throughout Urbit's kernelspace and userspace is written in Hoon.

86+

87+### What properties does Hoon have? What type of language is it?

88+

89+Hoon is a statically typed, purely functional, strictly evaluated

90+programming language.

91+

92+Hoon and Nock have several unusual properties:

93+

94+- **Axiomatic**. Nock is a fully axiomatic computing system — no

95+ dependencies, no builtins, no hardware dependence — just pure math.

96+ The jet system gives this a practical level of performance.

97+

98+- **Layered**. Nock is machine code designed for machines to run; Hoon is a

99+ programming language designed for people to use. Hoon layers over

100+ Nock in a very similar way to how C layers over machine code. Nock

101+ has no symbols; all programmer-facing variable names live in Hoon

102+ types. You can use raw Nock from Hoon, much like dropping down to

103+ assembly from within C. Hoon compiles to Nock with no "runtime

104+ system" — aside from subtree lookups, you could pretty easily compile

105+ most Hoon expressions by hand.

106+

107+- **Minimal**. Urbit is ruthlessly minimalistic throughout the stack. Nock

108+ has only twelve opcodes, and Hoon's semantics are a very thin layer

109+ over Nock's. The only fundamental datatype in Urbit is the noun:

110+ either an arbitrarily large natural number, called an atom, or a pair

111+ of nouns, called a cell. This forms a binary tree with atoms at the

112+ leaves. Lists, sets, maps, queues, executable code, closures, ASTs,

113+ buffers, strings, floating-point numbers, and everything else in the

114+ whole programming environment are represented using just this data

115+ structure.

116+

117+- **Acyclic**. There are no cycles in nouns, since they're always trees, so

118+ there are no cycles in Nock's memory model. Pointer equality is not

119+ exposed to the programmer. In practical Nock implementations, all

120+ data structures are what are elsewhere called "functional" or

121+ "persistent" data structures, meaning they're immutable and share

122+ structure wherever possible.

123+

124+- **Homoiconic**. Code and data are represented the same way and can be

125+ converted to each other. Lisp dialects are also homoiconic, but Hoon

126+ and Nock are arguably even more so, since things like closures and the

127+ environment are just Nock trees. We even have a statically typed

128+ metacircular interpreter called `+mule`. We run userspace code

129+ metacircularly with negligible performance overhead because of Urbit's

130+ jet system. In Lisp, "eval is evil" is a common saying, but in Urbit,

131+ eval is a first-class feature.

132+

133+- **Universally serializable**. There's one serialization format, called

134+ "jam", for any piece of code or data in the system. This makes it so

135+ that deserialization has just one function, a few hundred lines of C,

136+ as its security attack surface. It also facilitates portability of

137+ the virtual machine state, since this function can be called on the

138+ top-level VM state itself to generate a portable snapshot.

139+

140+- **Jetted**. A jet is a piece of code that the Nock interpreter has that

141+ reimplements a Nock function in some other, faster language. The `+dec`

142+ decrement function in Hoon's standard library is defined axiomatically

143+ using recursion, but is run as a jet written in C that makes use of

144+ the processor's ALU for performance. When calling a Nock function, if

145+ the runtime has a matching jet, it will use that instead of the Nock

146+ implementation. Nock isn't as slow as you might think, especially

147+ considering it's a minimal, dynamic, axiomatic language.

148+

149+ This arrangement has the deeper implication that all code written in

150+ Nock is best considered as a specification for a program, which can be

151+ executed directly but might never run at all due to being jetted.

152+ Cryptographic functions, for example, should all have jets with

153+ constant-time implementations to prevent timing attacks. Most jets,

154+ though, just take advantage of hardware acceleration for things like

155+ floating point arithmetic.

156+

157+- The amount of Hoon syntax is unusually large, but also **unusually

158+ regular**. Hoon is a "runic" language, meaning expressions generally

159+ begin with a digraph "rune" corresponding to the type of expression.

160+ Runes are used in place of keywords and Lisp's "special forms".

161+ Hoon's syntax makes better use of screen real estate than Haskell or

162+ Lisp by having a mostly vertical "backbone" of runes that prevents

163+ long functions from indenting repeatedly and helps quickly identify

164+ control flow. Hoon does not allow syntactic abstraction, so you

165+ always know exactly what you're looking at when reading Hoon. The

166+ similarity of Hoon's syntax to its abstract syntax tree makes

167+ metaprogramming easier and can be thought of as another layer of

168+ homoiconicity on top of Nock's.

169+

170+- **Subject-oriented**. There is no implicit environment; a Hoon expression

171+ compiles down to a Nock formula, which is interpreted as a function

172+ that runs with the "subject" as the argument. The subject can be any

173+ Nock tree, but it contains everything that's in scope. It usually

174+ consists of the Hoon compiler and standard library as a stack of

175+ cores, along with whatever functions and variables have been defined

176+ in the lexical scope.

177+

178+- **Cores**. A core is a pair of code and data. The core is the underlying

179+ representation of a function (a lambda with implicit fixed point), a

180+ library or module, an OOP-style object, and an OOP-style "interface"

181+ or "protocol". The code consists of a set of Nock formulas that can

182+ each be run against the whole core as a subject. This means there's

183+ always an implicit fixed point when running a function, and mutual

184+ recursion can occur among a core's formulas. A core's data usually

185+ consists of the standard library (itself a stack of cores), and

186+ possibly a "sample" (function argument).

187+

188+- **The type system has several unusual features**. It's intensional, in

189+ the sense that all constructs are first-class and can be up-cast to

190+ `noun`, Hoon's "any" or "top" type that matches all Nock nouns. Types

191+ are also used as scopes, so they store all of Hoon's variable names

192+ and docstrings. The type system uses an unusual macro-like feature

193+ called "wetness" to implement parametric polymorphism. The type

194+ system can also auto-generate coercion functions that validate and

195+ lift raw nouns into structural types, such as lists or cells. This is

196+ used to validate untrusted data, such as from the network.

197+

198+- **Reflective**. The type of type is just a normal datatype in Hoon, and a

199+ lot of the system manipulates types. In particular, the `!>` rune, when

200+ applied to a piece of data, uses compile-time type reflection to

201+ produce something called a "vase": a pair of type and data, similar to

202+ a `Data.Dynamic` in Haskell, or a limited form of a dependent pair.

203+ Since the Arvo kernel does a lot of dynamic compilation, it uses vases

204+ to implement something akin to a dynamically typed language using

205+ Hoon. This allows for type-safe dynamic program loading, program

206+ execution, and data migration.

207+

208+- **Inert**. Because Nock is purely functional, Hoon compiles to it so

209+ directly, everything is homoiconic, and Hoon is intensional, there's a

210+ very nice feeling that everything is just a stationary tree. There

211+ are no special objects that can't be manipulated; everything in your

212+ environment is just a subtree, and you could grab it and print it out

213+ if you wanted to. There's nothing like a "database handle",

214+ "websocket connection object", or other mystical constructs. The

215+ calmness of working with such inert building blocks is addictive, as

216+ many Hoon programmers will attest.

217+

218+### Why is Hoon the way it is?

219+

220+Minimalism, mostly.

221+

222+Urbit's principled minimalism simplifies all kinds of things at many

223+layers of the stack; for example, Urbit's linker, which is part of the

224+Ford build system, just conses together multiple libraries into a tuple

225+to form the compile-time environment for a source file. Universal

226+serialization means we can safely send arbitrary pieces of data to apps

227+on other ships without any more work than sending them to a local app.

228+Using an app called Aquarium that's about three hundred lines of code,

229+Arvo can run a whole fleet of other Arvos inside itself at full speed,

230+just like Docker, and perform a suite of deterministic end-to-end tests

231+on the OS as a whole.

232+

233+Even Hoon's seemingly baroque syntax is extremely regular and an

234+unusually thin layer over the abstract syntax tree. It's designed to be

235+a power tool; learning the syntax takes some time, but you only have to

236+learn it once, and then it's not hard to read. It's like an English

237+speaker learning Hiragana or Cyrillic. This heaping spoonful of syntactic sugar

238+(along with jets for performance) is enough to take Nock from a Turing

239+tarpit to a practical, ergonomic programming tool.

240+

241+Subject orientation in Nock and Hoon stems partly from minimalism

242+(there's just one subject, which serves as state, lexical scope,

243+environment, and function argument), partly from a desire to simplify

244+compilation (the type of the subject is a full specification of the

245+compile-time environment for a source file), and partly in order to give

246+the language a more imperative feel.

247+

248+You program Hoon as if you have a mutable environment, but you're

249+embedded in a purely functional, immutable context. While Hoon is a

250+purely functional language, many of its runes create a mutant copy of

251+the subject for manipulation by future runes (similar to Forth's stack

252+operations), which makes it feel more like an expression is "doing

253+something" rather than just calculating something.

254+

255+Everything about a scope, including name bindings, aliases, and

256+docstrings, is stored in the subject's type. This allows Hoon's

257+compilation discipline to be similarly minimal: the compiler is a

258+function from subject type and Hoon source to product type and compiled

259+Nock. Running this Nock against a value of the subject type produces a

260+vase of the result. It's hard to imagine a more streamlined formalism for compilation.

261+

262+The compilation discipline gets applied recursively to build the layers

263+of the Arvo stack. The Arvo kernel is compiled using the Hoon compiler

264+as subject, the Zuse standard library is compiled using the Arvo kernel

265+as the subject, and apps and vanes (kernel modules) are compiled using

266+Zuse as the subject.

267+

268+The promise of Urbit lies in its reimagination of the digital world

269+using components that are as constrained and limited as possible. By

270+adhering firmly to principle and doubling down on minimalism at every

271+turn, we get an OS that provides far stronger guarantees than Unix with

272+a thousand times less code. Given the complexity of modern software,

273+this is what's required to put personal computing back into the hands of

274+people.

main/blog/blockchain.md → content/blog/why-urbit-probably-does-not-need-a-blockchain.mdrenamed+190−187

@@ -1,18 +1,21 @@

1−---

2−date: ~2016.7.14

3−type: post

4−title: Why Urbit (probably) doesn't need a blockchain

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 />

1++++

2+title = "Why Urbit Probably Doesn't Need a Blockchain"

3+date = "2016-07-13"

4+description = "Urbit (probably) doesn't need a blockchain, because the Urbit address-space PKI is a special case of a consensus ledger."

5+aliases = [

6+ "/posts/essays/why-urbit-probably-does-not-need-a-blockchain/",

7+ "/posts/why-urbit-probably-does-not-need-a-blockchain/",

8+ "/blog/blockchain/"

9+]

10+

11+[extra]

12+author = "Curtis Yarvin"

13+ship = "~sorreg-namtyv"

14+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/posts/essays/why-urbit-probably-does-not-need-a-blockchain.jpg"

15++++

16+

17+

18+

1619TLDR: Urbit (probably) doesn't need a blockchain, because the Urbit

1720address-space PKI is a special case of a consensus ledger (itself a

1821special case of Byzantine agreement).

@@ -25,31 +28,31 @@ solving any problem with the weakest possible tools.

2528

2629Culturally, Urbit is best described as a functional stack built in the

2730"New Jersey" school of system software design, as described in Richard

28−Gabriel's famous ["worse is

29−better"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better) essay.

31+Gabriel's famous

32+["worse is better"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better) essay.

3033

3134There are two kinds of mindsets when approaching hard technical

32−problems. The "MIT" mindset, more typical among mathematicians and

35+problems. The "MIT" mindset, more typical among mathematicians and

3336scientists, wants to attack the problem as its simplest and broadest

34−case, producing the most general and powerful solution available. In

37+case, producing the most general and powerful solution available. In

3538short: better-is-better.

3639

3740The "New Jersey" worse-is-better mentality, more typical among

38−programmers and engineers, wants to do everything possible to *not*

39−attack the problem. Can I produce a serviceable approximation to a

40−true solution? Do I actually have to solve the general problem, or

41−can I reduce it to an easier special case? Can I change the product

41+programmers and engineers, wants to do everything possible to _not_

42+attack the problem. Can I produce a serviceable approximation to a

43+true solution? Do I actually have to solve the general problem, or

44+can I reduce it to an easier special case? Can I change the product

4245so it doesn't have this problem?

4346

4447Ideally, anyone building anything has both these mindsets in their

45−toolbox. But it's worth noting that (a) Jersey designs (meaning the

48+toolbox. But it's worth noting that (a) Jersey designs (meaning the

4649Bell Labs school that produced Unix, C, and Go) tend to beat MIT

4750designs in the marketplace, and (b) there are very few pure-functional

4851systems built with the true Jersey spirit.

4952

5053## Why Urbit (probably) doesn't need a blockchain

5154

52−Nakamoto consensus is an example of better-is-better. The blockchain

55+Nakamoto consensus is an example of better-is-better. The blockchain

5356design is actually more powerful than it needs to be. It's not just a

5457trustless decentralized ledger; it's a trustless decentralized

5558database and (as Ethereum has realized; but this idea is clearly

@@ -57,35 +60,35 @@ present in Bitcoin's scripting language) a general-purpose, zero-trust

5760decentralized computer.

5861

5962Again, Urbit is not a general-purpose decentralized database or

60−consensus computer. It's a special case of the former, which is a

61−special case of the latter. Urbit is nothing but a digital title

62−chain for network addresses. Our belief is that the special case is

63+consensus computer. It's a special case of the former, which is a

64+special case of the latter. Urbit is nothing but a digital title

65+chain for network addresses. Our belief is that the special case is

6366much easier than the general case, which is why Urbit (probably)

6467doesn't need a blockchain.

6568

6669The rest of this essay describes what makes this special case special,

67−and how we can use that to not need full Nakamoto consensus, or any

70+and how we can use that to not need full Nakamoto consensus, or any

6871kind of general-purpose Byzantine agreement.

6972

7073## The double-sell problem

7174

72−Urbit has the same basic "double-spend" issue as Bitcoin. As Satoshi

75+Urbit has the same basic "double-spend" issue as Bitcoin. As Satoshi

7376puts it: "The problem of course is the payee can't verify that one of

7477the owners did not double-spend the coin." But Urbit is not a

7578currency, so we say "double-selling."

7679

77−"Double-selling" means signing over an Urbit address (*ship*) to two

80+"Double-selling" means signing over an Urbit address (_ship_) to two

7881different parties at the same time, presumably with the intent to sell

7982it to both and skip town with the loot.

8083

81−Again, the logical problem is the same. Bitcoin attacks it as a broad

82−theoretical breakthrough: better-is-better. Urbit attacks it as a

84+Again, the logical problem is the same. Bitcoin attacks it as a broad

85+theoretical breakthrough: better-is-better. Urbit attacks it as a

8386narrow special case: worse-is-better.

8487

8588Intuitively, Urbit's answer is that a real-estate transaction is

8689substantively a very different thing from a credit-card payment. No

8790real-estate agent ever has ever leaned over the desk, quickly grabbed

88−*both* the check and the keys, and run laughing out the door.

91+_both_ the check and the keys, and run laughing out the door.

8992

9093To understand more rigorously how Urbit is a special case, let's take

9194a quick look at the Urbit address space and PKI.

@@ -93,64 +96,64 @@ a quick look at the Urbit address space and PKI.

9396## The Urbit address space and PKI

9497

9598(NB: this description differs in minor ways from the running code.

96−Where they differ, the description is right. Urbit is not at present

99+Where they differ, the description is right. Urbit is not at present

97100secure: use for entertainment purpose only.)

98101

99102An Urbit ship is an unsigned integer that serves four purposes: a

100103cryptographic identity, a packet routing address, a stateful virtual

101104computer, and a unique, human-memorable name.

102105

103−Each ship is owned by a private key. To transfer a ship to a new

104−keypair, sign the new public key with the old private key. This

105−revokes the old key and activates the new key. Propagating this

106−update globally makes the revocation global. This is essentially the

106+Each ship is owned by a private key. To transfer a ship to a new

107+keypair, sign the new public key with the old private key. This

108+revokes the old key and activates the new key. Propagating this

109+update globally makes the revocation global. This is essentially the

107110digital title system a smart 12-year-old would design.

108111

109112### Ships and wills

110113

111−Ships are 128-bit numbers classified into tiers by bitwidth. An 8-bit

112−ship (a number less than 256) is a *galaxy*. A 16-bit ship is a

113−*star*. A 32-bit ship is a *planet*. A 64-bit ship is a *moon*. A

114−128-bit ship is a *comet*.

114+Ships are 128-bit numbers classified into tiers by bitwidth. An 8-bit

115+ship (a number less than 256) is a _galaxy_. A 16-bit ship is a

116+_star_. A 32-bit ship is a _planet_. A 64-bit ship is a _moon_. A

117+128-bit ship is a _comet_.

115118

116−The chain of signatures for each ship is called a *will*. Unlike most

119+The chain of signatures for each ship is called a _will_. Unlike most

117120certificate systems, there is no metadata in an Urbit will. Nothing is

118−signed but the public-key fingerprint. The length of the will is the

119−keypair version that owns the ship. This version is called its

120−*life*. Each new signed fingerprint in the will is a *deed*.

121+signed but the public-key fingerprint. The length of the will is the

122+keypair version that owns the ship. This version is called its

123+_life_. Each new signed fingerprint in the will is a _deed_.

121124

122−Who gets to create a ship? Comets are fingerprints of a random

123−keypair. Moons, planets and stars are created by their *prefix*, the

125+Who gets to create a ship? Comets are fingerprints of a random

126+keypair. Moons, planets and stars are created by their _prefix_, the

124127ship whose bits are the bottom half of their formal width. For

125128instance, the star `0xbeef` is the prefix of the planet `0xdeadbeef`.

126129Galaxies have their fingerprints hardcoded in the official kernel.

127130

128−Ship numbers are not generally written in hex. They're written in

129−Hoon's `@p` syntax, a phonemic base-256. `@p` also permutes within

131+Ship numbers are not generally written in hex. They're written in

132+Hoon's `@p` syntax, a phonemic base-256. `@p` also permutes within

130133tiers, to superficially conceal prefix structure; for instance,

131134`0xdead.beef` is `~firbyr-napbes`, while `0xcafe.beef` is

132135`~nissep-sopnub`.

133136

134137### Parent hierarchy

135138

136−The prefix of a moon, planet, or star also becomes its *parent*. The

139+The prefix of a moon, planet, or star also becomes its _parent_. The

137140parent of a ship is its natural locus of federated services. The most

138141basic such service is to mediate P2P routing, as a so-called

139−"supernode." But the set of potential federated services is

142+"supernode." But the set of potential federated services is

140143unbounded.

141144

142−For moons, each new key update is signed by the parent. Planets and

143−stars sign their own updates, making them independent. To prevent

145+For moons, each new key update is signed by the parent. Planets and

146+stars sign their own updates, making them independent. To prevent

144147denial-of-service attacks by parents against children, stars and

145−planets can *exit*, choosing a new parent. An exit deed is a key

148+planets can _exit_, choosing a new parent. An exit deed is a key

146149update also signed by the new parent.

147150

148−The full public cryptographic record of a ship is its *dossier*. The

151+The full public cryptographic record of a ship is its _dossier_. The

149152dossier is the set of ship-will pairs, including all parents and

150−prefixes recursively, needed to validate the ship's current key. A

153+prefixes recursively, needed to validate the ship's current key. A

151154ship can process a dossier from an untrusted source.

152155

153−The full set of ship-will pairs a ship knows is its *cabinet*. So the

156+The full set of ship-will pairs a ship knows is its _cabinet_. So the

154157crucial question for PKI propagation is whether a submitted dossier is

155158accepted into a ship's cabinet.

156159

@@ -158,11 +161,11 @@ accepted into a ship's cabinet.

158161

159162The rule is simple: any deeds in the dossier which are new (not

160163already in the cabinet) must not use keys superseded in the cabinet.

161−Otherwise revocation doesn't work. But revocation affects only

164+Otherwise revocation doesn't work. But revocation affects only

162165dossiers received in the future; nothing already in the cabinet can be

163166revoked.

164167

165−Intuitively, this algorithm creates a propagation race. Life `2` of

168+Intuitively, this algorithm creates a propagation race. Life `2` of

166169`~firbyr-napbes` revokes life `1` of `~firbyr-napbes`, so propagating

167170life `2` to the whole network ensures that anyone who steals the

168171private key for life `1` can't use it in any way -- whether to launch

@@ -175,24 +178,24 @@ the system designed above?

175178

176179### Double-spend relaying in Bitcoin

177180

178−The first thing we need to notice about our special case is that *even

179−Bitcoin*, not considered as a general consensus problem but just as a

180−decentralized payment rail, isn't that far from *not* needing a

181+The first thing we need to notice about our special case is that _even

182+Bitcoin_, not considered as a general consensus problem but just as a

183+decentralized payment rail, isn't that far from _not_ needing a

181184blockchain.

182185

183186As the Karame ["Two Bitcoins at the Price of

184187One"](http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/248.pdf) paper points out:

185188

186189> An efficient countermeasure to combat double-spending on fast

187−Bitcoin payments would be for Bitcoin peers to propagate alerts

188−whenever they receive two or more transactions that share common

189−inputs and different outputs.

190+> Bitcoin payments would be for Bitcoin peers to propagate alerts

191+> whenever they receive two or more transactions that share common

192+> inputs and different outputs.

190193

191194"Fast Bitcoin payments" means zero-confirmation, ie, Bitcoin without

192−the blockchain. These double-spend alerts have never been integrated

195+the blockchain. These double-spend alerts have never been integrated

193196into Bitcoin Core, despite frequent proposals. Given that Bitcoin

194−*does* have a blockchain, it seems quite sensible for purists to shun

195−hacks that make zero-conf transactions somewhat more secure. Also,

197+_does_ have a blockchain, it seems quite sensible for purists to shun

198+hacks that make zero-conf transactions somewhat more secure. Also,

196199double-spend alerts in Bitcoin are a DoS vulnerability; Bitcoin has

197200fees to control the cost of propagating transactions, but who pays for

198201an alert?

@@ -204,29 +207,29 @@ An accepted transaction is simply one that propagates to one or more

204207randomly chosen observer nodes.

205208

206209This design, for the problem that Bitcoin is solving, intuitively

207−feels weak and a little hacky. The Karame paper is not actually

208−advocating for removing the blockchain from Bitcoin. At the same

210+feels weak and a little hacky. The Karame paper is not actually

211+advocating for removing the blockchain from Bitcoin. At the same

209212time, low-value zero-confirmation payments are commonly used.

210213

211214One way to think about security is to flip the tables and think of the

212−defender as the attacker, and vice versa. Just imagine you have some

213−moral right to double spend. The rest of the world is unfairly trying

214−to stop you. Can you defend yourself?

215+defender as the attacker, and vice versa. Just imagine you have some

216+moral right to double spend. The rest of the world is unfairly trying

217+to stop you. Can you defend yourself?

215218

216219In the context of a gossip network that shares all the things, a

217220procedure that involves telling one person one thing, and another

218221person another conflicting thing, and not getting "hacked" by the

219222unfair world which believes there should be only one truth, is

220−inherently quite fragile. And where the attack is fragile, the

223+inherently quite fragile. And where the attack is fragile, the

221224defense is robust.

222225

223226Most of the security in any digital title system comes from the PKI

224−itself. The double-spend problem, the general issue of Byzantine

225−failures in information propagation, is already a corner case. So

227+itself. The double-spend problem, the general issue of Byzantine

228+failures in information propagation, is already a corner case. So

226229perhaps we can solve it as a corner case.

227230

228−Again: *even Bitcoin* isn't that far from being able to build a

229−practical decentralized ledger without a blockchain. The same gossip

231+Again: _even Bitcoin_ isn't that far from being able to build a

232+practical decentralized ledger without a blockchain. The same gossip

230233model that broadcasts nonconflicting transactions is not at all

231234incapable of reacting to conflicting transactions. We're not really

232235recommending that Bitcoin ditch the blockchain, but this gives us hope

@@ -235,41 +238,41 @@ with our fundamentally easier problem.

235238## Various specific specialnesses

236239

237240What are the differences between the Urbit double-sell problem and the

238−Bitcoin double-spend problem? Is our special case really, truly,

241+Bitcoin double-spend problem? Is our special case really, truly,

239242special?

240243

241244In worse-is-better mode, we want every special-case advantage we can

242−get. Every difference we find is one we can use as a leverage point.

245+get. Every difference we find is one we can use as a leverage point.

243246

244247### Minimal transaction interdependency

245248

246249The first major technical difference between the Urbit title history

247250and the Bitcoin blockchain is that Bitcoin and its relatives are

248251designed to secure a complete, interdependent, collective transaction

249−history. Except for the parent-child relationship, Urbit wills are

252+history. Except for the parent-child relationship, Urbit wills are

250253independent of each other.

251254

252255Bitcoin's use of UTXOs rather than balances reduces interdependency

253−somewhat. But the validity of each transaction is still dependent on

254−all the transactions that created its inputs. (Ethereum drops the

256+somewhat. But the validity of each transaction is still dependent on

257+all the transactions that created its inputs. (Ethereum drops the

255258UTXO model, whose value in reducing dependencies may not match its

256259cost in complexity.)

257260

258−Urbit is not a payment system or a shared ledger. Bitcoins are

259−divisible, but Urbit ships aren't. An Urbit will containing its

261+Urbit is not a payment system or a shared ledger. Bitcoins are

262+divisible, but Urbit ships aren't. An Urbit will containing its

260263parent chain is self-validating and has no dependencies. There is no

261−collective history. There is no Merkle tree. There is no chain, with

264+collective history. There is no Merkle tree. There is no chain, with

262265or without blocks.

263266

264267This simplification doesn't eliminate the double-sell problem in

265−theory, but makes it much more tractable in practice. The set of past

268+theory, but makes it much more tractable in practice. The set of past

266269transactions (key transfers) that a new transaction could conflict

267270with is much smaller.

268271

269272### Trust hierarchy and governance structure

270273

271274The second major technical difference is that Bitcoin is a flat,

272−trustless, fully decentralized system. Urbit has a hierarchical,

275+trustless, fully decentralized system. Urbit has a hierarchical,

273276polycentric governance system which is a trust hierarchy.

274277

275278Now and for quite some time, urbits default to automatically accepting

@@ -279,41 +282,41 @@ You trust your browser quite a bit, which means you trust your browser

279282vendor.

280283

281284And since few Bitcoin node operators code their own daemons, the same

282−dependency on a source distribution exists in Bitcoin. It's informal

285+dependency on a source distribution exists in Bitcoin. It's informal

283286and off-chain, though, which is not really a good thing. (Urbit is

284287like if Bitcoin Core hotpatched itself automatically by publishing

285288source-code diffs on the blockchain.)

286289

287290To be on the safe side, we should think of Urbit as a centralized

288291system until the OS update that turns off automatic updates is

289−shipped. This of course requires a certain measure of perfection,

292+shipped. This of course requires a certain measure of perfection,

290293which cannot in any way be predicted.

291294

292295After Arvo proper becomes "deciduous" (apps will of course always be

293296remotely hotpatched), child-to-parent trust should diminish to the

294−power of the parent to deny service to the child. This will always be

297+power of the parent to deny service to the child. This will always be

295298present without some major redesign.

296299

297300But it's opposed by the equal and opposite power of the child to

298301switch to a different parent, creating a competitive market in

299−governance. This should deliver service at the highest quality and

300−lowest price, fortifying trust with incentives. The power of a

302+governance. This should deliver service at the highest quality and

303+lowest price, fortifying trust with incentives. The power of a

301304restaurant owner to deny you service does not give the food industry

302305the power to starve you to death.

303306

304307And if no parent wants your business, with 2^16 stars who could accept

305308it, you probably shouldn't be on the network at all. Urbit, like a

306309real society, is designed to be a network of incentives that holds

307−everyone in productive tension. We want everyone to be free, and no

310+everyone in productive tension. We want everyone to be free, and no

308311one to be unaccountable.

309312

310313For example: a parent which extends its will also needs to send

311−updated signatures to its children and former children. Either will

314+updated signatures to its children and former children. Either will

312315otherwise be unable to propagate their dossiers to ships whose

313−cabinets have the updated parent will, *even if some other parent

314−adopts them*.

316+cabinets have the updated parent will, _even if some other parent

317+adopts them_.

315318

316−But Urbit is a collectively governed and updatable system. A star or

319+But Urbit is a collectively governed and updatable system. A star or

317320galaxy which denies service to its own children will (a) get a bad

318321reputation, (b) drive its children to other parents, and (c) force the

319322network to hardcode a ship-specific exception into the propagation

@@ -322,29 +325,29 @@ algorithm, overriding stale-key revocation.

322325In theory, a parent can extort its children by denying service. In

323326practice, since Urbit is self-governing, not ungoverned, and its

324327government can right this wrong with a source-code patch, the

325−extortion won't work. So it won't happen. So the act of government

328+extortion won't work. So it won't happen. So the act of government

326329won't be necessary, and won't happen either.

327330

328−Of course a perfectly decentralized system would be freer. But worse,

329−as usual, is better. And since we are paying for this worseness,

331+Of course a perfectly decentralized system would be freer. But worse,

332+as usual, is better. And since we are paying for this worseness,

330333imperfect decentralization, we'd like to get all the mileage out of it

331334that we can.

332335

333336Again, Urbit, not being a trustless system, does not have to solve the

334337trustless consensus problem -- although we still very much want to

335−minimize and bound the delegation of trust. This is an obvious

338+minimize and bound the delegation of trust. This is an obvious

336339relaxation of Bitcoin's hard theoretical problem.

337340

338341### Routing: security through topology

339342

340−Please don't laugh. Security through routing topology isn't a joke --

341−unless firewalls are a joke. Cisco sells too many firewalls for them

343+Please don't laugh. Security through routing topology isn't a joke --

344+unless firewalls are a joke. Cisco sells too many firewalls for them

342345to be a joke.

343346

344347In Bitcoin we may have all sorts of reasons to ask what ship holds

345−what coins. In Urbit, when we ask what key controls an ship, we are

346−either sending or receiving a message. Is our outgoing message safely

347−sealed to the current owner? Is our incoming message properly signed

348+what coins. In Urbit, when we ask what key controls an ship, we are

349+either sending or receiving a message. Is our outgoing message safely

350+sealed to the current owner? Is our incoming message properly signed

348351by the current owner?

349352

350353When the parent also forwards all packets until a P2P link is

@@ -353,29 +356,29 @@ full cone NAT, TURN if not), we can design in all kinds of

353356interactions between routing and certificate management.

354357

355358In particular, a parent which is a single source of truth in some

356−sense is a very attractive design element. Again, we're paying for

357−our imperfect decentralization. We might as well use it.

359+sense is a very attractive design element. Again, we're paying for

360+our imperfect decentralization. We might as well use it.

358361

359−For example: I want to send a packet to ship X. Two parties, A and B,

360−are competing for ownership of X. A is the rightful owner. I am

362+For example: I want to send a packet to ship X. Two parties, A and B,

363+are competing for ownership of X. A is the rightful owner. I am

361364secure against B if either of these conditions are true: my packet can

362−only be decoded by A, or my packet is not sent to B. Both would be

363−ideal, of course. Either will do.

365+only be decoded by A, or my packet is not sent to B. Both would be

366+ideal, of course. Either will do.

364367

365368### Latency and friction tolerance

366369

367370Confirmed Bitcoin payments aren't especially low-latency by payment

368−standards. They're reasonably low-friction by payment standards. But

371+standards. They're reasonably low-friction by payment standards. But

369372fees are certainly a thing.

370373

371−Urbit is digital real estate, not digital money. When we look at the

374+Urbit is digital real estate, not digital money. When we look at the

372375standards of latency and friction in actual real estate -- where a

373376transaction that takes a week is super-fast, a 5% payment overhead is

374377normal, and a third-party intermediary is standard -- we see a much,

375378much weaker set of requirements.

376379

377380Obviously a week and a 5% overhead are incredibly sucky levels of

378−latency and friction. The point is that even if this is the only

381+latency and friction. The point is that even if this is the only

379382level of performance Urbit can achieve, that's not necessarily the end

380383of the world for Urbit.

381384

@@ -385,50 +388,50 @@ surely find out about), or there wasn't a double-sell. This stuff is

385388just not that hard.

386389

387390(One little-made point about Bitcoin, by the way, is that Bitcoin

388−enables trust-free *payments*, but not trust-free *exchanges*. The

391+enables trust-free _payments_, but not trust-free _exchanges_. The

389392seller still needs to deliver the goods either before or after the

390−payment; in either case, there is trust. Only Ethereum can solve this

393+payment; in either case, there is trust. Only Ethereum can solve this

391394problem -- and only for digital exchanges.)

392395

393396## We can afford to be patient

394397

395398With a better-is-better, general-purpose solution, one size fits all

396−until the end of time. With a worse-is-better, special-case solution,

399+until the end of time. With a worse-is-better, special-case solution,

397400the details of that case are critical.

398401

399−But we actually don't know these details. One rule of the

402+But we actually don't know these details. One rule of the

400403worse-is-better school: never solve a problem before you have to. You

401−don't know all the details, and you need those details. (Of course,

404+don't know all the details, and you need those details. (Of course,

402405with the better-is-better approach, the details don't matter at all.)

403406

404−Is there such a thing as a transitive adjective? Grammarians are

405−unclear. But technically, the adjective "secure" is always an error.

406−Nothing is "secure." "Secure against X" is the correct usage, where X

407+Is there such a thing as a transitive adjective? Grammarians are

408+unclear. But technically, the adjective "secure" is always an error.

409+Nothing is "secure." "Secure against X" is the correct usage, where X

407410is some threat model.

408411

409412Urbit is an insecure test network with no sensitive data on it. This

410−will remain true for a while. No Urbit ship has ever been transferred

411−cryptographically. This will also remain the status quo for quite a

413+will remain true for a while. No Urbit ship has ever been transferred

414+cryptographically. This will also remain the status quo for quite a

412415while.

413416

414−We *don't know the threat model*. We *can't solve the problem*. It's

415−as simple as that. The best Urbit can do, at the present time, is map

417+We _don't know the threat model_. We _can't solve the problem_. It's

418+as simple as that. The best Urbit can do, at the present time, is map

416419out the ballpark of solutions.

417420

418−And we have time to proceed patiently. One way to think about the

419−timing of cryptographic decentralization is to look at the DNS. It's

421+And we have time to proceed patiently. One way to think about the

422+timing of cryptographic decentralization is to look at the DNS. It's

420423clear that now, a decentralized DNS with cryptographic domain-name

421−titles would be extremely desirable. It was never designed to happen.

424+titles would be extremely desirable. It was never designed to happen.

422425It will probably never happen.

423426

424−But if we look at when cryptographic DNS with allodial title *should*

427+But if we look at when cryptographic DNS with allodial title _should_

425428have happened, it's probably sometime in the mid-90s. Ie, after over a

426−decade of production use of the Domain Name System. In short: there's

429+decade of production use of the Domain Name System. In short: there's

427430no need to hurry here.

428431

429432## A map of the solution space

430433

431−But we still need a map of the worse-is-better ballpark. Let's look

434+But we still need a map of the worse-is-better ballpark. Let's look

432435at some options, from least secure to most.

433436

434437The essential question we can't answer, without a better sense of the

@@ -437,19 +440,19 @@ especially are not sure about the threat model of malicious stars

437440(16-bit ships) and/or galaxies (8-bit ships).

438441

439442We need to know what kinds of double-sell attacks are plausible. Since

440−we don't know this yet, we need not one propagation design, but a

443+we don't know this yet, we need not one propagation design, but a

441444range of designs -- stretching all the way up to a full blockchain.

442445

443446### Acceptance model

444447

445−What doesn't change is the will *acceptance* model. A ship will

448+What doesn't change is the will _acceptance_ model. A ship will

446449always accept a new will if (a) the new will extends the old will, (b)

447450the parent signature on the initial public key is at least as recent

448451as the ship's current version of that parent.

449452

450453The parent clause implies that when a parent extends its will, it

451454needs to send updated initial signatures to all the children it's

452−launched. Otherwise, their own future updates will not be accepted by

455+launched. Otherwise, their own future updates will not be accepted by

453456ships that have seen the parent's update.

454457

455458This is not a big deal in the world of parent responsibilities. But

@@ -463,138 +466,138 @@ Scarcity rules.

463466

464467### Level 0: passive propagation only

465468

466−The Ames protocol can piggyback a will on any packet. Each ship also

469+The Ames protocol can piggyback a will on any packet. Each ship also

467470permanently records which other ships hold which version of its own

468−will. An update is automatically sent when needed.

471+will. An update is automatically sent when needed.

469472

470473With level 0 propagation, all key exchanges in Ames are passive and

471−invisible to the programmer. When the sender has no will or symmetric

474+invisible to the programmer. When the sender has no will or symmetric

472475key for the receiver, the packet is signed, bundled with the will, and

473476sent as cleartext.

474477

475−Signed cleartext? If you have no will for a peer, you've never talked

476−to this ship before. Your first words to a stranger probably won't be

477−super secret. If this isn't true, the programmer has to send an

478−innocuous message first and wait for it to be acknowledged. Kicking a

478+Signed cleartext? If you have no will for a peer, you've never talked

479+to this ship before. Your first words to a stranger probably won't be

480+super secret. If this isn't true, the programmer has to send an

481+innocuous message first and wait for it to be acknowledged. Kicking a

479482rare corner case up to the programmer is a classic worse-is-better

480483move.

481484

482485With level 0 propagation only (the current implementation, because we

483486don't even care about key updates yet), an updated does not

484−effectively revoke the old key. If Alice updates to a new key,

487+effectively revoke the old key. If Alice updates to a new key,

485488Mallory steals the old key, then Mallory talks to Bob before Alice

486489does, Mallory can impersonate Alice.

487490

488491So not only does level 0 not solve double-sell, it's also quite

489−insecure. But it's still fine for now (because Urbit isn't really

492+insecure. But it's still fine for now (because Urbit isn't really

490493decentralized yet).

491494

492495### Level 1: neighbor-only propagation with parent filtering

493496

494497The list of other ships which hold your will, essentially the list of

495−all ships you've talked to, is your list of *neighbors*. You

498+all ships you've talked to, is your list of _neighbors_. You

496499essentially have permanent, if perhaps very sporadic, conversations

497−with all your cryptographic neighbors. Symmetric keys time out fast,

500+with all your cryptographic neighbors. Symmetric keys time out fast,

498501but wills are held forever.

499502

500503By proactively pinging all your neighbors when you extend your will,

501504you prevent anyone who finds the old private key (ideally you update

502−when your old key is stale, not when it's actually been *stolen*) from

505+when your old key is stale, not when it's actually been _stolen_) from

503506jumping into these conversations.

504507

505−What about non-neighbors? We add a second feature: a parent will only

506−forward a packet if its sender matches the current will. So updating

508+What about non-neighbors? We add a second feature: a parent will only

509+forward a packet if its sender matches the current will. So updating

507510your parent (who is always your neighbor) transforms it

508511

509512There are two cases: where Alice's parent Trent is also Bob's parent,

510−and where Bob has a separate parent Walter. In the first case, the

513+and where Bob has a separate parent Walter. In the first case, the

511514expected packet flow is that Alice will send the packet to Trent, who

512−sends it to Bob. In the second case, Trent sends it to Walter, who

515+sends it to Bob. In the second case, Trent sends it to Walter, who

513516sends it to Bob.

514517

515518In either flow, Bob or Walter is sure that the packet came through

516−Trent. Since Trent is Alice's parent and hence Alice's neighbor, and

517−hence is updated, Trent will forward no packets from Mallory. So

519+Trent. Since Trent is Alice's parent and hence Alice's neighbor, and

520+hence is updated, Trent will forward no packets from Mallory. So

518521Mallory has no way to reach Bob.

519522

520523Non-neighborly packets not matching this flow can't be accepted.

521−Suppose Mallory gets Bob's public IP address directly? If Bob gets a

524+Suppose Mallory gets Bob's public IP address directly? If Bob gets a

522525non-forwarded packet marked "Alice," but Alice is not his neighbor,

523−that's super weird. He must reject the packet.

526+that's super weird. He must reject the packet.

524527

525528Level 1 is nice because it provides a reasonable level of security,

526−but it's still extremely simple. Not only does it not use a

529+but it's still extremely simple. Not only does it not use a

527530blockchain, it doesn't even need a gossip flood!

528531

529532And level 1 propagation also does a competent worse-is-better job on

530−the double-sell problem. Trent simply becomes the single source of

531−truth. The buyer of Alice needs to check that Trent, her parent, has

533+the double-sell problem. Trent simply becomes the single source of

534+truth. The buyer of Alice needs to check that Trent, her parent, has

532535Alice's latest will from the buyer's perspective. If Alice's seller

533536propagates a different fork to other ships, this damages Alice's

534537ability to communicate, but produces no obvious gain for the seller.

535538

536−Level 1 puts a lot of security weight on the parent. If Trent

539+Level 1 puts a lot of security weight on the parent. If Trent

537540misbehaves, for example by not filtering Mallory's packets, Alice can

538−be impersonated. And its solution to the double-sell problem is

539−adequate, but not ideal. Level 1 is the worse-is-better sweet spot

541+be impersonated. And its solution to the double-sell problem is

542+adequate, but not ideal. Level 1 is the worse-is-better sweet spot

540543for a young Urbit, but will probably give way to level 2.

541544

542545### Level 2: broadcast all wills

543546

544−We can't say definitively that level 1 will be inadequate. But

545−intuitively, it feels slightly weak. We will probably need a gossip

547+We can't say definitively that level 1 will be inadequate. But

548+intuitively, it feels slightly weak. We will probably need a gossip

546549protocol.

547550

548551The only ships that can be transferred are galaxies, stars and

549552planets; if all updates of all wills of all these major ships are

550−broadcast, we hardly have a scaling problem like Bitcoin's. Even if

553+broadcast, we hardly have a scaling problem like Bitcoin's. Even if

551554changing the lock on your front door counted as a real-estate

552555transaction, there are a lot fewer real-estate transactions than

553556credit-card payments.

554557

555558Moreover, conflict detection (double-sell alerts) is a natural part of

556−any gossip protocol. Gossip should be between stars, not directly

559+any gossip protocol. Gossip should be between stars, not directly

557560between planets; horizontal gossip, vertical distribution.

558561Star-to-planet distribution may still be limited.

559562

560563Especially since stars are somewhat trusted, ganking a gossip protocol

561564with random update edges is incredibly hard and requires a pretty

562−preposterous conspiracy. And flooding all planet wills does a lot to

563−keep stars honest. It would be incredibly stupid for a star to try a

565+preposterous conspiracy. And flooding all planet wills does a lot to

566+keep stars honest. It would be incredibly stupid for a star to try a

564567double-sell attack against its own planets, but code is always more

565568powerful than mere incentives.

566569

567570Finally, the exit model isn't fully baked yet, but it will probably

568−have more aggressive propagation needs. What's clear is that an exit

571+have more aggressive propagation needs. What's clear is that an exit

569572statement is another type of will entry, involving a signature both

570−from the previous key and the new parent. You can only escape to

573+from the previous key and the new parent. You can only escape to

571574another ship of your parent's class that agrees to adopt you.

572575

573576In general, because escaping need to work for routing (without the

574577cooperation of the former parent), wills containing an exit statement

575578(a planet moving to a new star, or a star moving to a new galaxy)

576579exit) probably need to be flooded globally among all 8-bit galaxies

577−and 16-bit stars. Exits should be rare, so they shouldn't present

580+and 16-bit stars. Exits should be rare, so they shouldn't present

578581much of a scaling problem.

579582

580583### Level 3: full blockchain

581584

582−Obviously a blockchain can solve Urbit's problem. Probably the right

585+Obviously a blockchain can solve Urbit's problem. Probably the right

583586thing to do would be to use the Bitcoin blockchain, and confirm the

584−current Urbit key version with a "colored coin" of some kind. (This

587+current Urbit key version with a "colored coin" of some kind. (This

585588should not be confused with the orthogonal idea of representing Urbit

586−*invitations* as colored coins.)

589+_invitations_ as colored coins.)

587590

588591This involves making all Urbit ships into Bitcoin SPV nodes at the

589−least. Not the worst fate in the world, but also a cost.

592+least. Not the worst fate in the world, but also a cost.

590593Alternatively, Urbit could have its own "altcoin" blockchain, with

591594actual Urbit-specific mining.

592595

593596Again, given that level 2 seems like it should work quite well, it's

594−hard to see why level 3 propagation would be needed. But we can't

595−really know at this point. There's a reason Urbit can update itself

596−over the air. That's why we say: Urbit (probably) doesn't need a

597−blockchain. If it does, we can retrofit it.

597+hard to see why level 3 propagation would be needed. But we can't

598+really know at this point. There's a reason Urbit can update itself

599+over the air. That's why we say: Urbit (probably) doesn't need a

600+blockchain. If it does, we can retrofit it.

598601

599602## Retrospective note

600603

@@ -603,18 +606,18 @@ stripped-down, worse-is-better variation of Nakamoto consensus.

603606That's clearly the right way to introduce it in 2016.

604607

605608Actually, though, this part of Urbit was designed before the Bitcoin

606−paper was published. There were other academic approaches to

609+paper was published. There were other academic approaches to

607610Byzantine consensus, but certainly none validated on a large scale as

608−Nakamoto consensus has been. It never seemed appropriate to treat

611+Nakamoto consensus has been. It never seemed appropriate to treat

609612cryptographic titles to network addresses as a case of generalized

610613Byzantine consensus, and without the existence of Bitcoin there was no

611614temptation in this direction.

612615

613−In a sense the secret of PKIs is that PKIs are easy. What's hard is

616+In a sense the secret of PKIs is that PKIs are easy. What's hard is

614617adapting an existing identity and authorization structure into a PKI.

615618If you build the simplest possible PKI, then force the human processes

616619to fit themselves to the protocol instead of vice versa, you have a

617−much easier job. Similarly, if you are not adding PKI to an existing

620+much easier job. Similarly, if you are not adding PKI to an existing

618621network, but building the network and the PKI as one system, many

619−simplifications are possible. This is once again the classic

622+simplifications are possible. This is once again the classic

620623worse-is-better method.

content/blog/your-last-computer.mdnew file+36

@@ -0,0 +1,36 @@

1++++

2+title = "Your Last Computer"

3+date = "2019-10-16"

4+description = "Your Urbit is a simpler computer, a quieter computer, a more private computer. We want it to feel predictable, safe, and reliable — things only a complete, sealed system can do. This, we hope, can get us a world where technology keeps us connected, but doesn’t dominate our lives."

5+

6+[extra]

7+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/understanding-urbit/your-last-computer/your-last-computer-waves%402x.png"

8++++

9+

10+This whole ‘simple, durable, yours’ thing may sound good, but what does it add up to? What does it feel like?

11+

12+First, let’s talk about what it should feel like in the future.

13+

14+

15+

16+Imagine that you can log in from anywhere with one simple, memorable name and password. And when you do, an entire OS appears for you. Inside is your whole digital life. Every conversation you’ve ever had, all your biometric data — every step and heartbeat. Your personal mesh of devices: your doors, your car, your irrigation. All of your communities, every message you’ve shared with friends and family. Every connection you’ve made and every archival piece of data, in one place. Secure and private, forever.

17+

18+You own and control this OS completely. Your system doesn’t live on someone else’s server, so there’s no risk of leaking it in a mass data breach or losing it when a service shuts down. Your Urbit is a sealed, secure, and durable system.

19+

20+

21+

22+We’re on our way to this future, building it step by step, but we’re not there yet. The Urbit of today is much more stripped down.

23+

24+The stripped-down Urbit – Urbit OS 1 – starts out as a new kind of social network.

25+

26+Today, each of our social tools does one thing. And so each of our communities ends up spanning multiple services. Urbit OS 1 gives you the tools to bring these together into one place.

27+

28+In Urbit OS 1, a community shares a set of modules. (Think of a module like an app without the data lock-in.) One community may choose to chat and share a forum. Another may choose to chat and watch the crypto markets. And yet another may chat, share links, ebooks, and a to-do list. Anyone can develop a module, and anyone can create a community.

29+

30+It’s a simple system for intentional digital communities. A first step away from the ill-formed digital world of today. We like to call it ‘social computing’ — on the surface it feels like a new kind of app, but under the hood it’s an OS. It’s customizable all the way down.

31+

32+We think that a new system like this, even in a simple form, will be a relief from the chaos of the current web. Think of it as a “back to the land” computing movement. If we’re ever going to build new digital cities, they’ll have to start as a few colonies on the frontier.

33+

34+

35+

36+Your Urbit is a simpler computer, a quieter computer, a more private computer. We want it to feel predictable, safe, and reliable — things only a complete, sealed system can do. This, we hope, can get us a world where technology keeps us connected, but doesn’t dominate our lives.

content/bounties.mdnew file+54

@@ -0,0 +1,54 @@

1++++

2+title = "Guide to Bounties"

3+date = "2023-01-04"

4+weight = 1

5+description = "A guide to posting and claiming bounties"

6++++

7+

8+Bounties are opportunities to do work on Urbit in exchange for address space or other funding. Bounties can be provided by companies, DAOs or individuals ("sponsors") in the Urbit universe. To the extent that they benefit the rest of the universe, the Urbit Foundation will [chip in on funding](#funding).

9+

10+For **workers**, bounties offer substantial funding opportunities and, compared to [apprenticeships](/grants/apprenticeships), are a way to take on larger challenges in a more autonomous manner. Learn how to [work on a bounty here](#work-on-a-bounty).

11+

12+For **sponsors**, bounties allow you to scale your workforce through the Urbit community, get critical tools built, or just fund cool projects that you want to see exist. Learn how to [post a bounty here](#post-a-bounty).

13+

14+## Work on a Bounty

15+

16+You can see [open bounties here](/grants?program=bounty&open=true&wip=false&completed=false#view-grants), which can claimed by filling out the form on each individual bounty.

17+

18+### How it works

19+

20+After applying, the Urbit Foundation will circulate the details of your application to the sponsor and schedule a follow-up interview to see if you would be a good fit for the project. Should your application be accepted, you will undergo a quick KYC process and recieve a contract for signature. Some bounties may also entail additional direct compensation from the sponsor for which the Urbit Foundation is not responsible for managing; please discuss these parameters directly with your sponsor.

21+

22+The sponsor of the bounty is ultimately responsible for signing off on completed work. They'll also be the primary point of contact while work is underway, although the Urbit Foundation may assign personnel to assist on bounties that it is particularly invested in.

23+

24+Sponsors are vetted by the Urbit Foundation as trustworthy to ensure their ability to fund the work that they post. The Urbit Foundation also collaborates heavily with sponsors to ensure that the bounty is [well-specified](#well-specified-bounties), which ensures that your project is both properly scoped and technically viable.

25+

26+### Getting Paid

27+

28+After you've finished your work on a given milestone, you will need to get signoff from your sponsor. To do this, contact your sponsor with the details of the milestone completed, any relevant instructions, github repos, or app download links, and solicit review from your sponsor. They can submit their approval to the Foundation by contacting `~marfun-pacpet`, at which point you are ready to [submit an invoice](https://airtable.com/shrXXCs1uaxtNSBcg). Once the Urbit Foudnation receives approval from your sponsor and an invoice for the amount agreed upon in your grant or milestone, the Foundation will pay your star allocation to the Ethereum address you have provided.

29+

30+We approve and issue payments within 30 days of invoice receipt and approval, although often payment is made more quickly. If you have any questions regarding getting paid or submitting an invoice, please contact `~marfun-pacpet` for assistance.

31+

32+## Post a Bounty

33+

34+To get started posting a new bounty, [submit it via this form](https://airtable.com/shr6ky4yshlhhqSm0).

35+

36+We at the Urbit Foundation will work with you to ensure that all bounties have [clear specifications](#well-specified-bounties) &mdash; this ensures that they get what you pay for. If your bounty submission is missing details or could be otherwise improved, we'll provide that feedback and work with you to refine your bounty.

37+

38+### Well-specified Bounties

39+

40+A well-specified bounty generally has these elements:

41+

42+- **Overview**: A clear description of what the worker will do to complete this bounty. It's a good idea to include a problem statement or rationale for the work.

43+- **Project Requirements**: An articulation of what constitutes complete work. User stories, Figma designs, interface specifications, and other technical constraints are all examples of requirements. It is recommended to reference any specific requirements &mdash; such as key user stories &mdash; on a milestone level to ensure clarity in which requirements need to be met at each stage of the project.

44+- **Worker Requirements**: A description of the skills and/or qualifications required of a prospective worker. Technologies or skills known, years of experience, work schedule (e.g. time availability), and demonstrable accomplishments are all examples of this.

45+- **Milestones**: Logical segments of work that can be considered done on their own. Breaking the project up into smaller pieces will help a new worker pick up the work should that be necessary, keeps the worker motivated with incremental achievement and remuneration, and is generally a sign of a clear specification. Milestones don't always make sense; sometimes there's only one.

46+- **Timeline**: If you're trying hit a certain deadline, make sure to specify absolute dates on the milestones. Otherwise, use relative dates (e.g. _two months_) to give the worker an idea of how long each milestone will take. This helps form an agreement between the sponsor and worker on volume of work, and grounds to seek other arrangements should schedules be missed.

47+

48+The more detail in the bounty's specification, the better the results and the smoother your working relationship will be with a contributor. Once a contributor has been selected, parameters such as absolute dates or other open ended questions will be updated prior to contract to ensure there are clear expectations for all parties involved

49+

50+### Funding

51+

52+You're free to fund your bounty with as much of your own capital as you'd like. You can also request funding from the Urbit Foundation.

53+

54+We fund projects based on their benefit to the whole network. If your bounty is for contributions to Urbit itself, or other technical infrastructure, we might fund all of it. If the bounty is to build or contribute to your company's product, we'll be open to funding less of it.

content/campus/_index.mdnew file+37

@@ -0,0 +1,37 @@

1++++

2+title = "Software Developers"

3+slug = "software-developers"

4+description = "Getting started as a software developer on Urbit"

5+sort_by = "weight"

6++++

7+

8+

9+Urbit offers foundational primitives that make it easy to build decentralized applications. This means developers can focus on creativity and application logic instead of operations to make sure the server or database doesn't go down.

10+

11+

12+Here are a few links to resources for developers:

13+

14+

15+### [Urbit Developers Overview](https://developers.urbit.org/)

16+An overview of using Urbit for development.

17+

18+### [Lightning Tutorials](https://developers.urbit.org/guides/quickstart/intro)

19+Get a feel for the process of making and deploying an Urbit app in half an hour, no previous experience required.

20+

21+### [Core Curriculum](https://developers.urbit.org/guides/core)

22+Learn the Urbit stack at your own pace.

23+

24+The Foundation also regularly runs a series of cohort-based live courses that go over the core curriculum, free and open to all. One lesson per week over the course of about eight weeks.

25+

26+### [Live Courses](https://developers.urbit.org/courses)

27+Learn the Urbit stack as part of a group.

28+

29+### [New Hooniverse](https://urbit.org/groups/~hiddev-dannut/new-hooniverse)

30+Discussion group for learning the Urbit stack. Open to beginner, intermediate, and advanced developers.

31+

32+

33+### [TomeDB](https://holium.gitbook.io/tomedb/)

34+A framework for building Urbit apps solely with Javascript.

35+

36+### [Grants](https://urbit.org/grants)

37+Build on Urbit and take ownership of the network in the process.

content/campus/blockchain-enthusiasts.mdnew file+35

@@ -0,0 +1,35 @@

1++++

2+title = "Blockchain Enthusiasts"

3+slug = "blockchain-enthusiasts"

4+description = "Learn how sound computing and sound money fit together"

5+weight = 4

6+[extra]

7+flatten_pagination = "true"

8+hide_next_title = "true"

9+hide_previous_title = "true"

10+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/understanding-urbit/urbit-id/urbit-id-cards%402x.png"

11++++

12+

13+We have yet to see the promised Cambrian explosion of general-purpose decentralized applications promised by blockchains. What happened?

14+

15+While blockchains are good for some problems, there remain others where a more general purpose computing solution is more useful. This is precisely what Urbit is for. Urbit’s vision of sound, easy-to-use, decentralized computing dovetails neatly with that of sound, easy-to-use, decentralized money.

16+

17+Learn more on how Urbit and blockchains work together:

18+

19+### [Bitcoin on Urbit: The Sovereign Stack](https://urbit.org/bitcoin)

20+How Urbit and Bitcoin fit together

21+

22+### [Azimuth](https://developers.urbit.org/reference/azimuth/azimuth)

23+Urbit’s PKI system on Ethereum

24+

25+### [Uqbar](https://uqbar.network)

26+The Urbit-native blockchain

27+

28+The leader in this space is Uqbar, an Urbit-native layer 2 blockchain that settles on Ethereum.

29+

30+From their [clearpaper](https://uqbar-network.gitbook.io/uqbar-clearpaper/uqbar-clearpaper/uqbar-clearpaper):

31+

32+>Leveraging Urbit’s peer-to-peer infrastructure, Uqbar provides a blockchain-native decentralized operating system uniquely positioned to deliver the composable primitives necessary to build a rich, functional distributed application layer. It fuses the trusted settlement of Ethereum with the decentralization, security, and interoperability benefits of full-scale peer-to-peer networking, unlocking the latent power of programmable blockchains.

33+

34+

35+

content/campus/creatives.mdnew file+21

@@ -0,0 +1,21 @@

1++++

2+title = "Creatives"

3+slug = "creatives"

4+description = "Urbit for everyone"

5+weight = 5

6+[extra]

7++++

8+

9+Urbit offers creatives the means to truly own the distribution of their work. An application becomes a tool you own rather than a service whose terms can change overnight. And with digital ownership on a decentralized network, the incentives of advertising based centralized services and an attention economy no longer apply.

10+

11+What would the world look like with more decentralized digital ownership? Check out the links below for a preview.

12+

13+### [Tirrel Studio](https://urbit.studio)

14+

15+Host, publish, and earn on Urbit. See the [Mars Review of Books.](https://marsreview.org/)

16+

17+

18+### [Meetup Grant](https://urbit.org/grants/community-meetups)

19+

20+Through our Grants program, the foundation rewards community-builders who

21+host regular meetups and help people learn about the project.

content/coinmarketcap.mdnew file+8

@@ -0,0 +1,8 @@

1++++

2+title = "CoinMarketCap"

3+[extra]

4+hidetitle = "true"

5+index = "true"

6++++

7+

8+The ticket number for CoinMarketCap verification is 429809.

content/communities/urbit-austin.mdnew file+11

@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit Austin"

3+description = ""

4+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/communities/urbit-austin.png"

5++++

6+

7+Curious about Urbit? Questions about Hoon syntax? Fed up with the current state of the internet? Join us to talk about the internet's future.

8+

9+––

10+

11+[Meetup page](https://www.meetup.com/Urbit-Austin/)

content/communities/urbit-berlin.mdnew file+16

@@ -0,0 +1,16 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit Berlin"

3+description = ""

4+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/communities/urbit-berlin.png"

5++++

6+

7+If you are sick of the current state of the web, of handing over your data and entire online presence to a handful of American corporations, of a web fueled with ads, then Urbit might be for you.

8+

9+Are you curious about Urbit and want to try it? Are you an Urbit OG looking to find to find others? Do you want to build your own peer-to-peer apps and leave the centralized web behind?

10+

11+We meet regularly in Berlin, and we try to have a theme or presentation for each meetup.

12+

13+

14+––

15+

16+[Meetup page](https://www.meetup.com/urbit-berlin/)

content/communities/urbit-christchurch.mdnew file+13

@@ -0,0 +1,13 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit Christchurch"

3+description = ""

4+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/communities/urbit-christchurch.jpg"

5++++

6+

7+Curious about Urbit? Questions about Hoon syntax? Fed up with the current state of the internet? Join us to talk about the internet's future.

8+

9+––

10+

11+[Eventbrite](https://chchurbit.eventbrite.com)

12+

13+[Telegram](https://t.me/chchurbit)

content/communities/urbit-cph.mdnew file+11

@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit København"

3+description = ""

4+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/communities/urbit-cph.png"

5++++

6+

7+~norsyr-torryn/nordics

8+

9+––

10+

11+[Twitter](https://twitter.com/UrbitCPH)

content/communities/urbit-dc.mdnew file+19

@@ -0,0 +1,19 @@

1++++

2+title = "DC Metro Urbit Meetup Group"

3+description = ""

4+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/communities/urbit-dc.png"

5++++

6+

7+This is a DC/Northern Virginia/Southern Maryland Urbit discussion group.

8+

9+It is for Urbit users or the urbit-curious or people who like to think and talk about decentralization, independence, and freedom on the internet.

10+

11+We will socialize, discuss urbit and related topics, and support lab and learning activities.

12+

13+Find us on urbit chat at ~tillys-fasryp/nova-urbit-meetup-lobby-3347

14+

15+––

16+

17+[Meetup page](https://www.meetup.com/dc-urbit-meetup-group/)

18+

19+[Twitter](https://twitter.com/dcurbit)

content/communities/urbit-denver.mdnew file+19

@@ -0,0 +1,19 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit Denver"

3+description = ""

4+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/communities/urbit-denver.png"

5++++

6+

7+While Urbit is the animating force behind this group, people of all interest levels & familiarity with the project - be they long-time users, or newcomers simply wondering what the heck Urbit is - are welcome & encouraged to attend these meet-ups. The conversations are lively and span a wide variety of topics, ranging from Urbit to philosophy, tech, crypto, the arts, health and well-being, and much more.

8+

9+Our goal is simply to build a community of people interested in the project and the future it envisions, in which members can freely connect and discuss the project and the various ideas & values adjacent to it.

10+

11+And for those wondering what the heck is Urbit? Urbit is an ambitious reimagining of what the internet can be; it is a virtual computer and peer-to-peer network, built on a philosophy of human-scale computing, where you own all your data and identity. Urbit strives to once again make the computer a useful tool under the control of the user, and not vice versa. Still confused? Stop by and we'll (try to) explain it.

12+

13+––

14+

15+~nospex-larsut/mile-high-mars

16+

17+[Meetup page](https://www.meetup.com/mile-high-mars-denver-urbit-group/)

18+

19+[Organizer's Twitter](https://twitter.com/OnAPersonaLevel)

content/communities/urbit-london.mdnew file+15

@@ -0,0 +1,15 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit London"

3+description = ""

4+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/communities/urbit-london.jpg"

5++++

6+

7+Urbit London is a monthly, occasionally biweekly, meet-up series aiming to establish a long-lasting community within the London tech and cultural scene.

8+

9+––

10+

11+~tichus-holnet/urblon

12+

13+[Twitter](https://twitter.com/urblon)

14+

15+[Telegram](https://t.me/urblon)

content/communities/urbit-mst.mdnew file+13

@@ -0,0 +1,13 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit MST (Utah)"

3+description = ""

4+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/communities/urbit-utah.png"

5++++

6+

7+Are you looking for more than the options presented to you?

8+

9+Come to our Urbit (MST) meetup. All are welcome. Bring a computer and we can onboard you with a planet and hosting for free on site. Whether you are new to Urbit or fluent in Hoon, come and meet others in Utah interested in Urbit.

10+

11+––

12+

13+[Website](https://urbitmst.org/)

content/communities/urbit-ny.mdnew file+11

@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit NY"

3+description = ""

4+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/communities/urbit-ny.png"

5++++

6+

7+We love experimenting with Urbit & tinkering with Arvo, Hoon, & Nock

8+

9+––

10+

11+[Meetup page](https://www.meetup.com/Urbit-New-York/)

content/communities/urbit-paris.mdnew file+23

@@ -0,0 +1,23 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit Paris"

3+description = ""

4+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/communities/urbitparis.png"

5++++

6+

7+Join us for our monthly Urbit meetups in Paris!

8+

9+Whether you're a tech enthusiast, an established Urbit aficionado, or a newcomer to the scene, our community is meant to welcome and engage everyone.

10+

11+If you're confused about what Urbit is, no worries, most people are at first. Drop by and we'll give you our best explanations of what Urbit is and how it's going to change the internet as we know it.

12+

13+We'll introduce Urbit, help you boot your own ship, and make sure you go back home all set!

14+

15+See you there!

16+

17+––

18+

19+~solsup-soplyd/urbit-paris

20+

21+[Twitter](https://twitter.com/urbitparis)

22+

23+[Meetup](https://www.meetup.com/urbit-paris/)

content/communities/urbit-seattle.mdnew file+14

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit Seattle"

3+description = ""

4+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/communities/urbit-seattle.png"

5++++

6+

7+Urbit is a simple, durable computer that you own 100% and forever. In this group, we'll discuss ongoing project developments, technical details, and how to use Urbit. With occasional speakers that will present on various topics.

8+

9+

10+––

11+

12+[Meetup page](https://www.meetup.com/urbit-seattle/)

13+

14+[Twitter](https://twitter.com/SeattleUrbit)

content/communities/urbit-sf.mdnew file+15

@@ -0,0 +1,15 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit SF"

3+description = ""

4+image = "https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/communities/urbit-sf.png"

5++++

6+

7+Want to own and control the server side? Your digital identity, data and computation?

8+

9+So do we — so we're building Urbit. We set this group up for anyone excited about this kind of stuff, even those who think we're totally crazy.

10+

11+Come join us to talk about what the future of the internet might look like.

12+

13+––

14+

15+[Meetup page](https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/)

content/ecosystem/spotlight/2022-august.mdnew file+44

@@ -0,0 +1,44 @@

1++++

2+title = "August 2022"

3+date = "2022-07-27"

4+

5+[featured-1]

6+title = "Software as Soulcraft and the Metaphysics of Engineering with Neal Davis"

7+description = "Professor Neal Davis Discusses why Urbit computers have souls, Shinto philosophy, and more"

8+image=""

9+content = """

10+Urbit Foundation’s Director of Developer Experience Neal Davis discusses the philosophy of development on Urbit in a wide ranging conversation that covers everything from the spirit of objects and why it’s not obvious that nuclear fusion would be of benefit to mankind.

11+

12+{% iframe height="220" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8f8vk1BhlDo" title="YouTube video player" width="100%" /%}

13+

14+

15+"""

16+

17+[featured-2]

18+title = "Studio"

19+description = "Need a personal website, fast? Studio can set one up in under a minute."

20+content = """

21+Studio is an application from [Tirrel](/organizations/tirrel) which enables Urbit users to turn a Groups notebook into a public blog with just a few clicks.

22+

23+One can enable comments, multiple templates, and even integrate with Sendgrid to send new posts as email updates.

24+

25+

26+

27+

28+Tirrel has announced on their blog that Studio’s next release will include USD payments integration, allowing individuals to use Urbit to make a storefront and accept USD.

29+

30+While most Urbit applications are focused on activity within the Urbit universe, Studio is unique in its focus on connecting the fiat and clearweb worlds to Urbit.

31+

32+"""

33+

34+[featured-3]

35+title = "The Mars Review of Books"

36+description = "The Mars Review of Books is a magazine in print and on Urbit covering both contemporary arts and culture as well as global sociopolitical issues."

37+content = """

38+

39+The Mars Review of Books is the first literary publication hosted on Urbit. Its inaugural issue includes an article on nuclear fusion from Urbit Foundation's [Neal Davis](https://urbit.org/ids/~lagrev-nocfep), book reviews from writer and man-about-town [Christian Lorentzen](https://twitter.com/xlorentzen), and reflections on millennial romance from Twitter personality [Default Friend](https://twitter.com/default_friend). The MRB can be purchased in [physical form](https://store.marsreview.org) or [read online](https://marsreview.org).

40+

41+

42+

43+"""

44++++

content/ecosystem/spotlight/2022-december.mdnew file+40

@@ -0,0 +1,40 @@

1++++

2+title = "December 2022"

3+date = "2022-11-29"

4+

5+[featured-1]

6+title = "UF Public"

7+description = "The best place to get the latest updates from the team at the Urbit Foundation."

8+image="https://interstellar.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/battus-datsun/2022.11.07..19.39.22-Sig.png"

9+content = """

10+Join the new and improved Urbit Foundation group to get updates from the Urbit Foundation spanning infrastructure development, developer activity, ecosystem news, announcements, and ways to get involved.

11+

12+

13+"""

14+

15+[featured-2]

16+title = "Groups"

17+description = "The new Groups application from Tlon is officially available."

18+content = """

19+

20+Test drive the future of Urbit now with Tlon's initial release of of Groups. This version features improved discoverability with features like searching by nickname, and creating public, private, or secret groups.

21+

22+Groups is part of the new Landscape suite of applications, and integrates seamlessly with Talk, Gallery, and Notes.

23+

24+Join the [Tlon group](/groups/~nibset-napwyn/tlon-public) for more information.

25+

26+

27+

28+"""

29+

30+[featured-3]

31+

32+title = "Scene"

33+image=""

34+description = "Explore Urbit with tirrel's desktop app, Scene."

35+content = """

36+

37+Tirrel is developing an outside-the-browser Urbit experience geared towards content creators. Check out their vision for Urbit as a desktop application.

38+

39+"""

40++++

content/ecosystem/spotlight/2022-november.mdnew file+42

@@ -0,0 +1,42 @@

1++++

2+title = "November 2022"

3+date = "2022-10-28"

4+

5+[featured-1]

6+title = "radio"

7+description = "Join or create shared environments for chatting and DJing with YouTube."

8+image="https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/applications/radio-card.jpg"

9+content = """

10+Assembly Capital recently released radio, an app that lets you create or tune into rooms where you can collaboratively DJ with other users on the network.

11+

12+Radio turns the algorithm-driven institution that is Youtube into an experience that's more like watching an old TV with just a few channels with your friends.

13+

14+Developer ~nodmyn-dosrux writes "Radio is the first urbit app with presence built in. Accurate presence data creates a socially charged experience ... Presence gives people reason to engage with each other. Our natural social impulses disincentivize “lurking”, but this doesn’t work when software makes us invisible."

15+

16+

17+

18+

19+"""

20+

21+[featured-2]

22+title = "Three Things #40: October 23, 2022"

23+description = "What the heck is Urbit?"

24+image="https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/articles/3things40.jpg"

25+content = """

26+

27+Lane Rettig takes on the challenge of defining Urbit.

28+

29+

30+"""

31+

32+[featured-3]

33+

34+title = "E12 - The Gang Does an Urbit Maxi Episode"

35+image=""

36+description = "Ted Blackman joins the Uqbar crew to discuss Assembly 2022, composability and the future of Urbit."

37+content = """

38+

39+This episode of [Uqbar](/organizations/uqbar)'s podcast asks important questions like "How do we evaluate Urbit?" and "Is Urbit ready for outside investment?" in this unique episode with long-time Urbit core developer Ted Blackman.

40+

41+"""

42++++

content/ecosystem/spotlight/2022-october.mdnew file+41

@@ -0,0 +1,41 @@

1++++

2+title = "October 2022"

3+date = "2022-10-03"

4+

5+[featured-1]

6+title = "Uqbar Development Suite"

7+description = "Write smart contracts and blockchain applications in an integrated development suite."

8+image=""

9+content = """

10+At Assembly 2022 Uqbar debuted their brand new developer toolkit: Ziggurat. Ziggurat provides a unified development interface where programmers can write contracts, receive compiler feedback, and test on a fake chain. This promises a huge improvement on the developer experience for smart contracts and blockchain application development alike. Note: As Ziggurat is in active development and undergoing frequent updates, Uqbar recommends installing Ziggurat on a moon rather than your primary ship.

11+

12+

13+

14+

15+"""

16+

17+[featured-2]

18+title = "Tlon"

19+description = "The organization that created Urbit is now focused on building the best possible foundational user experiences on Urbit."

20+image="https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/spotlight/tlonlogos.png"

21+content = """

22+

23+Tlon is the organization responsible for the genesis of Urbit and now focused on creating lasting and effective tools for Urbit. Formerly rather quiet about its development activity, Tlon has recently launched a [beautiful public website](https://tlon.io) and is sharing more of its process in the new [Tlon public group](/groups/~nibset-napwyn/tlon-public).

24+

25+

26+

27+

28+"""

29+

30+[featured-3]

31+

32+title = "The Dream of Digital Homesteading"

33+image="https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/spotlight/compact-thumb2.png"

34+description = "Compact Magazine's managing editor Geoff Shullenberger attended Assembly 2022 and tuned into both the event vibes and Urbit's technical aspirations."

35+content = """

36+

37+Compact Magazine provides a clear-eyed view of both the social and technical visions of the Urbit community as well as the literary milieu around it.

38+

39+

40+"""

41++++

content/ecosystem/spotlight/2022-september.mdnew file+45

@@ -0,0 +1,45 @@

1++++

2+title = "September 2022"

3+date = "2022-08-29"

4+

5+[featured-1]

6+title = "sphinx"

7+description = "Browse your urbit network with Urbit's first submission and search engine."

8+image=""

9+content = """

10+Sphinx is Urbit’s first search engine. Unlike traditional web search engines, sphinx uses a gossip mechanism originally found in ~paldev’s rumors, so that anything you and your pals post is shared to your pals, as well as pals of pals.

11+

12+You can currently submit and search for applications, groups, and content (notebooks and collections), as well as browse by tag.

13+

14+

15+

16+"""

17+

18+[featured-2]

19+title = "peat"

20+description = "Back up your urbit with peat, Urbit's first backup utility."

21+image="https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/spotlight/peat-thumb.png"

22+content = """

23+

24+Peat is Urbit’s first backup utility. Prior to Peat, there was no easy way to backup content from groups from your ship aside from copying your entire urbit. Peat makes it easy to export all your data from Groups, which uses the graph-store data structure, and in the future will provide support for the new structure in Tlon’s upcoming Groups revamp.

25+

26+

27+

28+

29+"""

30+

31+[featured-3]

32+

33+title = "Josh Lehman: Urbit – The Peer-to-Peer Network Re-Decentralizing the Internet"

34+description = "Urbit Foundation Executive Director Josh Lehman and Epicenter host Brian Crain have a wide ranging discussion on Urbit's history and future."

35+image="https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/spotlight/epicenterjoshthumb.jpg"

36+

37+content = """

38+

39+In this podcast Urbit Foundation Executive Director Josh Lehman provides a broad overview of that state of Urbit as of 2022, and what people can expecture in the near future and beyond.

40+

41+{% iframe height="150" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DqqUM-L_-2s" title="YouTube video player" width="100%" /%}

42+

43+

44+"""

45++++

content/ecosystem/spotlight/2023-february.mdnew file+48

@@ -0,0 +1,48 @@

1++++

2+title = "February 2023"

3+date = "2023-02-01"

4+

5+[featured-1]

6+title = "Realm"

7+description = "Realm is a desktop Urbit interface from that offers a variety of integrated features."

8+image="https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/applications/realm-hero.png"

9+content = """

10+

11+Realm proposes an Urbit experience that is outside the browser, running as a full-screen cross-platform native application. It offers features like shared application suites, built-in audio chatrooms, an integrated crypto wallet, as well as its own web browser.

12+

13+

14+

15+Realm is the flagship product of Holium, who are also building out several collaboration tools akin to a cloud productivity suite for Urbit and Realm. These applications can be bundled together into unique spaces – desktop environments that have been configured for communities and teams.

16+

17+

18+

19+Realm is currently in private alpha. Visit [holium.com](https://holium.com) to sign up for the invitation waitlist. In the meantime, you can also enjoy an [entertaining podcast](/podcasts/2023-01-24_reject-triviality) in which Holium founder `~lomder-librun` talks about his vision for Realm, amongst many other interesting topics.

20+

21+"""

22+

23+[featured-2]

24+title = "Native Planet"

25+description = "Native Planet is building Urbit-native hardware as well software which enables standalone Urbit home servers."

26+image="https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/spotlight/native-planet-thumb.jpg"

27+content = """

28+

29+Native Planet is Urbit's first dedicated hardware company. Their first product, the [Tellurian](https://www.nativeplanet.io/hardware), is a turnkey Urbit computer that you can run at home and access anywhere thanks to Native Planet's open-source [software](https://www.nativeplanet.io/software).

30+

31+

32+

33+What's the point of having a physical Urbit computer, besides the fact that they look very cool?

34+

35+You get the best of both worlds: the accessibility of cloud hosting, with the ownership of running Urbit locally. Groundseg and Startram make your Urbit accessible to any networked device without the need to trust any cloud service provider.

36+

37+

38+"""

39+

40+[featured-3]

41+title = "Urbit for Idiots | Galen Wolfe-Pauly, Tlon Corporation"

42+description = "Tlon CEO Galen Wolfe-Pauly talks to the Boys Club ladies and expounds on the fundamentals of Urbit."

43+image=""

44+content = """

45+

46+Is Urbit a computer? Is owning 'space' on the internet valuable? What is Urbit? How is it different from the the existing internet? Galen and Boys Club get to the bottom of these evergreen topics.

47+"""

48++++

content/ecosystem/spotlight/2023-june.mdnew file+40

@@ -0,0 +1,40 @@

1++++

2+title = "June 2023"

3+date = "2023-06-05"

4+

5+[featured-1]

6+title = "Labyrinth DAO"

7+description = ""

8+image=""

9+content = """

10+

11+Labyrinth DAO is a new decentralized autonomous organization for investing in Urbit projects. Supported by [Tribute Labs](https://tributelabs.xyz/), Labyrinth DAO will foster the growth and development of Urbit as it paves the way for the new internet. Find Labyrinth DAO on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/labyrinth_dao) or connect at labyrinthdao.io to get involved.

12+

13+

14+"""

15+

16+[featured-2]

17+title = "Osmosis"

18+description = ""

19+image=""

20+content = """

21+

22+Holium’s AJ LaMarc (~larryx-woldyr) has built Urbit front-ends for Uniswap, Osmosis, and Safe. This means that you can now swap or hold tokens and access your multi-sig from the comfort of your Urbit. You don’t have to rely on centralized services to provide interfaces for your favorite web3 platforms. You can download these apps on your Urbit today.

23+

24+Get

25+[Osmosis](/applications/~larryx-woldyr/osmosis) |

26+[Uniswap](/applications/~larryx-woldyr/uniswap) |

27+[Safe](/applications/~larryx-woldyr/safe)

28+

29+"""

30+

31+[featured-3]

32+title = "Zorp"

33+description = ""

34+image=""

35+content = """

36+

37+Zorp has built a secure-by-design zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM) with a uniquely minimal software supply chain which utilizes Nock as its instruction set. Nock, Urbit’s low-level language, is a famously simple instruction set. That property aligns itself well with what you might create if you were designing a language from first principles to do zero-knowledge proofs. Zorp’s zkVM could unlock new possibilities for crypto and more. Check back at Zorp’s [website](https://zorp.io/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/ZorpZK) for more info.

38+

39+"""

40++++

content/ecosystem/spotlight/2023-may.mdnew file+50

@@ -0,0 +1,50 @@

1++++

2+title = "May 2023"

3+date = "2023-05-01"

4+

5+[featured-1]

6+title = "The Mars Review of Books"

7+description = "The Mars Review of Books is a magazine in print and on Urbit. The third issue is now available in print and on online."

8+image="https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/spotlight/mrb3-thumb.png"

9+content = """

10+

11+The *Mars Review of Books*, a magazine in print and on Urbit, recently put out its third issue — with pieces from Sean Thor Conroe, Marc Hochstein, Miles Routledge, Peter Nimitz and more. And now for the first time, the *MRB* is selling digital and print subscriptions exclusively through Urbit.

12+

13+

14+

15+Using payment rails from [Studio](http://localhost:3000/applications/~tirrel/studio) by [Tirrel](https://tirrel.io/), you can now plug in your credit card and subscribe directly to content hosted on an Urbit owned and operated by the people producing the content (in this case, the ~bidbel star).

16+

17+Visit marsreview.org to subscribe to the magazine, buy a print copy of Issue 3, or read selected unpaywalled pieces online.

18+

19+

20+"""

21+

22+[featured-2]

23+title = "Portal"

24+description = "Find and curate Urbit apps, groups, and media from fellow Urbit users"

25+image="https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/applications/portal.svg"

26+content = """

27+

28+Portal is a lot like this ecosystem section of the Urbit website, except *on Urbit*. It’s a great place to find Urbit apps, Urbit groups, and recent media about your favorite Urbit developers and community members.

29+

30+

31+

32+Because Portal is on Urbit, networking among peers is built in. Anyone using Portal can curate their own list of apps and groups, and display that to other Portal users. It’s a great proof of concept for the way decentralized curation can work, a lot of fun to use, and the perfect place to start for anyone trying out Urbit for the first time.

33+

34+You’ll have to check it out on Urbit at ~worpet-bildet/portal

35+

36+"""

37+

38+[featured-3]

39+title = "%blog"

40+description = "Host a blog on your urbit with this application from ~dachus-tiprel."

41+image="https://storage.googleapis.com/media.urbit.org/site/ecosystem/spotlight/blog-thumb.png"

42+content = """

43+

44+Blog is just what it sounds like. A new tool from Uqbar, the app lets anyone on Urbit spin up and customize a blog that displays to the net at an auto-generated URL. Nothing could be breezier. Plus it’s got payments through Uqbar and group-blogging settings on the roadmap. Find out more about it on its [creator's blog](https://dachus-tiprel.tlon.network/blog/introducing-blog).

45+

46+

47+

48+Download it at ~hanrut-sillet-dachus-tiprel/blog and let the world know what’s on your mind. Bonus feature: a simple command allows you to automatically publish the URL of your latest blog entry to the notorious [Rumors](applications/~paldev/rumors) app.

49+"""

50++++

content/events/2017-08-11-after-hours-bootstrapping-urbit-from-the-ethereum-blockchain.mdnew file+21

@@ -0,0 +1,21 @@

1++++

2+title = "After hours: Bootstrapping Urbit from the Ethereum blockchain"

3+ends = "2017-08-12T19:00:00.000-07:00"

4+pinned = false

5+location = "Urbit Office"

6+image = ""

7+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/242295411/"

8+description = "This time we'll be opening up the office, opening up a few cold ones, and talking about Urbit + Ethereum."

9+guests = ""

10+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

11+starts = "2017-08-12T16:00:00.000-07:00"

12+

13+[[hosts]]

14+name = "Urbit"

15++++

16+

17+One thing that's been keeping us busy over the past month is designing the relationship between Urbit and the Ethereum blockchain.  We'll present our current design for this (from ~8:30 - 9) for people to comment on and ask questions about.

18+

19+Otherwise, as usual, there will be plenty of time to hang out and chat with other Urbit people.

20+

21+The backyard is really nice in the evening!  Feel free to bring friends"

content/events/2017-09-22-after-hours-fun-with-arvo-the-urbit-os.mdnew file+20

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@

1++++

2+title = "After hours: Fun with %arvo (the Urbit OS)"

3+ends = "2017-09-23T19:00:00.000-07:00"

4+location = "Urbit Office"

5+image = ""

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/243213975/"

7+description = "Same as usual: cold drinks in the backyard with the hoons.  Come meet other people crazy enough to want to replace the internet."

8+guests = ""

9+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

10+starts = "2017-09-23T16:00:00.000-07:00"

11+

12+[[hosts]]

13+name = "Urbit"

14++++

15+

16+Ted, the newest addition to our team, has been working on making changes to %arvo all over the place.  He'll give a short talk about some of his adventures in the Urbit OS and how they're going to make Urbit faster and easier to use.

17+

18+That, and discussing why Equifax should have never been holding all that customer data in the first place.

19+

20+Oh yeah, and we just got a fresh batch of Nock shirts!"

content/events/2017-10-26-after-hours-designing-robust-human-systems.mdnew file+20

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@

1++++

2+title = "After hours: Designing robust human systems"

3+ends = "2017-10-27T19:00:00.000-07:00"

4+location = "Urbit Office"

5+image = ""

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/244316080/"

7+description = "The office will be open and the beer will be cold.  Come hang out and talk about all things Urbit and Urbit related.  Cryptoeconomics, protocols, architecture, Japanese poetry, ancient aqueducts.  You get the idea."

8+guests = ""

9+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

10+starts = "2017-10-27T16:00:00.000-07:00"

11+

12+[[hosts]]

13+name = "Urbit"

14++++

15+

16+Galen is going to give a short (~20m) talk on designing robust human systems.  No code, no math, no time in the terminal.  This is a completely non-technical talk about design principles.  It was originally given at the IDEO Blueprint event a few weeks ago.

17+

18+Above all, these meetups are for meeting other people crazy enough to think the internet can be replaced.

19+

20+Feel free to bring friends!

content/events/2017-11-16-after-hours-visiting-contributors.mdnew file+17

@@ -0,0 +1,17 @@

1++++

2+title = "After hours: Visiting contributors"

3+ends = "2017-11-17T19:00:00.000-08:00"

4+location = "Urbit Office"

5+image = ""

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/245090392/"

7+description = "We've moved! Come check out our new digs, have a beer and hear about what people have been working on."

8+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

9+starts = "2017-11-17T16:00:00.000-08:00"

10+

11+[[hosts]]

12+name = "Urbit"

13++++

14+

15+This week we have ~mastyr-morzod, ~littel-ponnys and ~mastyr-harlud visiting the office. They've all been contributing great stuff from afar, so we figured out how to get them all in the same room to hack on Urbit for the week. On Thursday evening they'll talk about what they've been coming up with.

16+

17+We'll also spend plenty of time just hanging around and talking about Parity, BCH, and everything else crypto-related. Feel free to bring friends!"

content/events/2018-01-26-urbit-irl-20181.mdnew file+18

@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit IRL ~2018.1"

3+ends = "2018-01-27T18:00:00.000-08:00"

4+location = "Urbit office"

5+image = ""

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/246972285/"

7+description = "Happy New Year!"

8+guests = ""

9+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

10+starts = "2018-01-27T16:00:00.000-08:00"

11+

12+[[hosts]]

13+name = "Urbit"

14++++

15+

16+Turns out that just getting Urbit fans in one room is pretty fun — so come join. No demos or talks this time. Just some time to hang, listen to music and meet up IRL. The room is full of desks and the internet is pretty fast. So impromptu demos and tutorials are the norm. Bring your laptop and we'll install Urbit for you.

17+

18+Feel free to bring friends!"

content/events/2018-02-23-urbit-irl-20182.mdnew file+18

@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit IRL ~2018.2"

3+ends = "2018-02-24T19:00:00.000-08:00"

4+location = "Urbit office"

5+image = ""

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/247797527/"

7+description = "Turns out that just getting Urbit fans in one room is pretty fun — so come hang out and have something to drink."

8+guests = ""

9+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

10+starts = "2018-02-24T16:00:00.000-08:00"

11+

12+[[hosts]]

13+name = "Urbit"

14++++

15+

16+No demos or talks. Just some time to hang, listen to music and meet up IRL. The room is full of desks and the internet is pretty fast. So impromptu demos and tutorials are the norm. Bring your laptop and we'll install Urbit for you. Or just relax and talk to people.

17+

18+Feel free to bring friends!"

content/events/2018-03-11-20183-hoon-school.mdnew file+16

@@ -0,0 +1,16 @@

1++++

2+title = "~2018.3 Hoon School"

3+ends = "2018-03-12T19:00:00.000-07:00"

4+location = "Urbit office"

5+image = ""

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/248416276/"

7+description = "Come, bring your laptop, and we'll get you started building things in Urbit's language — Hoon."

8+guests = ""

9+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

10+starts = "2018-03-12T16:00:00.000-07:00"

11+

12+[[hosts]]

13+name = "Urbit"

14++++

15+

16+There's no lesson per-se, think of it more like an 'independent projects' class. A few of us will be around to help you get started working on whatever you're interested in. It's completely fine if you're new to the language. We're going to start with only 10 spots so we can help everyone individually.

content/events/2018-03-23-urbit-irl-20183.mdnew file+18

@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit IRL ~2018.3"

3+ends = "2018-03-24T19:00:00.000-07:00"

4+location = "Urbit office"

5+image = ""

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/248852261/"

7+description = "Turns out that just getting Urbit fans in one room is pretty fun — so come hang out and have a beer."

8+guests = ""

9+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

10+starts = "2018-03-24T16:00:00.000-07:00"

11+

12+[[hosts]]

13+name = "Urbit"

14++++

15+

16+No demos or talks. Just some time to hang, listen to music and meet up IRL. The room is full of desks and the internet is pretty fast. So impromptu demos and tutorials are the norm. Bring your laptop and we'll install Urbit for you. Or just relax and talk to the weird array of people who also want to replace the internet.

17+

18+Feel free to bring friends!

content/events/2018-04-08-20184-hoon-school.mdnew file+16

@@ -0,0 +1,16 @@

1++++

2+title = "~2018.4 Hoon School"

3+ends = "2018-04-09T00:00:00.000-07:00"

4+location = "Urbit office"

5+image = ""

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/249019207/"

7+description = "Come, bring your laptop, and we'll get you started building things in Urbit's language — Hoon."

8+guests = ""

9+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

10+starts = "2018-04-08T21:00:00.000-07:00"

11+

12+[[hosts]]

13+name = "Urbit"

14++++

15+

16+There's no lesson per-se, think of it more like an 'independent projects' class. A few of us will be around to help you get started working on whatever you're interested in. It's completely fine if you're new to the language. We're going to start with 20 spots so we can help everyone individually.

content/events/2018-05-25-urbit-irl-20185.mdnew file+18

@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit IRL ~2018.5"

3+ends = "2018-05-26T19:00:00.000-07:00"

4+location = "Urbit office"

5+image = ""

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/250889557/"

7+description = "Turns out that just getting Urbit fans in one room is pretty fun — so come hang out and have a beer (or wine)."

8+guests = ""

9+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

10+starts = "2018-05-26T16:00:00.000-07:00"

11+

12+[[hosts]]

13+name = "Urbit"

14++++

15+

16+Ted will give a quick update on Urbit's new build system, ford. Then it's time to hang, listen to music (our friend Grayson will be playing records) and meet up IRL. The room is full of desks and the internet is pretty fast. Impromptu demos and tutorials are the norm. Bring your laptop and we'll install Urbit for you. Or just relax and talk to the weird array of people who also want to replace the internet.

17+

18+Feel free to bring friends!

content/events/2018-08-03-after-hours-decentralized-web-summit.mdnew file+14

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@

1++++

2+title = "After hours 'decentralized web summit'"

3+ends = "2018-08-04T15:00:00.000-07:00"

4+location = "Orbit Room"

5+image = ""

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/253423219/"

7+description = "We’re hosting a last minute happy hour for our friends in town for the Decentralized Web Summit. All are welcome to join us tomorrow, Friday, August 3 at the Orbit Room from 5-7PM."

8+guests = ""

9+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

10+starts = "2018-08-04T13:00:00.000-07:00"

11+

12+[[hosts]]

13+name = "Urbit"

14++++

content/events/2018-08-17-urbit-irl-20188.mdnew file+20

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit IRL ~2018.8"

3+ends = "2018-08-18T18:00:00.000-07:00"

4+location = "Urbit Office"

5+image = ""

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/253292678/"

7+description = "UPDATE: Hey Everyone! Due to a conflict, we are rescheduling our gathering to the following Friday, August 17."

8+guests = ""

9+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

10+starts = "2018-08-18T16:00:00.000-07:00"

11+

12+[[hosts]]

13+name = "Urbit"

14++++

15+

16+Turns out that just getting Urbit fans in one room is pretty fun — so come hang out and have a beer.

17+

18+No demos or talks this time, but we will be hosting Hoon School again soon. Just some time to hang, listen to music and meet up IRL. The room is full of desks and the internet is pretty fast. So impromptu demos and tutorials are the norm. Bring your laptop and we'll install Urbit for you. Or just relax and talk to the weird array of people who also want to replace the internet.

19+

20+Feel free to bring friends!

content/events/2018-09-21-urbit-irl-20189.mdnew file+18

@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit IRL ~2018.9"

3+ends = "2018-09-22T19:00:00.000-07:00"

4+location = "Urbit Office"

5+image = ""

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/254602025/"

7+description = "Turns out that just getting Urbit fans in one room is pretty fun — so come hang out and have a beer (or wine)."

8+guests = ""

9+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

10+starts = "2018-09-22T16:00:00.000-07:00"

11+

12+[[hosts]]

13+name = "Urbit"

14++++

15+

16+Gavin will give an update on Urbit design at 8:30. Then it's time to hang, listen to music and meet up IRL. The room has tables and the internet is pretty fast. Impromptu demos and tutorials are the norm. Bring your laptop and we'll install Urbit for you. Or just relax and talk to the weird array of people who also want to replace the internet.

17+

18+Feel free to bring friends!

content/events/2018-10-10-urbit-zcash-blockchain-week.mdnew file+24

@@ -0,0 +1,24 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit + Zcash: 'Blockchain Week'"

3+ends = "2018-10-11T18:00:00.000-07:00"

4+location = "Urbit Office"

5+image = ""

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/255001807/"

7+description = "We're all full and looking forward to seeing you tonight. After you check-in at the front door please come up to floor 2, room 222."

8+guests = ""

9+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

10+starts = "2018-10-11T15:00:00.000-07:00"

11+

12+[[hosts]]

13+name = "Urbit"

14++++

15+

16+~Schedule

17+

18+7 - 8: Come on time for hot pizza!

19+

20+8 - 8:30: Alejandro Machado, researcher, advocate, and member of the Zcash community will speak

21+

22+8:30 - 9: Galen Wolfe-Pauly will tell you things about Urbit and our wallet

23+

24+9 - 10: Hangout

content/events/2018-12-20-after-hours-its-just-a-party-man.mdnew file+18

@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@

1++++

2+title = "After hours: It's just a party, man"

3+ends = "2018-12-21T18:00:00.000-08:00"

4+location = "Urbit Office"

5+image = ""

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/256732938/"

7+description = "We had a busy and productive 2018. This time around, we're just going to play music and relax."

8+guests = ""

9+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

10+starts = "2018-12-21T15:00:00.000-08:00"

11+

12+[[hosts]]

13+name = "Urbit"

14++++

15+

16+Come have a beer, connect with Urbit developers, fans and friends IRL, and ask questions about the address space going on-chain (if you have them).

17+

18+Feel free to bring friends!

content/events/2019-03-01-after-hours-ask-galen-anything.mdnew file+20

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@

1++++

2+title = "After hours: Ask Galen Anything"

3+ends = "2019-03-02T06:30:00.000-08:00"

4+location = "Urbit Office"

5+image = ""

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/259144802/"

7+description = "We thought we'd try something new this month. Come hang out and ask Galen questions about Azimuth, Arvo, or any part of Urbit."

8+guests = ""

9+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

10+starts = "2019-03-02T15:30:00.000-08:00"

11+

12+[[hosts]]

13+name = "Urbit"

14++++

15+

16+8:00-9:00pm: AMA

17+

18+Afterwards, have a beer, connect with Urbit developers, fans, and friends IRL.

19+

20+Feel free to bring friends and share the primer. [https://urbit.org/primer](https://urbit.org/primer)

content/events/2019-03-08-urbit-irl-austin-tx.mdnew file+16

@@ -0,0 +1,16 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit IRL: Austin, TX"

3+ends = "2019-03-09T15:00:00.000-08:00"

4+location = "Garage"

5+image = ""

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/259307805/"

7+description = "We're coming to Austin, TX! It turns out that just getting Urbit fans in one room is pretty fun — so come hang out and have a drink on us. Feel free to bring friends and come early for Urbit shirts."

8+guests = ""

9+timezone = "America/Chicago"

10+starts = "2019-03-09T13:00:00.000-08:00"

11+

12+[[hosts]]

13+name = "Urbit"

14++++

15+

16+Thank you to our friends over at Garage for hosting us. We'll be there from 5-7 PM.

content/events/2019-04-19-urbit-irl-20194.mdnew file+20

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit IRL ~2019.4"

3+ends = "2019-04-20T18:00:00.000-07:00"

4+location = "Urbit Office"

5+image = ""

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/260326318/"

7+description = "Turns out that just getting Urbit fans in one room is pretty fun — so come hang out and have a beer (or wine)."

8+guests = ""

9+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

10+starts = "2019-04-20T15:00:00.000-07:00"

11+

12+[[hosts]]

13+name = "Urbit"

14++++

15+

16+By popular demand: we'll try to keep this one QUIET so everybody can talk.

17+

18+Come for a quick update on what we're working on. Stay to relax and talk to a weird array of people who also want to replace the internet.

19+

20+Feel free to bring friends!

content/events/2019-05-17-urbit-irl-20195.mdnew file+18

@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit IRL ~2019.5"

3+ends = "2019-05-18T18:00:00.000-07:00"

4+location = "Urbit Office"

5+image = ""

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/261110620/"

7+description = "Turns out that just getting Urbit fans in one room is pretty fun — so come hang out and have a beer, or wine."

8+guests = ""

9+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

10+starts = "2019-05-18T15:00:00.000-07:00"

11+

12+[[hosts]]

13+name = "Urbit"

14++++

15+

16+This time we'll give a brief update on what we've been up to around 8pm. Turning the music down worked well, so we'll do that again. And if you want help installing Urbit, bring a laptop.

17+

18+Feel free to bring friends!

content/events/2019-06-21-urbit-irl-20196.mdnew file+18

@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit IRL ~2019.6"

3+ends = "2019-06-22T18:00:00.000-07:00"

4+location = "Urbit Office"

5+image = ""

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/262079477/"

7+description = "Turns out that just getting Urbit fans in one room is pretty fun — so come hang out and have some beer and pizza."

8+guests = ""

9+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

10+starts = "2019-06-22T15:00:00.000-07:00"

11+

12+[[hosts]]

13+name = "Urbit"

14++++

15+

16+This time we'll give a brief update on what we've been up to around 8pm. Turning the music down worked well, so we'll do that again. And if you want help installing Urbit, bring a laptop.

17+

18+Feel free to bring friends!

content/events/2019-07-19-urbit-irl-20197.mdnew file+20

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit IRL ~2019.7"

3+ends = "2019-07-20T18:00:00.000-07:00"

4+location = "Urbit Office"

5+image = "https://secure.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/e/0/5/b/600_482817435.jpeg"

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/262858100/"

7+description = "Turns out that just getting Urbit fans in one room is pretty fun — so come hang out and chat with old and new friends over a beer."

8+guests = ""

9+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

10+starts = "2019-07-20T15:00:00.000-07:00"

11+dark = "true"

12+darken_image = "true"

13+

14+[[hosts]]

15+name = "Urbit"

16++++

17+

18+Turning the music down has worked well, so we'll continue doing that. And if you want help installing Urbit, bring a laptop.

19+

20+Feel free to bring friends!

content/events/2019-08-29-urbit-austin-20198.mdnew file+18

@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit Austin ~2019.8"

3+ends = "2019-08-30T16:00:00.000-07:00"

4+location = "Garage"

5+image = "https://secure.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/a/8/d/4/600_483643220.jpeg"

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/263655974/"

7+description = "Thanks to our friends over at Garage for offering to host another meetup in Austin, Texas."

8+guests = ""

9+timezone = "America/Chicago"

10+starts = "2019-08-30T14:00:00.000-07:00"

11+dark = "true"

12+darken_image = "true"

13+

14+[[hosts]]

15+name = "Urbit"

16++++

17+

18+Come have a drink on us, and bring friends! We'll be there 6–8pm.

content/events/2019-10-04-urbit-irl-201910.mdnew file+20

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit IRL ~2019.10"

3+ends = "2019-10-05T18:00:00.000-07:00"

4+location = "Urbit Office"

5+image = "https://secure.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/e/1/c/5/600_485217797.jpeg"

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/265165676/"

7+description = "Lately, Urbit has been having dangerous amounts of fun online. So we got thinking, 'Wouldn't it be smart to try having fun offline as well?' Thus, we invented something totally new: an offline chatroom."

8+guests = ""

9+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

10+starts = "2019-10-05T15:00:00.000-07:00"

11+dark = "true"

12+darken_image = "true"

13+

14+[[hosts]]

15+name = "Urbit"

16++++

17+

18+We're calling it Urbit IRL. You can use it to see your friends face-to-face, converse about Urbit, even to share a beer. And we're trying it out Friday, October 4.

19+

20+We hope to see you there! If you want help installing Urbit, bring a laptop. And bring a friend, especially if they are interested in replacing the internet.

content/events/2019-11-15-urbit-irl-201911.mdnew file+20

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit IRL ~2019.11"

3+ends = "2019-11-16T18:00:00.000-08:00"

4+location = "Urbit Office"

5+image = "https://secure.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/4/c/e/6/600_486379686.jpeg"

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/266146513/"

7+description = "Lately, Urbit has been having dangerous amounts of fun online. So we got thinking, 'Wouldn't it be smart to try having fun offline as well?' Thus, we invented something totally new: an offline chatroom."

8+guests = ""

9+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

10+starts = "2019-11-16T15:00:00.000-08:00"

11+dark = "true"

12+darken_image = "true"

13+

14+[[hosts]]

15+name = "Urbit"

16++++

17+

18+We're calling it Urbit IRL. You can use it to see your friends face-to-face, converse about Urbit, even to share a beer. And we're trying it out Friday, November 15.

19+

20+We hope to see you there! If you want help installing Urbit, bring a laptop. And bring a friend, especially if they are interested in replacing the internet.

content/events/2019-12-13-urbit-irl-201912.mdnew file+28

@@ -0,0 +1,28 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit IRL ~2019.12"

3+ends = "2019-12-14T17:00:00.000-08:00"

4+location = "Urbit Office"

5+image = "https://secure.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/6/a/8/8/600_487107272.jpeg"

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/266904108/"

7+description = "Come celebrate, friends! Urbit has had quite the decade, transforming from an intercepted interstellar transmission to a functional operating system, which also functions."

8+guests = ""

9+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

10+starts = "2019-12-14T15:00:00.000-08:00"

11+dark = "true"

12+darken_image = "true"

13+

14+[[hosts]]

15+name = "Urbit"

16++++

17+

18+We're getting together to savor the moment and get hype about what the next decade holds (the whole replacing the internet thing).

19+

20+We hope to see you there!

21+

22+Things to bring:

23+

24+-A friend

25+

26+-A laptop, if you want help installing Urbit

27+

28+-Good cheer

content/events/2020-01-24-urbit-irl-20201.mdnew file+24

@@ -0,0 +1,24 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit IRL ~2020.1"

3+ends = "2020-01-25T18:00:00.000-08:00"

4+location = "Urbit Office"

5+image = "https://secure.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/2/1/7/6/600_487988566.jpeg"

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/267753862/"

7+description = "Neo-Urbit arrives from the future."

8+guests = ""

9+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

10+starts = "2020-01-25T15:00:00.000-08:00"

11+dark = "true"

12+darken_image = "true"

13+

14+[[hosts]]

15+name = "Urbit"

16++++

17+

18+It's 2020 and Urbit is accelerating. We've got a lot going live this year.

19+

20+Replacing the internet is a thing to behold. Come by the offices to hang out, have a drink, and hear the latest.

21+

22+Bring a laptop if you want help installing Urbit.

23+

24+And as always, bring a friend!

content/events/2020-02-28-urbit-irl-20202.mdnew file+22

@@ -0,0 +1,22 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit IRL ~2020.2"

3+ends = "2020-02-29T18:00:00.000-08:00"

4+location = "Urbit Office"

5+image = "https://secure.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/8/5/e/b/600_488794283.jpeg"

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/268519069/"

7+description = "Urbit is a wilderness right now. A vast continent of possibility. We're gonna head out there and hack around. Join us."

8+guests = ""

9+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

10+starts = "2020-02-29T15:00:00.000-08:00"

11+dark = "true"

12+darken_image = "true"

13+

14+[[hosts]]

15+name = "Urbit"

16++++

17+

18+Before we go headlong into that unknown region, we're gonna have a party at basecamp (aka the office). Come hang out and have a drink with your fellow Urbit explorers.

19+

20+Bring your laptop if you want to install Urbit.

21+

22+And as always, drag a friend!

content/events/2020-04-03-urbit-os1-launch-party.mdnew file+49

@@ -0,0 +1,49 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit OS1 Launch Party"

3+ends = "2020-04-04T18:00:00.000-07:00"

4+location = "Online event"

5+image = "https://secure.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/1/f/8/b/600_489548075.jpeg"

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/268519156/"

7+youtube = "71ViyftPkGk"

8+description = "Join us as we launch Urbit OS1!"

9+guests = ""

10+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

11+starts = "2020-04-04T15:00:00.000-07:00"

12+dark = "true"

13+darken_image = "true"

14+

15+[[hosts]]

16+name = "Urbit"

17++++

18+

19+The presentation will begin at 7pm Pacific.

20+

21+Join the live conversation on Urbit itself: `~/~dopzod/os1-premiere`

22+

23+[There is also a VR viewing party for this event, hosted by `~naltyc-wornes`](https://account.altvr.com/events/1435581121923383472).

24+

25+To receive the event merch, RSVP on this event page by midnight!

26+

27+Ready to launch OS1? Check out our install guide:

28+

29+[https://urbit.org/using/install/](https://urbit.org/using/install/)

30+

31+Want address space for your friends? Apply for an Urbit Community Grant:

32+

33+[https://urbit.org/community/community-grants/](https://urbit.org/community/community-grants/)

34+

35+Interested in contributing to Urbit? Sign up for Hoon School:

36+

37+[https://urbit.org/community/hoonschool/](https://urbit.org/community/hoonschool/)

38+

39+Get the latest on Urbit:

40+

41+Blog: [https://urbit.org/blog/](https://urbit.org/blog/)

42+

43+Urbit Twitter: [https://twitter.com/urbit](https://twitter.com/urbit)

44+

45+Urbit Github: [https://github.com/urbit](https://github.com/urbit)

46+

47+Still confused about what Urbit is?

48+

49+[https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/](https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/)

content/events/2020-10-09-urbit-hosting-launch-event.mdnew file+38

@@ -0,0 +1,38 @@

1++++

2+title = "Urbit Hosting Launch Event"

3+ends = "2020-10-10T15:00:00.000-07:00"

4+location = "Online event"

5+image = "https://secure.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/8/600_492480008.jpeg"

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/273439025/"

7+youtube = "w3qKe_WZr50"

8+description = ""

9+guests = ""

10+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

11+starts = "2020-10-10T13:00:00.000-07:00"

12+dark = "true"

13+darken_image = "true"

14+[[hosts]]

15+name = "Urbit"

16++++

17+

18+We've been busy building, testing and refining — and now it's time to show off what we've been up to.

19+

20+We're going to do a live demo of Tlon's Urbit hosting solution, check out some of the new features of Landscape and generally catch up on what both we (at Tlon) and the community have been up to.

21+

22+Since the OS 1 launch, back in April, we've been living on Urbit day to day. Urbit has gotten gotten a lot faster, more reliable and nicer to use. Most importantly, we've got an easy way for friends to come join us without running their own node. We're really excited to let people explore what's possible with Urbit and build communities without ever touching the command-line.

23+

24+Join the waitlist for hosting here: [https://tlon.io/](https://tlon.io/)

25+

26+---

27+

28+Got a group of friends who want to use Urbit together? We periodically give away blocks of planets and help people get set up. Apply for a community grant: [https://urbit.org/community/community-grants/](https://urbit.org/community/community-grants/)

29+

30+Interested developing on Urbit? Hoon School is a community-run program to teach you the basics of the language and system. Sign up here: [https://hooniversity.org](https://hooniversity.org)

31+

32+Mostly, you can find us on Urbit in the Urbit Community group. But you can also follow along here: [https://urbit.org/blog/](https://twitter.com/urbit)

33+

34+[https://github.com/urbit](https://github.com/urbit)

35+

36+[https://urbit.org/blog/](https://urbit.org/blog)

37+

38+And if you're still confused about what Urbit is, try these: [https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/](https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/)

content/events/2020-11-05-developer-call-graph-store.mdnew file+24

@@ -0,0 +1,24 @@

1++++

2+title = "Developer Call: Graph Store"

3+ends = "2020-11-05T18:30:00.000-08:00"

4+location = "Online event"

5+image = ""

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/274279522/"

7+youtube = "E4DFuAZQ32Y"

8+description = ""

9+guests = ""

10+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

11+starts = "2020-11-05T17:00:00.000-08:00"

12+

13+[[hosts]]

14+name = "Lane R."

15+

16+[[hosts]]

17+name = "Urbit"

18++++

19+

20+Developer calls are focused on the technologies that underpin Urbit, from the top of the stack to the very bottom. They’re an opportunity for the people developing and contributing to Urbit to share their knowledge and expertise, including things that typically don’t make it into the docs, such as how and why Urbit works the way it does.

21+

22+This call will feature a discussion by Tlon engineer Logan Allen about graph-store, the general-purpose store that is gradually replacing the bespoke stores behind Chat, Publish and Links.

23+

24+You can join the event by clicking the gotowebinar.com link posted here. Details for joining the conversation were also emailed to all registered attendees, and will be sent again shortly before the event starts. Please check your email inbox for a message from Meetup.com.

content/events/2020-11-19-developer-call-bittorrent-tracking-on-urbit.mdnew file+22

@@ -0,0 +1,22 @@

1++++

2+title = "Developer Call: BitTorrent tracking on Urbit"

3+ends = "2020-11-19T18:30:00.000-08:00"

4+location = "Online event"

5+image = ""

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/274650693/"

7+youtube = "cvx2UV6TJ5I"

8+description = "Developer calls are focused on the technologies that underpin Urbit, from the top of the stack to the very bottom. They’re an opportunity for the people developing and contributing to Urbit to share their knowledge and expertise, including things that typically don’t make it into the docs, such as how and why Urbit works the way it does."

9+guests = ""

10+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

11+starts = "2020-11-19T17:00:00.000-08:00"

12+

13+[[hosts]]

14+name = "Lane R."

15+

16+[[hosts]]

17+name = "Urbit"

18++++

19+

20+This call will feature a discussion by Tlon engineer Mark Staarink, also known as ~palfun-foslup, about writing an HTTP BitTorrent tracker and command line app in 1500 lines of code.

21+

22+The livestream will be held on YouTube, and a group video call will be made available via Google Meet after the talk for casual discussion and in-person conversation.

content/events/2020-12-10-developer-call-injecting-external-services-into-urbit.mdnew file+24

@@ -0,0 +1,24 @@

1++++

2+title = "Developer Call: Injecting External Services into Urbit"

3+ends = "2020-12-10T18:30:00.000-08:00"

4+location = "Online event"

5+image = ""

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/275051926/"

7+youtube = "LaWNHMmxQag"

8+description = ""

9+guests = ""

10+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

11+starts = "2020-12-10T17:00:00.000-08:00"

12+

13+[[hosts]]

14+name = "Lane R."

15+

16+[[hosts]]

17+name = "Urbit"

18++++

19+

20+This call will feature a discussion by well-known developer in the Urbit community, ~timluc-miptev. ~timluc will be discussing the work he's been doing to provide access to a Bitcoin full node, which will enable Urbit ships to make Bitcoin payments to other ships. More generally, he'll be discussing the patterns that he's using to manage an Urbit ship's connection to externally-running infrastructure, and how access to that infrastructure can be provided to other Urbit nodes.

21+

22+Developer calls are focused on the technologies that underpin Urbit, from the top of the stack to the very bottom. They’re an opportunity for the people developing and contributing to Urbit to share their knowledge and expertise, including things that typically don’t make it into the docs, such as how and why Urbit works the way it does.

23+

24+The livestream will be held on YouTube, and a group video call will be made available via Google Meet after the talk for casual discussion and in-person conversation.

content/events/2021-02-04-developer-call-architectural-idea-maze.mdnew file+23

@@ -0,0 +1,23 @@

1++++

2+title = "Developer Call: Architectural Idea Maze"

3+ends = "2021-02-04T18:30:00.000-08:00"

4+location = "Online event"

5+image = ""

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/275992798/"

7+description = ""

8+guests = ""

9+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

10+starts = "2021-02-04T17:00:00.000-08:00"

11+

12+[[hosts]]

13+name = "Lane R."

14+

15+[[hosts]]

16+name = "Urbit"

17++++

18+

19+Tlon Engineer Philip Monk is interviewed by Poprox in an "Architectural Idea Maze" discussion, where Phil will discuss the choices made, and possibly more importantly, the choices _not_ made in the design of a component of Urbit. In this discussion, Phil will be focusing on subscriptions in all their forms throughout Urbit.

20+

21+Developer calls are focused on the technologies that underpin Urbit, from the top of the stack to the very bottom. They’re an opportunity for the people developing and contributing to Urbit to share their knowledge and expertise, including things that typically don’t make it into the docs, such as how and why Urbit works the way it does.

22+

23+The livestream will be held on YouTube, and a group video call will be made available via Google Meet after the talk for casual discussion and in-person conversation.

content/events/2021-03-04-developer-call-scaling-azimuth.mdnew file+25

@@ -0,0 +1,25 @@

1++++

2+title = "Developer Call: Scaling Azimuth"

3+ends = "2021-03-04T18:30:00.000-08:00"

4+location = "Online event"

5+image = ""

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/276692816/"

7+youtube = "CKuHXrdkIw0"

8+description = ""

9+guests = ""

10+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

11+starts = "2021-03-04T17:00:00.000-08:00"

12+

13+[[hosts]]

14+name = "Urbit"

15++++

16+

17+Urbit engineer Philip Monk will be discussing the solution space to scaling Azimuth, the infrastructure for Urbit ID that's built on Ethereum.

18+

19+Unless you're living under a rock, you know that Ethereum is thoroughly congested and, as a result the cost of working with it is quite high. Most pertinently for Urbit, this means that the cost of bringing new planets onto the network is unacceptably high.

20+

21+Phil has been doing a ton of research for the past few months on different approaches to scaling Azimuth. In this talk, he'll lay out the what's been explored so far, the relevant considerations for Urbit, and the emerging solutions that are being pursued.

22+

23+As usual, this talk will feature a presentation, a Q&amp;A period and a follow-up video call that anyone from the audience can join.

24+

25+See you there!

content/events/2021-03-18-developer-call-pressure-and-protolith.mdnew file+25

@@ -0,0 +1,25 @@

1++++

2+title = "Developer Call: Pressure and Protolith"

3+ends = "2021-03-18T18:30:00.000-08:00"

4+location = "Online event"

5+image = ""

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/276898246/"

7+description = "Matilde Park, Landscape team lead, talks about the distinctions between the Landscape product and basic Urbit development, and the significance of building Landscape for Tlon."

8+youtube = "XjIDZQUZZtE"

9+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

10+starts = "2021-03-18T17:00:00.000-07:00"

11+

12+[[hosts]]

13+name = "Josh Lehman"

14+patp = "~wolref-podlex)"

15+

16+[[guests]]

17+name = "Matilde Park"

18+patp = "~haddef-sigwen"

19++++

20+

21+Landscape was an experiment. Now it’s Tlon's flagship client for the Urbit project: a product, a full-stack application, spread across a variety of Gall agents and libraries, lighting the way forward against the dwindling unknowns in the reality of Urbit userspace development and distribution.

22+

23+Matilde Park, Landscape team lead, talks about the distinctions between the Landscape product and basic Urbit development, and the significance of building Landscape for Tlon — the role of “high-pressure experiments” in forcing our computer toward something rock-hard, diamond-perfect. With a few examples of ongoing deployments, she also outlines the problems being solved right now and the ones still a touch further out.

24+

25+As usual, join us after the talk on the call to ask questions and hang out.

content/events/2021-04-01-developer-call-javascript-apps-on-urbit.mdnew file+25

@@ -0,0 +1,25 @@

1++++

2+title = "Developer Call: JavaScript Apps on Urbit"

3+ends = "2021-04-01T18:30:00.000-07:00"

4+location = "Online Event"

5+image = ""

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/277261928/"

7+description = "In this talk, Tyler Brown Cifu Shuster (~radbur-sivmus) explains how to use Javascript tools to develop a client for Urbit."

8+youtube = "avLSSdb2VLM"

9+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

10+starts = "2021-04-01T17:00:00.000-07:00"

11+

12+[[hosts]]

13+name = "Mike Osborne"

14+patp = "~taller-ravnut"

15+

16+[[guests]]

17+name = "Tyler Brown Cifu Shuster"

18+patp = "~radbur-sivmus"

19++++

20+

21+Urbit provides a powerful and extensible platform for all kinds of app development. It can serve as a general-purpose datastore, decentralized network, and identity solution for a variety of front-end applications. The client that ships with Urbit, Landscape, provides one example of the kind of applications that can be built on the platform. However, other developers can use the same tools used to create Landscape to power their own interfaces and clients for Urbit.

22+

23+Tyler Brown Cifu Shuster (~radbur-sivmus) has worked with the Landscape team over the past few months to extract these tools into reusable Javascript packages. In this talk, he will explain how to use them to develop a client for Urbit independent of Landscape. He will cover the basic lifecycle of a client and explain how Javascript interface and state frameworks pair with Urbit's data model.

24+

25+This talk should enable anyone familiar with modern Javascript development and HTTP grammar to build an application on top of Urbit without writing any back-end code.

content/events/2021-04-15-developer-call-software-distribution.mdnew file+34

@@ -0,0 +1,34 @@

1++++

2+title = "Developer Call: 3rd Party Software Distribution"

3+ends = "2021-04-15T18:00:00.000-07:00"

4+location = "Online Event"

5+image = ""

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/277474491/"

7+description = "Some exciting work has been going on behind the scenes to provide the foundation for 3rd party software distribution."

8+youtube = "XwICC6Its1E"

9+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

10+starts = "2021-04-15T17:00:00.000-07:00"

11+

12+[[hosts]]

13+name = "Josh Lehman"

14+patp = "~wolref-podlex"

15+

16+[[guests]]

17+name = "Raghu"

18+patp = "~sovmep-ripsum"

19+

20+[[guests]]

21+name = " Philip Monk"

22+patp = "~wicdev-wisryt"

23++++

24+

25+Some exciting work has been going on behind the scenes to provide the foundation for 3rd party software distribution. In this talk Phil (~wicdev-wisryt) and Raghu (~sovmep-ripsum) will discuss the work they've been doing to clay to provide "virtual desks"—an integral part of the infrastructure needed to have safe, generic software distribution.

26+

27+Raghu is a software engineer at Hudson River Trading who is perhaps best known for his work on ucal, the Urbit calendar application. The work he's doing with Phil on virtual desks is being done through our Scholarships program, in which community developers pair up with Tlon infrastructure engineers to work on infrastructure projects. We'll spend some time at the beginning of the call to introduce Raghu and hear about his experience working on the Urbit kernel.

28+

29+As usual, there'll be an opportunity to jump on the call with us afterward to ask questions and hang out.

30+

31+## Resources

32+

33+- [Original mailing list discussion of 3rd party software distribution](https://groups.google.com/a/urbit.org)

34+- [ucal](https://github.com/taalhavras/ucal)

content/events/2021-04-27-bitcoin-launch.mdnew file+27

@@ -0,0 +1,27 @@

1++++

2+title = "Bitcoin Launch"

3+ends = "2021-04-27T21:30:00.000-07:00"

4+location = "Online Event"

5+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/events/bitcoin-launch-event.png"

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/276741426/"

7+youtube = "_aRnfacZPto"

8+description = "Bitcoin is coming to Urbit! With the upcoming release of the Bitcoin Wallet, you will be able to pay Urbit ships directly with BTC."

9+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

10+starts = "2021-04-27T20:00:00.000-07:00"

11+dark = true

12+tags = ["bitcoin"]

13+

14+[[hosts]]

15+name = "Urbit Foundation"

16+

17+[[guests]]

18+name = "Marty Bent"

19++++

20+

21+Bitcoin is coming to Urbit! With the upcoming release of the Bitcoin Wallet, you will be able to pay Urbit ships directly with BTC.

22+

23+We’d like to take a moment to show it off, and discuss the future of commerce on Urbit. First, Christian and Josh will demo the wallet, then, our good friend Marty Bent will moderate a panel with Christian, Tim, and Ed. We will have time at the end for questions.

24+

25+The event will have a live stream on Youtube, and a live-chat on Urbit, links to come.

26+

27+Join the Bitcoin dev conversation in the Urbitcoiners group: [~pindet-timmut/urbitcoin-cash](web+urbitgraph://group/~pindet-timmut/urbitcoiners)

content/events/2021-04-29-developer-call-real-time-communications-on-urbit.mdnew file+30

@@ -0,0 +1,30 @@

1++++

2+title = "Developer Call: Real-Time Communication on Urbit"

3+ends = "2021-04-29T18:00:00.000-07:00"

4+location = "Online Event"

5+image = ""

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/277674273/"

7+description = "Video chat on Urbit? It's nearly here with WebRTC."

8+youtube = "XFct6JZHPC0"

9+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

10+starts = "2021-04-29T17:00:00.000-07:00"

11+

12+[[hosts]]

13+name = "Josh Lehman"

14+patp = "~wolref-podlex"

15+

16+[[guests]]

17+name = "Edward Amsden"

18+patp = "~ritpub-sipsyl"

19++++

20+

21+Video chat on Urbit? It's nearly here using the WebRTC protocol. Edward Amsden (`~ritpub-sipsyl`) will be giving us a look at the WebRTC Airlock library that he has developed that handles all the hard parts of WebRTC. This will allow developers to simply call or answer calls by ship or app name. Edward will also be giving us a live text-based demo of WebRTC on urbit. Please join us for an exciting presentation.

22+

23+Edward is a software developer and the principal of Black River Software LLC. He has several years experience building both backend and IoT software in Haskell, and in particular building IoT control and software deployment infrastructure. He also has academic background in programming language research.

24+

25+As usual, there'll be an opportunity to jump on the call with us afterward to ask questions and hang out.

26+

27+## Resources

28+

29+- [Urbit WebRTC on GitHub](https://github.com/black-river-software/urbit-webrtc)

30+- Check out WebRTC progress reports on `~ritpub-sipsyl/webrtc-on-urbit`

content/events/2021-05-13-developer-call-versioned-networking.mdnew file+26

@@ -0,0 +1,26 @@

1++++

2+title = "Developer Call: P2P Versioned Networking"

3+ends = "2021-05-14T13:00:00.000-07:00"

4+location = "Online Event"

5+image = ""

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/278052029/"

7+description = "Versioned Networking for Application Developers"

8+youtube = "BhQ1vk4jGsk"

9+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

10+starts = "2021-05-14T00:00:00.000-07:00"

11+

12+[[hosts]]

13+name = "Josh Lehman"

14+patp = "~wolref-podlex"

15+

16+[[guests]]

17+name = "Liam Fitzgerald"

18+patp = "~hastuc-dibtux"

19++++

20+

21+Building solid networking infrastructure has been a major focus of the Urbit project since its inception. There's a lot going on under the hood

22+that ensures our servers reliably stay connected. Liam Fitzgerald (~hastuc-dibtux) will be explaining how Urbit is able to deploy changes without breaking the network. Anyone designing userspace applications will be interested in the approach he has designed.

23+

24+Liam is an Interface Engineer working at Tlon working on the Landscape team. He will be discussing networking userspace applications in depth and going into detail about the new versioning system.

25+

26+As usual, there will be an opportunity to jump on the call with us afterward to ask questions and hang out.

content/events/2021-05-27-town-hall.mdnew file+54

@@ -0,0 +1,54 @@

1++++

2+title = "Town Hall"

3+ends = "2021-05-27T23:30"

4+location = "Online Event"

5+image = "https://media.urbit.org/site/events/URBIT-TOWN-HALL.png"

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/278188361/"

7+description = "A virtual mini-conference for the Urbit community featuring a special keynote talk from our friend Justin Murphy."

8+youtube = "8YSwt0vDPj0"

9+dark = true

10+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

11+starts = "2021-05-27T20:00"

12+

13+[[hosts]]

14+name = "Josh Lehman"

15+patp = "~wolref-podlex"

16+

17+[[guests]]

18+name = "Hunter Miller"

19+patp = "~nocsyx-lassul"

20+

21+[[guests]]

22+name = "Justin Murphy"

23+patp = "~hatryx-lastud"

24++++

25+

26+The Urbit community has grown at a rapid clip throughout 2021. There are so many exciting things going on that it's hard to convey them all, even with Developer Calls happening every two weeks. This event will function as a virtual "mini-conference" where we'll give a series of important and exciting announcements, including both formal and informal talks from many members of our community.

27+

28+Here's a rundown of what we'll be discussing:

29+

30+## Introduction: State of the Network

31+

32+_12:00 PDT, Josh Lehman_

33+

34+Urbit is under heavy, active development by both Tlon and a wide range of contributors. Josh Lehman will discuss some of the most important areas of work being undertaken, provide a picture of where Tlon and community efforts are going in the future, and even has a few exciting announcements to make.

35+

36+## Taisho, Urbit's Port City

37+

38+_~12:20 PDT, Hunter Miller_

39+

40+Piloting an Urbit ship requires expertise that many lack. To achieve the rich and prosperous ecosystem we've all envisioned requires making that journey easier. In this talk, Hunter Miller introduces a new way for users to join the network with minimal effort.

41+

42+## Keynote: The Revenge of Teleology

43+

44+_~13:00 PDT, Justin Murphy_

45+

46+Teleology—or inquiry into ultimate ends—has been out of fashion since the seventeenth century, when Francis Bacon said that, “like a virgin consecrated to God,” it “produces nothing.” I argue that the digital revolution is inverting Bacon’s claim. Baconian instrumentalism is now suffering from diminishing returns—it is what the youth today call a Boomer Ideology. Rather, the greatest gains are going to individuals and communities with teleological attitudes. This talk will observe some examples and present a model consistent with the observations. Bitcoin inquires after the telos of money, the most winning independent “content creators” inquire after the telos of media, and Urbit inquires after the telos of personal computing.

47+

48+## Lightning Talks

49+

50+_14:00 PDT, you?_

51+

52+After the scheduled talks we'll break out into a series of 30 minute talks led by community members. There will be up to three talks given in parallel at each of 14:00 PDT, 14:30 PDT and 15:00 PDT (so nine talks total).

53+

54+If you'd like to give a talk, please use [this form to sign up](https://airtable.com/shr0Xmqcv1HSy47EP). You can see the full list of [proposed talks here](https://airtable.com/shreGQ4kCU8RA5GJS/tblTZxCpqedJBwSkE), and if you'd like to voice your support for any of these specifically, [cast a vote using this form](https://airtable.com/shrhNRUAGCqZ38VXA).

content/events/2021-07-01-developer-call-runtime-future.mdnew file+25

@@ -0,0 +1,25 @@

1++++

2+title = "Developer Call: The Urbit Runtime and its Future"

3+ends = "2021-07-01T18:00:00.000-07:00"

4+location = "Online Event"

5+image = ""

6+registration_url = "https://www.meetup.com/urbit-sf/events/279137337/"

7+description = "The current and future thinking about the Urbit runtime"

8+youtube = "z0grAh_yhE8"

9+timezone = "America/Los_Angeles"

10+starts = "2021-07-01T17:00:00.000-07:00"

11+

12+[[hosts]]

13+name = "Ted Blackman"

14+patp = "~rovnys-ricfer"

15+

16+[[guests]]

17+name = "Joe Bryan"

18+patp = "~master-morzod"

19++++

20+

21+Please join us for a look behind the curtain at the Urbit Runtime. Host Ted Blackman (~rovnys-ricfer) will be interviewing Joe Bryan (~master-morzod). Topics will include event log truncation, plans for storing more than 2GB, multithreading implementation, and much more.

22+

23+Ted Blackman (~rovnys-ricfer) has worked on Urbit since 2017, mostly on the kernel, with forays into the runtime and userspace. Before Urbit, he worked in sensor fusion, robotics, web development, distributed systems, and data engineering. He has a degree in physics from MIT.

24+

25+As always, join us for happy hour after the talk.

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