OK, I fell down this stupid rabbit hole and I'm back with more to say.

Urbit is a boutique-ass OS that runs on an obscure VM that mostly runs on top of existing cloud infrastructure (!!). In order to use your fancy VM, you need to buy an ID with crypto, but if your landlord, sorry, "star" doesn't like you then

1/?

Public goods are good. Commons maxi. Here to dismantle shareholder capitalism, not reproduce it on-chain.

the hardware it runs on top of. (Computers within computers connected by Amazon Web Services connected by Ethereum).

Also, the selection of apps is extremely limited, and as far as I can tell, a perfect subset of existing software that runs out here in the normal world.

3/?!?!

DID I MENTION IT COSTS MONEY

Stars are selling for like 1-3 ETH on their marketplace, planets for like 0.01 ETH

The big selling point of galaxies and stars is that you get to sell planets to people who want to join Urbit... which has about 3000 active users.

4/!!!

In so many ways, it's such a cool project, and in so many ways, infuriating.

I can see the benefit of making ID space scarce (antispam, a form of proof-of-stake), but ...

5/??+

I'm absolutely appalled at the notion of a hierarchically arranged namespace reselling scheme that replicates a containerized version of internet on top of existing centralized hardware and network layers. 

Who is this for? What problem does it actually solve? 

6/$%&$

@jacktop  Urbit a pyramid scheme where you can buy $20 chat app that doesn't have any strong guarantees of continuity if your local landlord doesn't like you or accidentally fucks up their own infra.

7/7

they can disconnect you. Or if your star goes offline, then you need to migrate. Or if the star's galaxy goes AFK, you need to migrate. All of this is tied to Ethereum as a backbone. 

Also if you ever boot your "ship" in two places at once, it's effed. Also it has limited computing resources, more so than 

1/?!