[yarvin9]

~bitret, I remember you from a while back!

A planet is like a car -- it's not a toy, it's a tool for a responsible grownup. There are about 4 billion adults in the world. And not all of them are even Internet users.

Of course, the population keeps growing. Eventually either people have to learn to share, or the price will go up, or humanity will learn how to stop expanding exponentially.

Think of a planet as a unit of autonomy and reputation, not of personality. The global supply of autonomy is 2^32 units. That's not perfect in any sense, but if the supply is infinite the network is ungovernable, and the value of each unit is zero.

It's also an improvement on a world in which there's one unit of autonomy, and its name is Mark Zuckerberg. Urbit does a lot for digital freedom, but we're not in the miracle business here. No one can do infinity for digital freedom.

[kefka]

> A planet is like a car -- it's not a toy, it's a tool for a responsible grownup. There are about 4 billion adults in the world. And not all of them are even Internet users.

There's a reason why the IETF decided to switch to 2^128 for IP6. Mainly, because there are more computers and devices that need addressing than IP4 can handle.

I have to question the design of Urbit why you chose to go with 2^32 addressing space?

> Of course, the population keeps growing. Eventually either people have to learn to share, or the price will go up, or humanity will learn how to stop expanding exponentially.

Again, the future is "Pay to Play", just like Ethereum? And, is that a population control argument? How would you propose to "stop expanding exponentially"? Chinese method? Ender's Game method, or something else unsavory?

> Think of a planet as a unit of autonomy and reputation, not of personality. The global supply of autonomy is 2^32 units. That's not perfect in any sense, but if the supply is infinite the network is ungovernable, and the value of each unit is zero.

Ah, so you are the "governor", hence why it must be governed? This is literally artificial scarcity on something that could easily have been near infinite

> It's also an improvement on a world in which there's one unit of autonomy, and its name is Mark Zuckerberg. Urbit does a lot for digital freedom, but we're not in the miracle business here. No one can do infinity for digital freedom.

So switching from one master to another makes better "freedom"? I get being against walled gardens. I'm against them as well. But you make no point why Urbit isn't just another walled garden (using funny language to hide behind it no less) with you at the helm.

[yebyen]

> I have to question the design of Urbit why you chose to go with 2^32 addressing space?

They haven't. They went with base 256, for easier recognition of 32-bit (and 16-bit, and 8-bit) numbers. You can get a 2^128 identity or a 2^32 identity (or others.)

The fact that 64-bit numbers (like ~novfes-lodzod-sibfes-talzod) in Urbit's base 256 are twice as long as 32-bit numbers (~sibfes-talzod) which are twice as long as 16-bit numbers (~dalryp) and down to 8-bit numbers, which are the most memorable and highly coveted (disclosure: you're looking at a comment written by ~del, aka Hex number 0x25) is something between a feature of Urbit's networking stack, and an unavoidable consequence of doing math and dividing things up between persons that are remote from each other, therefore each needing addresses to be identifiable.

Identities that are made of 128-bit numbers are free, and essentially unlimited. They are basically public key hashes and the risk of a collision is sufficiently low that there is no need for them to be generated by a single authority and centrally assigned. (Note that this does not necessarily scale to the population of the earth and beyond as a solution to addressing graph nodes and efficiently routing traffic between them.) Identities that are made of shorter numbers are limited in number and assigned hierarchically; even if there are a boat-load of 64-bit numbers, it's not half as many, it's ½^64 times as many. Certainly there are more 64-bit numbers than humans on Earth today, or for the foreseeable future.

Whether you consider this to be more problem or solution will probably depend a lot on which side of the spam-wars you find yourself on. Currently there is no Urbit software or infrastructure that I am aware of that algorithmically discriminates against one kind of numbers or another.

You won't expect one authority to differentiate each of 8-billion humans and make sure that each one is granted a separate identity (but not more than one), will you? How about 256 such leaders? Still seems far-fetched, doesn't it... especially given the difficulty of coordinating 256 separate leaders. 65536 very smart individuals probably also cannot be expected to coordinate the identities of the rest of the humans in the world. It would be gargantuan undertaking just handling it when some of these leader-folks have forgotten or lost their passwords (and potentially disastrous for the 0.0015% of the world's population under their charge.)

64 bits of hierarchical ID space is enough for every 32-bit identity (planet) to individually dole out as many 64-bit numbers (moons) as there were 32-bit numbers to begin with. Urbit takes advantage of this roughly to make scaling the network's identity framework to rather immense proportions, happen at least a bit more naturally.

If your 32-bit leader gives a lot of 64-bit IDs to people that turn out to be spammers, you run the risk of being lumped in with those spammers by algorithmic processes. Imagine such a process that tries to discriminate against spammers and keep them from spamming everyone who is known on the whole network, at any scale. It's not a simple proposition, at all!

[tripzilch]

Do these things also get released if the person holding them dies?

(the reasonable assumption being that only a tiny fraction people will bother or care to actually make arrangements for this)

Or even without death, the idea being urbit "property" is all cryptographically locked tight, correct? So can a planet get lost? If someone loses all their keys or a server park gets droned and the dog ate their backups or something?