[imron]

> An Urbit identity, or "ship," .... is actually just a 32-bit number, like an IP address

32-bits huh? That's brave.

[kevinschumacher]

I was thinking the same thing. Pretty bold move for a startup with an aim to provide a digital identity for everyone in the world with their stack.

But if you really dig (and I mean really dig) into their site:

> In the general case, a ship is actually a 128-bit number.

...

> A comet's [128-bit] address is the hash of its initial public key. Anyone can launch a comet. Nothing stops you from using a comet as your identity, except that the name is a mouthful and everyone will assume you're a bot. [0]

So, I mean, there will be a market for names I guess.

[0] https://urbit.org/posts/address-space/#-moons-and-comets

[kaoD]

They are intentionally scarce and many are reserved by the Urbit owners.

This is like premined cryptocurrencies. I don't understand how anyone would invest money or effort in this.

[randallsquared]

They are intentionally scarce.

[zamalek]

> By keeping addresses scarce, we make spam and abuse expensive

The entire population of earth wouldn't be able to sign up. Just over half could. What happens in 50 years when all of those 4.2 billion people are dead? Does the entire infrastructure die along with those who were "lucky" enough to win the lottery?

[dingaling]

> The entire population of earth wouldn't be able to sign up

They also have freely-available 128-bit identities, called 'submarines', that can be created on whim.

The 32-bit identities are 'destroyers', both being subsets of 'ships'.

Like everything else associated with Urbit, it's back-to-front. Real-world destroyers hugely out-number submarines.

[knubie]

They've changed the nomenclature since then. submarines -> comets, destroyers -> planet. along with 64 bit moons, 16 bit stars, and 8 bit galaxies.

[GFK_of_xmaspast]

Addresses are transferred through agnatic selection.