[ThrowAway123543]

I shouldn't have said "planets". I think only the top 256 "galaxies" (owned by the founders and investors) really get a vote. Maybe? That might not be right, I don't remember the details.

But there are two other misconceptions to clarify.

First, the defense against "What if the people who run urbit turn out to be jerks?" is not to have democratic voting. And it's not Bitcoin-style "51% of us agree" forks either, urbit is a top-down hierarchy. The defense is that Urbit is open source, and anyone could go out and start their own Urbit network and ask people to join it.

Second, planets have (theoretical) value, but they're not fungible, they're identities. A good analogy is: imagine if Reddit were designed to only have 2^32 handles, and they each cost a dollar. In that scenario, if Reddit said, "Hey, we've sold all our handles, hooray! Now we're going to issue an update that makes some more available", would existing Redditors lose anything?

[rspeer]

Why would they each cost a dollar when they're running out? How could you possibly defeat economics like that? Scarce things are expensive.

The Redditors who are paying lots of money for the scarce handles, and the people they are paying lots of money to (the feudal lords or whatever, I don't know what to call people in this hypothetical Reddit/Urbit mashup), would absolutely lose out if more became available. They would be like taxi medallions, or houses. Urbit itself makes the analogy to real estate, and real estate owners do not have the tendency to say "yay, more neighbors!"

And I don't need to fork Urbit given the people who run it are jerks; I can just run my own normal Linux server, which runs reasonable well-designed programming languages, and can subtract in constant time.

[ThrowAway123543]

> Why would they each cost a dollar when they're running out? How could you possibly defeat economics like that? Scarce things are expensive.

The "urbit is land" analogy is, like any analogy, only so useful; don't carry it so far that it breaks. Urbit addresses are numbers, and numbers aren't scarce. They're only limited by convention, and conventions can change.

I think the devs like to trot out that "land" analogy for BTC users, to help illustrate that urbit addresses aren't fungible, but it only holds if you imagine that land in this scenario can be created out of thin air by the king when he feels like the kingdom is getting crowded, and if polluting your land makes other landowners pretend your land doesn't exist, and if used land on the secondary market is all presumed to be polluted.