[adiabatty]

> the most available first-class address in the system is in a 32 bit address space. Why? Not for efficiency, but because the authors believe there aren't and never will be 4 billion human beings on the planet worthy of having a first-class address in their system. This, by the way, is their actual response to the objection of an overlay network with 32 bit addressing.

One of the things they want is for identities to cost some nontrivial amount of money, about $10 or so. This mostly solves the spam problem because it's unlikely that spamming will get you $10 worth of value before you're blacklisted by your parent star and it refuses to route your packets.

Can you think of an identity count that would preserve moderate scarcity like this? Or would you have the address space be indefinitely mineable, kind of like bitcoin?

[ubernostrum]

If it hasn't already, the total number of humans with mobile phone service will exceed 2^32 within the next year or two, and phone service typically isn't given away free out of the goodness of the phone companies' hearts.

So the mobile industry is already past or very soon to be past the 32-bit space with paying customers.

[adiabatty]

Yeah, 2^32 was _clearly_ chosen based on what makes for nice, round numbers in binary, not based on reasonable population and cell-phone-use projections.

On the other hand, Urbit might never become popular enough for this sort of thing to really matter. We're at about 7 billion people now and the second derivative of the world population is negative, so it should level off at some point. If only 5% of 20 billion people care enough about this sort of thing to actually run a planet, then that'll be only 1 billion people, or a quarter of Urbit's 4-billion address space. 5% doesn't seem unreasonably low to me, either; app.net probably didn't even get 0.5% of Twitter's user count.

[ubernostrum]

Urbit might never become popular enough for this sort of thing to really matter.

And decisions like this might be a part of why it never becomes popular. Elsewhere in the thread people are suggesting that, say, children don't need their own "planet" or whatever it's called, and that they could be one per family and still service the whole world. But that bakes in an awful lot of assumptions about culturally-specific ideas of family and stability of family units. Granted, I think those are culturally-specific ideas Moldbug would love to impose on the world if he could, but this is why people keep saying that even the technical decisions in Urbit are pushing specific political positions of his.

Also, at this point anyone who deliberately designs an address space to be too small to handle already-existing popular things is probably not making sound long-term technical decisions to begin with.

[Nition]

Have they given a reason as to why it's not larger than 32-bit?

[yebyen]

The address space is 128 bit. You don't need a planet, but for a theoretical $10 price tag, why wouldn't you get one?

(FWIW I have never seen anyone pay $10 for their planet.)

[ubernostrum]

Yes, and it's been quoted and referred to multiple times in this discussion thread.

[Nition]

What I meant was, is there a reason to keep it low beyond "bigger isn't necessary"? Like a performance reason for instance, or an address is like a URL so shorter is easier to remember, or something like that.

The reason I ask is if there's a good reason that a bigger address space would be worse in some way, then "bigger isn't necessary" might be a decent argument, but if there's no good reason not to make it bigger, then it's not such a good argument.