[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.

[adiabatty]

While planet names would get harder to remember if they were longer (48 bits and six syllables instead of 32 bits and four syllables), the main reason they want the address space to be somewhat scarce is to make spam economically infeasible.