[miss_haru]

I'm not sure how you got your first assumption from the rest of your quotations.

"[the Urbit] "senate" can do whatever they want to my data"

No. The urbit senate can do nothing with your data.

Your server holds your data. It is not distributed on the block chain. It is not mirrored by your peers. No one has any access to your data, except where you give them permission.

Your final quote refers to the power the senate of galaxies has to manage the address space. (currently limited to 4b personal nodes. If scarcity becomes problem, galaxies can vote to increase availability.)

[iudqnolq]

My rough reading of an Urbit document describing the senate [senate] is that the senate has more power than that. For example, the senate can vote on textual proposals and code-based proposes. However, I'm not well-versed enough in Urbitspeak to conclusively state what this document actually says. Can you help me understand it?

[senate]: https://urbit.org/community/governance/

[iudqnolq]

You're right. I misinterpreted. People can buy power, but not of the more serious kind I thought initially. Thanks for the correction.

[miss_haru]

My pleasure.

fwiw, I don't blame you for your misunderstanding.

The project is quite young and not quite stable/mature enough for the faint of heart.

Having said that, the water's fine for swimming. :)

[jevgeni]

Wait, so how is it better than a trusty OpenBSD box?

[OceanSunfish]

Perhaps the idea is that updates provided by OpenBSD or another OS for example could be compromised or simply directed to an unpopular path, but in this way a "senate" of code reviewers with known biases provides a more democratic way of reviewing updates before publish.

[iudqnolq]

This is incorrect. Urbit has two paths for changes, a vote by the senate or a decision by the developers on the git repo. It only adds more ways of making updates, it doesn't fix the the devs can do anything "problem"

https://urbit.org/community/governance/