[gonehome]

It didn’t help introduce me to Linux - I used Linux for 15yrs before I heard about urbit.

I was disappointed that Linux would never be able to solve the incentive problems that lead to centralized companies handling that complexity.

Urbit’s approach actually could.

The reasons those other attempts are basically DOA outside of a tiny technical niche is they don’t go deep enough into the stack, they don’t tackle the issue with identity which is a core problem when it comes to handling spam and moderation. They don’t tackle administrative complexity and dependencies which is a core issue in making the system simple to run.

To really fix these things you have to think about why they always fail and design something to fix those incentive issues. Those problems start earlier up the stack - Linux will never be able to do it (imo) even if you tack on the identity layer.

[cowtools]

GNUnet is a pretty comprehensive solution that does address these things, albeit it is a work in progress. Their solution to the identity problem is a pretty ingenious petname system called GNS. Their solution to incentive issues is a cryptographic micropayment system called GNU Taler. I think you can pretty easily solve the problems "up the stack" if you make the systems transport-layer agnostic like GNUnet/IPFS has done, and like Tor/I2P are currently doing.

I think Linux's identity solution (if you consider it a solution) is GPG and PKI.

[gonehome]

I’ll look at GNUnet - I don’t know enough about it to comment.

GPG is largely a failure imo, I think Moxie is right about this - complexity is high (even when people’s life depends on it they won’t use it) and the core issue is that it’s distinct from the system itself.

Urbit nodes cannot be separated from the ID - you can’t run it without an ID which is a pretty clean way to solve a lot of this stuff out of the box (also adds a lot of cool features/guarantees you can make about collaborating with users over the network, ability for pseudonyms to accrue reputation, easy ability to moderate, and make spam not economically possible, etc.

I’ve become convinced you can’t solve these things separately in parts on the Linux stack, maybe someone will - but there’s been 30yrs of failure so I’m not optimistic.