A crucial difference between Urbit and other networks is that planets are
scarce. Even when the network is fully populated, there are only 4 billion.
Early in Urbit's life, most stars and galaxies are not yet operating, so
far fewer are available. No one will ever be able to get planets trivially
and for free.
Urbit is a friendly network: a network on which you can assume that a
stranger is nice until proven nasty. Friendliness is a direct consequence
of scarce, individually owned identities. We're not changing human nature,
just creating the right economic incentives.
Most forms of network abuse are "Sybil attacks": they rely on an infinite
supply of fresh identities. Scarcity makes reputation work. Spam is a
business; if the cost of a new planet exceeds the amount of money you can
make by spamming from that planet until its reputation is trashed, there
will be no spam.
Shady stars and galaxies that sell blocks of planets to spammers will also
develop reputations as "bad neighborhoods," damaging the value of the whole
block. Abuse at any level is designed to be counterproductive and
economically self-terminating.
Urbit has no reputation system at all at the moment, simply because we're
so small that friendliness is automatic. The clear and rigorous structure
of the address space is not a reputation system; it is a platform on which
any number of such systems can and should be built. But we can't build one
until we need one.
Artificial scarcity helps them make sure that only the "correct" people get planets.
EDIT: You think I'm making a random political dig at Urbit that isn't borne out by the actual system, don't you. No, I am making a political dig at Urbit about something that is actually designed into the system. The design is about ownership, and about how not everyone can have it.
It's not just about gatekeeping. My reading seems to imply that its design also ensures they have economic and political power if the thing ever becomes popular. Their long game seems to be a pyramid scheme at best.
Now you're faced with exactly what the GP said: address spaces are hard to change later.
What part of Urbit involves voting?
Even if Urbit were a democracy, which sounds improbable, why would the people who have the scarce thing vote to open it up to more people? Look at Bitcoin right now: they can't increase the block size because large miners benefit from the small block size.
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?
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.
> 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.
