> ... If you aren't an independent adult, and you don't need or even shouldn't have unconditional digital freedom (no one's 8-year-old daughter needs unconditional digital freedom), a moon from someone else's planet is fine."
What's wrong with this? A 32-bit namespace for full-blown "server-like" identities still beats today's world where everyone and their dog just crowds onto a single centralized service like Facebook, enjoying an equivalent "not an independent adult" status. Besides, the IPv4 address-space is 32-bit, and is nowhere near efficiently utilized - so Urbit's projected "neo-feudal dystopia" is already here even in the best possible case. (No, IPv6 rollout is not helping practically, at least not yet.)
Isn't the exact same political opinion "encoded" in IPv4, and/or the continued use thereof? It seems weird to complain about Urbit specifically when it's just perpetuating such a long-standing practice, and even mitigating it (to the extent that its address space sees more efficient use than IPv4 itself).
I don't think the designers of IPv4 claimed to be non-political. They were working on a project to link the US military with major US universities. I agree that IPv4 is also a poor basis for systems that are generic to all possible politics - I just don't think the designers of IPv4 ever made such a claim.
I also think the politics of the designers of IPv4 are closer to the politics of most people on this forum than the politics of the designer of Urbit. So even if there are political assumptions encoded in the use cases it was designed for, they probably do match your use cases.
Perhaps the difference is that IPv4 was an experimental protocol that was supposed to be replaced while Urbit seems to explicitly plan to remain 32-bit forever.
Everyone who makes this argument seems to be plainly ignoring a good half of the address spec, that Urbit's 32-bit namespace is part of a total 128-bit address space.
If I told you that IPv6 has 32 of its 128 address bits reserved as markers for making top-level subnets out of them (this is not true, but for argument's sake, pretend it was) would you say "Oh no, there's not enough IPv6 for everyone to have their own subnets" ?
Of course you wouldn't, because addresses are 128 bits long and there's enough address space for "EVERY ATOM ON THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH, and still have enough addresses left to do another 100+ earths." per the first StackOverflow post I could find on the subject.
Is there enough address space for every atom on the surface of the earth to be neatly organized into subnets according to ownership rights? Well that's debatable, and if you want to compare apples to apples, you should ask that question.
If Urbit runs out of planets, then it will have roundly surpassed the expectations of anyone who makes this argument. You don't solve these problems on Day 1, it's really enough to have a plan that would allow 20-50% of people on the planet to have a stake in ownership of Urbit at this stage. When it starts getting cramped, how about THEN we spend some time and tackle scaling past a usership base of 50% of the population of humans that are alive?
There was actually a point to the scarcity, it's meant to solve the spam problem. "Planet" identities are meant to be precious. If your identity was worth $10, you probably wouldn't use it to engage in spamming unless you were sure that you could get more than $10 from the campaign before landing your address on a blackhole list. (And if it was possible to reliably achieve a profit like this, it would undoubtedly drive the price of a planet up, as others figured out how to compete with you at doing that.)
And even that is a naive assessment of the scope of the idea and how it prevents spamming. The identities are provisioned in a hierarchical fashion, such that if you landed more than a couple of planets on such a spam list (none exists today, but...), you would probably find out pretty quickly that nobody with inventory is willing to sell you another one. (Lest they wind up getting their whole "star system" banned from polite society for association with spammers.)
I think it's 64 bits not a full 128, but still, you have a point. People have actually suggested that scrapping IPv6 and lightly extending IPv4 to 64 bits (creating a new "IPv5") in a very similar way to how Urbit works today would be the right thing to do. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that this is a realistic option by now. Switching to an entirely new, greenfield addressing layer like Urbit might be the best option!
Urbit moon addresses are 64 bits long, comets are 128 bits long.
You need a sponsor to get a moon, you only need a unix computer and a network connection to get a comet.
I'm pretty out of touch with Urbit lore, but I'm not aware of anything you can do with a moon that you can't do with a comet. The planet is worth more because it can parent moons and stuff.
4 billion addresses being usable is a pretty recent development. The original design was classful addressing, with US universities, US military departments, and US corporations getting chunks of 1/256ths of the available space. So yes.
Right, we're already in the neo-feudal dystopia. Corporations like Facebook grant us land to create effectively all of the value, and then profit nearly exclusively from the 100% tax on our data they demand. Urbit at least in principle was an attempt to move in the right direction.
What's wrong with this? A 32-bit namespace for full-blown "server-like" identities still beats today's world where everyone and their dog just crowds onto a single centralized service like Facebook, enjoying an equivalent "not an independent adult" status. Besides, the IPv4 address-space is 32-bit, and is nowhere near efficiently utilized - so Urbit's projected "neo-feudal dystopia" is already here even in the best possible case. (No, IPv6 rollout is not helping practically, at least not yet.)