Urbit: ‘Virtual Galaxy’ for Bitcoin nodes

                                                        Urbit: ‘Virtual Galaxy’ for Bitnodes  
It is argued that bitcoin can be considered as a digital asset, akin to nobody virtual gold. If so, this positioning raises the question – can technology be used to create a fully digital environment?
The developers of the project Urbit spent most of the last decade trying to answer this question. It is because of this concept the project, developed by a startup Tlon has received the support of influential Silicon Valley investors such as Andreessen Horowitz and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.
Urbit is a network of personal computers in the cloud, which, according to its founders aimed at creating the means by which people can create their own servers without the necessary cost of running a complex server infrastructure.
Described by its creators as “the creation of a virtual Republic”, project started in the mid-2000s years and is the brainchild of programmer Curtis Arvina that caused hot debate in the past for his “neo-reactionary” political essays under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. In spite of the brought on by to many years of criticism, the project is moving forward, and yesterday successfully completed its first krausel server addresses.
Invent the computing paradigm again
Put simply, the project is an ambitious attempt to rewrite all of modern computing paradigm from scratch. According to the project founder Curtis Arvin, the existing standard technology stacks (e.g. LAMP – Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) are giant piles of legacy code of varying quality, to ensure the security and predictability which is fundamentally impossible. As a result, this problem is “solved” by a patch to the code after another that eventually led to a hopeless situation when in system code with many millions of lines of “the devil himself would break a leg,” and hardly anyone actually understands the details, as there is at least something works.
The way out of this impasse is the founder of Urbit saw through the use of the modern paradigm of functional programming, based on the invariance and repeatability of results and absence of “side effects”. There's only one “poser” in order for all this to work properly, you need to completely abandon everything that has been done in the field of system programming over the last 40 years, Unix-architecture and closely associated system C language and even network Protocol TCP/IP. They should be replaced based on SKI-combinators a simple virtual machine, functional systems programming language and a new peer-to-peer network communications.
“Starting from scratch”, the developers hope to create a system code that is compact, reliable and not prone to errors. Long-term objective is not to “develop” the code, and that on every level to bring it to perfection and freeze, leaving clear to all and predictable forever. That will allow you to build on top of reliable, safe and constant system code a new application with a hitherto unknown level of predictability and security.
How it looks
At the moment, the project consists of several working parts: a virtual machine (called a “Nock”), operating system (“Arvo”), system functional programming language (“Hoon”) and peer-to-peer network (“Ames”). While this works “on top” of Unix and UDP, what is happening inside the virtual Urbit-space is completely isolated from the operating system and easily transferable until (eventually) specialized equipment, which can be much easier available multifunctional CPU and fits well in the concept of “Internet of things”.
An interesting point is that the address space in a network of Ames is organized hierarchically and is fundamentally limited. Newsletter Urbit galactic uses images to describe how identities are presented and organized in its hierarchy. From “galaxy” to “stars” and “comets”, Urbit is regarded as a virtual universe, and this approach also extends to the process of forming identities.
On how does the interaction with Urbit, co-founder Tlon'and Galen Wolfe-Poly said that it depends on the preferences of the user. According to him, the key element of the design is portability (portability).
“You can install a personal server Urbit locally and also can either pay someone for the hosting to host it in the cloud or can easily place it in your own cloud,” he explained. “Or, if you are really concerned about the privacy issues, it can be very easy to install on an old Linux box and put it away in your closet.”
The project is still at a very early stage when the basic functionality is working, but custom applications while virtually none. Wulf-Poly explained to CoinDesk, which at the moment is to use Urbit might be interested in the first place the developers. Currently, this project exists in test mode, it is possible to download and install.
What does this have to do with bitcoin and the blockchain?
As explained in the online documentation, Urbit itself does not use the blockchain as such (although it has some resemblance to them in architecture peer-to-peer network). At the same time, in the newsletter of the project is often referred to bitcoin, and in an interview with wolf Poly claimed that Urbit can be an ideal platform for running bitcoin nodes, and distributed applications.                                                                            Urbit and bitcoin
In addition opencores development and peer-to-peer (P2P) nature, Urbit applies to Bitcoin the concept of scarcity of resources. The address space of the network is artificially limited (which, according to founders, will allow to solve the problem of spam and the anti-social network behavior). This allows the creators of Urbit to describe the address space as “virtual real estate”. If, presumably, the use of the system Urbit will increase, this property will be as valuable as, at the time, the domain names of the Internet. Office address Urbit, routing between them and their transmission is cryptographically protected and do not have a single point of failure.
Earlier this week, the team sold 1,020 Urbit “stars” at $256 per set during krautsalat on your website. As a result, the project generated $209,100 to continue their activities. Initially it was assumed that krausel will last for months, but in practice it turned out that the “stars” were sold out within just a few hours.
While walking a sale, chief Executive officer of bitcoin startup 21 Inc and Board member of A16Z Balaji Srinivasan made the comparison between Urbit and Bitcoin, arguing that “if IP addresses can be traded on the principle of P2P as bitcoin, it would be equivalent to the address space Urbit”.