🌴⛓ Chainletter - Issue #9
🌴⛓ Chainletter
Our new weekly newsletter covers Chainforest - a recap of our latest happenings, our members’ accomplishments, and our projects to come. We’ll also offer a collection of the best threads and articles sparking conversation within our Discord.
In the past 7 days, 13 new Rainmakers have joined the forest.
The top three channels were: 🎨│ nfts-general, 📈│ charts, and 🎮│ gaming-general.
Urbit, Uqbar & The Digital Domestic: The ~hodzod-walrus Interview
A few months ago, Chainforest dove deep into Urbit, the world’s only p2p networked operating system focused on making the internet cozy. “⬜│ urbit” was spawned and a deep dive session with Rainmaker ~hodzod-walruscurrently building Uqbar, a blockchain built on Urbit, was organized by Cam Porter and David Feld.
In this issue, we dive again into the computatively esoteric world of Urbit with ~hodzod-walrus to learn more about it’s structure, solutions, and what distinguishes Uqbar from the rest of L1s.
D: In your words, what is Urbit?
HW: Urbit is a purely functional definition of a computer that allows people to perform things that are very difficult to do in the traditional computing environment that we’re all used to. What I mean by that is it is very difficult for every person that uses a computer to run services — hosting, uploading, streaming, etc. This leads to people basically using their computers as terminals to interface with other people’s computers instead of running services on their own. Those other people are usually corporations, which then post, store, and do what they want with your activity and data. Instead, Urbit makes some technical choices that basically rebuild the whole stack from the ground up and let running services be an everyday thing.
D: How did you get into Urbit?
HW: I had heard about it like years ago, just because it gets posted on Hacker News. I had looked into it and had no idea what was going on. In college, though, studying CS, I started getting into functional programming like Haskell. Then I saw Urbit again. I recognized that the entire operating system was functional, which inspired me to get on the network in 2020.
What has kept me super interested is the fact that everybody I meet on the Urbit network is super interesting, in one way or another. It really is a new way of being social on the internet. We’re all used to having a bunch of different accounts, spread across different platforms, having pseudo-anonymous identities. Making friends is a pretty bad term for what we traditionally do on the Internet. It’s mostly just liking posts, and searching for engagement and stuff. Urbit is not like this at all. It really is a more accurate reflection of how humans socialize. A user has a permanent identity, acquires a reputation attached to that identity, and accesses public and private groups related to the interests that they have. It lays the groundworks for making connections with people in a very nice way. I already use Urbit more than I use the regular internet.
D: What will bring the next million to Urbit?
HW: So the irony is Urbit is supposed to be easy, but up until recently it’s been hard. Urbit ID’s live on Ethereum, which is expensive. That cost, up until a couple days ago when layer two planets became available, created friction. Now, there’s a bunch of people giving them away and, if you know who to ask, you can get a planet for free.
But then there’s the matter of making the pipeline of owning an Urbit ID to running it smooth and simple. A lot of people are working on low cost hosting for that — $5 -10 a month can get you hosted on Urbit. The pipelines for onboarding to Urbit are becoming easier and easier. There are now, by default, peer-to-peer social networks called Groups which make what I think will bring the next million to Urbit possible. Onboarding the next million people to Urbit is going to come down to making Urbit the best place to run your DAO: having proposal creation, voting, social feeds, multisig transactions, in the same space as sending and receiving messages — right on your Urbit ship. That’s what we’re doing at Uqbar.
Right now, DAOs are really scattered across a bunch of different platforms. They use discord for communication. They use mods and bots to bring the chain to discord, to demonstrate I own this NFT, that I’m a part of this DAO. They use snapshot for voting, gnosis for wallet management, Discourse, Notion, for documentation.
The silly thing about that is it’s not your state on the chain, or that state of your data, that is connected to your discord status. It’s a one- time thing that can get out of sync. It’s a workaround. There are a lot of pain points there, in those separate states. The state of the DAO on chain, and the state of the DAO’s assets on chain, should be synchronous with the state of whatever you’re using for your place of meeting at all times.
D: What are the differences between galaxies, stars, and planets? Are they operational privileges?
HW: Yeah so, I think everybody’s going to be able to use their planet level to host their DAOs. There’s no gatekeeping at the star level in terms of who can use a DAO or run a DAO service. So that’s not a worry. Stars are useful for being a more trustworthy identity on the network, because they come at a higher cost. There’s some really interesting theory around this that I’m excited to see in practice: how much is a star worth simply for being a certain class of node on the network?
Right now, being even a planet is a very high trust thing. I trust planet owners, to a certain degree. This is basically the premise of why we have Urbit IDs and why they’re not infinite. If somebody is running a planet, they’re a real person. They might own other planets, but this is clearly an identity that they’ve invested something into. It’s a pretty cool thing to have a planet and be immediately recognized as a first-class Internet user.
Yeah. So yeah, you can look at all Urbit IDs as equal in that realm of capabilities, belonging to organizations, DAOs, stuff like that. It’s just an identity, a login to stuff. It’s one identity for everything.
D: How does Urbit governance work?
HW: Urbit governance is poorly understood by people who aren’t on the network. t’s no fault of their own. It’s been a pretty esoteric project for a while. We’re just starting to make things approachable. Urbit IDs are first class computers. They have the same set of things that they can do. The ID hierarchy serves two major roles.
1. It demonstrates skin in the game, and just generally status. Rare things are valuable for being rare. NFT’s have proven this. Owning rare address space, just like owning prime real estate, is a valuable thing.
2. Even more significant to Urbit governance is the Urbit ship. You receive your software on your Urbit ship, you can receive the default software, what comes with your computer, when you buy it, from your star, which receives it from its Galaxy. Thus, the Urbit software needs to be governed or chosen by galaxies. Right now, everyone is on the same page. Everyone is downloading the same Urbit software from one galaxy which is run by Tlon, the company actively developing Urbit. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Anybody can choose to set the source for updates to whatever ship (galaxy, star, planet) they want. However, users need to coordinate if they want to communicate with one another, and be “on the same page”, in terms of what protocol they’re running. So Galaxies, of which there are 256, actually do have what’s called, “the Galactic Senate”. This is where they get together and they say, okay, you know, “we’re all on the same page with the protocol here” — the apps, the operating systems — that we’re going to be pushing down by default to all the ships beneath us in the address space. That’s the extent of it. Now, there might be a case where two parts of the network are in disagreement about what the protocol is, and they’re not communicating with one another. That’s okay. That’s a fork of cryptocurrency. Forks have happened in the past. Usually one fork wins, because it achieves more adoption, and the other dies. That’s fine. In Urbit, planets could migrate their host or their sponsor to a galaxy, to get that specific set of apps and version of OS. So the whole thing boils down to optionality. There’s no reason to ever be locked in to one galaxy or star that’s providing you with software updates, you can go to any other galaxy or star or planet for that matter. It’s totally decentralized.
D: How will Uqbar and Urbit merge with existing blockchains?
HW: We want to be able to really tightly integrate the Ethereum chain with Urbit stuff. We’re very interested in Ethereum’s potential to stick around as a base layer to settle to and to hold critical information and assets. I don’t want to position, you know [redacted] [redacted] [redacted] [redacted] [redacted] [redacted] [redacted] [redacted] [redacted] [redacted]. What I can say is, there’s going to be tools for interacting with Ethereum in the Urbit environment. I’m not talking about bridging assets. That’s down the road. I’m talking about using an Ethereum wallet that’s on your Urbit ship to directly read data off of Ethereum and use it in a DAO context.
Diving into Urbit really has been a community effort. Below are some resources compiled that helped us dive deeper into this exquisite project whose ambition knows no bounds.
Understanding Urbit - shared by Amit Mukherjee
Urbit: the Good, the Bad, & the Insane - shared by Schottsy
Introduction to Urbit & FAQ - shared by ~hodzod-walrus
What Da Beep is Web3 w/ Galen (Tlon), TobyShorin, Ed (Urbit), & Sam Frank - shared by David Feld
From the Mouth of the Forest
On Bitcoin:
A proof-of-work vs. proof-of-stake discussion sparked in the Bitcoin channel, citing these two twitter threads: Lyn Alden on Proof Of Work & Ryan Selkis on BTC Dominance
Mark Cuban jumped in the comments with a harsh response
In the Chainforest Discord, yousuf - @yousufhaque brought forward the argument that proof-of-work is also subject to economies of scale, as those with more capital can purchase more computing power.
Chainforest member @americanpharoah brought forward an interesting point, stating that Ethereum took a better path to decentralization and inclusion by being a proof of work project for ten years before switching to proof of stake.
P2E Gaming:
Conversation broke out discussing play-to-earn crypto gaming vs. “play and earn” in the gaming channel/ general channel.
Alex - @awattermann shared an interesting article about the financialization of crypto gaming.
General consensus was reached that a game needs to be fun to play before anything else in order to have a long term future.
Personally, I have my doubts about P2E gaming, as right now VCs are flooding the market with capital, so earning “money” on a P2E game is not incredibly difficult.
What happens when that influx of money stops? Does it take the route of online poker where only the best survive until eventually there is no one left?
Crypto Superbowl Ads:
The Superbowl saw advertisements from all the centralized exchanges that operate in the U.S. The number of prominent crypto ads, including ads from Coinbase, FTX, and Crypto.com, represents a moment for the crypto industry as a whole. It indicates that these companies have generated enough wealth to spend tens of millions collectively on crypto ads. More importantly, it suggests the crypto industry believes the average American is ready to adopt crypto. Our favorites:
Overall Winner: Coinbase, whose floating QR code for $15 in BTC sparked 20 million visits to the Coinbase site.
Most entertaining: FTX. In various points in history, Larry David’s character rejects major inventions such as the wheel and electricity, eventually rejecting cryptocurrency.
Critics lashed out at the ads, calling them irresponsible for promoting ‘FOMO’ over educating people on the risks of investing in crypto.
This article by The Verge makes an interesting connection to 22 years ago when 17 dot-com startups bought Superbowl ad slots. Those 17 companies no longer exist.
Alive and Well
ETH Denver:
Several members of Chainforest met up at ETH Denver for happy hour and dinner, the turnout was impressive (over 20 members). It was nice to put faces to discord names.
Other “unofficial” happy hours and meet ups occurred throughout the week of ETH Denver.
At my first crypto conference, I found it impressive how organized it was, how friendly everyone was, and how almost all events were free (open bar too).
Big musical names were also hired for certain, including DeadMau5, Tiesto, and Pussy Riot.
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