#21

The simple (possibly too simple) answer to this question is that, like any service offering established in the world, one could choose not to purchase or operate or interact with infrastructure he owns.

I acknowledge this is a possibly naive outlook, but similar to how one can choose to buy from a local market vs. whole foods, one can choose to operate (and interact with) urbit infrastructure they recognize as being true to their beliefs/ideals.

This is obviously hard to do real due diligence on, but I do believe it will be possible.

While it goes without saying that -some- subset of folks out there will be fine and actively pursue purchasing network infrastructure/nodes from curtis, and he will inevitably profit off this subset, one of the primary points of urbit’s existence is that folks who don’t wish to interact with nodes involved in that sphere can choose to do so incredibly easily.

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#22

Tlon is a startup, a classic corporate structure, if you will — ‘urbit’ is a protocol, and already operated under a number of structures — I’m aware of at least a handful of network infrastructure being run under cooperative ownership, with one group in particular actually situating the ownership of a single star as cryptographically-cooperatively owned, if you are aware of what a multisig wallet entails:

https://dalten.org/

While the hierarchical nature of the networking infrastructure is made immediately legible, the nodes in and of themselves can literally be owned by an arbitrary number of people, a case the dalten group outlines in a small way. There’s absolutely nothing stopping a single node’s (a star) children nodes (planets) from each maintaining collective ownership and management of a star.

Frankly, there’s really nothing stopping individuals from completely shrugging off the network hierarchy and choosing to run their urbits in the forest, locally networked with their friends.

#23

Aren’t there a lot of other ways to do such things already? I’m trying to understand Urbit’s specificity in this matter as a protocol. But maybe don’t answer me now. I’ll go and find more about it tomorow and read people’s opinions here.

It’s too bad for such an ambitious and suposedly game-changing project that you use an old capital related start up structure to build the platform, seems to go completely against any “anarchist” (whatever this word may mean to you, I personally find it weird to not consider it a leftist word) ideal or impulse you might have had initially. I feel like if the company was to really prove how it’s moved past anything disgusting its founder might believe in, instead of shrugging it off like it’s nothing, overhauling the entire structure of “how it’s made” would be the first and most crucial step to help people make sense out of this.

But I’ll just check more about this and the alternatives this week and come back more informed.

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#24

I was under the impression the star/planet virtual real estate was intentionally scarce? Wouldn’t this limit the type of choice you are suggesting is possible?

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