From an email to friends:
And now for something completely different. A short brain dump on the Urbit project:
The best way to grow a new internet is from the inside out, having Urbit planets as VMs tucked inside *nix OSes such as Mac (and Linux of course), maybe Windows is in the works [editor: I think it works on the Linux subsystem].
Have these planets all reach out to one another and exchange messages using an Ethereum address space, but with the ability to someday cut loose and migrate to some other address space if that seems more promising. The galactic senate will decide.
The cost of a planet right now is about $100, up from $20 only recently, and unlike a domain, which charges rent yearly, your planet is yours forever with no renewal fees. And if you put it on a memory stick and run it a hundred years from now, or someone does, it’ll just work.
Each planet is a personal computer state machine server defined by a single integer and all computation is in terms of a giant binary tree, belonging to Arvo, the operating system, and manipulated by a system language named Hoon (rhymes with Dune) which works against the Arvo tree to move from one state to the next, atomically, such that pulling the power cord at any point leads to a stable (not corrupted) state.
