So ignoring the abstruseness and pretentiousness for a moment [x], what I don't like is this model of immutable networking Urbit has. Maybe I am in a minority position, but I fear the future where everything is cryptographically signed, verifiable and irrefutable.
I want to be able to go on a website and post bullshit that I'll regret 15 years later. And if after 15 years someone unearths that post, I want to be able to say "that proves nothing, anybody with a text editor could have forged that". You might say a prospective employer wouldn't buy that argument even now, but I want to live in a world where people do buy that argument. Where you can post party pictures on the internet, because it's trivially easy to fake pictures, and everybody has accepted that pictures have no proving power, so everybody feels free to post them, even my boss. Let technology drive society to be more laissez faire.
A similar thing with bitcoin. My utopia doesn't involve cryptographically secure, ideal money - it rather involves no money at all. I'd rather put my energy into developing a new kind of society based on free association (rather than labor & money) than using algorithms to cement this society.
I believe cryptography is great for being CRYPTic, i.e. providing anonymity. But using it to prove identity etc. should be used very sparingly and not without thinking about the consequences.
[x] And I don't want to denigrate this project. It seems to be a great technical and theoretical achievement - it's just that their ideals are not necessarily mine.
I want to be able to go on a website and post bullshit that I'll regret 15 years later. And if after 15 years someone unearths that post, I want to be able to say "that proves nothing, anybody with a text editor could have forged that". You might say a prospective employer wouldn't buy that argument even now, but I want to live in a world where people do buy that argument. Where you can post party pictures on the internet, because it's trivially easy to fake pictures, and everybody has accepted that pictures have no proving power, so everybody feels free to post them, even my boss. Let technology drive society to be more laissez faire.
A similar thing with bitcoin. My utopia doesn't involve cryptographically secure, ideal money - it rather involves no money at all. I'd rather put my energy into developing a new kind of society based on free association (rather than labor & money) than using algorithms to cement this society.
I believe cryptography is great for being CRYPTic, i.e. providing anonymity. But using it to prove identity etc. should be used very sparingly and not without thinking about the consequences.
[x] And I don't want to denigrate this project. It seems to be a great technical and theoretical achievement - it's just that their ideals are not necessarily mine.