I shouldn't have said "planets". I think only the top 256 "galaxies" (owned by the founders and investors) really get a vote. Maybe? That might not be right, I don't remember the details.
But there are two other misconceptions to clarify.
First, the defense against "What if the people who run urbit turn out to be jerks?" is not to have democratic voting. And it's not Bitcoin-style "51% of us agree" forks either, urbit is a top-down hierarchy. The defense is that Urbit is open source, and anyone could go out and start their own Urbit network and ask people to join it.
Second, planets have (theoretical) value, but they're not fungible, they're identities. A good analogy is: imagine if Reddit were designed to only have 2^32 handles, and they each cost a dollar. In that scenario, if Reddit said, "Hey, we've sold all our handles, hooray! Now we're going to issue an update that makes some more available", would existing Redditors lose anything?
But there are two other misconceptions to clarify.
First, the defense against "What if the people who run urbit turn out to be jerks?" is not to have democratic voting. And it's not Bitcoin-style "51% of us agree" forks either, urbit is a top-down hierarchy. The defense is that Urbit is open source, and anyone could go out and start their own Urbit network and ask people to join it.
Second, planets have (theoretical) value, but they're not fungible, they're identities. A good analogy is: imagine if Reddit were designed to only have 2^32 handles, and they each cost a dollar. In that scenario, if Reddit said, "Hey, we've sold all our handles, hooray! Now we're going to issue an update that makes some more available", would existing Redditors lose anything?