Some have said that bitcoin can be thought of as digital property, akin to a kind of virtual gold. If so, this description then raises the question – can technology be used to create entirely digital landscapes?
The developers behind a project called Urbit have spent much of the past decade trying to answer that question. It’s through this concept that the project, developed by a startup called Tlon , has attracted support from Silicon Valley powerhouses like Andreessen Horowitz and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.
Urbit is a network of personal cloud computers that, according to its founders, aims to create a means through which individuals can run their own servers without having to go through the trouble of running complicated server infrastructure.
Described by its creators as a "virtual city", the project dates back to the mid-2000s and is the the brainchild of Curtis Yarvin, a programmer who has stoked controversy in the past for his "neo-reactionary" political writings under the pen name Mencius Moldbug. Despite attracting criticism over the years, the project is pushing ahead, and last night completed an initial sale of sever addresses.
So what does this have to do with bitcoin and blockchain?
As its online documentation makes clear, Urbit itself does not use an actual blockchain (though it does share some kinship through its peer-to-peer network). Yet in the project’s white paper, bitcoin itself is frequently invoked, and in interview, Tlon co-founder Galen Wolfe-Pauly argued that Urbit could become an ideal platform for running bitcoin nodes and distributed apps.
Wolfe-Pauly told CoinDesk: "A blockchain is more useful when the nodes are run by actual users. Coinbase is cool, but it would be great if there was an easy way to run a full node. Urbit is well-suited to solve that problem." What it looks like
The project is composed […]
