Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies Galen Wolfe-Pauly: Urbit – A Digital Republic Reinventing the Internet
7 snips
Oct 18, 2017 Galen Wolfe-Pauly, CEO of Tlon, shares insights on Urbit, a groundbreaking project aiming to reinvent the internet through personal servers. He discusses its 15-year evolution and the philosophy that contrasts traditional internet architectures. Key topics include Urbit's unique components—Nock, Hoon, and Arvo—and its governance system likened to a digital republic. Galen envisions a future of decentralized social networks where users regain control over their data, promising a radical shift in how we interact online.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
Galen's Urbit Discovery Story
- Galen Wolfe-Pauly discovered Urbit in 2013 and was drawn to its promise of personal servers like in the old open network days.
- He found existing full web stacks frustrating and wanted to return to users owning and running their own computers.
Nock: Urbit's Micro Virtual Machine
- Urbit began with four years developing Nock, a tiny deterministic virtual machine of about 30 lines of code.
- This micro-VM computes state transitions enabling a computer that can update its entire operating environment over the network.
Reinventing Computing For Simplification
- Urbit rebuilds computing from the ground up to drastically simplify the complex existing stack.
- It fits into 30,000 lines of code, roughly the size of a web app, enabling freedom from industrial-scale machinery like Unix.