A16z, a well-known Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Bitcoin and Urbit

Rage Review : Tlon is a US startup that has received investments from Andreessen Horowitz, a well-known Silicon Valley venture capital firm, and Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal. Its core technology comes from the Urbit project, a personal cloud computer network that allows individuals to avoid complex infrastructure and independently run servers. Tlon founder Galen Wolfe-Pauly believes that Urbit can build a network similar to the Milky Way and is an ideal platform for Bitcoin and distributed applications. The two have similarities in peer-to-peer networks, but their internal structures lack distributed characteristics. There will definitely be more possibilities for technical integration between the two in the future.

Translation: Annie_Xu

Some people say that Bitcoin is a digital asset, similar to a virtual gold. If so, can this technology draw a new blueprint for digitalization?

The developers of the Urbit project have spent decades trying to find the answer. The concept is what attracted Silicon Valley’s big-name venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel to the project of the startup Tlon.

The project founder said that Urbit is a network of personal cloud computers, aiming to allow individuals to run their own servers without having to run complex server infrastructure.

The founder compared Urbit to a "virtual city", which can be traced back to mid-2000, when Curtis Yarvin first proposed this idea. This programmer once caused a lot of controversy because of his "neo-reactionary" political comments, and he used the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug at the time. Although the project has been criticized, it has not hindered its progress, and the first server address was sold on June 28.

But what does this have to do with Bitcoin and blockchain?

Urbit website documents indicate that they do not use blockchain, but their peer-to-peer networks have commonalities. However, the project white paper mentions Bitcoin many times, and Tlon founder Galen Wolfe-Pauly said that Urbit is an ideal platform for running Bitcoin nodes and distributed applications.

"User-run nodes make blockchains more useful. Coinbase is cool, but it would be even better if running a full node was easier. Urbit is a perfect solution to this problem."

Urbit Description

This project has several parts: virtual machine (Nock), operating system (Arvo), programming language (Hoon), and peer-to-peer network (Ames).

The Urbit white paper uses a picture of the Milky Way to describe how identity is managed within the architecture. From the Milky Way to stars to comets, Urbit is portrayed as a virtual universe, and the process of generating identity is further explained.

As for how you interact with the Urbit, Wolfe-Pauly says that comes down to user preference; portability is a core element of its design.

"You can install Urbit locally, you can pay someone to manage it in the cloud, or you can just do it yourself, which is very simple. Or if you are really concerned about privacy, you can simply install it on an old Linux computer and put it in a closet."

But the project has only just begun.

Wolfe-Pauly told reporters that most of the people using Urbit are developers. Although it is still in the form of a test network, it can already be downloaded.

Bitcoin and Urbit

In addition to the peer-to-peer network, the commonality between the two is the concept of resource scarcity. The number of identities in the network is artificially limited. Earlier this week, the team sold 1,020 Urbit stars at $256 each, netting $209,100.

As the crowdfunding campaign continued for several hours, Balaji Srinivasan, CEO of bitcoin startup 21 Inc and a16z board member, drew a comparison between the two, noting that “if IP addresses can be traded on a peer-to-peer network like Bitcoin, Urbit address services will be needed.”

Balaji Srinivasan

Let's call it the similarity between the two, but that's about it.

Today’s Urbit does not have the global distribution features of Bitcoin. As its white paper states, the hierarchical structure of the Urbit “universe” is different from the model in Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin document.

Currently Urbit is mostly centralized (due to its initial deployment), but Wolfe-Pauly said that as the ecosystem changes, the overall structure of the Urbit network should become more distributed.