Josh Lehman: Urbit – The Peer-to-Peer Network Re-Decentralizing the Internet #450

Transcript

so welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the global boxing revolution i'm brian crane and today i'm speaking with josh lehmann he's the executive director of the orbit foundation and we're gonna talk a lot about you know what is arabic and what it all means but just before that a brief word from our sponsor so first of all we have steak wallet steak wallet is you know your new favorite multi-chain mobile wallet that puts the power of web3 at your fingertips so with just a few taps you can easily stake and manage your assets on over 22 different protocols including major evms l2s and chains like cosmos salon near and more

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that's kind of like structured organized as a doll and their you know their commitment to community ownership goes beyond just the wallet so they're also sponsoring ether.js as an open source javascript library and they also apply to commit two and a half percent of their token supply to a bitcoin aqueduct so head over to tallyho dot cash so that's t-a-l-l-y-h-o dot to try it out and with that let's get into the episode uh josh thanks so much for joining me it's great to have you here yeah thanks so much for having me it is great to be here yeah so so maybe a little bit of context here

so we're going to speak about urban today and kind of the theme of this orbit of this episode is sort of you know building on orbit now we've i have actually done an urban episode before in this podcast a long time ago it was five years ago where my hair and i interviewed uh galen uh who is the ceo of tlon which is sort of it's been the main company building orbit so go check out the episode it's actually still pretty current i you know we listened to it recently and it's kind of it's all still you know it's all pretty uh pretty accurate you know because uh orbit has actually been sort of conceived a long time ago and so a lot

of the fundamental architectures is unchanged and they're just slowly moving along it has not pivoted yeah it's not pivoted exactly not limited and so i have become i mean i've been interested i guess in arabic since then so for about five years but then more recently become much more interested because i just felt like it went from this abstract thing to something okay there's actually activity progress felt like it was going somewhere and going to some place that's exciting and um and then josh here uh yeah so josh is at the urban foundation but maybe we can we can just hang out with you at this point tell us a little bit about yourself

you know who are you and how did you get involved in this orbit thing yeah so i'm josh um i head up the urban foundation which is a new entity as of this year unlike a lot of projects in the space urban started first with a for-profit company that worked on the project for a long time and spinoff spun off the foundation much later after kind of a long incubation period and a good amount of watching the space to figure out how to best do a foundation and what it should do my background's in software development i did a series of startups in san francisco bay area

they all you know eventually didn't make it but they took progressively longer to not make it i learned a lot from doing that built a lot of technology myself as a solo founder always at first and eventually with the team and i spent a lot of time just kind of in the trenches of classic web 2 programming building technology i started my involvement with urban started as just an enthusiast i heard about it on hacker news which is how a lot of people heard about a lot of things back in the day maybe they still do and uh whatever it was i had no clue but it was certainly really interesting and someone had spent a lot of time naming things and it seemed like a

you know it was serious in a different way than than a lot of things were that i was familiar with but i didn't quite get it and it took a few years i think until about late 2016 early 2017 to when i finally really understood the project because they put some time into explaining it in this like 10 minute long video interview with galen and curtis and i started going to meetups because they had these in the bay area and i became absolutely fascinated with it because it was stupidly ambitious you know i was always into functional programming had been since college and i built most of the technology i worked on in closure because i had a hard time grocking haskell

closure made a lot of sense to me and i always you know i loved functional programming but i was not really you know like the thing that blew my mind about urban was that it was actually a functional computer an entire stack built around those ideas and so what first drew me to it was that it was as a technologist as a programming language and a stack but this was in 2017 at a time when orbit was barely usable you know it existed it had existed since 2013 as a you know real piece of software you could run but not for anything useful really and so i stayed involved with the project talking to the various people

that were working on it that i met at these meetups like galen and ted uh over the course of i guess until 2020 so about three years as i was working on this other startup and in 2020 uh i got really into it again and decided to plunge a little bit more fully into the ecosystem as i you know found myself increasingly impressed by what these guys had built that they'd taken this crazy idea to reinvent all of computing you know who would do that uh and they actually did it and started building real products on it and it was at that point that you know the stars aligned for me and i got to make the plunge into working on it full time

cool i i think you sort of like touched on you know you mentioned like a few things before you mention like functional computer reinvent computing but like most people listening to this podcast they will not have heard of orbit at all probably or maybe they heard like they heard about it and we're very punched by it that's a very common one yeah maybe there's some of the people have heard about it and confused most many people will not have heard about it at all uh so yeah can you explain what is urban and what is the vision of herbert what is it trying to accomplish you know to start and may be relevant for this crowd urban is not a blockchain uh it makes use of a blockchain which it

did as of 2019 but that's you know probably not the most fundamental component of it what orbit is is the recreation of personal computing sort of as imagined at the you know turn of the 90s when the internet was becoming a thing and there was this dream that people would be running all of their own software on servers and connecting peer-to-peer with one another you know that was the mentality of of the you know the early pioneers of the internet and obviously it morphed into something very different the fundamental idea behind orbit

i think is that computing is too complicated the the stack that we build on is inherited from the 70s and before you know unix and linux which well you know unix being kind of the main philosophy powering linux which powers pretty much the entire internet which is in my opinion the most useful interesting application of computers which is communication between people that is all based on technology that predates networks themselves and so ever since then we've been bolting on additional layers of software further and further up the stack

as we discover the things that we really want to use computers for and as a developer in the you know 20 teens what you find is that building the kinds of applications that we all want to build is insanely complicated and it's full of what we call incidental complexity the things that are not related to the problem you're trying to solve uh but are to satisfy the constraints of the computing environment that you're in so you need to build authentication you need to deal with databases you need to deal with security and a bunch more the fundamental idea you know returning to urban is if you could redesign computing to be you know from the present looking back in time and going this is

actually what we want to use computers for is communication with other human beings if we were to build a computer today around the things that we know we want to use computers for could you build something that was simple enough to where everyone could actually run their own technology without you know descending into a horrible web of complexity that ultimately leads people to delegate that to trusted third parties that can do it for them and if you can do that you end up with very different software you end up with things that are not services but tools this is a thing that you know is held up very well about galen's whole line of

reasoning is that software should feel like a tool it should feel like you know a thing that you buy or create and then you use like forever and maybe you tweak it here and there over time but ultimately it's a thing that you own and it's a thing that stands the test of time you know there's a idea to make you know as close to eternal software as we possibly can things that are um inherently good and you know without an underlying motive to become google uh and to own every aspect of uh you know the people that use the system uh so

yeah that's that's really what it's aspiring to be is is a system in which a group of people ideally everybody runs their own infrastructure and runs the tools that they need to communicate with the people they need to communicate with and they are very much using a proper bicycle for the mind something that isn't trying to harvest their attention um for various forms of profits and not that i'm against profit but the kinds of things that are harmful to the end user often in ways that their creators don't anticipate now that's kind of a you know philosophical pitch what this thing actually is it's a

new computing stack it's like you go back to the 1970s you you start over from scratch with what a computer should be from assembly language on up to a higher level language on up to an operating system that uses those stacks that's you know like i mentioned earlier that's an absurd thing to imagine doing these days nobody goes and says let me just you know start over at assembly language and build a new computing environment because that's just a huge challenge well that's what orbit set out to do and that they actually did and that you can now run software on top of yeah i think that is one of the things that's sort of actually particularly striking about the urban thing which kind of makes sense if you understand like the scale of the

ambition is also sort of the history of the project and it's just like how long uh this has been going it's like 20 years yeah can you talk a little bit about sort of what yeah what is the history of urban so i can i can talk about it imperfectly because i wasn't there in the early days uh but you know i've i've had a lot of the lore passed down from me through to me through being around all these people but um this legend would have it the project started in about um as the personal project of a guy named curtis yarvin much has been said about him i'm not going to say too much he worked on this as a personal project and as an idea from

about you know something that there aren't any public records of until around you know screw up the year i think it was 2010 or 11. there was a lab was a site he ran um blog post that introduced the concept of orbit and uh the dart you know the those early period when it was kind of an idea in his mind to when it became public uh was you know seven or eight years at about the time that you imagine bitcoin was being created i don't really know exactly how long that was being worked on but probably over a similar stretch um it was you know announced to the world at about the same time and it existed as a you know complete

you know not very good working system in 2012 2013 somewhere in there and that's when curtis took that idea and said you know i need to in order to actually build this thing i'm going to need to recruit a team and i'm going to need to raise some money and he went out and founded a company called tlon with with uh galen who became his co-founder shortly thereafter and the two of them worked on tlon from now from then until the present and talon you know the idea was that you know there's kind of two models that eric s raymond outlined in like an early 90s

paper um called the cathedral and the bazaar where there's these two models for for building software you have the cathedral which is the top down hierarchical there is a singular point with a vision and everything stems from that and defines a software system by design and then you have the bazaar which is sort of the linux model of open source where you have a group of people who build something collectively on merit and you end up with very different kinds of architectures you know the cathedral is very much you know rigid and hierarchical and highly specific and the bazaar is sort of organic and amorphous and you know full of all kinds of different outgrowths and both are very good um both both can be not good also

they're just two two models and the idea with urban was you know for this system to come to exist it has to start as a cathedral it's very much a you know it it has a singular vision and a take on the world that has to be defined and done in a setting that gives the creators more or less complete control over that vision until which point that that vision is sufficiently solidified and communicable to a wider audience the principles of the system are defined and at that point morphing into a bizarre model is

is a good thing so tulan was that cathedral that would you know sort of give birth to the project and over that period of time you know urban gain something of a reputation as being sort of hostile to open source that's why they were really not trying to harness open source until a point at which the system was solid enough um that time started happening in about 2020 maybe a little bit before which is about when i showed up and that was when flan was beginning to realize this is the time to begin figuring out how to transition

this from being our project and our vision to something that is more widely held by a community and eventually an ecosystem over a lot of that time the technical you know the the the work that had to happen was that urban had to go from something that was an mvp to something that you know really embodied its own principles and at a bare minimum it needed to work you know like it needed to be a thing that you know you didn't have to do what we call a network breach on every couple of months uh which used to happen that's where you basically reset the entire main net uh to to zero and everyone must start over from scratch with all of their data blown out you know it's like a you know like a test net that you can

just blow out and that was the state of things and it was resetting every few months which made it very hard to actually use it for anything real and it was horribly inefficient and the design of the veins the parts of the kernel was not really fleshed out so there was a lot of churn of the code base which made it very hard to accept open source contributions even though the code was open source because you often have you know sweeping design decisions being made that blow out the you know an entire way of doing things that aren't really communicated to anyone um that's you know we're now at this point where that's all changing yeah i know i think this is a good uh a good description i think good

description of both the history a bit and and sort of where it's at yeah i do i do think i mean yeah who knows what satoshi did right and like how long he was working on this thing until like it kind of came out but definitely yeah you could imagine something like that right probably like yeah i think it's sort of a fascinating thing right after some person spent like eight years or just like in a solitary pondering of this crazy idea yeah just in a rapture with an idea you know and yeah that's it's a long period of time to be working on a thing alone what is uh like you mentioned a bunch of

stuff right you mentioned sort of the you know the release of this initial orbit system in you know 2012 and then getting to the point where okay it is more it's more something that's like okay solid right and it's gonna be kind of like this but can you talk a little bit more about you know where's urban today like what has what's the current state of you know of the system yeah totally and let me uh let me start that by kind of speedrunning some of the major things that i've been present for over the last couple of years that uh maybe last three that started to make it

really solid and get us to where we are today and i think one of those big ones which was about a year before i came on to you know really devoting my energy to the project was in 2019 when they went on chain prior to that orbit's address space model was stored in a text file on a github repo there was always this idea that okay there needs to be people that cryptographically own parts of the urban address space um but we don't have a system for that actually i think that's maybe something that's worth explaining what is urban outer space yeah so you know urban address space is the

it's the network topology um we have names for for these you know a running orbit node is called a ship and there are multiple classes of ship the ones that are important to really talk about for this conversation are galaxies stars and planets um galaxies you can think of kind of like root dns nodes uh they are able to spawn stars which are other infrastructure nodes they perform peer discovery and packet routing because this is this is sort of one of the problems you have with a peer-to-peer network is ultimately you need to be able to establish connection with people throughout the world you tend to need certain nodes that are privileged to

and usually have better infrastructure capabilities to route your request to somebody else so that you can form a peer-to-peer connection and that's the main role of uh one of the main roles at least of the infrastructure nodes the nervous you have this hierarchical address space which is there to enable a peer-to-peer network to actually operate efficiently so the galaxies there's a limited number of those just as there are root dns nodes they tend to be fairly valuable because there aren't very many of them they also form what's called the galactic senate which is the group of people that have the ability to upgrade the rules that define urban address space

so this was all dreamed up long before ethereum and taos existed but you can think of the galaxies as kind of a dao and that's that's you know kind of how they operate today um they vote to upgrade a set of smart contracts that run on ethereum and that's what governs the rules of the address space and so you have these galaxies 255 of them each of which can spawn 255 stars and each star can spawn roughly 65 thousand planets so two to thirty two there are sixteen um planets are what an individual urban user would use

they are valuable enough to where you would actually want to establish a track record of using one and use it day to day but they are not so valuable that you have to go through um annoying opsec hoops in order to you know keep a valuable piece of cryptographic assets safe and so each of these are nfts uh they all correspond to a number from zero through four point three billion two to thirty two and they comprise the urban network when running they largely operate the same with these slight differences in that stars and galaxies perform packet routing and peer discovery and they also one thing i left out is the galaxies perform software

distribution so um a galaxy disseminates its software to all of its stars which then disseminate that to all of their planets and so um you can imagine a fully fledged urban network being a thing in which the different galaxies start to diverge in which code they actually supply to their section of the network that hasn't happened um it's it could though yeah yeah totally and then basically right so you have you have this like scarcity of this outer space and then in 2019 right you mentioned basically this is like put on ethereum um

and today lives on ethereum right so like if yep correct smart contracts turned out to be the right substrate to build this kind of model um you know rather than trying to invent that ourselves it's like oh yeah use ethereum that that works yeah and scarcity it's worth noting you know thing about scarcity and that it provides an important function because each of these you know the urban address space each one of these nfts is what's called an orbit id and it has a human pronounceable and visual representation that's recognizable um my planet is called wall ref podlex uh you can you know it sounds weird but eventually you get used to it and

because you can pronounce it it becomes a name of sorts and that's what you use when you run any software on the urban network to communicate with other people you know it's like your domain name and ip address rolled into one and persistent or like your ens name you know is maybe a good way to think about it for this crowd but it's built into the operating system and every application uses it at a packet level to send packets signed by that identity throughout the network so this becomes like a primitive identification mechanism for every actor on any piece of software that you build on the urban operating system and that's really like the key important thing to get from urban address space is that there's a

finite number of those and their scarcity is what makes them valuable and makes it so that orbit creates high trust communities because your reputation is valuable you had to pay something to obtain that nft and communicate with people and if you do anything malicious it will destroy the value of that in other people's eyes and uh you know ultimately not work out very well for you so you mentioned uh i think this you know big event uh or this big change i kind of came refurbished which was distribution of software right so you know basically

people can can write applications sort of like urban applications but can you explain like what are with applications and how do they differ from let's say uh an application that let's say an iphone application or maybe uh adapt like let's say an ethereum decentralized application so yeah what are the differences yeah that's a great question um so an urban application is server-side uh primarily um it can of course have any number of interfaces you can interface with an urban application

over an iphone app or over a command line over a web interface but the urban part of it is something that runs server side but the key thing is that it's your server and so you know when you run an urban application you're running it on your own node um and so that is your own personal cloud server it is you know an urban application is you know the technical name for it would be what's called a desk which is like a a package of code the main unit of code in there is what's called an agent and this is like a long running process you can think about it like a you know kind of like a web server or

some service that would run on say linux we call them agents and they have a specific interface for accepting information allowing you to read information out of them and subscribe to certain paths that will produce updates over time um so i think the the key things about an urban application that are important to to get are you know any application you build like i was mentioning before has authentication and authorization baked into it uh every packet that you send is it is bound to an identity so you're not

building authentication systems into an urban application um every application has the ability to talk to any other application whether that's running on your ship or any other person's urban node or ship same thing that you know urban defines this peer-to-peer network that allows these applications to talk to one another and all the information exchanged over that network is typed this is kind of this is kind of cool you don't need to go and read developer documentation for you know what someone's json api is and then program against it and get everything just right because either you can send information or you can't because it satisfies the type system or

not you know so the whole network in peer-to-peer the whole period of your network is statically tight and so when you build an urban application that can talk to any other person's application you you can also distribute that peer-to-peer so if i build something anyone else can get it directly from me so every orbit node is its own app store or at least can't be where those are things that you build rather than submitting them to say apple's app store with an ios app or the chrome web store for a web extension or some third parties uh you know gated moderated um you know distribution mechanism

the applications are distributed peer-to-peer themselves and that means that every person running an urban application is running a full version of it urban is also an asset database meaning all of the in you know the the data that an application needs to run is stored on that ship with transactional semantics so i don't need databases either so ultimately an urban app is like a it's a server-side application that you do not have to build authentication into you do not need to deploy a database to because urban already is one and a peer-to-peer network with static typing all of that baked in so what do these tend to look like in practice well

orbit can also serve web pages so you can serve your own website that talks to any you know a number of agents packaged into a desk urban application um and so you have a web interface for talking to your own private server and that can also talk to other people so there's all kinds of applications you can build with this anything social the current you know kind of predominant use case is a discord like groups application where you can form groups of people and you can create chat channels notebooks link collections share information with people there's a variety of other things that

have been built as well and i think the thing that urban particularly excels at is any kind of application that networks with other people um how this differs from adapt is that you have off chain state you know this is one of the big problems of of dapps is that you know if you if you need to do anything other than display information on a blockchain you have two options you store that information in local storage or you store it in some other centralized service and both of those are a problem you can also store it on a blockchain but then you have to pay a bunch of money to store it and there's all kinds of data that you really just don't want to have to put on a

blockchain because it's just not important enough and it's only yours you know it's your private settings or configuration gnosis safe is a great example of this where you know your all the metadata associated with your safes is stored in local storage so if you ever want to use a different browser then well you kind of have to re-upload your safes and at least the information that identifies them but what they what as what they are and when you sign a transaction you're relying on a service that gnosis runs in order to shuttle those partially signed transactions back and forth um an urban application would send things directly to the other people that you are trying to talk to and would store all of your information

your annotations and metadata about information on a blockchain on itself which is private and only yours and not shared with any third party cool i think that's a nice that's a nice example right so like okay let's say we we the two of us together have uh agnosis safe right so basically like a multi-sig we control an ethereum and that could be built inside orbit right so then it would mean now the two of us wanna i mean first of all i guess right would be what you mentioned right okay so we can have each some local state that describes maybe labels or transactions or something like that and that's just in our personal server and then if you

want to make a transaction you know i'm like in initiating the transaction it gets sent to you via the urban php network you know you can you can sign the other side and then like broadcast it and then it's live right which is doesn't work like that today in ethereum right because i guess today in ethereum people access this via you know like the web browser and you know then it's maybe in this local cache i guess like what you said yeah they they need they need a way you know and notice safe if you and i have a multi-sig when i sign a transaction all i'm doing is you know i'm not putting anything on the chain yet

i'm creating i don't know which cryptography they use exactly um this is beyond my pay grade but what they're doing is creating a part essentially a partial transaction that's awaiting one more on the multi-sig and that's information that you need to sign in order to submit it to chain um but i have to get that to you somehow and the way i get that to you if you're using gnosis safe is through a service that gnosis runs that indexes all of the multi-sig addresses along with the recipients so it knows that when my address signs this transaction it looks up the other addresses that are on that multisig

and says okay i need to actually provide this information to the other people that are accessing the gnosis safe client through those addresses so your the network routing is through gnosis and if that service goes down then you can't use nosa safe anymore it is not actually a decentralized application yeah yeah so maybe you can go a little bit more into like so okay we have to close the safe as an example right i think it's a nice example but like for most people they're like okay but why do i care like why would i want to use like an urban application like what's the great benefit for the sort of normal user of you know web applications of the over the internet today

so go come at that a couple different ways like yeah a lot of normal users don't really care that they own their information they just want the thing to work right some people do care that they actually own their information and a lot of people that do care have noticed that when you own your information and you own the tools you're using it changes your behavior on the network right when you know that you're using a network in which every person participating is responsible for being there themselves running their own infrastructure and communicating with one another

it sort of changes the social dynamics you know everyone has kind of like a a shared sense of responsibility for keeping whatever that community or application is running because you're all participants on equal footing rather than using something provided by someone else that's something you kind of have to feel in order to understand um i think this is you know fairly well fleshed out with the groups model where you know people that participate in urban groups um you know like the group only really goes down if the people stop using it you know the urban network doesn't go down unless everyone decides to actually stop

using it and so the software like that characteristic of the software coupled with the fact that developing orbit applications is extraordinarily simple compared to building any other piece of infrastructure and i can talk about why that is in a minute we probably should it brings the accessibility of building applications for you and your community down to a level where people can normally do it and so you know where my mind goes is like okay dows are a big thing and and dao is sort of a placeholder for online community that undertakes something with one another you know usually with

some expenditure of capital or or effort really um for lack of a better word we'll call that a dow but there's a lot of those that don't follow the traditional dow semantics urban applications bring developing software as a small group that is used by that group within reach to just about any of these groups like it's actually not you know give it a couple years maybe from now to there but this is where we're going is it's actually fairly trivial for us to build our own chat application that is tailored to our community exactly as we want it and it will never change or go down until we actually change it or decide to take it down or collectively stop using it you know we can actually build and own

our own tools as communities and so it's much more of like a cambrian explosion of different kinds of software that are used by the people that that create them rather than a monoculture of everybody in the world is on twitter or using whatsapp uh there are like pros and cons to both of those things you know and i don't necessarily think that orbit is a new internet i think it's an alternative one that works differently and you're probably going to see these things you know operating alongside one another for a long time um you know it's nice to have a global town square if you

you know want to go and troll some people or um you know get your blood boiling but it's also nice to you know have a place to talk with your family that is always the same and never changes and it's just the thing that you're used to you spoke you mentioned a little bit sort of the aspect of okay it's like easier to like build an application can you talk a bit more about you know the developer perspective like you know what are the advantages from the perspective of somebody you know wanting to build an application yeah and i think this is sort of the big like this is the biggest selling point

in my mind and this is what originally drew me to the project which is and i think that you know when you nail this everything else kind of stems from this because people build you know they build good software so you know if you want to build a web application today like one of the first questions you like there's a whole bunch of things you have to regardless of what it is you're building there's a bunch of things you have to figure out how are you going to authenticate your users how are you going to store their information because you need to store their information if you're going to authenticate them at least some of it how do you keep that secure how do you deploy your software and keep it running and embedded within those kinds of

decisions there's a whole bunch of other ones okay well which authentication mechanism do i use do i use oauth do i use some third-party service some sas service like auth0 that i pay for do i use metamask and go full web3 you know that's a growing valid option do i you know what database do i use am i using nosql sql and you know the many options within those how do i keep this information secure which you do have to keep secure if you're storing information for other people right and this is still your option if you want to build any kind of social networked application you're going to have to build it in some way where someone is responsible for maintaining the infrastructure that stores user data and relays information

back and forth to people even if it's gnosis safe and those are just signatures you have to answer all those questions and a bunch more right it doesn't really stop there um but you know i'll focus on some of those some of the big ones and you you end up with this problem where okay well because someone has to run this thing and they have to answer all those questions and they have to build all this they got to get paid to do it they have to be responsible for everybody else's data which makes the application more complicated because you know they're not storing their information they're storing things on behalf of everybody and dealing with the networking involved with sending you know with scaling that to whatever

level of scale it needs to on orbit you don't have to deal with authentication because it's built in everyone has one identity it's built into the operating system it's something you can just totally take for granted and assume that every piece of information that comes into your system from the outside world comes annotated with who it came from and you just know that out of the box and they must be authenticated and must be the person they say they are to have sent that packet you don't have to deal with a database because urban is already a database and that's feasible because every person running orbit is running their own

database and restoring all of their own information so you're no longer responsible for storing anything for anybody else you're no longer responsible for having to build an infrastructure that can handle load for a large number of people it's only your own load so that's a you know for most applications it's a fairly small number unless you're like you know kanye on twitter and you have a lot of followers that's a different class a problem but for most people you know your own traffic and your own information is not you know doesn't really require anything too fancy so you don't have to deal with databases and you don't have to deal with security that's built in you don't have to worry about a data breach of your users

because you don't have users you only have you you don't really have to worry about devops or deployment because you know actually like installing an urban application just means putting some files in a place after you run a specific command at the command line to create a package for these which you can then publish and make available to anyone else if you give them a simple text mnemonic that they can plug in to install your application so you have a built-in distribution mechanism directly to the people that are going to use your software updating that software is as simple as just changing the code and then it immediately pushes that out to everyone using it unless of course it was broken in which

case the type system wouldn't let you change it in the first place you have built-in data identity all of these things these are just not things you have to worry about anymore all you actually do is focus on building the application that you need and you can take networking data storage security identity you can take all that for granted not to mention devops so when you make it that simple developers actually get to spend more time building things that are novel and less time solving the same old problems over and over and over again that come with embedded responsibility on behalf of other people

which creates weird social dynamics you know if i'm a dow and one guy is responsible for maintaining all of our infrastructure then he's got you know a certain amount of power and responsibility and obligation that means that you know we're all indebted to him in a way in this model you don't have that we're all peers yeah yeah i think that is also one of the things that to me is very interesting about orbit is the kind of different business models that will come with that right because in the in the existing uh world right in the in the sort of web to cloud

world right like the reality then means that mostly okay you're developing an application you're gonna have to run a bunch of servers right you have you have to maintain all this data do all the security do all these different things you must be sas yeah so it's kind of this natural model that then you say okay i'm gonna charge people you know uh whatever ten dollars a month right for this and i have to you know i have all these costs that come with every user so i you know have to cover those and more and then i have to like cover the software during cost but then in the orbit world you don't have most of those costs

right so you could do something very different i mean for one the kind of obvious model of oh i'm i'm developing a bunch of software and i'm gonna just sell you the software right i just uh you can just buy it and then you can use it yeah it's a return to the days in which you you know buy a box with a cd in it uh now at your local costco and uh or wherever sells software um and you install it to meditate yeah maybe we can talk a bit more about sort of the intersection between crypto and orbit right so we talked about the outer space right so that that's on on ethereum

he also mentioned the example of diagnosis safe and like how one could basically for example integrate that in something like orbit and it would be quite nice but what do you see as the like you know what are the synergies or like how how do how does the crypto blockchain world come together with orbit more generally there's a lot left to explore in the general space of where do you put your off chain state and where do you run your applications you know there's also the idea of you know every user can host their own applications so you

you know you don't end up being like it's a lot harder to come after uniswap if uniswap isn't providing uniswap on uniswap.com for everybody if it's actually a collect of people that are all running it on their own servers uh trivially so one is just distribution of infrastructure uh to everyone trivially because it's actually feasible to you know run a web page very simply for only you on pretty much any computer you know i think another part is just making like at a certain level when you can better normalize that idea of like we actually have a model that

aligns with our values of keeping our information private as we transact with one another in this trustless way you end up with much richer applications right i can i can build a lot more social capabilities into things that are directly connected to a blockchain than i can otherwise because i have a layer that lets me talk directly to people you know not only is urban off chain state but it's also compute you know it's your urban is a running server it is always on it can do things on your

behalf we've talked a number of times although we're not quite sure how to do this because we're you know we're kind of looking for the right group to come along that knows this space but algorithmic trading on your behalf with your own programmed algorithms operating on your own crypto which are stored on your server at least you know some degree of keys can be stored for it those are things you can start to do with her but push notifications and other kinds of automated interactions can happen because it's your server and it can talk to you over any mechanism that a server can talk to a person so when certain things happen you can drive all kinds of other programmatic constraints you know like

imagine if you could get a push notification every time someone requested your signature on going back to gnosis you know you've actually got something there waiting for you and i don't have to use some other mechanism like signal to tell you that you need to go and sign this thing instead it's something coming directly from the urban gnosis safe application that upon clicking takes you directly to a place where you can actually sign the transaction and view it or interact with it so i mean i think the biggest thing it really has to offer is just enriching the whole ecosystem with more usable applications that are less fragmented like crypto needs an operating system it needs something that isn't just a set of disparate tools built into web pages with you know augmented with

centralized services behind the scenes of whatever company is providing the thing um which they you know like to gnosis credit they've built it in such a way that they really don't know anything about you when you're using this and that's good but they're still up against the fact that they have to maintain the service or gnosis safe doesn't work and because they don't have a model in which you know they can build an application that does know things about you but without the company gnosis knowing things about you they're handicapped in terms of the amount of like the the quality of experience that they can deliver you you know they can't give you the ability to annotate your own transactions with private information that is meaningful to you that you don't want to share with some other company like you know you

can't annotate your address book with information about the people that you're transacting with and which addresses are associated to whom without giving that to some other company and they can't send you push notifications because they would have to have enough information about you in order to send that notification in the first place and they don't want that so there's just kind of like this global limit to usability that is placed on the crypto ecosystem as a whole until they have a platform to build applications that doesn't involve some major compromise and integrity of what the whole thing stands for um urban can deliver that fantastic so let's talk a little bit about sort of

you know the larger ecosystems like you mentioned in the beginning right so there was like clone uh for a long time as this you know main company that was developing you know the cathedral but now we're moving to this world of the bazaar right where there's like lots of things going on so you know what are what are the most exciting things that are happening in the urban ecosystem one company there's a couple of uh salons doing some exciting things still but i'm gonna save them for you know for the end uh because we talk about them a lot um holium holium.com they are a group that started building on orbit beginning of

this year they were previously trying to build their product on polka dot but quickly realized that the whole off-chain state and lack of you know that blockchains couldn't solve everything and they needed something else and they you know the team there um led by this guy named trent discovered orbit and realized that it actually solved a lot of their problems and what they want to build is a unified computing environment a space that is collaborative for doubt the idea is you know okay i've got my group of people and there's a bunch of things that we want to do very much like we do

on discord right we want to be able to talk with one another we want to be able to you know and talk to one another over text over video chat over audio a variety of different ways um we want to be able to like and this is one of the things that i haven't seen you know they're heavily in the works on but i can only kind of imagine but they're building what feels like a desktop environment in which each dow defines its own space with its own software that it runs it's customized its look and feel and then shared cursors are a built-in primitive to the environment so when you are in a space on your desktop which is earmarked for some specific dao

they call this a realm um you're seeing not only your that software for that group but you're also seeing the cursors of other people and you can build in applications that have shared cursors amongst all the members of the community as a native primitive along with you know a global audio room or video room or something that this group can talk to and you can easily switch to another space another realm that has a totally different layout totally different applications and totally different people and urban is really kind of the the backbone of what enables all of that uh all of that to happen

um there's a little more to it also you know when you instantiate a realm you can do so with whatever you know governance rules you want and uh you can tokenize it as well immediately if you so choose um so you know it's kind of like a there are these dow builder tools out there but to my knowledge none of them also come with a complete suite of tooling that allows those people to all interact with one another in a shared space in software that they collectively decide to use buckbar is another one worth mentioning different company they've been running since about november of last year so you'll see a theme with people getting started right

after software distribution hit and it became possible to actually build things on her but akbar is building its own blockchain on urban starting as an l2 zk-based roll-up to ethereum the idea is orbit ships all act as validator nodes ultimately their plan is to build an l1 blockchain that is all natively on orbit that there's still some infrastructure work for orbit to undergo for that to really be possible but in the meantime a zk-based l2 is what they're going for and that zk language is all based on hun um you know the fundamental the assembly language of urban you might say is called noc

they've built a parallel to that called zoc which is the zero knowledge version of it and they found that noc being a combinator-based language is particularly well suited to the zero knowledge proofs um so they've been working somewhat closely with starkware they've built cairo compatibility between hoon code which compiles to knock or zock and cairo and so the idea is that you can now with them not only can you build a peer-to-peer social application and distribute that peer-to-peer with other people but it can also distribute smart contracts directly with it all built in the same language that the rest of your program is built in so that's pretty cool you

learn one language you learn one stack and you have blockchain programming and peer-to-peer software development um all in one place another group called terrell uh they're building software for creators where you can accept payment either along crypto or fiat rails for uh pretty much anything you list your orbit can become its own storefront you can list a blog that can be subscription gated or not you can list products in fact we're about to we're working with them very closely especially this week to go live with a pilot of their product store which will be what we use to sell tickets for assembly or conference so

that'll actually all be our ticketing infrastructure will be built out by an urban company and sold over an urban company's payments rails and it's important for us that it's settled into usdc because the urban foundation is completely unbanked and uh crypto native um so they're mostly working on this space for how can individual people list their own products for sale how can they you know actually make either real money or magic internet money for them whether those be content creators or physical good creators and of course talon like one of the big things they're working on is urban onboarding it's still very difficult to run in orbit yourself if you're unless you're a highly technical person

or a moderately technical person urban hosting is their big thing where they provide hosted orbit for you as a service and part of the constraints of providing good urban hosting is that you know you can take your urban with you and this is one of the hard things infrastructurally to build about an urban hosting provider is you need the ability to you know basically export your orbit from the hosting provider and shut everything off um through them you know instead of paying them a monthly fee you can download that whole orbit you can then start running it on your local computer or you can move it into a self-hosted one if you want to take that on yourself um but having an option for you know normal people that do not want to spin up their own digital ocean droplet and

run an urban um is very important where they can just sort of sign up for one and let someone else run that infrastructure for them and that's kind of their i'd say the the fundamental thing that they're trying to crack along with a company called the third earth which is also uh building hosting technology themselves um so and they have a totally different architecture for it so there's a little bit of friendly competition there to see kind of whose architecture is best one more question sort of in terms of the you know the the future so one of the things that i find pretty interesting and like strange about urban er but like actually it makes a lot of sense

it's this idea that okay the software or at least the the orbit system the fundamental operating system becomes uh you know does it stops changing at some point right so that you can you know for example you'd be able to like boot up some planet right 30 years from now and it will still run right which is of course very different from if you look at any kind of software from like 20 years ago nothing works right because like it's all built on stuff that's changed and upgraded and like uh but so if you look at this fundamental uh orbit kernel um is that finish or like is there still

like a road map of changes that are coming yeah the kernel is definitely not finished um there's a lot that's going to change the thing you flag there is that it will finish you know like that's and and that's not that's a that's a hard constraint of the way urban is built um which probably bears some elaboration um you know what what brian's referring to is the idea of at least if we take it technically the idea of what's called kelvin versioning uh which urban invented as far as i know yes we also invented our own versioning system which counts backwards to zero and stops at zero

uh yeah this is in stark contrast to everything else which counts infinitely upwards with you know whatever scheme you want whether that's you know no counting at all it's just you know a hash of the latest version or it's you know december or something the idea with urban is that you are gradually you know you're the and this is really only constrained to the kernel like the most fundamental layers of the stack right user space software applications you build that can be versioned however the heck you want it to be uh but the kernel the actual operating system is versioned which means it starts at a warm state you know four or five hundred somewhere in there and it moves backwards to zero

and once it gets to zero it can never be updated again so the mentality that this enforces is every time i do an update it needs to be more robust than the last one because it's getting closer and closer to my last update that i ever get to make and so where you know in our current world most software is either perpetually changing or it is frozen by accident because it's now become so ubiquitous that it's impossible to change without causing a like a catastrophe like if you imagine what happened if json introduced a breaking change it wouldn't happen it just can't happen because json has become an accidental

standard in its current form that you know you couldn't make backward incompatible or change uh without you know an unimaginable amount of overhead um just about everything else changes indefinitely or you know it ends up kind of at whatever state it is until it's too hard to change the urban kernel is being designed to to freeze to hit absolute zero that's the name kelvin version it's being designed that way which means that it should perpetually approach this you know as close to perfect as as these guys can get it which means the software stack simplifies over time the arc of

the arc of development is one of contracting a contracting code base there's less and less that is added over time as the group figures out how to make things more concise and elegant um more fundamental per se and where is it at today like you know so the operating system itself collectively is at kelvin 418. so we've got a long ways to go um hoon the language is it kelvin four or sorry no noc the assembly language is a kelvin 4. so there are four more updates that can ever be made to knock so noc is not updated very often mahoon i think is in the low hundreds and then the arvo kelvin is at about 400

so there's many more updates that can be made there's you know several of them made per year but that will probably pick up as more developers are added to the project and the changes become more fine-grained i think the main the main things that are on the core developers radar right now are performance related like one of the big current things is called subscription reform the subscription mechanic where you you know subscribe it's kind of a pub sub model to information coming out of gall agents returning to urban applications the api for that is you know after a couple years of working with it

has been shown to be you know kind of annoying and so and you know not very ergonomic from a developer's perspective and so they're kind of reworking the way that subscriptions work to be both more performant and more pleasant to use there's a global content addressing scheme called they call it uncreatively content distribution but this is a way of more efficiently distributing information around the network through things like gossip protocols and universal identifiers allah ipfs this enables it you know enables orbits to syndicate out information and get it not necessarily from its source but from anyone else that happens to have the same piece of address content and that's

a big improvement and another ongoing effort is a complete rewrite of the orbit runtime or virtual machine that's all written in in c the current runtime we have is the product of a handful of people's work over the last decade plus and it's you know it's pretty good but it's amazing that it is as good as it is given you know how little resources have been put into it and there's currently an effort to kind of re-architect the entire way that that works which will uh fix a lot of major performance constraints around the uh like the storage limit

back when urban was first built it was built as a 32-bit system so there's a limit to you can only have two gigs of data in an orbit that's one of the things that is going to change which enables the storage of much larger files on your ship constrained only by the underlying disk space um as well as just the general performance of the system through a different architecture uh making the aims network the peer-to-peer network it's called aims making it much more performant past that uh developer experience needs to be greatly improved you know the fundamentals are there but the day-to-day um can still be a little bit rough

there's a lot of work that needs to happen to the terminal which is close to coming out we did a developer call on that last week with health and fossility sort of showing off the latest work on the terminal um permissions and security there's a little bit more a lot more auditing that needs to go into the underlying security model um and permissioning between applications model on a given ship that's that's kind of the stuff that's in in the immediate sites right now um and that's probably to span the next year year and a half but we're definitely like a lot of the major problems you know the main things like aims actually working um and

you know an identity system really working and being scalable these problems have been solved and we're now getting into those fine-grained things and closing narrowing down on the list of of big outstanding problems which you know in coming years all of those will be done and it'll be on to to polish and refinement of the experience cool uh i'm sure a lot of people are like curious interested how can they get involved how what can what can they do with orbit like so yeah can you can you give some pointers like if yeah if people are intrigued and they want to they want to get involved in some way where should they go

anyone that's interested should definitely get on the network you know it's not the easiest thing in the world to do but it's also not the hardest i'm talking to a web3 audience so you know we're all accustomed to a little bit of of ux pain um you can get on for free using a comment you can also get on i mean a planet is the ideal way and you can buy them um you can also generally just like ask on twitter or people will dm you one uh because it's a very friendly group of people so you should get on the network and you should you know start talking to people and seeing what's going on usually in the group's application um you should go to our website if you're a developer um there's a big update coming out in about ten days the end of the month is when

we're targeted for which will create kind of a totally reworked developer portal with content that describes in very succinct terms step by step what you need to learn in order to become an urban developer we ran a course we run probably twice a year we're going to run an instructor-led introductory class uh we just ran the last one graduated about 61 people actually precisely 61 people and that was that was a huge hit it's taught by a wonderful instructor um we have a grants program unsurprisingly that awards urban address space to people that either tackle

technical projects or propose their own we also have an apprenticeships program as part of that where you can kind of learn side by side with a more experienced developer who will mentor you um on you know some some more technical problem um and then finally we have a you know the i hesitate to call it a conference because if you've been to an urban event you won't find it like any other conference so i've been using the word confluence we have an urban confluence in miami uh in september tickets are going on sale for that in the next week or so it's september 22nd through 25th uh that'll be a place where you can meet a whole bunch of people from the

community go to some you know go to some side events hear some talks see the things that have you know our ecosystem has been working on for the last year um there'll be a lot of launches there uh and a lot of people with a lot of energy that will be very happy to meet you and get you involved in whatever their project is things are very word of mouth on urban so being on the network and talking to people is how most of the work gets done through you know direct relationships we're running a hackathon that culminates at assembly the winning four teams present and will be you know voted on as prize winner by the audience using an urban

application that holium produced called ballot and that group will win you know a handful of stars for the best thing they do and you have two months so app school live the class that teaches you how to become an application developer that does have some prerequisites so you you know you've got a few weeks before that starts so um you know start reading the docs for sure on urban.org that kicks off september july 12th the hackathon starts a couple weeks later culminates in assembly so if you're a developer you're listening to this you want to get involved now is a really great time and you can always reach me at joshua.org or

will ref podlex on the network cool thanks so much josh it was really great to have you on uh you know i'm super excited about everybody i'm definitely gonna be at assembly uh and you know um i've been you know probably speaking very much yeah absolutely and i've been very much enjoying you know diving into urban and super excited about what's there to come for for the network and for the project so thanks so much for coming on and we're excited to for our listeners to kind of get an update on orbit and i'm sure some of them will you know check it out and get more involved as well absolutely yeah thanks so much for having me this has been a lot of fun

and uh you know enjoy it i'm looking forward to seeing the assembly