This is epicenter episode 450 with gas, Josh Lyman.
Welcome to episode of the show which talks about the
Technologies projects in people driving decentralization and the
global box. One revolution, I'm Ryan Crane.
And today, I'm speaking with Josh Lehman, he's the executive
director of the irbid foundation and we're going to talk a lot
about, you know, what is there a bit and what it all means?
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And with that, let's get into the episode 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 theme of this orbit of this episode is
sort of um building honor bit. Now we that I have actually done
and herbal episode before in this podcast a long time ago
goes five years ago where I'm here and I interviewed Galen who
is the CEO of Clone which is sort of spin the main company
building a rabbit. So go check out the episode It's
actually still pretty current, you know, we listen to it
recently and is kind of is also, you know, it's all pretty pretty
accurate, you know because herb it has actually been sort of
conceived a long time ago and so a lot of the fundamental
architectures is also unchanged and they're just slowly moving
along. It has not pivoted.
Yeah, it's now pivot it exactly not related and so I have
become. I mean, I've been interested I
guess nervous 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 thinking something.
Okay, there's actually a lot of activity progress.
Felt like it was going somewhere and going to some place that's
exciting. And and then Josh here.
Yeah so Josh is at the very 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 Urban thing? Yes I'm Josh I head up the Urban
Foundation which is a new entity as of this year unlike a lot of
projects in the space orbit started first with a for-profit
company that worked on the project for a long time and spin
up. 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
backgrounds 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 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 to programming
building, Technology, I started my involvement with herb.
It 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 whatever it was, I have no clue but it was
certainly really interesting and somewhat spent a lot of time
naming things and it seemed like a, you know, it was serious in a
different way than then, 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. Only 16 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 Kayla and then Curtis and I started going to
meet ups 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 enclosure because I
had a hard time grokking 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 herb, it 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.
One orbit was Barely usable you know it existed it had existed
since 2013 is a 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 we're
working on it that I met at these meetups like Galen and Ted
over the course of I guess till 2020.
So about three years as I was working on this other startup
and in 2020 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
take in this crazy idea to reinvent, all of computing, you
know, who would do that, 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 II, think he's sort of like
touched on, you know, you mentioned like a few things
before I mentioned. Like functional computer
reinvent Computing. But like most people listening
to this podcast, they will not have heard of it at all.
Probably. Or maybe they heard like the
heard about it and we're very pleased by it.
That's a very common one. Yeah.
Maybe to some of the people have heard about it and confused.
Most many people will not have heard about it at all.
So Yeah, it can you explain what is urban and what is division
over but what is it trying to accomplish?
You have to start and may be relevant.
For this crowd orbit is not a blockchain.
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, Whatever It Is. Is the re-creation 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. 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 her 'but 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 power is 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 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 call incidental
complexity, the things that are not related to the problem.
You're trying to solve, but our to satisfy the constraints of
the Computing environment that you're in.
So you need to build authentication, you need to do
with databases, you need to deal with security, And a bunch more.
The fundamental idea 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 that should feel like you know a
thing that you buy or create and then you Like forever and maybe
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 inherently
good and you know, without an underlying motive to become.
Google and to own every aspect of, you know, the people that
use the system. So yeah that's that's really
what. It's aspiring to be 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 mine.
Something that isn't trying to harvest their attention 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 her, but 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 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 this has
been going on for 20 years? Yeah.
Can you talk a little bit about sort of yeah.
What is the history of urban? And so I can I can talk about it
in perfectly because I wasn't there in the early days but you
know, I've had a lot of Laura passed down from me through to
me through being around all these people.
But this Legend would have it. The project started in about
2002 as the personal project of a guy named Curtis Garden.
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. Screw up the year.
I think it was 2010 or 11 there was a moron lab as a site.
He ran blog post that introduced the concept of urban and the
dart you know, the those early period when it was kind of an
idea in his mind to when it became public was you know,
seven or eight years. At about the time that you
imagine Bitcoin was being created, don't really know
exactly how long that was being worked on, but probably over a
similar stretch, it was, you know, announce to the world at
about the same time and it existed as a, you know,
complete. Although, 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 Need to raise some
money and he went out and found a company called Tuan with with
gaalan who became his co-founder shortly thereafter and the two
of them worked on flan from now from then until the present and
Lon. You know, the idea was that, you
know, there's kind of two models that Eric s Raymond outlined
like an early 90s paper 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 Software System by Design.
And then you have the bazaar which is sort of a 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 You know, the cathedral is very much, you
know, rigid and hierarchical and highly specific in the bazaar is
sort of organic and amorphous and, you know, full of all kinds
of different outgrowths. And both are very good.
Both both can be not good. Also there just to two models.
And the idea with herb, it 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 has a singular
vision and a Take on the world that has to be defined and done
in a setting, that gives the Creator's 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 Bazaar model is It's a good
thing. So, Tuan was that Cathedral?
That would You know, sort of give birth to the project and
over that period of time, you know, herb it gained 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 that
time started happening in about 20, 20, maybe a little bit
before which is about when I showed up.
And that was when flan was Getting 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
work that had to happen was that orbit had to go from something
that was an MVP to something that he really embodied its own
principles. And at a bare minimum, it needed
to work, you know? Like, it needed to be a thing
that That you know, you didn't have to do what we call a
network breach on every couple of months, what used to happen?
That's where you basically reset the entire magnet 20 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 The colonel was not really
fleshed out. So there's a lot of churn of the
code base which made it very hard to.
Except 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 entire way of doing
things that aren't really communicated to anyone.
That's, you know, we're now at this point where that's all
changing, Yeah and I think this is a good good description.
I think it's description of both to history a bit and and sort of
where it's at. Yeah, I do.
I do you think I mean yeah. Who knows is that though?
She did right in like how long he was working on this thing
until lucky kind of came out but definitely.
Yeah, you can imagine something like that, right?
Probably like, yeah, I think is sort of a fascinating thing
right now to some person spent like eight years.
All right. Just like in a solitary
pondering of this, crazy idea. Yeah.
Just in a Rapture with an idea, you know.
Yeah. That's it's a long period of
time to be working on a thick alone.
What is like, you mentioned, a bunch of stuff, right?
You mentioned sort of the release of this initial orbit
system in, you know, twenty twelve and ten getting to the
point where okay, it is more is more.
Something that's like, okay, solid, right?
And it's going to be kind of like this, but can you talk a
little bit more about, you know, where's the early today?
Like what has what's the current state of, you know, of the
system? Yeah, totally.
And let me let me start that by kind of speed running.
Some of the major things that I've been present for over the
last couple of years that 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 really devote my energy to the project
was in 2019 when they went on chain prior to that orbits
address. Space model was stored in a text
file. Ilan in a GitHub repo.
There was always this idea that there needs to be people that
cryptographically own Parts of the urban address space but we
don't have a system for that actually.
I think that's maybe something that's where work explaining.
What is urban outer space. Yeah.
So you know, Urban address space is The it's the network.
Topology, we have names for for these in order are running,
Urban node is called a ship and there multiple classes of ship,
the ones that are important to really talk about for this
conversation are galaxies stars and planets galaxies, you can
think of kind of like root DNS nodes.
They are able to spawn Stars which are other infrastructure
nodes. They perform pure 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 Jen tend to need certain
nodes that are privileged to and usually have better
infrastructure capabilities to route, your request to somebody
else that you can form a peer-to-peer connection.
And that's the main role of One of the main roles, at least of
the infrastructure notes, 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 Our space.
So this was all dreamed up. Long before, etherium and dowse
existed. But you can think of the
galaxies is kind of a dow. And that's that's, you know,
kind of how they operate today. They vote to upgrade set, smart
contracts, that run on ethereum, and that's what governs the
rules of the address space. So, you have these galaxies 255
of them, Each of, which can spawn 255 stars.
And each star can spawn roughly 65,000 planets.
So 2232, There are 16 planets are, what an individual?
Orbit user would use. They are valuable enough to
where you would actually want to establish a track record of
using one use a day to day but they are not so valuable that
you have to go through annoying opsec Hoops in order to you know
keep a valuable piece of cryptographic assets safe and so
each of these are n FTS. They all correspond to a number
from zero through four point. Three billion to 2.
To, 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 a discovery.
And they also one thing I left out as the galaxies perform
software distribution, so a Galaxy disseminates its software
to all of its Stars which then Disseminate that to all of their
planets. And so 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. It's it could though, Yeah.
Yeah. Totally.
And then basically right. So you have you have this like
scarcity of this address space and then in 2019 right?
You mentioned basic is like put on etherium and today lives on
in here. All right?
So like if trick smart contracts turned out to be the right
substrate to build this kind of model, 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 a thing about scarcity
and that it provides an important function because each
of these You know, the urban address space, each one of these
FTS is what's called an urban ID and it has a human pronounceable
and visual representation that's recognizable.
My planet is called well, ref potlucks 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, as maybe a good
way to think about it for this crowd, but it's built into the
operating system in 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 orbit operating system.
And that's really like the key important thing to get from a
bit address space. Is that there's enough finite
number of those in their scarcity, is what makes them
valuable and makes it. So that herb, it 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, you know, ultimately,
Not work out very well for you. So you maintained, I think this
you know, big event or this big change, I kind of came with her
between us was distribution of software, right?
So you know basically people can can write applications sort of
like Urban applications. We can he's playing like
whatever with applications and how do they differ from?
Let's say an application that lets say an iPhone application
Or maybe adopt like let's say any theory of decentralized
application. So what are the difference is?
Yeah, that's a great question. So Urban application is
server-side. Primarily it could, of course,
have any number of interfaces, you can interface with an orbit
application, over an iPhone app or over 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.
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 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.
So I think the key things about an orbit application that are
important to get our You know, any application you build like I
was mentioning before has Authentication?
And authorization baked into it every packet that you send is.
It's bound to an identity. So you're not building
authentication systems into an urban application.
Every application has the ability to talk to any other
application whether that's running on your ship or any
other persons or bit node worship, 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 in 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, the whole network and peer-to-peer hope your
network is. Statically typed and so when you
build nerve, it application that can talk to any other person's
application. You can also distribute that
peer-to-peer. So if I build something, anyone
else can get it directly from me.
So every herb it 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.
You know, dated moderated. Distribution mechanism, the
application to distributed peer-to-peer themselves.
And that means that every person running a Target application is
running a full version of it. Herb.
It is also an asset database, meaning all of the in, you know
the the the data that an application needs to run is
stored on that ship with transactional semantics so I
don't databases either. So ultimately herb adapt is like
a It's a server-side application that you do not have to build
authentication. Into you do not need to deploy
database to because orbit Arctic is one and a peer-to-peer
network with static typing, all of that baked in.
So what are these tend to look like in practice?
Well herb. It 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 or web application.
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 are particularly excels at is any
kind of application that networks with other people.
How this differs from adapt is that you have off chain State,
you know, this is one of the big problems of Of daps 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 Block Chain
because it's just not important enough, and it's only your's,
you know, it's your private settings or configuration gnosis
safe is a great example of this where you know, you're all the
metadata associated with your safes is stored in local
storage. So if you ever want to use a
different browser than Well, you kind of have to re-upload your
safes and at least the information that identifies them
at what they and what as what they are and when you sign a
transaction, you relying on a service that gnosis runs in
order to shuttle. Those personally signed
transactions back and forth under bit 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 metadata about information on a blockchain on
itself. Just private and only yours and
not shared with any third party. Well, I think that's a nice.
That's a nice example, right? So like, okay, let's say we the
two of us together. Have agnosia safe, right?
So basically like the multisig we control and helium and that
could be built inside orbit, right?
So then it would mean now the two of us.
When I mean, first of all, I guess right.
Would be the, what you mentioned, right?
Okay. So we can have each some local
state that describes maybe label such transactions or something
like I think that's just in our personal server and then if you
want to make a transaction, you know, I'm like in initiating
this transaction, it gets sent to you via the urban P2P
Network, you know, you can, you can sign the other side and then
like broadcast it and then it slides right.
Which is doesn't work like that today any theorem, right?
Because I guess today in etherium people access this via
you know, like the web browser and you know Oh, then it's it
may be in this local cash. I guess like what you said.
Yeah, they need, they need a way, you know, gnosis a few.
And I have a multisig 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.
This is beyond my pay grade but what they're doing is creating a
parle, essentially, a partial transaction.
That's a waiting one more on the multisig, and that's information
that you need to sign in order to submit it to chain, 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 multisig, 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 you're the network routing is through gnosis And if that
service goes down, then you can't use no safe anymore, it is
not actually a decentralized application.
Yeah. So maybe you can go a little
more into like, so. Ik behalf of nose to save as an
example, right? I think it's a nice example, but
like for most people they're like, okay, but why are you
okay? Are like, why would I want to
use like in irbid application? Like what's the great benefit
for the sort of normal user of, you know, web application?
So the over the internet, Today. So good.
Come at a couple of 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 of 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 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. I think this is, you know,
fairly well, fleshed out with the group's model where, you
know, people that participate in irbid groups 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 Urban 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, dowser, a big thing and and do is sort of
a placeholder for online community that undertakes,
something with one another, usually with some expenditure of
capital or effort really For lack of a better word, we'll
call that a dowel but there's a lot of those that don't follow
the traditional bow. Semantics irbid 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 of 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.
There are like pros and cons Of those things you know and I
don't necessarily think that herb it 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 you know it's nice to have
a global town square if you you know, want to go and troll some
people or, you know, get your blood boiling but it's also nice
to have a place to talk with your family that is always the
same and never changes. It's and it's just the thing
that you're used to. Bees folk imagine a little bit.
Sort of to aspect of. Okay.
It's like easier to like build an application.
Can you talk a bit more about, you know, to developer
perspective like, you know, what are the advantages from the
perspective of somebody, you know, wanting to build an
application. Yeah, I think this is sort of
the big like, this is the biggest selling point in my mind
that 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 do,
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 used to I use oauth?
Do I use some third-party service some sass service like
off zero that I pay for? Do I use meta mask and Go full
web three? You know that's a growing valid
option. Do I you know what database do I
use my using no sequel 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 Network 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 snows a safe and those are just
signatures, you have to answer all those questions and a bunch
more, right? It doesn't really stop there.
But you know, I'll focus on some of those some of the big ones
and you end up with this problem.
We're okay. We'll 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 honor bit, 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 the
database because Urban is already a database.
And that's feasible because every person running herb, it is
running their own database in the storing, all of their own
information. So you're no longer responsible
for storing anything, for anybody else, you no longer
responsible for having to build an infrastructure that can
handle load for a large number of people?
It's only your own blowed. 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 Problem.
But for most people, 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 orbit 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
demonic 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 a 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, I'm 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 dowel and one guy is responsible for
maintaining all of our infrastructure than 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
and Away in this model you don't have that, we're all peers.
Yeah, I think that is also one of the things that to me is very
interesting about herb. It is the kind of different
business models that will come with that, right?
Because in the in the existing world, right in the sort of web
to Cloud world, right? Like there's a reality then
means that mostly okay, you're developing an application,
you're going to have to run a bunch of servers, right?
You have a 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 going to
charge people, you know, whatever $10 a month, right for
this. And I have to, you know, have
all these costs that come with heavy users or how, you know,
how to cover those in more and then after like cover this off
with you, I'm cost. But then in the early world, You
don't have most of those costs, right?
So, You could do something very different.
I mean for one it kind of obvious model of oh, and you I'm
developing a bunch of software element.
Just tell you the software, right?
I just you can just buy it and then you can use it.
Yeah. It's a return to the days in
which, you know, by a box with a CD in it.
Now at your local Costco and or wherever sell software and you
install it to Medici. Yeah.
Maybe we can talk a bit more about sort of the intersection
between crypto and orbit. Right?
So we talked about the address space, right?
So that that's on the theorem, He also mentioned example of
diagnosis safe and like how One could basically if example
integrate that in something I grabbed it and it would be quite
nice. But what do you see as the like
here? What are they Energies or like
how, how do? How does the crypto blockchain
world come together with Urban more generally?
there's a lot left to explore 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 you in a swap. If you wanna swap isn't
providing you to swap on you to swap.com for everybody if it's
actually a collective people that are all running it on their
own servers trivially. So one is just distribution of
infrastructure 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. Then I can otherwise because I
have a layer that lets me talk directly to people, you know,
not only is Herb it off chain state, but it's also compute,
you know, it's, your orbit 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 to knows the 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 bit.
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, talk to a person.
So when certain things happen, You can drive all kinds of other
programmatic constraints, you know about.
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.
When I don't have to use some other mechanism like signal to
tell you that you need to go inside 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 I think
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. Which they, you know, like to
know, sisters credit, they've built it in such a way that they
really don't know anything about you when you're using this.
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 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 Faith.
Like, you know, you can't annotate your address book with
information about the people that you're transacting with,
which addresses are associated to whom without giving that 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.
Build applications that doesn't involve some major compromise
and integrity of what the whole thing stands for herb.
It can deliver that. Fantastic.
So let's talk a little bit about sort of, you know, the largely
existence that you mentioned in beginning, right?
To those like long for a long time as the single main company
that receives helping the cathedral.
But now we're moving to this world of the bizarre 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 is couple of clowns, doing some exciting things
still, but I'm going to save them for, you know, for the end
because we talked about them a lot.
Holy mmm. Pulliam.com they are a group
that started building honor, but 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,
they're led by this guy named Trent.
Discovered orbit and realize that it actually solved a lot of
the problems. And what they want to build is a
unified Computing. Environment a space its
collaborative for douse. 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 and talk to one another over text over
video chat over audio a variety of different ways.
We want to be able to like and this is one of the things that I
haven't seen, you know, they're, 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 its
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, do they call this a realm?
You're seeing not only your that the 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
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
backbone of what enables all of that, all of that to happen,
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 you can tokenize it as well
immediately if you so choose. 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 Akbar, 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, it became
possible to actually build things under.
But Akbar is building, its own blockchain honor, but starting
as an L2, ZK based roll up to a seated.
Ethereum the idea is Herb. It ships, all act as validator
nodes. Ultimately, their plan is to
build an L1 blockchain. That is all natively under bit
that there's still some infrastructure work for herb, it
to undergo for that to really be possible.
But in the meantime as EK based, L2 is what they're going for and
that ZK language is all based on who, you know, the fundamental
Assembly Language of urban, you might say is called knock.
They've built a parallel to that called zoc, which is the zero
knowledge version of it and they found that knock being a
combinator based language is particularly well-suited to zero
knowledge proof. So they've been working somewhat
closely with Stark where they've built Sky row compatibility
between Hoon code, which compiles to knock or zoc 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 all at one place. Another group called Tyrell.
They're building software for creators, where you can accept
payment either along crypto or Fiat, rails for 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 of products. In fact, we're about to we're
working with them very closely, especially this week to go live
with a pilot of there. Product store, which will be
what we use to sell tickets for assembly or conference.
So that will actually all be our ticketing instruction will be
built out by an orbit company and sold over 100 companies
payments rails. And it's important for us that
it's settled in the u.s. d.c. because the irbid foundation is
completely unbanked and crypto -.
So they're mostly working on this space for how can
individual people list their own products for sale?
How can they Actually make you the real money or magic internet
money for them. Whether those be content
creators or physical, good creators.
And of course, toll on, like, one of the big things they're
working on is urban onboarding. It's still very difficult to run
a nerve, it yourself. If you're, you know, unless
you're a highly technical person or a moderately technical
person. Urban hosting is their big thing
where they provide posted orbit for you as a service and part of
the constraints of providing good Urban hosting, is that, you
know, you can take your orbit with you.
And this is one of the hard things infrastructurally to
build about an orbit. Hosting provider is you need the
ability to basically export your orbit from the hosting provider
and shut everything off through them.
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, but having an option
for, you know, normal people that do not want to spend up
their own digitalocean droplet and run in her bed.
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 fundamental thing they're
trying to crack along with a company called third Earth,
which is also building the hosting Technology themselves.
So and they have a totally different architecture for it.
So, there's a little bit of friendly competition there to
see kind of who's architectures best One more question.
So, two in terms of the, you know, the future.
So, one of the things that I find pretty interesting in,
like, Strange about irbid but like actually makes a lot of
sense. It's this idea that okay the
software or at least the nervous system, the fundamental
operating system becomes does it stops changing its own point,
right? So that you can, for example
you'll be able to like boot up some planet, right?
30 years from now and it was so wrong, which is of course, very
different from. If you look at any kind of
software from I'm like 20 years ago, nothing works right because
like it's all built on stuff that's changed and upgraded and
like the so if you look at this fundamental, irbid Colonel is
that finish or like, is there still like a roadmap of changes
are coming. The Colonel's definitely not
finished. 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 that's not
that's a that's a hard constraint of the layer B is
built which probably Bears some elaboration, you know what
Brian's referring to is. The idea of least, if we take a
technically, the idea of what's called K versioning, which
turbine invented, as far as I know, yes.
We also invented our own versioning system which Count
backwards, 20 and stops at zero. 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, September or something.
The idea with herb it is that you are gradually.
You know, you're the end and this is really only constrained
to the colonel, like the most fundamental layers of the stack,
right, user space software applications, you build that can
be version 2. However, the heck you want it to
be? but the colonel the actual
operating system is K version, which means It starts for at a
warm State, you know, for 500 somewhere on there and it moves
backwards, 20 and once it gets to zero, it can never be updated
again. so, the mentality that this And forces 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 we're you know, when 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 Kasich at it 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 without,
you know, an unimaginable amount of overhead just about
everything else changes in definitely.
Well, we're, you know, it ends up kind of whatever state it is
until it's too hard to change. The urban kernels being designed
to To freeze to hit absolute zero.
That's the name k 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 that the software Stacks simplifies over time the
Arc of the Arc of development is one of Contracting.
A Contracting codebase, there's less and less that is added over
time as the group figures out how to make things more concise
and elegant. We're fundamental force, a, and
where is it at today? Like, you know, so the operating
system itself, collectively, is it, K 418?
So we've got a long ways to go. Hoon the language, is it k for
or sorry? No, knock the Assembly Language,
is a k 4. So there are four more updates
that can ever be made to knock. So, knock is not updated very
often Hoon. I think is in the low hundreds
and The r vo K. Is it about 400?
So, there's many more updates that can be made, there's, you
know, several of the made per year, but that will probably
pick up. As more developers are added to
the project and the change has 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 called subscription reform, the
subscription mechanic where you, you know, subscribe It's kind of
a pub sub model to information coming out of Gaul agents
returning to Urban applications, the API for that is you know
after a couple of 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 the
call. I'm creatively 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 a tables herb it's 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 see the current run time. 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 fix a lot of Major Performance, constraints around
the Like the storage limit back when herb it 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 change, which enables the
storage of much larger files on your ship, constrained only by
the underlying disk space. As well as just the general
performance of the system, through different architecture,
making the Ames Network peer-to-peer Network.
It's called Ames making it much more performant.
Pass that developer experience needs to be greatly improved.
You know, the fundamentals were there, but the day-to-day 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 the developer call on that last week with Pelton
Foster lips or showing off the latest work on the terminal
permissions and security. There's a little bit more a lot
more auditing that needs to go into the underlying security
model. And permissioning between
applications model on a given ship.
That's that's kind of stuff that's in in the immediate sites
right now. And that's probably going 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 Ames
actually working 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 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. I'm sure a lot of people are
like, Curious interested. How can they get involved?
I will kill you. What can they do for a bit like
so yeah, can you give some pointers?
Like if you have if people are in tweaked and they want to do,
want to get involved in some way, where should they go?
Anyone 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 web three
audience. So, you know, we're all
accustomed to a little bit of of ux pain.
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. You can also generally just
like, asked on Twitter, people will D mu 1 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. In the group's application, you
should go to our website. If you're a developer, there's a
big update coming out in about 10 days.
The end of the month is when were 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 orbit developer, we
ran a course, we run probably twice a year.
We're going to run an instructor-led in.
Traductor E-class. 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. We have a grant program
unsurprisingly the towards Urban address space to people that
either tackle technical projects or propose their own.
We also have an apprenticeship program as part of that where
you can kind of learn By side with a more experienced
developer, who will Mentor you on you know some some more
technical problem. And then finally we have a, you
know the hesitate to call it a conference because if you've
been to interpret events, you won't find it like any other
conference. So I've been using the word
Confluence, we have an herb, it Confluence in Miami.
In September tickets are going on sale for that in the next
week or so it's September 22nd through 25th.
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 here. Some talks see the things that
have you know our ecosystem has been working on for the last
year they'll be a lot of launches there 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 under but 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 it assembly, the winning four teams present and
will be you know voted on as Prize winner by the audience
using an urban application that Holy and produced called ballot
and that group will win you know handful of stars for the best
thing they do 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 know, You've got a few
weeks before that starts so you know start reading the docks for
sure under B dot org that kicks off September July 12th, the
hackathon starts a couple weeks later called minutes at
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 Josh
Shader but not org or will ref potlucks on the network.
Cool. Thanks so much Josh.
It was really great to have you on and, you know, I'm super
excited by her weight. I'm definitely gonna be an
assembly and, you know, I've been probably speaking very
much. Yeah, absolutely.
And if I'm very much enjoying, you know, diving into irbid and
super excited, about what said to come for for the network and
for the project. So thanks so much for coming on
and doing excited to for our listeners, to kind of get an
update on orbit, and I'm sure some of When will, you know,
check it out and get more involved as well.
Absolutely yeah, thanks so much for having me.
This is been a lot of fun and, you know, enjoyed looking
forward to seeing you assembly. Thank you for joining us on this
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