Bitcoin is digitally manages money, ethereum digitally manages laws (in the form of autonomous contracts, in the form of code is law) and urbit digitally manages real estate (in the form of hierarchical address space).
My understanding of Urbit is that its trying to solve the problem of identity management, while maintaining that all data begins with you, while using ie we give our information to facebook, and facebook is free to use that information as it wishes (including modifying it, or deleting it). Facebook thus becomes the source if truth. Ideally, the control structure should be inverted; our machine is the source of truth, and facebook gets to read from us when we let it. And since we're the source of truth, there's no issue with sharing that data to anyone else (ie google).
This is of course what we have when dealing with desktop applications reading from our personal files; vim and sublime can be used interchangeably because our files are ours, and we always have access to it. Use google apps, and you get access to your text file only when google chooses to let you have it. If they refuse to give it back to you in a format recognizable by anyone else, then, well, you're fucked. But if we choose the format, and google must follow..
The idea, as they express it, that using a cloud service a n:1 deal; many users on a single app. Urbit tries to provide the inverse, 1:n. Many apps working solely for you.
After that is a bunch of interesting implementation details; a purely functional os, language; the pretense that multiple servers are one unified machine, the pronouncable base-256 encoding, the astronomy-naming system for address space, the political governance of Urbit as a network, etc.
My understanding of Urbit is that its trying to solve the problem of identity management, while maintaining that all data begins with you, while using ie we give our information to facebook, and facebook is free to use that information as it wishes (including modifying it, or deleting it). Facebook thus becomes the source if truth. Ideally, the control structure should be inverted; our machine is the source of truth, and facebook gets to read from us when we let it. And since we're the source of truth, there's no issue with sharing that data to anyone else (ie google).
This is of course what we have when dealing with desktop applications reading from our personal files; vim and sublime can be used interchangeably because our files are ours, and we always have access to it. Use google apps, and you get access to your text file only when google chooses to let you have it. If they refuse to give it back to you in a format recognizable by anyone else, then, well, you're fucked. But if we choose the format, and google must follow..
The idea, as they express it, that using a cloud service a n:1 deal; many users on a single app. Urbit tries to provide the inverse, 1:n. Many apps working solely for you.
After that is a bunch of interesting implementation details; a purely functional os, language; the pretense that multiple servers are one unified machine, the pronouncable base-256 encoding, the astronomy-naming system for address space, the political governance of Urbit as a network, etc.