#205 Galen Wolfe-Pauly: Urbit - A Digital Republic Reinventing the Internet

Transcript

[Music] hello and welcome to episode of the show which talks about the technologies projects and startup driving decentralization and the global blockchain revolution my name is Baron Fabian crane I'm a heron today we'll talk to go Galen Wolff poly co-founder forbid I hope it is like a very interesting project that's somehow trying to build a system that allows people to have their own personal servers walk through the history of the Irbid project what it's trying to do its vision and how the

project will move forward Galen welcome to be sure hey guys thanks for having me tell us a bit about your background how did you come to be involved in orbit sure yeah so I have an architecture degree which is kind of the most weird and notable thing about my background I have but I grew up in the Bay Area building software so I'm really interested in designing systems designing tools and I'm really interested in how software works and how we could use software to kind of build tools that shape the way that people think so the short answer to how I got involved in orbit was that I had spent a lot of time working on sort of building the full stack for different web

projects and I had done enough of that that I knew that I hated that stack so deeply I just wanted it to go away and I wanted to get back to what I remembered from being a child which was that you know you ran your own computer on a network and other people ran their own computers and it was sort of a delightfully open-ended and fun experience so when I saw orbit I thought okay this is it this is like this is the thing that can potentially get us back to that world and that was in kind of late 2013 so kind of a while ago can you share a bit about the history of orbit because orbit is a crazy old project maybe it's the oldest projects that he ever had on the show yeah if it is an old project that's for sure it's

cryptosystem is actually pre Bitcoin we can talk about that a little bit later but yeah so Kurtis is the original sort of urban author and he started working on urban after he had written the kernel to the open wave web browser which was like if you ever had a cell phone like a black and white cell phone with a web browser that was probably a web browser so he always says that they shipped about a billion units of which like a hundred thousand never got used but I think he took a little bit of extra cash from that or like after that was over had the resources to work on an independent project so I actually think the kind of the right way to understand the urban stack is to just know that like the sequence in which was built so

at first I think Curtis started out thinking okay I want to rethink you know the foundations of computing I want to think about what's the right way to compute can I build the sort of perfect virtual machine and so the first four years are what are probably or perhaps maybe those slow as lines of code ever written so for years we're spent building knock which is our virtual machine that's 32 kilobytes I think it's like probably 30 lines of code about it fits on a t-shirt it's a sort of micro VM that defines kind of like the very foundation of Herbet right like the way that the computer actually functions the following two or three years are spent building Heun they're a bit programming language yeah go ahead this is the

second than that so he spent four years writing designs of Coach that is insane I know I think they was important I think there's a lot of surfing in there a lot of like you know this was not like a full-time job right it's pretty insane now but it's I mean they're almost like math equations right it's like a it's almost like a theoretical math project to come up with I think the foundation for how you might so I think that the fundamental thinking actually curtis's old boss once told me this that he used to talk about this when working at open wave that the idea is basically could you have a computer whose state is just a number and every time something happens to it that number changes so

knock just computes the transition from state a to state B right so you so the sort of foundation of Irbid is a computer who just simply goes from state a to state via to state C depending on the input events that come into it and so what you get from that is that you can update everything if you had a network of computers that ran that way you can update everything above that virtual machine over-the-air you can update it over the network so I think that was certainly in mind in those initial years it feels a bit like a smart contract Yeah right right lately we've been one way to explain Herbet to people who are you know deeply in the blocked eight world is that herb it's kind of like a personal blockchain that

it has the same you know it's it's a deterministic computer right it's just that you own your Herbet with a private key and it's private to you it's not a public ledger but we get into that later so nock is basically like assembly you don't want to write knock although you can and you can we have some contributors who actually love writing knock it's kind of a fun challenge of course once you got knocked down you want to write a language that makes it reasonably easy to compile directly to knock so that's hoon hoon you should think of hoon like C for assembly or like as C as to assembly hoon is to not write it's kind of a thin layer over knock so who and works after a couple of years and that's great but you know now you have this thing that should be a

networked computer and it doesn't have any of the functionality of a networked computer so our foe is I think that arvo the operating system just answers the question like what are the key pieces of functionality that you would want from a computer that like lives permanently on the network so file system build system web server networking protocol secret storage and something I always forget which is probably really important it's it I I mean those are the key pieces yeah so you could say it's similar to the web stack in a way and kind of services what you would imagine you know like what you might need to basically run applications communicate over a network and like manage other nodes in

that network so that's kind of that handles I guess project history and and like what the project is and I encountered the project when or above the OS was basically a prototype just barely booted barely worked and it was clear to me at that point that this was have a lot of potential or had the potential to do what I thought sort of like nothing else is really tackling so one question that comes to mind is you're building like computing from the ground up right like a virtual machine functional language OS and then networking between these personal servers so why why do you write everything from the ground up that's a good question and it's a question we get

a lot I think the basic answer is if you look at the amount of complexity in the existing stack it's very difficult to somehow make it simpler on its you know with its with those existing components and then if you look sort of historically and say like how do we end up with pcs we ended up with pcs because people just rebuilt everything instead of taking like a PDP 10 or like a room size server you know like a work a room sized workstation that everyone shared in 1978 and figuring out how to reduce it in size people just built simpler computers so oliver 'but fits in about

30,000 lines of code it's a you know I mean it's about the size of a web app and I think if you're going to actually if your thesis is I want to make this entire stack simpler it's almost easier to just build it from scratch there's no kind of there's no way to like retrofit the existing set of tools to towards that end I also think like personal you know personal networks computers like not really something that's ever it's not really it's never really existed you know UNIX is like a piece of industrial machinery so if you want to build that it's hard to kind of shim like [ __ ] is also a piece of a dust real machinery right most of the staff that we're familiar with today is built for a situation where one person

runs the server and people connect to it so Orbitz built for a different purpose and I think you know the combination of those things are what kind of give us the license to do that but we're not saying it's not crazy like it's definitely a nutty thing to try to so when you joined Herbet was it just Curtis how did you find the project like how did you end up making the choice to say like okay this guy who's been working on this for seven years like hacking away and this like you're saying like why did you think this was a good idea so you know - in 2013 there weren't a lot of things that were you know this is pre aetherium this is pre I mean dick Quinn was around and doing okay but it

was about to enter into that kind of bearish period so walk chains work a fad right and they weren't kind of the default answer - how do you t centralized source or Reed centralize the world and so the competitive projects were kind of things like camlistore which you guys may or may not remember which is sort of like a generalized get for data and orbits ambition I guess struck me as maybe its greatest asset like it seemed like if you were actually gonna fix this problem like if you were gonna give people general-purpose computers again that this see it just seemed to me like this is the only possible practical way to do it and it worked I think the main thing is that it worked I mean and I still think that's

actually people I guess some some of our contributors kind of remind me of that like Herbet is still young but the fact that you know it runs its own overlay network you can actually use this thing and you know when you go to urban org it actually computes an OP function to deliver you to that website and that's pretty amazing that I think that on its own is really what convinced me now there are a lot of different ways of describing orbit and looking at it and so maybe you can just run through a whole bunch of them and you can give sort of you know what what does it look like in this way one is maybe the first one to start with is the one that I think you guys use the most which is this idea of a general-purpose personal

server what is that good question so the simplest way that I have found to explain that is basically through the lens of WeChat and not everyone super familiar we chat because it's not as popular in the West but what's incredible about WeChat is that it provides a single unified UI that you can use to interact with all kinds of different services so doctor's office may have basically provide data through some API that we chat then turns into UI so I think that what you would want a personal server to

be is the one place that you go to interface with all of the things that you want to do in the world whether it be messaging and documents whether it be making transactions or you know booking appointments booking reservations so on and so forth and you want that sort of servant server like thing of yours to be private to you to be something you own with a private key so in terms of a very like broad strokes big vision kind of thing I think that Herbet is positioned to provide that in a way that is difficult is hard for me to imagine anything else really providing is this like first Lisa were running on one piece of individual piece of hardware

could it be like itself distributed so your Herbet event log should be committed to many different you know in an ideal world your Herbet event log is sort of rafted across many different data centers but your Herbet is designed to just live on top of any UNIX box where with sort of layers over UNIX box with an internet connection so that could be your laptop that could be a server in data center somewhere but certainly in a mature system the way to get kind of same reliability that you get out of like s3 is to basically back it up to s3 back it up to glacier that

your event log is you know lives in multiple places so you get really you know lots of nines of reliability or of certainty that you're not going to lose data that make sense yeah yeah it makes it so basically like it's my whole bit is my own abstract my personal server that could be running on different pieces of hardware that's gonna stole all of my data and yeah like some applications to me that that that are using that using them data in some way right Andy and the idea would be like all of us would have these personal servers and they would connect to each other in a in the

network that's right we kind of skipped over the networking aspect but that Herbet runs its own network over UDP and we treat address space as cryptographic property so you own your orbit with a private key and your Herbet when we say your Irbid it is a virtual machine but it's also a network address and network addresses in Herbet are short pronounceable names such as mars odd or Ravenel Rock dial or and those names are just a direct function from some number which is like an IP address to a pronounceable name and we take that address fit that address space is finite so you can think of it like there are

four billion addresses and we divide it up into blocks so at the top there are two to the eight there are 256 galaxies that sign the keys for two to the 16th or 65 thousand stars that sign the keys for four billion or two to the 32nd planets the idea is that your parent just signs your initial key and then you're free you can change parents you can communicate directly a peer to peer with others on the network but I'll dividing it into blocks allows us to kind of decentralize the decentralization problem which is a confusing sentence this I think does actually actually accurately describe it meaning that basically I can sell you a star and you then can now go and issue

65,000 planets so now it's I can no longer control who you issue those planets to but because those planets have a cost they are not something you want to throw away right they're not something that you want to spam from so it's not up to us to decide who gets on this network it's up to the collective of people who own address space and then you hope that that's that collective can kind of help keep the net a network of real humans this is fascinating but let's come back to this in a second but I just wanted to run through some of these other ways of looking at urban so one a one was that you being an architect right like I think you look at it also through that kind of architectural perspective

can you describe that sure so there are a few different ways of looking at that or kind of thinking about it from a design thinking kind of standpoint I think in a way the reason that I wanted to work on something like this was very much motivated by a desire to build better interfaces better tools and I think if you look at if you look sort of long-term historically at the kinds of tools that people use so I'm holding matches in my hand right we all know how matches work they're very like it's very intuitive I own this little weird brass

thing of matches I know what it does it's clear to me because I own it in my hand there is such a big kind of tactile difference between an object that I own and my Facebook account and I think that we rely so heavily on software to govern the way that we communicate and the way that we store the records of our lives as a designer it felt impossible to deliver to people really nicely designed things that worked on their behalf if I was building centralized systems so I think one of the sort of biggest advantages of Herbet or something like orbit or really decentralized platforms in general is

that the incentives of the developer are aligned with the incentives of the user you're kind of you want to build things that people can actually use and appreciate so that's I guess really the foundational appeal of like why an individual would want something like this to exist right you build we build tools for you to actually use rather than building tools to get you to look at more ads and maybe lastly the idea of Orbitz being every public in which way is that true I guess it is kind of good that we digress a little bit into the network if you're going to run a network where individuals run their own nodes you also want those individuals to have you want the network to have kind of

built-in systems of systems of accountability that kind of flow in both directions so Herbet is a republic in that people who own an issue address base are also incentivized to provide good service to those who they issue address base to you because those people can potentially exit and go work with different nodes so I think the network is sort of Republican in design in that you don't want anyone in the network to be it for it to be possible for them to accumulate too much power so we can get into the mechanics of that but I think that's the basic idea that like the network itself the rules of the network should be somewhat sort of egalitarian by design that they should balance the interests of like you know who's in

power and why and those who like and that the rest of the network can kind of hold those people accountable by moving to by changing who does the routing so I kind of stated differently each each or business of my orbit is like my personal server it has a public key and it has an address so that those ugly two identifiers so it has public key address and that address translated into like a human readable name right so that's that's my orbit and so that my orbit is also called a planet it doesn't

understand it and each of us can have our own planet basically our own orbit and in the beginning it might be that like 65 thousand planets like 65 thousand of us have one administrative controlling star is it so so so the sort of the set of these six 5,000 person orbits is sort of administered by a higher-level Authority which is star and then you you can have like many stars so many constellation of constellations of these planets many

stars next sixty five thousand of these stars are then administered by our galaxy and then there are many galaxies but close enough like the numbers are like slightly off but the idea is sort of I mean to put it in more specific rooms sort of Republican and I mean that in the Roman Republican sense like 256 galaxies we think of those in a way like the Senate they actually distribute the kernel they ship software updates so they're kind of like the most important governing body but 256 people that's a pretty good sized governing body right it's like you know you're gonna have a lot of difference of opinion to negotiate there then you think of the

stars to the 32nd or to the 16th 65 thousand stars think of them like the Congress they have to actually approve those updates to shift them to their children right but then their children these four billion planets they can all move so they depend on a parent to do pure discovery and do some of their routing so for example if you and I have planets and we want to talk to each other I it sort of DNS style I asked my star to ask their galaxy to find you goes back down the chain and then with my first message comes my IP and then you we communicate directly so they're just doing pure discovery they're not really they're administrative role is somewhat limited but if for any reason they're censoring your peer discovery or

interrupting it or not providing good service or they're not distributing Network updates or they're just genuinely or generally being a pain in the ass for whatever reason you can move but the other thing you know that moves the other that's that close the other direction too so you have if you're a star and you have a child who's you know distributing illegal content or you you don't want to you feel like you don't no longer want to host them or route for them you can stop routing for them so you want to kind of have this balance of interests but of course you stop for them you know they can move to a star that's hosted in a different jurisdiction or whatever you want there to be kind of like a you want there to emerge ideally a real like gen Ewell like genuine diversity of like of

options for for routing cool and other incentives to be a be a star on galaxy and provide these services to the planets you would expect there be some rent-seeking involved so you first you are able to you know you're distributing real estate you're distributing address space so as a star I can issue 65,000 planets which I you'd expect that someone may sell or I don't know provide incentives for how someone might acquire them and then to exist as a child of my star I might charge you some nominal fee per month to you know provide your routing services and you could certainly

imagine that you know you'd like your home your orbit to be hosted somewhere so the idea that larger pieces of urban infrastructure may also provide hosting and related services I think is pretty realistic so yes I think I think this is a this is a really nice vision ideal the orbit as the network as like a republic personally I think the an eulogy that sort of seems to fit for me is that like like we are globally we have 180 nations similarly like orbit has 256 galaxies right then each nation might have like in geography it might have the Parliament so each galaxy will have like 65 so I don't know

the us- 300 Parliament members know bit like each galaxy is 65 thousand stars each galaxy has 256 stars so it's actually closer to what each other's but yes you're right 256 stars and then each star which is like a parliament member of a nation it's it has like the constituency of 65 thousand people in here is like 65 thousand planets and the lower you are in the hierarchy the more you depend on piers above you in the hierarchy to do routing and some basic functions but the Republic feature comes in because you

have this way to exit so if you are a planet and you don't like the administrative functions provided by your star then you can move to another star that's right and so it's a very dynamic network in which the threat of exit makes makes elements in the top of the hierarchy behave that's the idea yeah and you an exit to be clear is designed to be very fluid like it's not like you need to go get another passport somewhere kind of thing that's that's a super-important but yeah you got it so so finally there was this other other way of describing orbit which is Tobit

is an operating function so explain to us what this perspective of looking at so I think we touched on this just briefly earlier but the idea being I mean that's orbit is full of all of these kind of cutesy turns a phrase that's just in some ways that's just a you know we made that up right but your orbit is an operating function in the sense that it's a deterministic computer like this it's your Herbet state is a permanent fixed function of its entire event history so you can orbit functions like a database like it has a check point and its entire event log right and we have and do regularly like delete

that check point and have your Herbet actually recompute at state from the entire event law and I mean we've we've done this with millions of events I mean in the case of any cases where you replaying the event log has taken many hours and you'll always end up at the exact yet 4-bit state that you did when you started right and this is also I think this this might have been actually to your point about like why how did I get involved with this one thing that I find really I still find amazing about Herbet is that you for example like if you type a few keys in your console and then kill nine the process like just kill it and read like those key presses are still in your console right it feels like maybe it's just a trick but the idea is that your

Herbet is in fact like yeah your 'but is an operating function like it's an operating system who at the foundation is just a pure function that's computing a new state every time you send some input to it whether that be keyboard input or network input or whatever let's say you create a smart contract address right the smart contract address has basically a piece of code and let's assume that what's it when it begins it doesn't have any data now like when people send transactions to that smart contract the code processes that transaction maybe add some data and then the next transaction comes in that is

processed and then somehow some data is added then the next transaction comes in and so on so if you have any smart contract just by like looking at all of the transactions you can get to the current sort of state of this smart contract right so if you just give me the list of transactions that that contract processed and B and the code I'm going to be able to compute what the smart contract ought to look like currently so similarly like 4-bit seems to be that instead of these transactions you have these events so the event might be an input like your keystroke might be an input that is an

event and so in in orbit you have these series of events they are like these transactions and and like the code of the smart contract is like this operating function that just determines how that personal server should the should sort of integrate these events into a state of the state of the machine so if you have this code this operating function and the list of events that happen then you can just as you can calculate the final state of a smart contract I should be able to calculate the final state of my firstly would be or so that's right yeah and that this sort of you know the

kind of claim I guess like value proposition of that is that that underlying function is very concise so under like what flows from that is that Herbet is a trusted computing platform in a somewhat formal sense like you can you can verify that your Herbet is in fact can you know doing what you intended it to do you can understand its security much more deeply certainly than you would like a you know a UNIX machine I want to come back to this example of V Chadha maybe maybe a social network let's say it's something like Facebook right so today we have this gigantic internet companies like Facebook right so they have their servers they're

collecting all this data that's running on this server so they have a huge amount of private information amazing to run all kinds of AI stuff on it they provide the application write the computing environment and them on their server and maybe to some extent in my browser now if I imagine this Herbet world where I have this personal server and and all of a sudden the data my data is is on my server on my own you know private server right and to you I kind of like runs in my own private server so that also may mean right that I use a different UI then-mayor

maybe right like haha what does that look like what would it how could one build a big company or would they even exist or how do you business model change it seems such a radically different world from where we are today that I really struggle to imagine it what we used to live in this world much more right I mean people used to build and sell software it's not like that I think it's not that different of a vision in some ways from the idea that you know the user has a machine that stores their data that stores they're kind of like personal archive and they

decide what software run on top of that data and it's not required that the software that I use be the same software that you use we're just sending data back and forth and I think that like I mean the kind of lock-in that's required from our currents like you know current cloud service providers like Facebook or WeChat or whatsapp or slack or whatever you just take messaging alone the only reason for a lock in there is because the business model doesn't allow anything else to exist and so messaging as far as I mean messaging in Irbid is you know I guess it could be faster but it certainly works and I think that what

you would hope is that people want to extend and build on top of that protocol because it's fun like I think that in some ways what also true has driven me to work on something like this is that as a developer like it's not that hard so so like what's the difference between Twitter and Instagram right it's not that big of a difference like if there's a if there was a universal messaging protocol building each one of them it should be like a weekend project it should be super easy and super fun and so I think that like what in a way what were the audience that we're building for is the audiences not so much developers in this kind of professional sense but it's more like hobbyists it's like if you had all of the web stack as

infrastructure running on a global network building things on top of it would be it would be a much more it would be a fun thing to do it wouldn't be like a job so let's think of how like a simple chat application would work right let's sort of reference Twitter we'll try to imagine how an old bit Twitter would work now so in Twitter we have this you have this know you have this notion of like an account in in orbit that's logically my address and in my name the name of my planning so so I enter a message in my own personal server and now I now I want these

messages this message to be displayed by all of the people that are sort of following me so there are the planets in the world that are like following my planet in this in this chat application how does the message go from my server to them and how do they find out that I have created a message so we built a very simplistic Twitter clone in maybe 200 lines of JavaScript and the way that that works is that there's a message bus that we call talk that's an extensible message bus you can just define a message type and talk kind of handles all of what you're talking

about in terms of subscription handling so you can create channels that you publish messages to you and other people subscribe to those channels it's just general pieces interests you know a general purpose piece of infrastructure and so in a way building Twitter is just a matter of saying messages are only this long I'm going to post a feed I'm going to create a channel that is a feed and I'm gonna create a channel which is sort of my home stream or whatever and I'm gonna subscribe other feeds into that home stream and so yeah you get identity for free you get networking for free and you get basically subscriptions and updates for free search is a slightly more difficult problem as it is in any decentralized system and you know

it's it's an interesting we can we can dive into that a it's a it's kind of a differently shaped problem I think I guess from a very high level I I guess I'm like ice about Twitter twitter is a bit of a war zone right so I think that the constraint of a decentralized system does better with kind of like smaller like sort of less connected graphs right like I have just my clique of people that I talk to and you have your clique of rather than me trying to browse like the entire network I actually kind of my feeling is that that's more akin to how people want to connect with other people on a network that kind of living all your whole life in public is not really

the right way the internet should work but that's kind of a separate conversation so that point of how do you build Twitter the point is that it's potentially just a friend and application and yes all of the infrastructure is handled by every bit itself now today right one of the huge technological trends is is AI right and it's just like analyzing data and and of course there's kind of two sides to that right so in the one hand we have these huge companies like Google Facebook Amazon that are accumulating all this data so we're concerned right I think they're legitimate concerns about the power and the information that is accumulating there but at the same time right there's tremendous progress

tremendous innovation that's possible because of that in this Herbet vision how would that work like how would you be able to do any kind of large-scale machine learning data analysis ai that's a great question I think we a lot of us would agree that yeah there there are sort of portions of that quote-unquote research or whatever right that data mining that we perhaps would not want to consent to and so the example that I think of is like population scale genetic research so 23 and feticide I don't personally really want to put my genome on anybody else's server right that's the kind of thing that I very

much would like to keep private to myself I'd love to store it in something like orbit I'd also be more than happy to let people do research on the contents of my genome even relative to you know like data about my life right and the way that Herbet handles that is it's just like ok great you keep that data private to you and the researcher sends you a program that you run and you compute a result and send it back and so I think that my feeling is that there's a whole universe of sort of more private data that you could probably learn interesting things from especially in the realm of sort of scientific or medical research that are very difficult

to it's very difficult to collect that data in the existing systems and what you need to move to is a model where user who owns the data and the researcher the company either pays that user or just simply gets permission from that user to run that the user runs the computation and returns the result cool no that's that's a great answer and I just wanted to kind of share two more like personal things that's kind of fit in this urban vision so first of all is the question of Facebook right so I I deleted my facebook I think about a year ago and the reason was just that I felt the the motive and incentives of Facebook was so opposed to my own

motives that I just didn't make any sense to me so you know they obviously have this huge interest in keeping people on the side console engaging spending at a time there which is certainly not what I want to do and and they're very good at doing this right and they have all this technology to do that and at some level it would be great to have a kind of a social network but it would be great if I could give it like you know what what is the thing that I want to optimize right maybe I would be like I will don't want to spend more than 15 minutes on this per day and I want to like get this kind of things on there and it would be wonderful right if then user interface and a whole lot of other stuff could be optimized around

that and and that's totally not possible of Facebook but I could see that kind of thing being possible of Herbet and it kind of related to that is I remember we want to blockchain people at the dinner in Berlin a while ago and and then this issue of brain and somebody mentioned this term brain defense chef what was really interesting so but I think it kind of ties into the same thing right where we have all these technologies that are basically trying to like you know capture your attention and and and they're gonna get better and better and better and I think attention and concentration and having ideas and is becoming harder in this environment and

so I think to protect kind of this own mental space in the environment to defend against all these intrusions and advertisement and manipulations is is going to be so extremely crucial and again that's something that I think is very hard to imagine in today's web but when I see orbit right and I'm like okay that's that's perfect for that so I I really like the vision for it like those two things I'm like oh this is really directions it's wonderful yeah you're getting it exactly right I mean it's surprisingly almost frustratingly all the search for understandable is it's

hard to pitch that because people think I think people really think it's not possible to basically kind of help people stay focused basically and and and sort of like build humane connections with each other but to me that's absolutely like the promise of and I think the the potential like the potential for a decentralized social network hopefully with something like Herbet or with urban itself is that it can allow people to build relationships on a network that are really fully under their control it's under their control

how they consume the content that comes to them over the network it's under their control who they relate to and if I think the way I think about it is like all of the substantive conversations that I have happen over email and that is so crazy like email is so old it's an ancient protocol it works fine but I would love to be able to have you know substantive group conversations that you know really go deeply into a particular subject and people always say okay well you can already do this you know you could start a blog or you could I know there are a million other solutions but they don't actually somehow they do like they haven't made this possible it doesn't

feel like people are able to in a way like use computers in a kind of calm way and I think that's that's absolutely the hope and my feeling is that that's it's actually something people really want basically like I think I think people don't they don't kind of explicitly want it and everyone thinks it's like unfund a bowl and impossible but it feels very necessary to me yeah absolutely and actually that's also where for me the big sort of hesitation comes in reverb it because I feel like I understand the vision I really like it I wish we can get there but then it seems to really

say throw away everything companies like Google Facebook Amazon right they can't believe this in this universe and you say like okay let's throw it all away start from scratch and it's yeah it's just don't understand and don't see how we can get there yeah I think that's that's certainly the question I'm most concerned with like like luckily it doesn't keep me up at night but it is something that I think it's the right question to ask it's the most important thing like the many people have tried like this is not a new you know like everyone knows that it would be like it's clear well not everyone but like solving this problem would be fantastic

I don't think anyone is you know it like takes issue with that it's just a question of how do you actually do it and and just can you do it can you technically practically pull this off and I think the you know the nice thing is that you know people right now people use Herbet to build orbit and you know it's slow and it's clunky and there are a lot of things that I wish were better about it but it's surprising the level of engagement and enthusiasm people show for feeling like they are in a new world and they're also in a new world that actually works so they can you know post something to the forum that's hosted on

orbit and get feedback and actually you know start building something new or contributing to the kernel or helping us build infrastructure and seeing like relationships get built around that and and like people actually connecting with each other and building things and I mean in a very material like real sense that's what makes me think this is possible is that it well it actually works and we're kind of on the road to making it work and and and it's actually getting better I mean that you know I certainly wish it was getting better faster but you know we're we're working on it and sort of like real progressive steps to are in fact happening so I appreciate

the skepticism I like I I want to people should be skeptical like that I I think that's like the right attitude when you see something like this and and it I think of it as basically our job to provide very like material evidence that this is possible it's just like you should be able to be tangible you should be able to just use it and not not have to sort of worry or think about it when you look at like all of these things that that changed the world almost always they start off like weird like they start off with things that then you just don't understand that this there's just no precedent for it things like that and and for me like all of it feels that it passes the weirdness test I have

[Laughter] weird like we do to follow and see see where it goes and if there was a way if they're like emerges a way to actually make it like commercially successful and I have like selfish incentives for people to like base off and build the ecosystem it would just be right it could it could blow up it could become really big another way to answer the prior question really is like oh well actually so so today it's the question actually to your earlier question was like do you really need to build the whole stack III like I basically have the same exact feeling that you did which was like oh you know like like it's a bit of a weird it's not

the thing I would have thought of but like you know like maybe it maybe it buys you the freedom to do it right basically right like it's like the thing it feels like if you're gonna if you're gonna tackle this problem it's gonna be really really hard and you and you need them and you need the freedom to basically make it work correctly you can't be hemmed in by like other people like other things breaking or like too many people being involved or whatever and so it's it's basically like there are some weird decisions in Herbet that I think are genuinely weird and maybe even wrong and we should change like things about the language and stuff like that but I think that there are some of those weird things that are exactly as you described where it's like it's counterintuitive but like

you know it actually it actually works like it actually it has some material effect that's really beneficial so it's hard to look at things I think you know that it's easy like it's it's hard to look at things with that kind of like perspective I guess so like I like like to be that open-minded that you're like well it looks weird but maybe it'll work and I think that's kind of that that's the state of mind you have to be in when you're looking at it definitely so then to the I mean to in more practical terms like you know how are we gonna get there it's like what I would like what you can use Orbitz for today is like IRC in 1997 or whatever right it worked it actually works pretty well for that and use it for that all the time just for group

chat and and groups or foreign forum discussion and so in the near future like what we're working on right now is to get it to be the point where I could actually say to someone hey you know your private crypto slack okay you should probably host that on a platform that's not centralized and you should host it on something where you can actually audit the crypto and where you can understand the whole thing and I I think we can get there sometime early next year like the you know the infrastructure is there there's still work to do but that's a very kind of practical point at which it's like it becomes much more real still simple as sort of the Facebook 2004 of Irbid or whatever but early days work we're pretty close to that like that that's that's that's imminent the other thing that I think I'd like I'd like orbit to

be able to do for you and that we're working on in the near term is like your Herbet is kind of the right place for you to make blockchain transactions from right so I've somehow heard this pitched back to me from other people a million times but I think Herbet has a slightly different take on this approach which is like the personal Bloomberg terminal of crypto so simple way of thinking about this the size the Bloomberg terminal does a lot of things right and it has all the sort of social networking and research and you can also execute trades but a computer that is like a trusted computing platform that can hold your private keys that you can program that can call up to the blockchain is a pretty powerful thing so I remember reading I don't really

hold crypto I don't trade crypto but I've always wanted to experiment with trading algorithms even if it's like a little bit of money it just seemed like kind of a fun side project so I don't I mean how do you do that like that seems so incredibly hard to actually just go and take one of these conventional you know conventional known trading algorithms and just let it right out of them let it run on the theory or let it run on BTC or whatever and I think that like Herbet being the place where you can kind of program with the blockchain that's something that I think we are reasonably close to being able to to offer like soon I mean like next year like I think that's something I'd want to be able to start encouraging people to do and they're there other that's that's like just one kind of example

like UI for decentralized apps or hosting data related to be sensitive to a theory I'm applications I think it's like potentially super super useful and so you'll see Herbet become more practically tangibly useful in the in the very near future at which I hope can kind of speak to your question although I hope that you know yeah I want people to be skeptical I think like the obit version to me is it's quite clear it's the thing that we'd want to focus on is there's another vision in this space which is this vision of like a decentralized internet or a decentralized web and its really been spearheaded by these projects like ipfs

block stack swarm and then you have whole bit which is like your personal server server what do you think is the difference between these two visions I can speak better to ipfs than two blocks tack although I think they're actually quite similar or like they sort of fit the same the potentially sort of fit the same model or survey integration model with orbit so your Irbid is like the post a database that is your personal archive right like it's just this it's your permanent personal data store so that data may actually exist elsewhere so in the case of ipfs I would

very much like to have it be possible that you can just have a and file in the Herbet namespace like a file in the Herbet address in the urban address space that or sorry urban file system that maps directly to an IP FS file and we keep that that mapping updated and we like would encourage you to do that right like you drop a file into Herbet and you should be able to easily store it in ipfs IP that's a great project and that's you know you but you want to you probably want some way to kind of like capture all the references right you want to wave like it's not just my raw files it's like I need to do things with them I need some UI for them I need some other metadata about them and your Herbet can provide functionality that I

think ipfs probably can't provide directly but of course it's early we don't know exactly you know how these things might work together and I think that's the same is true for block stack where you see like there are block static applications where I may store my I don't know my authentication may happen to Herbet or something like that or and may like prove ownership over a block stack like some data that I have like reference and block stack is actually like I keep my references in urban I guess like that's in general how I think of like your urban should just connect to everything that's kind of like that's the approach and I think that with the decentralized platforms there's you know I we we all know each other and I think kind of like would

like all of these things to be as interoperable as possible so it's very different than the kind of like the fragmentation of like your Facebook's and slacks and whatsapp's or whatever like as far as I'm concerned these things should be as compatible and in interoperable as possible there's the incentives for competition are really different when I compare like ipfs and a little bit like one of the one of the key differences that at least I can see between these two projects is that it's it's really in the in the data structure so if if if you look at like ipfs it's trying to make this one giant data structure for lots of data on the web

and that it's like so it's the merkel wave right so there's this one data structure with like data blobs connected in a you know in a particular kind of graph anyone can access any part of that graph and it's just one data structure for that whole web but it's like with all bit my own personal server has my data and you can think of that filesystem as as one data structure and like your planet has a different data structure so we have like smaller data structures but belonging to me individually and then it's like and then there's like networking in order to move data between these data structure so

it's to me it seems to be like the difference between one global giant data structure for ipfs and on the other side like smaller data structures lots of them and networking between these data structures to move data around the Erb a file system is a global immutable namespace so any file in the file system is you kind of have like a permanent immutable reference to any revision of that file whether it's on your orbit or on my orbit it doesn't matter so there is a sense in which Herbet kind of tries to treat the whole network as a single

computer but yes you compute because you compute locally they're kind of the permissions model is different but orbit is also kind of not yet and I think for some time not it's not optimized for like binary storage orbit is not it's meant it's meant to sort of store references to what could be large pieces of data that exist elsewhere and so I guess I think of ipfs is kind of trying to build the I mean I think of ipfs is trying to replace HTTP basically right like like trying to replace like the width is the naming system for hat like both how we start to build both the naming system and the storage system for how data like how people just store the cultural record right like everything

that kind of happens in the world and I think of that as much more aimed at yes or public data the data that doesn't have like a specific owner whereas Herbet is basically identity address so if you want to find a path to a file of mine you would actually say like it's just like slash my planet name slash the path to file right so in a way they're like cooperative you may have this global cultural record of which I create references to when I say tweet about something or whatever right and so the the record of my tweet is or you know my message or whatever public message is like that's identity addressed in Herbet so the identity root is sort of a different thing it's a very

different model from the ipfs model but you can sort of see how they're like cooperative I speaking about the naming system namespace I also had some questions that came up for me when I was speaking about that and one of them was and maybe this is it struck me as a little bit weird so you guys have a four billion a planet right so that is the maximum amount of basically entities that can participate here and you guys particular thing argue I think that these would be human beings so what why four billion and what happens if orbit is super successful and you know there's ten billion people and they all want to

have an ERV it the short answer is a it solvable and B it's a problem I want to have but I'll tell you how it's all about because it's it's a totally fair question like we have all been through like we've seen the ipv4 madness right like for you know two to thirty second is a sort of like a risky number like everyone knows it's potentially too small so a yeah there it's unclear how many I was like trying to when I tried to look into kind of like how many people so how many Facebook users are there right there's something like two and a half build or something I was two billion like and the difference we two billion and four billion scores a lot and so it certainly could be a long time before we start to

even get close to exhausting the address space and of course there is a different economic incentive for keeping one of these addresses right so when we look at like how ipv4 got exhausted in large part because a lot of it ended up being blacklisted it's all BOTS and spammers right and you look at the same same problem with like trying to measure using so big social networks it's like they're all kind of pumping up their user numbers so how many people are actually like online in the capacity that they're participating in their daily lives through the internet those numbers I think are like lower than we think but let's imagine that sure fifteen years down the line orbit is like reaching is exhausting the planet supply the way the name space works that's you could basically start to

subdivide each planet has four billion moons that are its children moons don't move they don't change parents and so the idea is that your moons are your devices and that that you know four billion is a big number because you'd kind of assume that IOT becomes actually starts to work if something like orbit existed but you could easily enforce rules for how to subdivide that address space and that's a very so 2 to the 64th is a giant number there's certainly more than enough moons and you would just and that that could be done with a kernel update like we could just change the rules of how like you could allow say the first 65,000 children of each planet to change parents and effectively extend the

planet address space in that way something along those lines so it's sort of like it's a solvable problem without completely breaking the system scarcity is important in the early days because you don't want the network to potentially get over you know you need address space to be valuable so it doesn't become overrun with Bob and spammers yeah that was that was kind of my other question tying into that so what drives the value of outer space I mean if if we have for example four billion that is still as you point out a huge number right and if they're all kind of similar and I can get them from any of 256 galaxies or you know the 65,000 stars then I mean it would seem

logical that it would kind of gravitate towards the sort of lowest common denominator and you know will be almost free so why are they gonna have value so will certainly give you a planet for free today and yes they you know at this point they're very very cheap why do they evaluate at the end of the day they have value because orbit has use value I mean you you know the kind of simple and on the imported lines stupid way to think about it it's like look I mean you pay for Dropbox you pay for WordPress you pay for iCloud you pay for you know you already pay for all of these services that help you sort of store your data and run your life right like a

planet someday should cost like you know less than Internet access for a month say you know so that's like say it's like 20 bucks or whatever you would assume that the price would settle around that and if you look at ipv4 auctions they they tend to hover in that range and so certainly like you know the finiteness of the address space is a bootstrapping mechanism for trying to tackle a project of this size and you know we we want other people to own chunks of address space to help us build the network and help get other people like figure out how to get other people on and how to authenticate them properly and so on but it's you know it's it's

definitely like a way of like bootstrapping maturity basically cool well maybe a final final topic here what's what's coming up for a bit like what are some of the milestones or things on the horizon yeah good question so guess I touched on it briefly yeah we've we've been so herb it works pretty well we've run test networks like continuous networks for about nine months maybe almost a year last one so it's getting pretty good but we you know Herbet is not a big enough sort of pinata that we feel like it's completely secure so we've decided to bootstrap address base ownership off of the

etherium blockchain so the thing that we're working on right now and that we've been talking about a lot both within the community and like publicly is how exactly that works source for writing contracts that will enforce the logic of the PKI and how Herbet will listen to aetherium and well issue a sort of like address based backs token through those contracts and so that's taking up a lot of time or do it I mean like the contracts are pretty real they're about to get audited and they're in public and people should check them out we're gonna build an interface to them so that's happening pretty soon so you'll have some way of actually redeeming and transacting address space that way and then what I was talking about before so I think our main goal is to get a sort of better faster more

usable orbit experience out the door by early next year where you can really more easily like chat and connect with people on the network and sort of use it as if it were you know just like a simple decentralized social network basically and you know then we go from there I can keep talking for half an hour about the plans that we have but those are the those are the simple concrete near-term ones cool Galen that was super fascinating talking about orbit I'm really excited about this project and I hope it's gonna I hope we're gonna see a lot of exciting news coming from me thanks yeah it's glad to be here and fun to chat with you guys cool and well thanks so much for a listener for once again tuning in there's a lot of

interesting post Constitution posts about the language stuff on the urban websites we're gonna link to that in the show notes if you want if you want to kind of dive more deeply into it to maybe learn how to get involved in the projects as well so yeah please check that out and thanks so much for tuning in once again if you want to support the show and please do so by leaving a review for us on iTunes and otherwise we look forward to seeing you again next week [Music] [Music]