On The Brink with Castle Island - Urbit (Christian Langalis and Logan Allen) (EP.17)

Episode Date: November 11, 2019

Christian Langalis and Logan Allen from Tlon join the show to discuss Urbit, the ambitious and somewhat mysterious computing project that they work on. We discuss how Bitcoin and Urbit could be mutually beneficial, how Urbit might free us from the tyrannical tech oligopolies, and why a from-scratch rewrite of Unix and the computing stack is necessary.

What's up, everyone? This is Nick Carter with another episode of On the Brink with Castle Island. So this week we have a very special podcast and it's one that I've wanted to do from the very start. So I was in San Francisco for Blockchain Week and I paid my good friends at Erbit a visit. So for those of you who don't know, Erbit is a long-running project to reinvent the entire internet stack, essentially from scratch. So Curtis Jarvin, the founder of Erbit, he started to work on it in 2003. So the project is motivated by this desire to allow users to network and communicate with their peers without being subject to the whims of the massive tech oligopolis that intermediate everything that we do today. So in that sense, it's a profoundly urgent project. As the election gets closer and all the various tech platforms are being abused and pressured by the government to promote certain agendas,

there's never really been a greater need for a movement to restore personal computing. move away from some of these oligopolis. So, Erbit is frequently derided by many, including in the past by myself, as kind of an elaborate form of performance art or sort of esoterica for the sake of it, basically that it's too complex. So I spent a lot of time thinking about it and reading about Erbit. Right now I'm convinced it's one of the most important projects active in the world today, and I'm very hopeful it's able to succeed in its objectives. I make no secret to the fact that I'm really fed up with living in a digital feudal regime where all my content and even my online identity, they're all held at the mercy of some bureaucrat working for Jack Dorsey or Mark Zuckerberg.

So Erbit doesn't really aim to compete with these big tech corps directly. Instead, it reimagines the internet from scratch, choosing to help users run a personal servers and unshackle themselves from the centralized data silos that we all rely on. So to help demystify Erbit and explain its objectives and approach to normal folks, I visited Talon, the company that does most of the development for Erbit. I had a great conversation with Christian Langalis, who's better known as Bitcoin Sign Guy, who now acts as a go-between linking the Erbit and the Bitcoin projects, as well as Logan Allen, who is a talented engineer who has a fantastic grasp on the Erbit system as a whole. And in honor of Erbit, which is famously committed to definite aesthetic,

I've replaced a normal jingle with a vapor wave track for this week only. I learned a ton from this conversation, and I hope you do as well. Welcome to the On the Brink podcast with Castle Island. I'm Nick Carter, and I'm sitting here with Logan Allen engineer at Arbit and Christian Lingalis, who's the Bitcoin ambassador at Erbit. We're here at the Talon offices. and some part of San Francisco called the dog patch, I think. Undisclosed location near some warehouses. It actually truly is undisclosed. It's not indexed on Google.

And so I was trying to figure out how to get here before. And I had to look up their address on their SEC filings. That because these guys weren't answering my texts. We take bunker aesthetics very seriously. I was busy working. So thankfully the SEC knows where you guys live. and I'm here now. So we're here to talk about Erbit.

Erbit is a somewhat mystical project. You know, people really don't understand it for the most part. The people do understand it seem to like it or really hate it also. So we're going to try and demystify some of that, you know, break through the veil of complexity, which I guess is actually a frequent critique of Erbit. And we're also going to talk about how Erbit is related to Bitcoin and what the relationship might be. So why don't you guys both tell us some in turn what it is you liked about Erbit? You know, why are you so attracted to the project? Sure. I'll start. So I first got into

Erbit in the summer of 2017 when I was hanging around on Twitter, hearing all sorts of crazy Bitcoin mysticism and hearing a lot of people talk about how new technologies needed to be built on top of Bitcoin in order for Bitcoin's real future or real impact to be realized. Just insofar as there's so many centralized platforms that exist and so many intermediaries who are built into our society and built into the way that we communicate. And so a lot of people, uh, were talking about how the incentives that Bitcoin creates for more free computing could lead to something bigger. And eventually I got really interested in the question of online reputation. And so as a part of my research into decentralized reputation systems,

I found Erbit because they have an identity system that has a reputation primitive. And at first, Erbit seemed like super crazy and I bounced off of it because there were all these like weird words and I didn't know what was going on. But eventually I felt like I got it. And then somehow I started working here. And now I like hoon all day. Christian, what about you? How did you make your way to Erbit? So I have an elective affinity with Erbit as a as a Bitcoinser. I came to Erbit, I guess out of concern for Bitcoin's development, not to say, you know, I'm, I figured out what's wrong with Bitcoin and, you know, I'm here to fix it, but that I do sense a certain trajectory of centralization through

the delivery of Bitcoin services that is primarily a result that the fact that people run Bitcoin as a naked protocol. So it's not running perhaps nested in a in a suite of more self-sovereign computing tools. And so Erbit, I see as an operating system that prioritizes sovereignty and has a more full-featured way to interact peer-to-peer. And so I think it's perhaps the ideal way for people to use Bitcoin. So in your mind, Bitcoin is. a protocol which gives users sovereignty and freedom of choice and so on, but it's contextually

deficient in that you have all these other dependencies and all these things you have to trust in order to use Bitcoin. That's correct. So what I think is a failure mode for Bitcoin is that if people only ever adopt it in the context of large cloud services, that's a cliff that I would prefer we not drive off. And I haven't know that many exchanges are run on the cloud, not even on servers that they control. Yes, that's correct. So let's presume no prior knowledge here.

And why do you guys collectively try and describe to me what Erbit is from an outsider's perspective? Cool. So Erbit is an actual cloud computer, dude. It's an actual cloud computer insofar as it's a personal server operating system. that was defined and created specifically to make it easy for people to run their own personal servers. And we look at the way that people actually use their computers in the real world today. And Christian has this super powerful MacBook sitting over here. And he uses it as a glorified web browser.

And the web browser has become increasingly complex so that it can run sandboxed code inside of these crazy virtual machines so that it can be like, mildly secure so that it can you do these like simple, clunky, like flat UI applications that are running on other people's servers. So why are we running code on other people's servers all the time? Because it's more efficient. Because it's very difficult to run your own personal server. Wasn't that kind of the default back in the early days of computing in the web and so on? Well, there have been multiple waves of this. And so there used to be mainframe like computers that were very large and people do time sharing on them.

And in those days, everyone was on different, like, was on, you know, their own servers in some university. But it was a single large server. And then we had the personal computing revolution where we actually had computers in people's homes. we had Usenat, we had IRC, and people were actually peer-to-peer communicating. But then as technology advanced, it became more efficient once again to move to a client-server paradigm where these people lost their sovereignty, but they got better services. So would you say that Erbit is kind of restorative movement and that it's trying to regain the status quo that we had in the 80s, 90s?

Absolutely. Erbit is a back-to-the-land computing movement. Not to make a tortured analogy, but how Bitcoin is, I consider it to be restorative technology in terms of restoring an age of free banking and sound money and so on. So, yeah, Erbit is meant to, if anything, disrupt and remove almost all current internet startup-as-a-service business models. that offends me as VC that's okay so

so so orbit is a cloud computer that people can actually use right and the idea is that individuals would be running their own servers through Herbert and they would also be controlling

their online selves their identities right yeah that's it can you guys talk a little bit about how the identity protocol works sure Sure. So the way that the identity protocol works is that it was created to be a replacement for DNS. So DNS is how you can get from Google.com to Google's IP address just by knowing the human readable phrase.

And so there's two parts to it. There's the scarcity of the address space. So there's a set of addresses similar to IP addresses or similar to how each domain name in the traditional web can only map to, you know, one IP address. And then there's a limited number of those such that it's hard for botnets to come onto the network and spam people and DDoS people. And so the reason why that's effective is because you can ban people from being able to interact with you. And so if someone tried to use their addresses in that way, it wouldn't be profitable. But the difference between Erbit's ID protocol called Erbit ID and DNS or any of these traditional systems is that an Erbit ID corresponds to a single computer.

Not a single device, but a single person's virtual computer. So if I want to send you a message, I only have to know your ID name on Erbit. similar to how if I want to call you, I just need to know your phone number, regardless of where you are or if you got a new phone. And in Erbit jargon, the equivalent of a computer is called a planet, right? Yeah, we're kind of using the word Erbit as a shorthand. Okay, so are you going to be reforming the excess of jargon that we have? Oh man, we're trying to.

There's so much jargon because engineers have a tendency to want to finely delineate concepts. So when a concept is slightly different than another thing, so for instance, a galaxy is slightly different than a DNS root node or a star is slightly different than an internet service provider. But they're so analogous that it seems as though the new jargon, though useful for initial technical reasons, just to explain the differences between the concepts, doesn't seem so useful anymore. So for the uninitiated, the hierarchy in the orbit address space goes as follows. You have galaxies, which are the most fundamental.

There's 256 of them, correct? Yep. And think of it as a hierarchical tree whereby the parent owns everything beneath it. So beneath galaxies, you have stars. Be stars, you have planets, and beneath planets, you've comets. I think that's all of the, that's the whole set, right? Moons and comets. So you could think of those as devices.

You could think of planets as just individual computers. You can think of stars as nodes or hubs, and then the galaxies as the root nodes. Yeah. And what would be the name of a typical star, for instance? That's typical star would be Marsad. So Erbit has this interesting scheme where they have these these human readable but non-human intelligible namings,

the entities in the address space get more scarce as you subtract letters and less scarce as you add letters. And so this is where the value in part derives from. If you have something with very few letters like Zod, that's the parent of it all, right? Sure. Well, I think the value is not necessarily the syllabic density, but rather that when you have one of the higher level urban addresses,

you can more easily provide services to other orbit addresses. So each star governs the planet's under it and the planet governs the commonplace. Govern is a, govern is I think too ambitious of a word. It provides services according to the choice of the addresses underneath it. Sure. So, like, you could think of, so the services that it provides are mostly discovery of other, it's mostly peer discovery. So for instance, when I want to send you a message, Nick, I'm Tacrit Sokrip on the network. And let's imagine that you're Rob Mel Rapdil.

If I want to send you a message and I don't know what IP address you're at, then I will, ask my sponsor or my parent if they know your IP address. And if they do, then they'll tell me what your IP address is, but they'll also send that first packet that I was trying to send to you to you. And then after that, we just connect directly to each other. And then if you switch IP addresses, then we do the peer discovery again. So the services that a star or a galaxy might provide to the entities that live in their domain, do you envision them as quite minimal in this respect, or do you think that there would be

more comprehensive services they would provide? I think that they'll likely grow over time as different businesses determine how to provide value in different ways. And not to interject, but also they will grow, especially as the, the ease with which you can incorporate monetization into the network. And so this is this is where Bitcoin comes in. We really think that Bitcoin can be the OS level money primitive for for urban and that it can be, you know, a simple money abstraction that any developer

can can deploy to make any. any transaction enabled application. So before we get into more complexity, I want to make this somewhat accessible as an Erbit primer as well. So just from a tangible sense, how would an individual use Erbit? I mean, it's live today. How would a normal person use it? Sure.

So use cases that someone could go through today are you could use it to chat with your friends directly with no intermediaries, no middlemen, no platforms that you were depending on. you can use it to blog. So you can use it to host your own personal blog, share it with your friends. Soon you'll be able to use it to hold your own personal personal, completely private and decentralized social graph. So for instance, imagine Twitter except you own your own tweets

and you don't have to send them off to Twitter or have any advertisements. So you own your timeline, you subscribe to other people's data if they want to send you their tweets, that sort of thing. So I guess the reason sometimes it's so difficult to talk about use cases is because Erbit is a full from scratch reimagining of computing and networking. Yeah. And it's hard to conceive of the ways that it might take off initially because it is so flexible. It is very flexible. Like back to the what services a star could provide.

For instance, like these businesses that are doing infrastructure could easily provide like CDN, so content delivery, for these small web servers that people are running on their personal computers. So if you have an urban that posts some YouTube video, for instance, or you know, just some video that you want people to be able to see, and you're hosting that video, and suddenly, it goes viral and 10,000 people start watching it at the same time, your orbit probably won't be able to handle that load. And so you might offload and cache that on some content delivery

network that your star is hosting for you. So that's the type of service. But these use cases are currently not something that people ever think about because they're always utilizing other people's servers for these things. Right. So our online lives occur in these enormous silos. And you could think of them as feudal states where the rules are ordained and made and enforced unaccountably by essentially all-powerful despots, you know, people like Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey, even though I actually like Jack. And so Erbit envisions a world in which you have the right to exit from any service provider or digital locale with your data and self-intact. and where it is not retained or administered or controlled by some distant unaccountable third party.

Be your own despot. And so this concept of free exit is pretty critical in the philosophy of orbit, right? Yes, I would say so. And I think it very much parallels the way that Bitcoin represents a complete exit from legacy monetary policy and fiscal policy. Although I guess it's a little bit harder to conceive of what it might look like to exit a social media service entirely because it doesn't happen. You know, you either get deplatformed or you just leave at some point, but you don't get

to pull your reputation, your identity, your followers, and your social graph with you. Which has always struck me strange because, you know, to get to get banned or D platform is to be robbed of the work that you put into your social graph. And, uh, I mean, all of us spent a lot of time on Twitter. I spent the last 10 years on Twitter curating a list of people on a listen to. And if I were to be banned, which is totally possible because I say some subversive things from time to time, I would have no recourse whatsoever. But in the scenario that you guys envisioned with Erbit, you would be able to, you would have constructed that social graph in a way that cannot be obviated by some third party

because the graph itself is data that's sovereign to you. You own your identity, you own your data, you own your connections to everyone else, and no one can take it away from you. And I guess there is an urgency for something like this, especially in today's day and age where it's so popular that hate on Facebook and Congress keeps telling Zuckerberg that he needs to be the arbiter of what's true or not. No one has seemed to grasp that the answer is not more regulation of these online platforms, but rather to create a world where the platforms do not have these complete totalitarian unaccountable power over all their members. I feel like Ron Paul said this at some point. I don't have a quote, but I feel like the real dichotomy in thinking here is that there are some people

who are saying these states or these platforms should not abuse this massive amount of power that they've been given. And then you have a completely different set of people on the other side of the dialectic that are instead saying, let's create new things that disallow anyone from ever being able to have that type of power ever again. So in this case, Irbit is, it's post-political, very much beyond the political process.

We don't think that we should even leave it up to chance to the process to decide whether Facebook and Twitter can control us in these ways. I see it a little bit as digital sea-studding. Instead of trying to secede from some country and form your own, rules or, you know, carve out some political authority in some sovereign land, you just say, all right, screw this. I'm going to create my own new country from scratch, although potentially more viable than C-Setting, which is liable to get you assassinated by the Thai government.

Right. And that's a real thing. C-Sitting is also, as a sailor, I can say, it's going out, striking out on your own. in meat space is such a pain relative and especially relative to what you gain for it. I mean, most of our sovereignty these days is bound in digital systems anyhow. So even if you're on a C-stead and the breeze is blowing in your face and it's beautiful, you know, when you log in, you're still being controlled and striated in all the same in all the same ways as though you were on shore.

it's also a non-starter for me because I get seasick so I can't even succeed man I just like people too much I don't I don't think that I would actually be able to leave the possibility for any social interactions or community because that's that's really what ties people to a lot of these services and to a lot of the places that they want to live in the real world anyway it's it's not jurisdictional arbitrage like that doesn't really happen very much it It only happens at the fringe is because people care about their connections and their relationships far too much. So that raises a good point, though.

I mean, how will you convince people to defect en masse to something like an orbit if it requires, you know, some considerable deal of work up front? And, you know, they have these nice communities that they're very comfortable in on Twitter and Facebook and Reddit and so on. How do you convince someone to start fresh, especially in a... what is ultimately a network where the value of the network is some function of the users in the network. Well, there will be API access to legacy services to ease you in. But eventually, I think people will just find that having one identity for all of their digital services is eminently more convenient. I think the bootstrapping problem is always the hardest one. with any of these companies or with any of these platforms.

And it's really something that has to be done delicately because you don't want to end up in a situation like Gab where you get a bunch of people that are low value or particularly hateful that cause other people to not want to use the platform. It's kind of like an adverse selection problem. Yeah. They marketed to people who had been banned from Twitter,

but it turns out many of those people. or horrible. Yeah. Although actually, that said, I actually find Gab to be a useful check on the power of Twitter. It's mere existence. It's good that multiple platforms exist that are micro-blogging mediums. But I think that really what we think that the main draw will be is that people can actually move to this platform with their whole digital community and be able to interact with that

same digital community in all the ways that they were used to interacting with them and more. So instead of just talking to a bunch of people on Twitter, you could bring that entire group of people with you to Erburt, talk to them on a new micro-blocking platform, and share document editing facilities, or share chat facilities, or easily be able to use that same group of people and share whole other application experiences that are easy to build with those same people. So instead of just one very constrained use case that's provided to you by a centralized party,

suddenly you and your friends can go and build new experiences and still use similar mediums as you were using before. So if anything, it's more expressive. Do you think there's a risk that Erbit becomes a kind of computational aspirational, Esperanto in that it's a technological marvel and it is a very well-formed reaction to some of the ugliness in the established world but ultimately due to a lack of adoption or high barriers to entry,

people just don't use it. This is an interesting question. I think that it's more likely to be a computational Esperanto for the programming languages that Erbit has than it is to be a computational Esperanto for actual users. So I think it's likely that for a long time there will be fewer programmers on Erbit than there are users and that it'll be harder for programmers to get started on it than it is for users to get started on it. The experience to get started on it as a user is going to be drastically simplified and will feel almost equivalent to starting on a centralized platform within a matter of

once we get automated hosting built out as an open source tool. So what automated hosting will allow is it will allow any company to get started on the urban address space and to provide server space and for users such that when they sign up, they can sign up, be given an identity, and have their own server that's running on the cloud somewhere else, almost as a custodied Bitcoin wallet solution. Okay, so I was going to say, because it seems like to be somewhat of a paradox to say, here's your sovereign computer, and then also why don't you custody it with us, some third party? Sure. We try to be pragmatic. But the, I guess the difference between that and like using

Name Cheap or GoDaddy is that you still have your credentials and you can withdraw your, your custody. That's right. So the difference between the type of custody that you would do in this, in an urban hosting scenario and in a Bitcoin wallet scenario, is that in a Bitcoin wallet, you're never going to be given access to the private key of the Bitcoin wallet that this centralized third party like Coinbase is holding. They'll let you withdraw it to another one, but you'll never actually have access to it. Within Erbit, there's actually different keys for different things. So you may have an ownership key. That's completely different than the key that lets someone run and boot your orbit.

So you may give the key that lets this hosting provider boot your orbit, but you could always take away that key and cycle it at any given time by using your ownership key. Or they could just let you export your data like they likely will due to market demand. So I actually got started with an earlier version of orbit, and it was a lot of command line stuff. It was pretty tough, actually. And then I got it to run eventually, but there wasn't much I could do it at the time. And let's say user wants to self-administer the orbit.

Does that require some sort of always-on functionality? Or is it like running a Bitcoin node where you have to periodically catch it up if it's not always on? You could do either one. You'll have a better experience if it's always on, which is why the hosted experience is at least the easier thing to do. up until the point at which someone puts it on a laptop at their house or some equivalent of a Casa Hodel or a Notel box for Urban is built. But if you turn it off and then you turn it back on, yeah, it'll work. You'll get all of the things that you had missed.

It'll just slowly come back up to date and it'll be fine. I guess that your peers wouldn't be able to talk to you though if you were offline. That's right. But any messages that they had tried to send you would have just been queued up. and then would just be sent to you as soon as you came back online. So, Christian, part of your mandate is to evangelize Erbitt to Bitcoiners and maybe also the converse, you know, be an advocate for Bitcoin here at Erbit because you believe that the two projects are ideological neighbors

and can be mutualistically supportive of each other. So curious to hear about your view on how you think Erbit and Bitcoin comport with each other and, you know, how they play together. What's the relation? Sure. So the most meme condensed version is that sound money deserves a sound computer. You have this high power digital money Bitcoin and you want to be able to use it in as secure and as sovereign a manner as possible.

And, you know, even the epitome of this is operating a, uh, a full node where you validate the full Bitcoin blockchain. And so what tools get you to this point and with a good user experience such that you don't just fall back onto the to the opiate of centralized cloud services? So that's where I think that Erbit and its design priorities of security, stability, et cetera, come in and truly shine. And especially on the topic of Erbit being a personal server. It's interesting that people have slowly been waking up to this realization that, oh, I need a personal server because they've been trying to run the Bitcoin blockchain and they recognize now that it's actually pretty difficult. And the ones that do succeed then start to wonder, okay, well, why don't I

run my own email server or chat application server? And so the Erbit really picks up, picks up bitcoins and meets them where they are with some of their concerns today. So, Logan, you've said that Bitcoin alone is not enough, right? I hope I'm not garbling that. No, yeah. Bitcoin alone is not enough. And that if we are to be free, we need to supplement it with Erbitt. So explain how that is the case if you're addressing the Bitcoiners. Okay, sure. So Bitcoin poses the problem to the world in a truly succinct way in the Genesis' block. And it, Bitcoin forces us all to ask, why are there so few people who are so disconnected from us who have so much power over our lives? They control our economy. They control what we can

say. They set into, they set up these forces that over time have huge effects on us as their incentives that shape the way that everyone around us acts, whether it's government subsidies, if you want to be very blunt or pick an obvious example, or whether it's obscure laws relating to who can be a money transmitter. And really all of these things set the background for the world that we live in, and they always do live in the background. They are never put to the forefront, but they're still shaping the world as we experience it. So Bitcoin poses that question and forces us to look at those things by juxtaposing a radically free, uncensurable alternative to that system. This is why sometimes I call Bitcoin profane, because it exposes the way

that reality is, which is often concealed from us, and it forces the arbiters of reality to engage with that truth, which is very uncomfortable to them. So the interesting thing is that similar to how physicists are always looking for beautifully simple mathematic truths that reflect reality, Bitcoin as an expression of a set of game theoretic principles that can create a secure currency is Bitcoin is simple. Bitcoin is simple, it works, and no one's made a better version of it since the very first one. And in its simplicity lies the critique. Because given the simple game that it created, it created entirely new emergent market forces simply by its existence.

Erbit is similar and Erbit faces a different component of society. Erbett faces computing generally. What is computing? Computing is a social phenomenon where we have machines that do work for us that allow us to communicate with each other, that allow us to interact with each other, that show us media that shapes how we view the world, that allows us to interact with beauty, that shows us new experiences,

and computers were meant to be a bicycle for the mind, a way for us to do more, to be more, to experience more of humanity. But that type of self-expression, though prevalent on things like YouTube or Twitter and enabled by the internet in ways that we couldn't have imagined.

Who could have imagined memes? Gerard. Despite all of that, all of these beautiful and new modes of expression that are popping up are tainted by the underlying set of incentives, perhaps not regulations, but technical insufficiencies

of the computer. platforms that we've been using. Architectural, not malfeasances, but architectural accidents that just happened to occur. Because 50 years ago when Linux was being created, I mean, Unix was created in three weeks. The creator of Unix, his wife, went on vacation, and then this guy just sat down and made Unix in three weeks. Was it the perfect, most ideal system that could have ever existed? No, but it worked and people were amazed at it. But for some reason, all of our computers that we've had since then are based on the same architecture. Why? It's not because it's the best architecture. It's an accident. And the fact that no one has had the guts to go

and try to rebuild everything from scratch to match the way that humanity actually wants to use their computers is kind of strange to me, but someone did. So Logan, I think that's very evocative and very profound, but you know, the question I have is what changed such that Unix or Linux was no longer the best way to arrange things and such that Erbit is warranted or something like Erbit? Unix or Linux? Linux is a very complex piece of software. The Linux kernel by itself is 50 million lines of code, and it's secreted more and more over time, and fewer people have understood the inner workings of it. So it's not so much that Linux itself changed, though it did grow more complex, but it's that even as the way that humans have used computers evolved, the underlying computing substrates that we have used did not change to match the expectations that we have of those systems. substrates. Instead, we just built more and more layers or hacks, hacks on top of hacks,

that became ever more complex, that break in ever more unexpected ways, that create ever more expensive and hard-to-fix security holes, heart bleed, for instance, the open SSL vulnerability. And so this entire computing stack that we have has just grown more complex as we've asked more of it because it wasn't built for the ways that we're using it today. But what would you say is the more urgent motivator for something like Erbit to exist? Would you say the complexity and the idiosyncrasy and the stack that we have or the fact that we live in these feudal serfdoms on the various oligarchic networks which are controlled by relatively few individuals? Which of those two would you say, or are they inextricably linked? They're inextricably linked. We live in these

oligarchic networks, these massive digital platforms, because the easiest way to build those applications was to build them in a client server architecture. And the reason it was the easiest way to build it that way was because Linux and units are structured the way that they are. The fact that Erbit has rewritten virtually everything from scratch, talk me through the various layers in the programming languages because that always is entertaining. So what are the various components in the system? Sure. So I'll explain the whole thing.

Here we go. All right. So of course there's all sorts of different components within it. But the main distinctions and the main way in which Erbit is different from current computers is that Erbit OS, defines a specification where the kernel is considered to be an abstract set of I.O. interfaces, of input-output interfaces. So, as opposed to current systems where the kernel is a concrete implementation of input-output interfaces, Erbitt has a strong separation between its own environment and the outside world.

So Erbitt has two main layers, the interpreter and the operating system itself. So Erbett's interpreter, and there are multiple interpreters, there are two right now, and there could be many. But the interpreter is what's in charge of actually talking to the computational hardware. So talking to the audio driver, talking to the hard drive, talking to the CPU. And then the OS itself has a kernel as the base layer, and that kernel defines a set of abstract I.O. interfaces. And so then every application on top of that, is using strict types to communicate with these abstract I.O. interfaces in the kernel. And so this is a radical difference from the way that things are done today for multiple reasons.

And some of them are strangely enough now related to the languages with which Erbit is built. So Erbit is an entirely functional operating system. so this this OS that this that the interpreter runs is entirely functional so functional programming and it also works but functional programming what does functional mean for an outsider so have you ever done calculus yeah okay so it doesn't involve calculus but you know how like you have that like f of x right like you have some function you give it an input x and then the function you give it an input x and then the does something to it and you didn't output. You might be surprised, but current computers don't really work that way.

Current computers use at the base layer imperative programming where you're moving bits through a lot of logic gates and storing memory in registers. So although it's technically the same thing as a function, the way that it's implemented is not a pure function, but something that's in practice much more complex. So the assembly language that all code is compiled down to is put into this very obfuscated strange form that the machine runs. In Erbit, we started by building a new assembly language that is also functional. So in the same way that in the same way that you might have a single function that computes x squared you know you put in two you get four you know what you're

going to get every single time your entire computer is represented by a function a single function was there a way to build the desired uh kind of system without going all the way down to the assembly layer was the full from scratch rewrite necessary the full from the full from scratch rewrite necessary The full from scratch rewrite was necessary because it hermetically sealed everything inside of orbit from the outside world. It provided a hard boundary between the old world and the new world. And the reason that that was necessary is that it forces the kernel with its set of abstract input-output interfaces to provide the only gateways out to the outside world. But it's not all Suncheon and Raybows.

there are drawbacks, right? So what is the cost of building a new system like this from scratch? Well, it takes a long time. And the people that are building it have to have a very specific set of skills. Talent. Erbit is talent. This is the key question. You know, Linux has taken probably billions of man hours, maybe trillions even, to build.

And, you know, probably most of the world's corporations run on Linux, as opposed to anything else. And so by any measure, it's a technological marvel, I would say. It's the biggest open source project in the world. You know, countless hyper-intelligent people have dedicated their lives to it. How could you believe that you could catalyze something similar? Because it seems like a lift like that would be required were Erbit to ever become a standard. like Linux. When you start over, you can make something that's much simpler.

When you build on top of something that already exists, you inherit all of the baggage that it also has. Erbitt's kernel is 50,000 lines of code. A couple of years ago, I built a chat app, a mobile app. The chat app was 12,000 lines of code written in JavaScript. So what is it about Erbit that enables this parsimony of code? Erbitt's programming language, because the assembly language is functional and because

Houn, the language that compiles down to that assembly language is also functional, is succinct, minimal, and mechanical. It's very easy to tell what something is doing, and it will act the same way every time. It's deterministic. There are far fewer types of error cases. It's strictly typed. There are far fewer types of security holes. because the I.O. interfaces are abstract, as opposed to concrete, different types of hardware

don't need their own hardware drivers that are living within the Urban OS itself, as opposed to Linux, where every time there's new hardware released, the drivers for interacting with that hardware have to be compiled into the new kernel. It seems to me that this project is going to be decades long. I mean, in fact, it already has been, so Curtis Yarvon started Urban 2003, if I'm not mistaken. Well, Curtis started thinking about Erbit as a concept in 2003, and he started working on the functional assembly language. But at the time, it was a part-time research project of a PhD student. It wasn't the same beast that it is today. And Erbit wasn't truly started until 2013 when it was incorporated, and it started to have a team of five people working on it full-time.

And Erbett really picked up Steam in 2018 when the team grew to 20-something people and started really charging long. And in terms of the distribution of contributors, I mean, you guys envision it to be an open source project, although Toulon probably dominates, right? I mean, are there outside contributors that are not part of the company? There are outside contributors, yes. How it strikes me slightly different from Bitcoin, which had less of a corporate stewardship at a inception, how do you guys envision, you know, power being able to be shared or what would be the intrinsic motivation for someone to work on it if they knew they could be paid to work on it, for instance, a TILAN?

Well, there are opportunities for non-TALON employees to work on orbit and be compensated. So, for example, we recently launched a handful of bounties specifically to build tooling for remote control of a Bitcoin node. And so Toulon does have the opportunity to draw people into its stable of developers. It's also worth noting that for people who already own large amounts of network address space within Erbitt, regardless of whether they work at Toulon, there's an incentive for them to make the project better, to make their investment worth more. So I know it's hard to predict these things. You know, like, Ethereum's never really knew what the first killer DAP of Ethereum would be.

And I think they were all shocked by, you know, first ICOs and then, and then defy, you know, even though there are lots of smart people trying to forecast what the applications would be. So I think there's maybe a similar issue with Derbitt where it's hard to know what the first breakout application would be. I mean, are you guys even trying to achieve some sort of breakout success? Or are you trying to keep it sort of niche for the foreseeable future? I kind of think the longer that it's niche, the better. Because Erbit isn't a single network like Twitter, where there's some search function where you can go find anybody and go talk to anybody and go see all of their information without talking to them or becoming their friend.

Erbit is more like an archipelago of networks. It's like, what if there were just a bunch of people? networks that were entirely disparate that could develop on their own. And so I almost feel like the longer that different communities have to come on to Erbit and make it their own before it becomes mainstream, the better. I would say that more so than any crypto project, Erbit truly respects and instantiates the benefits of Cadillaxi. And they, they, they've always allowed people to, to engage with Erbit on their, on their own level. So, Erbit is not forcing itself on anyone. It, it wants to empower people to self-actualize.

Correct. Without coercion or without aggressive PR marketing. Yeah. Like, you could meditate for a long time or you could learn who. Yes. It's an invitation. I think I'll choose meditation. This is, this is an invitation. Of course, we believe that there are reasons why people would want to accelerate their adoption of orbit. Because as a Bitcoiner, I do think that Bitcoin is heading toward a cliff where if we don't come up with alternative, well, I want to use the word like cybernetic feedback, but I'll explain what that means. If we don't come up with ways other than KYC AML to conduct business with Bitcoin, if we don't come up with, say, a system of online pseudonymous digital reputation, for example, we will rapidly be in a world of hurt where we have this new global money that ties us all together,

but we unwittingly constructed an even more and even more effective panopticon. I certainly feel that too, actually, and I see this looming as a catalyst for serious discord within Bitcoin. You know, I just ran the numbers and something like 20% of Bitcoins are custodial in some way today. You could see that number creeping up. Absolutely. And the custodians, they, they don't really believe in in cypherpunk values they wear they wear suits and they they're beholden to shareholders and to you know the the official process and I guess the

issue is that the processes that allow you to enable with custod of Bitcoin are indistinguishable from the legacy financial system and in a sense it means we've achieved nothing right they will if Bitcoin's become gated in such a way Without coming up with alternative cybernetics, it will soon model the legacy system. We need new incentive systems. We need new defaults. We need people to have not digital rights, but digital control over their lives. And we also need ways for markets to incorporate feedback in a way that isn't state-based or

you know, official process based. So one of my favorite books is called The Mystery of Capital. And basically the idea is that capitalism only works on a bedrock of sound property rights. And that's why in the U.S. property rights got hashed out over a series of centuries where you had squatters, you know, squatting on state-owned land or land owned by distant landlords. And you had this huge battle in the courts and actually electoral battles. And the squatters argued that they deserved the property that they had improved. They deserved to own it, even if legally they didn't quite own it.

And what happened in the end was for the most part, their claims were ratified because the courts chose the path of least resistance. They chose to ratify the existing arrangements because they understood that there would be too much chaos if they really tried to, you know, evict all the settlers and so on. And, you know, this makes me think of the way that orbits are distributed. There's this big doctrine of kind of fairness in crypto land where people believe in air drops and universal basic income, and they try and devise ways to allocate tokens in a fair way.

But by contrast, Erbitt is not interested in fairness, I would say. You know, Curtis, when he left, he wrote a post saying, well, this is a digital land, but we're in fact the creators of this territory. So, you know, for better, for worse, we own the land. And now it's our task to distribute it. And we distribute it in admittedly a very arbitrary way. He sort of admits this. But ultimately, I guess the idea is that it would be distributed through some force,

which I guess you guys are still puzzling that. So how do you plan, I don't know if you guys could have a lot? the answer to this, but how do you plan to distribute the orbits to the various, you know, frontiersmen and squatters and so on? How do you plan to distribute them in a way that causes you have a vibrant, you know, ecology? So there are, there are opportunities for grants of urban address space, but however it, however it propagates, it will it will be conducted with, you know, I guess, rigid respect for property rights. I would also go on to say that the way that they've been distributed so far is

there have been, I believe, two crowd sales and then another round of venture capital where some galaxies were sold and in large blocks of address space. so the galaxies and all the associated planets, et cetera. And I think that the real test of Erbit will be whether the incentives for the landowners actually create a large enough incentive for those people, a large enough incentive and opportunity for those people to go out and build. businesses that provide great services to people on top of those businesses. That can then go out and distribute their property to other people, sell it to them, so that

those people own their own identity now, but can still make use of this business's services. Because really, I think that the only way in which you can get to the point where, as Christian said, a new incentive system or a new incentive system or a new. new cybernetics overtakes the current one is by massively incentivizing large numbers of people to act in ways that make the network stronger. And Bitcoin is truly the best example of this happening in the real world. So one question I have is really how Erbit distinguishes itself from, you know, crypto assets, cryptocurrencies, where a token was sold. Because I believe there's a really significant disanalogy there. And that Erbit, to me, resumptuels.

symbol's property. And of course, the galaxies are non-fungeable with each other. And it really is a little bit more like selling, you know, blocks of territory and some new domain. Or IP addresses. Or, yeah. Or name space. Yeah. But then in some sense, there's definitely analogies to the, you know, the hated or the reviled crowd sales, that some of which are very extractive. App coins. Well, I would, I would just point out that, Bitcoin is digital money and that's perhaps the largest and most important substrate for what could be called digital sovereignty, but it's not the only one. So I think it's in Tim May's email signature. You know, there's also other stuff like digital pseudonyms. So there are

other reputation there there are other systems of infrastructure that are that are needed to transact, you know, self-ownership in a digital space. It can't just be the money. The disinology that I came up after thinking about it, the one that I came up with was that to use a network like Ethereum or any of the new smart contract platforms, you need to actually purchase the tokens. And that's the, essentially, that's the run seek. If you want to get out of access to the assurances of those networks, you have to pay the people that created them or the early buyers, many of which are VCs and so on. But for Erbit, from my understanding, you don't actually need to buy anything to participate because I know this is maybe a point

of potential conflict, but to get the most junior form of property, which is the comet, you don't really need to buy anything, right? Those are essentially free. Yes. So you can get a comet for free, and you can do that by mining. You can get a comment for free because they are the least privileged entities in the network, basically. They're long strings and numbers, and so people might mistake you for a bot if you're a comet, right? That's kind of the civil resistance mechanism. And then and then Erbit makes it such that to get the higher privilege entities and the higher hierarchy, you know, those are costly. You might have to buy a planet for a couple of bucks. I think planets are going on average for something like $14 right now.

Yeah. And since planets are meant to be the main unit, yeah, it's not exactly expensive to get an identity in the system. Maybe one day it might be, though. But I guess the redeeming factor here is that there's always a way to begin to participate in the system that doesn't require extraction of value from the end user, right? That's true. Yes. And that'll never go away. Once you have an address, an urban address, it's yours forever, and you won't need to consider, you know, its value again, at least in the context of access to the network. In a sense, to make a torture analogy,

it's a little bit like Fortnite where it's free to play. And then if you want to achieve glamour and prestige, you can buy the skins. Yeah. You know, so you can always pay for a star or a planet, I guess. I mean, imagine how much you would have paid to have the phone number one when phone numbers first came out. This actually happens today. There's bidding wars over exclusive license plate numbers.

Or a.com. A.com. Yeah, so the way that Urban works is like auctioning off A and all of. the words that start with A, right? Yeah, exactly. It's an interesting, kind of an unintuitive way to divide up and address space. So one thing I want to ask you about is actually the prehistory of orbit. So, you know, Bitcoin has these, people often think Bitcoin is a brute entity,

which just emerged fully formed from some sort of primordial Satoshian soup. But in fact, Bitcoin has this very rich heritage, and it's actually the culmination of many decades of work and attempts to create a digital cache and peer-to-peer systems. And understanding this allows people to understand Bitcoin better because you learn really what Satoshi was intending to do, not necessarily by listening to Satoshi, but listening to his predecessors and the people that he cited. And so it's a very useful exercise for Bitcoiners to understand the history. So I'm presuming that there's something similar for Erbit, so I'd like to get your thoughts

on what the prehistory of Erbit might look like. In fact, I would say that much of Erbitt's prehistory is also Bitcoin's prehistory and vice versa. So, for example, David Chom had untraceable electronic mail, return addresses and digital pseudonyms. Whitfield Diffey had his cryptographic work, RSA public key cryptosystems. You know, these are things of the 70s and 80s that are, foundational to both Bitcoin in Erbit, I would say. Or Terry Davis, for instance, with Temple OS. Temple OS, where he wrote a new operating system that was designed to be the third

temple prophesied in the Bible. I think people disparagingly compare Urbett to Temple OS sometimes. Oh, all of us at Erbit viewed as a compliment. So that's actually, that leads me to my next question, which is, like, Erbit's veiled in this cloud of esoterica and mysticism. And I pointed this out in a light touch of mockery in the past. But, you know, it could also be a critique, you know, why is it so difficult to understand Urbit?

You know, like, maybe you're trying to hide something. We certainly see it in CryptoLand, which is the veil of complexity to make criticizing something very difficult by raising the barrier to entry for critique. And it's a very common tactic of some of these insolubrious ICOs where they say, well, you know, don't critique us until you've read our treaties on sharding or our hyperplane routing system or something or other. And it's actually very irritating because it makes being an educated critic very difficult. So I run into this a lot. Yeah. But then I guess, you know, in defensive orbit, maybe, or it just is quite complex and there's a lot to understand because it's a multifaceted

system. So do you think that it is too esoteric? I mean, that the bearer to untreat and understanding it is too high or is it kind of just right? Well, I really think about this in terms of how easy is Erbit to use? And we really want Erbit to be very, very simple to use. And for Erbit to be a system that can live entirely in the background and be neutral infrastructure that people can use without any need to actually understand the underlying technical components of the system. But in terms of, I feel as...

though most people have encountered our technical marketing and have thought that it was marketing for consumers. And our marketing or our... So it's like almost like the marketing was too good because we mistook it for user-facing marketing. We have great design, but we weren't trying to make it marketed to consumers. We were trying to make it marketed to functional programmers that we wanted to lure into our project. So us, us fools that read all the technical specifications and interpreted them as something for end users,

we had strayed beyond our realm of confidence. Just as a user of Bitcoin in 15 years won't even know that there was a white paper. It's kind of funny because all of the weird words that were came up with and the jargon. I mentioned earlier that it's most because the concepts are slightly distinct from their analogous concepts

within current operating systems. But I like to think about it this way. Once someone has actually spent the effort to learn what all of those words mean, it's actually really hard to convince that person to go get a regular job. So it kind of works as this beautiful sunk cost where once a very senior technical person

has put in enough effort to understand it, they don't want to work on anything else. So we have a great and actually phenomenal retention of our developers. And we don't have any bad, like, you know, like low quality, like, man, I made a web scale Node.js application in two days on Ethereum. We don't have that problem at all. So the learning curve, people always say steep learning curve, but actually I think the really the more appropriate term would be a shallow learning curve.

if the x-axis is time and y-axis is the amount that you learn. A steep learning curve implies that you're learning rapidly, but shallow implies that you're learning slowly. So dwarf fortress would have a shallow learning curve, right? So making our erbil the dwarf fortress of computing actually has these benefits potentially, in that you attract a high-quality bunch who are clearly not mercenaries

and really ideologically are committed to the project. Yeah, I would say so. It's been really effective internally. It's been confusing to everyone externally. Yeah, I certainly feel that once you get past the jargon, you know, the complexity kind of fades away a little bit. I mean, with Bitcoin, I think it's similar. And the idea I would bring up is that,

the phrase, you know, by their fruits, you shall know them. So, Erbit, because it's, you know, eminently more performant than current systems, it doesn't, in fact, have to persuade anyone. It can simply perform. And, you know, it impresses itself upon people rather than needing to necessarily explicate with great labor each aspect. Yeah, it's kind of like you don't really need to know how a combustion engine works or drive. Right, but you know that when you stomp a pedal of a nice car, you know, that's instantly

identifiable as a good experience. But people, they feel that since these are new technologies that they have a right or a need to understand them. And so they are not comfortable with just using them. They try to understand them first. I mean, I certainly see it with Bitcoin. I mean, most people involved in Bitcoin would say, like, yeah, you know, I read the white paper and then I learned about elliptic curves and Shaw-256. And actually, most of those things are totally surplus to requirements. You don't need to understand them to understand Bitcoin. Right. And we're still in the era of the ideological power user, like the Bitcoin

cypherpunk maximalist or the hardcore urbit user. But it's a very different demographic than the people that will ultimately be beneficiaries and use the system with low friction. Just like we all

used to use Swift in the interbank system without without needing to understand how the monetary system functioned. Yeah, that's a very good point. So one thing I want to ask you guys, I know this isn't necessarily something that is often discussed about Erbit, or maybe it is. But, you know, Arbit is primarily the creation of Curtis Jarvin,

right, who's better known in some circles is Mencius Moldbug, the famous or infamous blogger, political theorist. And some people will say that he founded this neo-reactionary movement. So it could be said that Orbit has political objectives just by its very nature and that it's, you know, intentionally imbued with them due to the nature of the founder. And some people will write it off immediately because of its association with Curtis and they don't like Curtis, who's currently not with the project, by the way.

how ideological would you say it is I mean clearly Erbitt is very insistent in terms of having a definite view of the world and how things should be so it's a very normative project sure but how related is Erbett itself to some of the political theories of Curtis Jarvin if at all I would say it's very much not related to Curtis's political theories insofar as from 20, 13 forward, the different people that were working on the project with Curtis were in constant dialectic with him and had very different opinions than him. And if anything, all of them each

saw that Erbit needed to be created or something like Erbit needed to be created for very different reasons. So Galen, our CEO, for instance, is an architect by trade and thinks that it's very important for a consistent experience that people can own that can last and be durable to them, that can be a tool for them like a hammer is. He thinks that computers should be tools in that manner. And it's not so much that Curtis was, did not affect the project or anything. Curtis, if anything, was very instrumental in developing the project and getting out the first prototype. But it was the dialectic of these very different ideologies that converged on the need for post-propes.

political computing, neutral infrastructure that could not be subverted for political aims. That's truly what Erbit was born out of. I guess it's interesting because, you know, the same could be said of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a truly neutral global settlement layer and store value because it's very hard for any one entity to obtain discretion over the system and enforce changes. And so as with Erbit, Erbit is kind of federated by design. and it allows people to resist, you know, despots and so on, because they have the ability to leave their little enclave if they want to.

It may be, is this a bit-steenism that Bitcoin is for enemies? Yeah, I mean, just look at Andrew Torba and Jack Dorsey both love Bitcoin, and you couldn't find two people more opposed. Sure, absolutely. So both of these systems are manifestly, neutral by their very function and form. But in a sense, in the way that they collide with the real world as it exists, they're also very political because they append the order. They disallow political violence. Explicitly. But, you know, some people would say, you know, they're inherently imputed

with political ideas because, because, you know, Bitcoin disempowers the state, for instance, and and orbit disempowers these internet mega oligopolis. So in that sense, they're kind of deeply political. There's a way in which they both deeply empower the individual. And there's a way in which you could say that that's a political statement. But I would disagree with you in that case. Different, of course, ideologies have different views of what is the political. Of course, Marx would say that everything is within the realm of the political.

Right. And libertarians might say, like hardcore libertarians might say only the question of protection should be within the realm of the political. But even what is the politicalism is a set of murky boundaries that people don't agree on. So there's different frames. You can think about it in different ways. And Erbit is for everyone.

Do you think that the ideological underpinnings of Erbit will be a blocker that will cause people to want to not engage with it. I used to worry that, but the online conversation about Erbit has shifted significantly as people have actually used it and have come to understand just how much more freeing the platform is to actually use than current systems. I think a great case study in that is how Mastodon, for instance, which is a federated version of Twitter, which you could say has a similar set of ideas behind. it than Erbett does, although Mastodon is still an application built on the existing Internet stack.

Mastodon caters to very, very different communities who, you know, you've got radical feminists, you've got, you know, the alt-right who are banned by Twitter and so on. So I guess the interesting observation is once you build these systems that do not allow for the arbitrary implementation of wholesale political and social norms on the populace, once you build alternatives to those things, there's a thousand flowers that bloom in terms of the user base, even groups that might disagree with each other. I mean, in particular groups, though, they're okay with sharing that space

because it's a space where exit is possible. I would entirely agree with that. that erbit erbit can contain multitudes is a testament to the neutral nature of its architecture so we've been going for a long time

Christian what would you my last question for you is what would you choose if you could wave your hand and abolish one of the big internet oligopolis which one would you delete from existence Well, that's a tough question because it seems like every institution in the world is instantiated in some internet oligopoly at some level.

I mean, the largest and most arcane, I guess, monad of cloud computing is AWS. But, you know, Erbit isn't anti-cloud. it's it's it's anti you know difficult cloud that you you can't even control yourself so you just hand it over to someone who's willing to fork over millions of dollars to to keep a system online so is your answer Amazon uh maybe Logan would have a better a better answer I have an answer I have an answer to this as well. I would kill Doodle. That's my choice as well. I find Google to be the most insidious of them all, in that it tries to control your thought by telling you, by curating your search results and nudging you in the direction of the things you should believe. Doodle determines what

exists. Also that, yeah. They choose what gets indexed, including the address of this place or not. Yeah, just so we're clear, I would not say my answer is, is. Amazon. It's just that it's Amazon is presents the clearest, uh, the clearest picture of why we don't have, you know, a more, a more free internet. It's, it represents the difficulty, the, the literal technical difficulty of operating a personal server. I think it's actually a good case study in terms of like a reducto ad absurdum taking the current internet architecture to its logical conclusion whereby even enormous multi-billion dollar firms can't run their own hardware anymore, they default into this, you know, the AWS system because it's more convenient for them

and maybe cheaper, who knows. And now we have compute, which is, you know, whatever, some enormous fraction of the world is held in Amazon servers, which is kind of like an amazing, I don't know, it's like a satire of our current system. I think that you can't take, a company further than Amazon. I think that Amazon is the best example and the strongest example of the best that this paradigm can do. And I really think that that's a compliment to Amazon, if anything, because the experience that they provide is probably better than the experience of any other similar centralized service that I use. Yeah, I mean, I see them as probably second only to the, you know, the East India Company in terms of influence historically.

And East India Company had mercenaries. And, I mean, well, you have to keep in mind, Bezos has a rocket company, and rockets aren't that dissimilar from missiles. Or from square rigors that could cross oceans. Well, we see the coupling of these tech oligoplies and the kind of nation-state apparatus, which is explicit in China, for instance, where all those tech companies are explicit. state owned or partially state owned or at least coerced by the state.

And you also see it in the U.S. AWS is a huge contract with the CIA. So the CIA can't really afford to offend them or they'll turn off their servers. In the same way, Amazon can't really afford to offend the CIA. But they're, you know, I would say that, you know, they're transnational. So these tech companies aren't exactly beholden to any one jurisdiction. They've achieved scale such that they've exited, the kind of Westphalian state system and they're their own entities now they at least

negotiate as equals I would be hard pressed to see them negotiating as uh as the party with the more leverage over a state and I think we've had such a great case study in terms of the power struggle between tech companies and the state uh with Libra Facebook's cryptocurrency or maybe just currency uh where it'll be really interesting to see if Libra is able to transcend the boundaries of the U.S. and issue its own sovereign currency and its own monetary unit of account. To me, that's like the final step in the state admitting its inferiority to a tent company and them asserting their superiority in such an explicit way. All I'll say is that if Amazon tried to do it, they would be able to.

Yeah, that's right. They do seem far more competent than Facebook, in fact. Zuck, rise up. Rise up, Mark. Jeff Bezos is magging, Zuck. You might be able to say. All right, gentlemen, thank you so much

for having me here your offices and talking me through the technicals and the ideologicals verbat. Is there anything you still don't understand? Many things. I don't even understand the first thing about it.

But hopefully my audience is a little edified after this. So thank you for sharing your time with me. Tell me how can people reach you? I'm on Twitter at at Logan LNC. And I have a Twitter account called Bitcoin Err. So Bitcoin You are. That's a reference of course of the ancient city of Er. Of course. Yeah. And all things all things prototypical. What's the city that compots said? Dool. Dool.

Thule will rise again. Erbit will reinstantiate er. And it'll complete the system. I don't know about them. I feel as though the system will never be complete. I'm one of those. Well, I'm more of a comp bot kind of guy. So I think Erbitt's going to complete the system of German idealism.

I think Erbitt has a place. Girtles and completeness. theorem as well. So if Bitcoin in orbit are two missing pieces in our world today that can potentially free us from the shackles that we find ourselves in, is there anything else? Is there another domain in which we're unfree? Yes, and Kanye West points the way. That's a solid mic drop to end it with. Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you, Nick.