urbit

I had some time to do research about urbit (https://urbit.org/) in the last couple of days. This is a pretty good non-technical (or as non-technical as it can get) explanation about what it is:

https://urbit.org/blog/urbit-for-normies/

I already managed to get WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) with Ubuntu running, installed urbit and started up a comet in order to access Landscape, urbits interface though. That's free and you can try it at home. It's much easier if you are running some kind of gnu/linux distro or macos. Try this guide:

https://urbit.org/using/install/

Now, I wanted to buy my own planet (identity), but in the end ETH gas fees (transaction costs) are so high right now, that the original price of 0.025 ETH per planet (around 30 USD) is accompanied by a 0.75 ETH gas fee. Basically I noped the fuck out of there.

Luckily, I found a very nice community called smol-computers (~dasfeb/smol-computers). A very nice user set me up with a sponsorship, which basically means you get a planet for free. Or so I thought.

I tried to set it up via the urbit bridge (https://bridge.urbit.org/ that's where you manage your urbit credentials) and at point 3 of the registration, i was notified that my urbit wallet doesn't have enough credit (in ETH) for the transaction fees.

Now, since urbit is currently linked to the Ethereum blockchain, all transactions to that blockchain have transaction fees. Which are very high at the moment. Which means that even though someone gifted a planet for me, booting it up means you need to have between 0.2 and and 0.5 ETH in your urbit wallet at the moment. That's around 200-500 USD.

I talked to ~ed (one of the urbit devs) about it, and basically this is an issue they are trying to solve, but in terms of economic accessibility I won't boot up my planet anytime soon as it seems.

For now I'll be a cute comet flying around the urbit universe.