I keep coming across the Urbit project, and decided to investigate it for myself to learn what it’s all about. I’ve read a bit and watched some youtube introduction videos, and decided I’m quite bearish on the project. I don’t think it has a good future. Here’s why.

First of all, I’ve yet to find a video of Urbit that demonstrates a solution to any of the problems it addresses. It’s claimed to fix slow and bloated websites like Facebook which are supposedly complicated by a plethora of libraries and third-party APIs (which is partly true). But then where is the Urbit solution to centralized social networks?

The Urbit namespace relies on Ethereum, which is a non-starter. Furthermore, there are only ~4 billion possible Urbit addresses, so there’s no way for everyone on the planet to run their own Urbit server. And then creating an Urbit server apparently requires me to purchase an Urbit address from someone else. Right now, these addresses cost only a few pennies, and they say we are so early. So in the future, these addresses will cost more, excluding people without access or funds to buy their own Urbit address.

Urbit supporters and Urbit documentation focuses on technical details rather than the solution itself. I don’t really care about how many Urbit planets exist in an Urbit galaxy, how they created a new programming language to fix the problem of all the other programming languages, or other details like these. I want to understand how I can use Urbit to solve problems with traditional centralized web services.

Finally, Urbit is not an operating system. Urbit runs on Linux. It is an application.

For these reasons, I am bearish on Urbit.