Dukedom for Sale.
Urbit "dukedom" [1] no. 24, "DYS", belonging to yours truly, is hereby for sale!
Sold! Please enjoy your purchase, Mr. Gogulski!
Price: 4.5 BTC, payable to 15pWcAqagHf2EeFjapjWt4EhYWgL5fne7s. Sale ends on Dec. 31.
Anyone seriously interested should contact Curtis Yarvin, the author of Urbit, to broker the sale.
Alternatively: I've written a PGP-signed declaration of the sale. [2] You can simply send the BTC and show it to Mr. Yarvin, who will presumably honor the contract. You might want to ask him first, though.
No refunds or exchanges! Please think carefully before buying.
[1] Or, to use the author's new terminology, "aircraft carrier."
[2] My personal PGP key can be found in the Bitcoin community's "WOT", and also here on this site.
I wonder if this is the first case of a dukedom on sale.
Dear MP,
I believe this is so. Unless you count the author's sales (marked as "Donum" in the chart.)
Yours,
-Stanislav
Out of interest, what is the market-tested going rate? $4096 was the price a month or so ago...
Or is it confidential?
Dear Ben,
If I'm not mistaken, Mr. Yarvin continues to sell these for exactly $4096 each. While supplies (one byte of address space) last.
However, my understanding is that "used" dukedoms are slightly less valuable than new, virginal ones. See here and also here. This, plus the continued availability from the original source, explains the discounted price.
Given that I paid nothing at all for mine, and presently regard Urbit as brain-damaged [1], I believe that I have made a rather good deal.
[1] No disrespect meant for Curtis, but I did warn him. He went with broken foundations, and got exactly what one ought to expect: a swamp of broken edges and heavy impedance-mismatches that cannot be cured without eliminating the Unix foundation entirely. And recently, Urbit has incorporated, and taken millions in investment money from gullible American oligarchs. As far as I'm concerned, that was the last straw.
Let Mr. Yarvin and his Silicon Valley friends enjoy trying to reinvent computing while overseeing an 'HR' department, complying with employment regulations, hiring bean counters and lawyers.
Money (beyond what the mastermind needs to avoid
prostitutionworking) is absolutely lethal to a project like Urbit."A-students hire B-students, B-students hire C-students, C-students hire hookers and spend the rest on coke." More heads: more idiot complexity, more mainstreaming, eternal surrender to the Big Stupid.
As if Unix didn't suck enough already.
Yours,
-Stanislav
Ah, thank you. Being an idiot, I didn't immediately realize that I can simply look up the current BTC/USD exchange rate.
Wolfram Alpha says BTC4.5 is about $3893.
Urbit is an interesting experimental computing project. I do think it has a number of problems and will probably ultimately fail. Deletion was the one I raised. Poison jets/oracles is another. Recovery from failure cases appears to be another.
Best regards, Ben
Ben,
Rapid and merciful failure is the optimistic scenario.
The more likely outcome is that Urbit putters around for some years, supplying intelligent computer users with plentiful false hope, and a whole regiment of parasites (those $millions have to go somewhere, and the money's far too 'hot' to remain in the pockets of engineers) with an easy living.
From what I hear, the squad of lawyers is already laughing 'all the way to the bank.'
Yours,
-Stanislav
[...] hours later othersiii took notice of my position and proceeded to divest [...]
I'm also putting my empire (formerly known as Dukedom) for sale. I'm ~nyt Ptolemy, but you can ask CY to rename it.
4.5 btc looks like a good price. I'll send a bitcoin address to the buyer.
Note that CY strongly recommends you to publish your real name.
The sale of my empire, ~nyt, 1/256 of the Urbit namespace, is conducted as an auction. Public and secret bids both accepted, in either USD or BTC (at the median rate of the day before bidding ends, 2013-12-25). Details at: http://bit.ly/nyt_auction
[...] PGP « Dukedom for Sale. [...]
[...] the sale of my Urbit ‘dukedom’, several readers have written to me, asking ‘why.’ The following was my reply to one [...]